Support the Arts Now: The Importance of Nurturing Local Artist Communities

The day begins at sunrise. This is generally accepted as truth. Well, in Judaism, as some may know, the day begins at sundown. What does it mean if we take such a fundamental understanding of something like day and shift our definition ever so slightly, just 12 hours? We open our mind to new possibilities, new connections, new empathies. To challenge such established ways of thinking, David Horvitz took a boat out to longitude line 127.5° west of Greenwich. It is here that the United States Department of Transportation decided time changes from Pacific Standard Time to Alaska Standard Time. Horvitz gathered buckets of water at this exact location, where the waters are always churning, in a futile attempt to capture time. Upon returning to land, the artist filled 32 glass vessels and placed them in a north-south line in a gallery and wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation requesting that the time zone be shifted based on this action.

Time is defined not by a natural cycle but by a federal office here in DC. The artist calls attention to the tenuous grasp we have on the defined limits we have imposed. They can so easily slip through our fingers and elude containment. In a world that feels so broken right now, we need artists to remind us that there is more than one way to view the world.

This piece by Horvitz, somewhere in between the jurisdiction of time (2014), was included in an exhibition titled “Night Begins the Day” that I co-curated with Renny Pritikin at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. It is an example of how a simple, sometimes humorous action can cause us to pause, forcing us to think about the things that we have made assumptions about or taken for granted. If we let go of those assumptions, what ideas can we open our minds to, what conversations can we have without judgement?

We need art in our communities now more than ever, as always. I don’t want to write about funding for the arts--though funds always help--I want to write about the bigger picture and why we need everyone to care that they have artists living and working amongst them. As fears around censorship and decreases in national funding for the arts appear warranted, it is important to remember how much may be accomplished through civil discourse. Art and artists so often give us the permission to cross blurred lines and consider positions from multiple angles. Art has the power to change minds in a direct appeal to logic and emotion. Sometimes, as with Horvitz’s piece, it helps to have the context and background information to fully grasp complex approaches and ideas.

DC is home to some of the most incredible museums and cultural collections and experiences in the world, and many of them are available to visitors at no cost. It is an embarrassment of riches. However, we, as DC residents, many multi-generational DC natives and many new to the city as federal employees, students, partners to federal employees, human rights workers, are neglecting our artist neighbors. We have artists addressing issues like gun violence, displacement and relocation, joy in family, celebrations of music and the DC soundscape. There are only a handful of places to see this work—all smaller community-focused nonprofit organizations that are currently struggling to provide the public good that is art without the full support of our neighbors.

Hamiltonian Artists has been on U Street NW for over 15 years now and have worked with 100+ artists through our professional development fellowship, and many more through exhibitions and other public programs. We are constantly looking for new audiences, new patrons, more funding, and larger networks here and afar. The artists we work with have audiences around the world but not here where they live. Recent shows have featured work about the beauty of the everyday, death, gentrification, the joy of Blackness, masculinity, memory, and immigration by artists from here, Mexico, Israel and Palestine, and Korea. We must support their work so that one day they can be the artists on the walls of our national institutions; they represent the places they come from and live. Artists generously offer themselves to the public to open conversations. Locally based and focused organizations, such as Hamiltonian Artists, are their amplifiers.

Why do we need art? Art is not going to change the world. Art is not policy, it is not a human right, even. Art is a form of communication that is both accessible and completely obtuse and incomprehensible. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. Art does not offer answers, it poses questions. We must support all our artists—not only the ones at national institutions—by showing, looking at, writing about, and buying their work. Live with art.