30: From Judy Chicago to Juvenile Halls: How One Activist Artist Facilitated Radical Change Through Creativity

 Susan Hill: The Path Made by Walking ForwardSusan Hill has, one of the best minds, and hearts I know for translating human creativity to the needs of the human community. In our conversation, we talk about how that complex alchemy works, and doesn’t, getting the respect of people who really distrust you, and what happens when the lights go off in a high-security prison classroom. Here is her bio followed by our full transcript. Susan Hill: I’m an eccentric combination of very small towns in New England, and very very large, diverse, multi-lingual cities: living by the ocean is the constant. My relatives include a clipper ship navigator, a detective, excellent carpenters, a race horse trainer, a car salesman, a dressmaker, an artist who changed / Americanized her name, nurses and teachers and wonderful cooks. I love the risks, the service, and the high craft implicit in their lives.I went to college (1961-1965) , not to art school … but fell in love with photography in college, learned to develop film and to print images by apprenticing, began photographing people and neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles .. walking everywhere, photographing. This is how I began … an immersion in seeing a city, in fact, documenting what I saw … but as witness, documentarian, not an agent. I was looking for a different way of working, and went to a lecture by (then, young) Judy Chicago (1975) , who spoke about a new project she was beginning, a project she needed people to work with her. The Project was The Dinner Party. I was one of the first people who entered her studio to work; our early conversations, and the skills I’d learned from my grandmother, led to our deciding to add embroidered panels to each place setting, my being responsible for the embroidery, for the teams of stitchers, we trained.The studio environment, the collaborations, the engagement with direct social action, changed everything.After The Dinner Party was complete, I worked with Judy Baca, founder of SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center) during the design and painting of the last segment of The Great Wall mural … a brilliant and generous mentor, deepening my love of collaboration and community engagement. (NOTE: Judy is now embarking on one more segment of the Wall.) At the same time, Susan Loewenberg, founder of L.A. Theatre Works, was Director of Artists in Prison and Other Places; she hired me as an artist in residence for California Institution for Women, responsible for creating a fiber arts project with the inmates that would be given public exhibitions. It became a two-year residency called When Prison is Home, creating quilted triptych banners documenting life with family, life within prison, circled by aspirations, worked by inmates, and free women who came to project sessions in the prison as team members. Most of the inmates we worked with had long sentences or life sentences; were considered respected elders of the prison community, had power, were good mentors, generous collaborators. The CIW project experience led to Artsreach, which expanded our community constituencies and the range of arts disciplines. Our worksites included youth and adult prisons, service agencies for seriously developmentally challenged adults, community centers in marginalized areas of South Central, Watts and East Los Angeles. We began a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic theatre company that wrote its own material, there was modern dance, African drumming, spoken word poetry, ceramics, book arts,...

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