Art: Recounting Stories, Fueling Resistance

By Steph Rychlo

As a creative navigating academia, I often feel isolated from pursuing a formal education in arts as there is a high value placed on technique, rigor, and competitiveness amongst artists. The Crafting Community Symposium on Arts Practice and Research was much more of an inviting environment which encouraged participants to engage with both the theoretical and practical elements of art and artmaking. Not only were participants given their choice of media to engage with – from collage to creative writing and collage to creating zines – but were also invited into conversation to co-construct understandings of art and what it means to build and engage with community. By focusing on art creation in this collaborative and interactive way, we are fostering the use of art as praxis.

So often art creation is reduced to the production of a commodity. Paintings, collages, and pieces of writing are only seen to have value if they are presented as a finished piece to be sold or featured as a part of a larger collection of hegemonic work. By viewing art as simply a commodity, we recreate a hierarchical system of value amongst artists and their various mediums, all pressured by the expectation of creating works that will be the most palatable and profitable for a mainstream audience. This capitalist framing of art also creates a barrier to engagement for aspiring creatives as many are unable to see themselves in the identity of an “artist.” This is frequently the case for intersectionally marginalized creators, whose works often carry messages of resistance but are dismissed as not being “real” art.

Of course, despite the commodification of creativity, art still has an incredibly radical and transformative potential. Regardless of medium, creation is the process of sharing ideas and narratives. By engaging in tangible acts of conjuring up visual, audial, and/or experiential pieces of art, artists are constantly pushing the boundaries of communication to tell their stories or articulate concepts in unique and impactful ways. Emerging from this, is the promotion of shared experience, empathy, and connectivity, often being a catalyst for community building and future collaborations amongst artists.

These were concepts that I saw being displayed and discussed at the Crafting Community Symposium. An immersive example that I was fortunate enough to experience was the creation of zines in a workshop by Cristina Pietropaolo. This workshop dove into the history of zine creation and highlighted the medium’s radical roots of counter-cultural resurgence. Zines, paradoxically, are both a simple and a particularly complex medium. Often made from easily accessible household materials, like photocopied and folded pages stapled together with pasted text and images, a zine also provides an artist with creative freedom, amalgamating many of the other art forms being discussed throughout the symposium. Zines also provide an artist with opportunity as there is no expectation for any piece of writing to conform to a particular structure. This is a stark contrast to academic writing that can pose creative restrictions with rigid requirements for structure, contents, and adherence to rubric criteria.

In the workshop, participants experimented with the creation of their own zines. All in attendance of this session chose to select a unifying theme to work from, sampling media from the same pile of existing magazines, newspapers, and craft supplies. Despite working from shared materials and inspirations, each participant ended up with a final product that was completely unique to the other creations. Every finished piece made use of different words and images and ended up conveying widespread messages on a variety of topics. It also helped to have creatives from a variety of disciplines to bring their own stories and experiences to their work. For me, this solidified my understanding of why so many art collectives and community organizers gravitate to zines as a preferred choice of medium. It allows for a plethora of stories and perspectives to be highlighted in a single finished product that is easy to distribute and consume. Most importantly, a zine is accessible to both readers and creators, removing the gatekeeping of academia so that we can all truly create, tell stories, and be recognized as artists.