Photo by Gerd Altmann

Living Madly: Art is Power

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

I’ve been thinking about art lately, not only visual art but also literature and music. These things are an important part of my life, not just because I’m a writer but because they make me feel connected to something larger than myself, to other people, to memories I’d forgotten about. Whether I’m listening to music, reading a novel, or looking at a mural, art makes me feel grounded.

Whatever form they might take, we have known for a long time that the arts help foster a sense of community among people by lifting up and celebrating universal human experiences. They give us hope, promote mutual understanding, and can engender feelings of strength and empowerment.

Novels, songs, photographs, and paintings let us know we’re not alone, that there’s a light, however faint, waiting for us someplace in an often too-dark world.

It doesn’t happen often, but there have been times when a painting, photograph, or piece of music has moved me to tears. I once stood in the middle of a gallery at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover crying uncontrollably after looking at a photograph by Sally Mann.

It was an image of a young girl, about seven or eight years old, playing outdoors in dress-up clothes, her dirt-smudged cheeks a perfect foil for the string of pearls around her neck. The expression on her face was one of pure ferocity: Try to stop me. I dare you.

The photograph evoked a time in my early life—in the young lives of nearly all women—when I was fearless, bold, when I was in full possession of my own power and could wield it at will for my own sake and enjoyment, without consideration for the way my behavior would be viewed by anyone, especially members of the opposite sex. Try to stop me. I dare you.

The girl in that photo was me, before I was told that it was time I started dressing and and acting a certain way, that I should lose ten pounds, cross my legs, keep my voice down. Until the moment I set eyes on that image, I’d forgotten all about her. In some ways, that photograph gave me back a part of myself that I’d lost.

The arts communicate thoughts and ideas in a way nothing else can, directly from the heart and mind of one person to the heart and mind of another, even across continents and centuries. It’s for this reason that the arts, and creative people themselves, have historically been viewed as threats by the governments of certain countries, especially by autocratic regimes.

In the 1930s, Hitler’s Gestapo arrested any creative person whose work didn’t conform to Nazi ideology, destroying their studios, dismissing them from their jobs, even sending them to concentration camps.

As part of their mission to squash dissent, authoritarian governments continue this practice today. In 2011, artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei was arrested and jailed by the Chinese government. And in 2021, Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez, had artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Maykel Osorbo arrested on trumped up charges and imprisoned after closed-door trials.

Authoritarians have also sought to use art’s influence as a means toward their own ends.

Artists of which Hitler approved were given the task of creating pieces that supported the narrative the Nazis wished to put forth, works that often depicted strong, blond Aryans conducting wholesome work in an idyllic German countryside.

The Third Reich commissioned several musical compositions to excite crowds and celebrate their perceived achievements, some of which were performed live as Jews were marched to their graves.

A similar phenomenon has often been seen in dictators commissioning images of themselves, not only to boost their own egos but to implant in people’s minds the idea that they are omnipresent and all-powerful.

Josef Stalin ordered hundreds of images of himself to be created, paintings and sculptures that plastered the Soviet landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. The same thing can be seen today in North Korea, Syria, and Turkmenistan.

Making and consuming visual art, music, and literature can also be an act of resistance. This has historically been the case in many countries, even in the United States. Some of these American works include Andy Warhol’s 1964 silkscreen Race Riot; Keith Haring’s 1989 painting Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death, created to protest the government’s lack of response to the AIDS epidemic; Dorothea Lange’s powerful photographs of migrant workers; and the well known The Problem We All Live With, painted by Norman Rockwell in 1964 to draw attention to the school desegregation crisis in the South.

Since the election, much has been written speculating about how the creative community in the United States will fare under a government that has historically been hostile toward it. Some have predicted art’s demise or at least its decline. But I disagree with this idea. Like the human spirit, one of art’s greatest strengths is in its resilience, in its ability to rise up under the most adverse of circumstances.

As long as the arts provide us with a source of strength, hope, and inspiration people will fight to protect and preserve them. And as long as we have them as part of our lives, our culture and we ourselves will persevere.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost is the author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. You can see more of her work at emilienoelleprovost.com.