ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the catalytic moments, transformative relationships, and generative challenges that have shaped the author’s work over 30 years as a cultural organizer working for social justice. It shows how art and politics, individually and together, can expand the world or diminish it, reinforce the status quo or re-imagine it. Arts & Democracy supports the cross fertilization of culture, participatory democracy, and social justice. A moral economy requires the dismantling of a system of arrangements that support extraction. Art and politics come together both in artists’ creative work and in the ways that they engage communities, activism, and policymaking. Cultural organizing can be used to unite people through the humanity of culture and the democracy of participation or it can also be used to divide people through fear and polarization. The relationship between culture, creative action, and political change raises several questions.
