14: Forget Pipe Cleaners: Why Real Cultural Organizing Is Not What You Think It Is- Part 2

Episode 14: DIVA CATS - PART 2Threshold Questions and Juicy QuotesYou artists are volunteers right?"No! We're professional artists. Everybody gets paid and they get paid well" because I won't have it any other way" They may say, "Oh, well, isn't it nice that those men are able to learn some arts and crafts stuff?" No, we don't use paper plates or pipe cleaners, and to Pacia's point, we are not trying to help them. They are learning to figure out how they can help themselves. Con ChristesonWhat does sustainability mean when you are working with vulnerable people and communities?I'm sure that Roseanne and Con can both attest to it, you don't really clock out from these kinds of things. you don't take your teaching artists or community care or counselor or administrator hat or smock off when you go home. Right. So the biggest way is that the work has shown up is that it's always present, you get phone calls, you get emails, you're invited to come to this thing, you don't, clock out, you know, It's like your partner or your child or your parents that you care for. Right. It's omnipresent. It's always kind of over here. Pacia AndersonWhat does "with not for" mean?Doing something with a group of people means you're side by side with them, you are succeeding and failing with them, you are listening to each other. You are understanding what needs to happen. When we come someplace and we have a plan, then we are doing something for a community. We're not listening to the community, to the people there. We don't know all the things that are going on underneath the surface because we think we're doing something for people because we decided they needed it. Who are we to decide? Roseann WeissWhere does the work fit? In the altered landscape that has emerged around us? (I am experiencing) ...my accountability, shifting of power, amplification of marginalized voice, liberation of all oppressed people everywhere, more than I feel like I've ever seen in my forty-two years. (In this context the creative process works ) ...as medium, as conduit, as inspiration, as catharsis as an example of possibility as documentation. Yeah, as the material and inanimate embodiment of what an artist is. Pacia AndersonTranscriptPacia Anderson: ...And though distance may divideor routine in timerendering your spaces high as the tideStill the look that holds tighttwo the ends of the flash backI am rich memoriesI am fond intensityHeld in place by the mere desire to create itWhen one comes aliveWhen our atoms collideWith twin flames, one desireSacred namesbathed in fire, bathed in fire, bathed in firefire, fire, fire, fireStill life pretty and shinnyI could hold its sweetness in my handTickle the linchpinStroke the beautiful dangerA delicate malevolenceThe simple and gentle miserable symbolhold this opusthe explosive closenessSo focused that I didn't noticethe dagger in my back...BC: That was Pacia Anderson, or as she calls herself Pacia Elaine Anderson, one of the three remarkable women we have dubbed, the DIVA Cats, who shared their wisdom and stories in our last episode. In that conversation they talked about the different paths that led them CAT, the nationally recognized

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