Activism articulated Archived article from Oct 5, 2001 By Douglas Frank   In 1994, Marie Cieri and Claire Peeps, who both had worked for many years as arts producers, curators, writers and administrators, began to look at the role the arts can play as a catalyst for social change. The result is "Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America" (Palgrave), in which 15 American activists speak candidly about how and why they struggle for social change. Two things stand out among the interviewees: the length and breadth of their commitment to change on the one hand, and the almost universal belief that they did not expect to see truly significant change in their own lifetimes, observes Cieri, a doctoral candidate in geography, who conducted and edited the interviews along with Peeps, director of the Durfee Foundation, a Los Angeles-based arts and community development organization. Esther Kaplan, for example, a longtime leader in the radical anti-AIDS group ACT UP, confesses to having doubts about the effectiveness of activism. "Working around AIDS right now is a really, really hard thing. Having your comrades and the people you get your inspiration from die all the time does really bad things to you," she says in her interview. "I'm actively in search of hope right now, but I don't necessarily have it," she continues. "At the same time, I'm not at all interested in just doing activism as a point of principle. I'm really interested in doing it if it can change things." Despite such misgivings, notes Cieri, "There's plenty of optimism among the activists we interviewed, even though they are being realistic about what it takes on a personal level to be an effective agent for change. I'd say that the stories the activists tell are inspirational at the same time they are real." Initially, the editors were trying to "come to terms with the political, financial, and spiritual crises that had overtaken the arts in the wake of the (Andres) Serrano and (Robert) Mapplethorpe funding controversies and subsequent challenges to the National Endowment for the Arts." Some of the 15 interviews in the book, however, contain little or no content about arts and culture, says Cieri. As the two women culled through the 53 interviews they completed, they decided that it was less important to focus on those that contained the most direct references to art than to choose ones that conveyed the most compelling messages about what it takes to be an activist. The final goal became to provide material that addressed the "crisis that progressives in general are experiencing, not just those affiliated with the arts." Interviewees include: Independent filmmaker Barbara Trent, who has depicted U.S. interventionist policies in Latin America. Singer Bernice Johnson Reagon, who has used her talents to further the cause of civil rights. Norma Swenson, longtime women's health activist and a co-author of "Our Bodies, Ourselves." Cleve Jones, developer of the AIDS quilt, who discusses its grassroots production and the spread of its message. Cieri is a 1973 Rutgers graduate in journalism and art with a master's from the University of Southern California in art history. She is currently hoping to use her background in writing, art and cartography to "employ an artistic approach within geography that might lead to new and potent ways of looking at space and at the social interactions that occur within it."

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