The Art of Nonviolence
Creativity, Activism, and Social Change
As we often say at the Center for Peacemaking, building community is at the heart of nonviolence. One aspect of thriving communities is the ability to recognize and nurture the diverse skills and talents of community members.
Our community at the Center has always been blessed with the presence of artists and creatives — and we’ve always tried to nurture this spirit among students. As the Center’s founding director, the late Fr. G. Simon Harak, S.J., liked to say, all nonviolent actions are in some way a form of creative expression.
It takes creativity both to imagine and communicate the change we want to see in the world. This is, in essence, what it means to be creative: to actively engage in envisioning and bringing about a more just world. Likewise, there is a reason that artists are grouped as “creatives” — they are blessed with the talents of vision, voice, and expression that are so often the seeds of social change.
Nurturing and Celebrating Creative Nonviolent Expression
Over the Center’s first 15 years, many of our events have engaged the arts. We’ve hosted concerts, plays, and open mic nights for peace.
We’ve also collaborated with Chicago-based artist, activist, and educator, Paul McComas on numerous events.
Anyone who has gone with us to the SOA-Watch vigils knows the power of art as a form of resistance: the songs and spoken word performances by artists like the Peace Poets, the Puppetistas’ street theatre performances, and the ritual call-and-response of singing “Presente!” to remember those killed by state-sanctioned violence.
Our Peace Works program partners with Bloom Art and Integrated Therapies to provide art therapy to students at the MPS Success Center. An example of this is the Dolls for Peace memorial that MPS students have created. During this activity — inspired by the research of Dr. Rochelle Royster — students create a fabric doll to represent a loved one lost to community violence. Through this process, students are invited to acknowledge their grief and share about it, as well as to communicate their hope for a more peaceful future.
Furthermore, numerous Marquette students have used summer peacemaking fellowships to search for their artistic voice or to hone their creative expression. Some of these are on display in our office.
Other student fellows who have engaged with the art of nonviolence include:
Chris Jeske produced a documentary on race relations in Kirkwood, Mo.
Sally Nadeau researched the effects of art and dance in post-genocide Rwanda.
Emily Landes worked at an art therapy program with youth in El Salvador.
Ciara McHugh researched peace murals in Northern Ireland.
Johnny Irias Puerto created a photography exhibit about immigration in the US.
Audrey Lodes created a photography exhibit based on an art therapy internship she completed working with women and refugees in Jordan.
Lisset Perez Jaramillo wrote poetry about a delegation she participated in that visited Indigenous people in Manitoba and Grassy Narrows First Nation.
Graduating senior, Paige Stoeffler, is another in this tradition of students who pursued an art-based fellowship. Her project was to visually represent stories of women in the Bible. Beyond her fellowship, Paige has completed numerous works for us. She created a pencil sketch collage of prominent peacemakers for our office. She also wrote and illustrated a children’s book that addresses sexual abuse and domestic violence.
Earlier this year, Paige reached out about completing her Peace Studies capstone internship with the Center for Peacemaking. We had the perfect project in mind: coordinating the Peacemaker in Residence activities for Nicolas Lampert, a Milwaukee-based artist, activist, and educator.
An Art and Activism-based Residency
Lampert is the author of A People’s Art History of the United States and is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, the Art Build Workers, and the Voces de la Frontera artists collective. In collaboration with Marquette’s Justice in Action conference and the Haggerty Museum of Art, Paige coordinated Lampert’s three-part residency at Marquette.
The residency components included designing a graphic with students, leading an art build at Marquette’s Justice in Action conference, and delivering a lecture on how art is used in nonviolent social movements.
Designing the Graphic
At the start of the spring semester, Lampert led two workshops with students to design a graphic for our art build. At the first, we discussed the conference’s purpose and themes, and how this could be displayed graphically. Lampert explained common elements of captivating graphics and catchy slogans, sharing some of his favorite designs as examples. He concluded the workshop by giving us a homework assignment — to create and submit a few potential designs before the second meeting.
We started the second workshop by browsing each of the submissions that participants submitted. This naturally led to a lively discussion about which parts of each graphic we liked best and if there was a way to combine them to represent the desires of the whole group. Lampert facilitated this process only as much as was needed, letting the student voices guide the way. With our laptops out, we made and shared our revisions then and there. Only a few minutes after the scheduled end of the workshop, we were in agreement — we had our design.
The Art Build
On Saturday, February 25, around 150 students gathered in Marquette’s Alumni Memorial Union for the 2023 Justice in Action conference. As the morning workshops commenced, we began setting up for the art build. Stations included banner painting, screen printing, drying, fabric tearing, attaching safety pins, and poster making. Then more than 30 students arrived to participate in art build.
In the span of two hours, we painted a banner, made posters, and prepared 200 cloth prints. Lampert also spoke with us about the importance of art in social movements and how his favorite part of running art builds is the natural community building that takes place as everyone meets and talks to each other.
With our build completed and the banner dry, we displayed it at the conference’s concluding panel. As students left the conference, we distributed the cloth prints to everyone who attended.
Presentation
For the final component of his residency, Lampert presented on “Art & Nonviolent Social Movements” at the Haggerty Museum of Art to share about the power of art as a powerful tool for change when wielded by organizers, activists, and communities.
He used examples from across the country and around the world to show how art can be used in direct action. The examples ranged from basic (crafting catchy slogans and designing popular graphics) to sophisticated (in which the art is the protest). Regardless of the complexity, he emphasized the power of art to clearly express a movement’s core issue and goal.
He also spoke of how art engages with culture — how it draws in people who identify with it, or who are moved by it. In this way, art is accessible and affordable as a tactic, as well as effective as a strategy.
Agents for Change
Marquette’s vision statement aspires that “Marquette graduates will be problem-solvers and agents for change in a complex world…” When discerning what it means to be an agent for change, it helps to think of three distinct ways you can take action.
The most familiar type of action, political activism, focuses on influencing policy, oftentimes through legislation. This can also be thought of as regulating behaviors.
The second type, social activism, is also familiar. This includes taking action, such as volunteering or working in a way that directly engages with issues of injustice in social systems — with particular attention to those on the margins of or excluded by these systems. This can also be thought of as repairing or building structures.
Lastly, cultural activism is often the least familiar — even though it is a foundational piece of any movement for social change. Cultural activists are adept at influencing a society’s core attitudes, values, beliefs. The changes that political and social activists enact are normally first expressed by cultural activists through a variety of art forms.
In this sense, it is fair to call artists the beating hearts of our movements and creativity one of the most important skills to nurture among aspiring peacemakers.
