A letter from Skowhegan Co-Director, Sarah Workneh
Dear Skowhegan,
It has been difficult to negotiate writing an institutional statement about the events of the past weeks. Who writes it? Skowhegan as a disembodied voice? Me, Sarah Workneh, as a Co-Director, as a person who is black? I am not talking about race in America in abstraction, I am talking about my own body and the bodies of my family and my loved ones. My initial impulse was to create a way for us—the individuals who make up a Skowhegan—to sign a statement. But, who am I speaking to and who am I speaking for? Our community, our values, and our experiences with racism are not monolithic, nor are our solidarities.
Despite our differences, racism is endemic to every aspect of each of our lives because every structure we encounter in this country, including its democracy, was built on it. It is hard to confront the depth to which it has structured our existence. And many of us are caught in a deep confusion, a suspended anticipation about what this moment actually means for our mobility, our access and the everyday awareness of our bodies and our minds that comes not just from interactions with law enforcement, but with our peers, our friends, our neighbors, our teachers, our doctors, our collectors, our donors, our fellow artists.
Last week, the Governor of Virginia ordered the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond. Nickelodeon paused programming for 8 minutes and 46 seconds—the length of time that George Floyd struggled to breathe under the weight of Derek Chauvin’s body. Already, cities and states are talking about how to effectively dismantle and re-route funding from police departments. This is a paradigm shift. It has taken the actions of the past weeks to force a change in public consciousness because the way in which our democracy functions/dysfunctions has left no option but to require the vulnerability, the labor, and the bravery of protestors.
At the same time, much of the language of solidarity that surrounds these protests still contains divisions. Phenomenon X is happening to Group Y; we are with you, but not of you. It is a division that abstracts oppression into an unseen structural force, and not the result of active participation of some on others, whether as bystander, beneficiary or perpetrator. When you are the target of it, it is exhausting. When you are the beneficiary, can you see it? When you are the bystander, or the perpetrator, in small ways and large, can you admit to it; can you intervene? Simply confessing privilege isn’t the same as dismantling the boundaries around it.
Protest requires many necessary and urgent forms—responsive and outraged, but also sustained and oftentimes unseen, through self-care and through the care of others, through arguments, through harnessing joy when we find it, through our work, and through demanding and stealing space for imagination.
Skowhegan is a site for me to do this work—because radical ideas can take root when no one is looking. It is also due to Skowhegan’s foundational commitment to diversity, and the work and activism of its artists, whether through the act of making itself or through the content of their work. Artists like David Driskell and Emma Amos, both of whom passed away in the last two months, have done this work, as have our Board of Governors, our alumni, my colleagues, our founders; and our trustees and donors have enabled it. Skowhegan, as an organization, staff, and boards, stand together for a real and ongoing commitment to fostering equity. We are doing the work—even if it is sometimes flawed. Yet, with all of this support, it is still an uphill battle. I feel it—I know many of you feel it. I witness it on campus, and I have witnessed it in what we all carry with us when we arrive on campus. Still, I wake up each and every day to do this and other work that I understand as my own sustained protest. And even though I am tired, I do it BECAUSE I am tired. The questions that guide me are what can I do as a victim and what can I do with the power that I do have?
Some of Skowhegan has done the scary work in standoff with a militarized police force. Some of Skowhegan protects their bodies and psyches at home, in vigil to do the work once the protests end. Some of Skowhegan doesn’t feel complicit in making the world we all live in now. And some of Skowhegan doesn’t know where to start, and is looking for ways to do more.
And so, I speak for myself and in my role as co-director of Skowhegan. I ask that we move beyond solidarity to recognize the limitations of our imaginations that result from hundreds of years of enforced separation, refusal, antagonism, erasure, complicity, and American individualism, and which prevents some of us from being seen, and others from seeing the roles we play in where we find ourselves now. We are in it and of it.
The effects of structural oppression have been evident in COVID all these many months. The effects of structural oppression have been evident in our isolation, our workplaces, our schools, our grocery stores, our so-called justice system, and in who and how we mourn. It is also evident in the personal oppressions knowingly and unknowingly perpetrated each and every day. Imminent danger is one aspect of race in America, but the non-remarkable is insidious and just as perilous. It is also where the extended work lies.
What has given me hope and feelings of gratitude and awe over the last week—the reclaiming of space for civic discourse and civic discord—has also given me pause. Does the resistance end once the protests end? Who is required to do the work that others can just witness? How do we ensure that the promises made over the last weeks to do better, to do more are substantive on institutional levels but also in our individual hearts and minds? What is happening in the streets right now is an expression of cultural rage, cultural fatigue, and an attempt at a new cultural imaginary, but once the streets clear out, how will Black Lives matter then?
With love, with hope, and in and of solidarity,
Sarah Workneh
Co-Director