Art can be argued to be a great thing for our society in a multitude of ways. I think that art is good for the "soul" or mental health, but also for inspiring change or awareness.
During my time in the last couple of months, I have learned even more about how art can influence our understanding of the world. My peers and I have put a lot of time an effort into creating art lessons/projects for high schoolers that do just that.
The project I created with my teammate was geared towards growing our empathy for other around us. This is important because sometimes in society we can become self-centered and forget that all the people around us are struggling to an experiencing as well. We focused specifically on natural disasters and the emotional impact of natural disaster on the human experience. If my "students" could take anything from this art project, i'd hope they'd understand that having empathy is key to our survival. If the people viewing the artworks we made were to take anything with them, I'd hope it would be a sense of empathy or maybe even hurt for those who have gone through natural disasters, but also those who might in the future. Basically what I'm saying is art is nice to look at, so if it has a message or call to action people can take that with them and maybe do some good for our society or at least have awareness that we need to be better in one way or another.
I mean, if you look at art history and all the artists that were thought to be radical for "calling out" their society, or depicting certain images, you'll see the real impact of art. With art, we can all evolve. In the past, I have taken quite a few art history courses. Every time I complete one of these art history courses, my list of the good art can do on our society grows. For example, a while back I learned about Yinka Shonibare, a African British contemporary artist, who constantly is creating pieces of art that call out our society for the damages that still exist from colonization today. Now, an atrist can't expect that, after creating an artwork like this, everything is going to get better and the "damages of colonization" will cease to exist. However, people will view your artwork and see or learn that their is a problem. After all, education is the start of all change and adaptations.
This artwork is a collage of all the social justice and awareness project my colleagues and I have created for high school students. I chose to combine all these projects and an artwork from Yinka Shonibare to represent all the different perspectives that art provides and all the things we have to learn about and inspire change in our society through art. I changed the colors to be more hopeful and loving because that's how I feel when I see the positivity and change inspired by art. Yellow is representative of hope and the pink represents the love that is lacking but also could increase with the help of art.
I think that this influences my path of becoming an artist and educator in the sense of excitement to inspire change in my own artwork and in my future student's artwork. I am a strong believer in the idea that children are the future of of society, so why not start teaching students to question the world they live in and how to do so when creating art.
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