Art has been an instrument for activism and social justice, but as a result of today’s climate the usage of art to make comments on current issues has grown far more prevalent.
The Patricia L. Summerville Emerging Artists Panel is featuring artists who use their art to express their feelings towards injustices of minorities and can offer diverse perspectives.
They can provide examples of how their professional art can be used to promote social change.
On Friday, Oct. 29, the panel will be open to the public on Zoom at 5 p.m. The featured artists, Jasmine Burton, Leila Khoury, Sue Shon and Paul Verdell, will share their experiences with student artists to show them what career paths in the art field can look like.
The artist will have an opportunity to give a spiel on their work and what inspires them and then they will move on to specific questions.
The questions will concentrate on advice to upcoming artists, ways of advancing inclusivity, change in the art community and far more.
This diverse group of artists from various backgrounds will provide multiple perspectives about career paths in the art field. Read more about the featured artists:
Jasmine Burton
Jasmine Burton is a social inclusion and design specialist with a focus on social equality, youth engagement in social issues and innovation with water sanitation and hygiene.
Passionate about social justice, human rights and access to sanitation and hygiene products, Burton has taken her activism to an international level, working with organizations such as the Toilet Board Coalition, Equilo, Planet Indonesia, Women in Global Health, as well as one she founded herself called Wish for Wash.
Burton is the CEO of Wish for Wash, which serves to bring innovation to sanitation and has grown to be a multipronged collective.
“As a freshman at Georgia Tech, I was inspired to do something about the global sanitation crisis at a women’s leadership conference,” Burton said, “I learned that over two billion people in the world today lack access to improved sanitation and over four billion people lack access to safely managed sanitation.”
After doing more research on the sanitation crisis, Burton started Wish for Wash in December 2014 to create a positive social impact.
“In response to this reality, our growing mission is to amplify more diverse voices and inclusive innovations in the water, sanitation and hygiene and global health sectors through the lens of research, design and education,” Burton said.
Leila Khoury
Leila Khoury is a multidisciplinary artist and preservationist based in Cleveland, Ohio, and her work takes a look at architecture and how it can lead to less inclusive and more gentrified space.
After receiving her masters degree in architecture and historic preservation she found that her education tended to exclude certain spaces.
“What frustrated me about my education was the lack of regard to community and neighborhood histories and their systemic erasure,” Khoury said.
Khoury’s field tends to have a eurocentric focus and she wants to expand to a focus that is more holistic. She commented on the eurocentricity of architecture in her graduate thesis called “A Soulful Body: The Immigration and Placemaking of Arabs in Detroit.”
“Being an Arab American I was interested in how they carved out spaces for themselves from preexisting structure to suit their needs and community,” Khoury said.
Currently, Khoury is the creative director of Cleveland Community Archives an interactive website and storytelling platform.
“One component from my thesis that inspired me to do this was a collection of oral histories I had,” Khoury said. “I became really interested in oral history and storytelling as a medium to shed light on history that isn’t well documented.”
Beyond housing oral histories, the Archives also shares Cleveland’s historic DIY and experimental art spaces, mutual aid organizations and LGBTQ venues that no longer exist because of systematic erasure.
Sue Shon
Sue Shon is an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. She teaches courses like art history and offers a nontraditional perspective to a traditional course.
“Whenever I teach a class that would be traditional like art history I foreground what usually gets underrepresented,” Shon said. “For example I foreground black feminist perspectives on art history.”
She also does research about the visual culture of race in modern history and investigates if there are connections as to what’s happening now.
She is currently working on an article that takes a look at runaway slave advertisements and how their descriptions of Black people was the emergence of racial profiling in Amercia.
“I wanted to look at the roots that influence anti-Black and indigenous policing,” Shon said. “I’m trying to find answers and see if I can make connections from the past to what is happening now.”
Paul Verdell
Paul Verdell is an artist based in Toledo, Ohio, whose work takes focus on vibrant colors and creates work from the perspective of being Black.
“My work is a reflection of how I see the world as a Black man,” Verdell said.
Verdell is going through a transitional phase with the concepts that motivate his work. When he first started, his works were politically fuelled and then it turned towards a focus on color and figure.
“Although I have moved from more of a political stance in my art, when you’re a Black artist your work is always perceived as inherently political,” Verdell said.
At the beginning of his college experience in 2015 much of his work was inspired by the issues of the time such as the upcoming presidential election. His post-college pieces still present messages in his work but in a more tame fashion.
Being in a transitional period, Verdell is able to give upcoming artists a unique perspective to something they may go through in their careers.
“I was caught in a weird area of my work, but I can provide insight because all artists have these moments,” Verdell said.
The panel will be from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 29, at murraystate.zoom.us/j/83834536674