A LEADERSHIP & GRASSROOTS JUSTICE COLLECTIVE
ARtMAKING & SOCIAL JUSTICE
The Linden Leadership Collective seeks to explore the role of imagination and creativity in promoting individual and collective agency in social change. The arts open up new imaginative edges. Art and creativity can bring more critical consciousness to injustice, and lends us tools to re-imagine closed systems of bias.
There has been a long-standing conversation around how power influences how art is created, shared, consumed, valued, and used.
Becoming a Linden Leader seeks to give permission to play in the arts to reimagine the status quo of our relationships, bias and power dynamics. Making art can shape, express, and transform our “moral imaginations,” our sense of what is just, and our understanding of what is possible.
Artmaking shapes our souls and the souls of our communities. In an increasing frenetic visual world, the ability to make sense of the images coming our way is crucial. We can step into the fray, harness our imaginations as conscious creators, and add our stories to the collective narrative. Artists and activists have worked in concert historically giving form voice to injustice, horror, and beauty. It has been used to resist and to perpetuate oppression. The Linden Leadership Collective is an invitation to use art to resist bias internally and socially.
"Art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything." - Frederich Buechner
Art & Soul
The act of making art is, at its heart, the act of being alive—fully, wildly, unsparingly alive. It is the soul stretching toward the edges of what it knows, yearning to make visible the invisible. It's a conversation, a reckoning, a dance.
Making Visible the Invisible
Art breaks silences, speaking the truths we are too timid to speak. It unsettles us, demands of us, awakens us. It offers us back to ourselves, changed. The soul longs for beauty, but not the easy kind. Not the kind that is polished and neat and easy to admire. The soul longs for the kind of beauty that redeems and that sings the songs of broken things mended.