These days, I have 2 brains: a climate activism brain and mural painting brain. I’ve always thought of them as different, and blissfully so. I dedicate about half of my extracurricular time to the Climate Action Movement, a climate activist group, and Live in Color, a student mural painting group, both of which I co-founded my sophomore year. The great thing about running both a mural club and a climate activism club is how different they are. When we are fighting for something as intangible as climate action, taking a break to paint a wall bright colors feels like a breath of fresh air after you’ve been bed ridden with the flu. 

 

However, after reading a sentence during my research, I started to doubt everything. Like many street artists, Haring’s work was inseparable from his activism, reads an article titled the evolution of street art. This sentence caused that nausea and dizziness that accompanies a re-evaluation in life and career. Well, not exactly a re-evaluation but more of a confirmation that I’m so confused about what I want to do with my life and how to validate anything that I do. 

 

Unlike Haring, I have purposefully separated my activism and art. Unlike Haring, I pushed my mural painting to my left side of my brain, and my activism to the right side, leaving an uncrossable chasm in the middle. 

 

I am beginning to doubt this dichotomy too. This process, this project, is showing me that there is more connection between my art and activism than I originally thought, and might even shed light on what I want to do with the rest of my life. What stood in the way of me realizing the underlying, common theme between my art and activism was my narrow definitions for both art and activism, and my inability to see the overlap. 

 

I believed that activism had to be inherently political. It was about pressuring politicians and institutions outside the system to further socio-political causes. I believed art was the opposite, done as hobbies and professions, on rainy days, to be hung in rooms or museums. Obviously this stark of a dichotomy didn’t exist in my head, but it is to prove a point that these two ideas—art and activism—occupied different spaces in my brain. The overlap between art and activism only existed when people used their artistic talent to write, paint, draw, or make overtly political pieces. Black and white.  

 

However, as I paint these poles, think about them, and write about them everyday, I am beginning to blur this black and white dichotomy between art and activism. New definitions have emerged. 

 

Activism: people working for change, working for something better, working with the people around them to better your community, however large. 

 

Art: anything that makes people feel. It is free for them to decide what is art, how to feel. 

 

Dear reader, if you have a more ~sophisticated~ definition of art, I accept your eye rolls, I am growing as I do this. 

 

Anyway, despite putting plain colors in one part of campus, and politically charged and accusatory banners on other parts of campus, the two acts had more in common than I thought. What they had in common was a desire for change and a lack of acceptance about the status-quo systems of power and satisfaction about the way things were, politically or aesthetically. 

 

What excites me about both of these two activities is figuring out how systems and institutions function, how they don’t work for everyone, and how to change them. That is something that I have learned about myself recently, and something that I will continue to fight for tomorrow. 

 

My art is my activism, and the theme is the ability to—and desire f0r—change.

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