I am so excited to begin Emerging Rhizomes to share the brilliance of leaders, caregivers, creatives, and facilitators, who are digging deep into their lived and ancestral experiences to help us backstroke, butterfly, wade, float, stand, and sit as we navigate the waters of intense, collective social change in our communities, organizations and industries and ourselves. This section of our writing is meant to inspire and shine a light over work that helps us decolonize our thinking and/or practices.
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This month I wanted to share an excerpt of an article by Wild Dreamer Panthea Lee. Panthea Lee is a writer, activist, and facilitator working for structural justice and collective liberation. For me personally, Panthea is also a fierce transmitter of the untold stories from communities and people who can help us make sense of the major transitions we are experiencing.
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In May 2022 Bazaar Magazine published Panthea’s recent thinking, Grieving and Healing Through Creative Communion which really articulates a kind of wisdom about how to practice grief through art and connection. We hope you will read the whole piece and think with colleagues at work or in your community projects about how we can reimagine the role of art and grief in our work for social change and in our workplaces and community relationships.
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You can follow more of Panthea’s work here.
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In America, those who direct cultural investments are overwhelmingly white: In 2017–18, nearly half of museum boards were completely white, as were 88 percent of leadership and 84 percent of curators. This has enormous implications on those whose experiences, whose grief is recognized and resourced. In 2019, 85 percent of works in major U.S. museum collections were by white artists, and 87 percent by men.
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I bring this question to Christine Y. Kim, curator-at-large at Tate Modern and an advocate of historically underrepresented artists. “[Phingbodhipakkiya’s] art addressing grief is incredibly moving. Whether from her didactic graphic images with captions or her symbolic performance gestures, there could be tremendous healing to come out of her work,” she says. “But, of course, there are people who would try to dismiss it, [thus] perpetuating white complacency and supremacy.” Biases in art education—which legitimize selective, largely Western bodies of knowledge—mean the art world has often overlooked practices meaningful to non-white communities.
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Kim sees Phingbodhipakkiya as part of a tradition of artists who use images in inventive ways to empower communities excluded from the art world. Predecessors include Charles White and Ernie Barnes, who insisted on having their work in spaces where they would be seen by Black audiences. For White, this meant notebooks and calendars. For Barnes, this meant doing the artwork for the 1970s sitcom, Good Times, about a Black family in Chicago public housing. “When images appear in spaces that matter to communities,” Kim asserts, “the resonance can be surprising both in the moment, as well as years later.”
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One way to measure resonance is economic: A Barnes painting featured in Good Times recently sold for $15.3 million. Another is cultural: Phingbodhipakkiya made her I Still Believe series, based on her subway incident, freely downloadable for protesters. On the streets and at rallies, they represented strength at a time when the AAPI community needed such talismans.
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What would it look like to widely celebrate such practices? What would it mean to decenter white-box galleries and moneyed museums—where socially vital art is stripped of its animating context and power—in how we manifest art’s possibilities?
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Lincoln Center was not Phingbodhipakkiya’s first choice for GATHER. She had wanted to bring rituals to communities in need of healing, across every NYC borough. Due to logistical constraints, and her trust in the center’s new chief artistic officer, Shanta Thake, the project found a home there. As an Asian woman, Phingbodhipakkiya’s takeover of the Lincoln Center campus—her vivid colors and billowy textures disrupting its monochromatic marble—fills me with pride. But I can’t help but wonder: What if Phingbodhipakkiya had gotten her initial wish? What if instead of bringing artists of color to enliven elite institutions, we invested in artists and culture at their source?
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This question is very much alive. In recent years, Western museums have begun repatriating looted cultural artifacts to their communities and countries of origin. Since 2020’s uprisings for racial justice and decolonization, pressures have only intensified. The Smithsonian recently announced an ethical returns policy for stolen works across its holdings. Yet as cultural institutions reckon with the violence and extraction that undergird their legacies, they must also examine their present-day manifestations.
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A chorus of voices is calling for historically marginalized communities, whose practices enrich the art world, to reap the benefits of their contributions. In New York City, Hue Arts is calling for “community-centered over collection-centered approaches” to cultural development, arguing that New Yorkers should not have to travel to Lincoln Center and Museum Mile to enjoy art’s healing powers. Yet arts entities that center communities of color face persistent precarity. More than half of those surveyed by Hue Arts operate on less than $500,000 annually. By contrast, in 2020, Lincoln Center’s CEO earned more than $716,000.
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New York City council member Shahana Hanif chairs the City Council Committee on Immigration, and serves on its Committees for Cultural Affairs and Mental Health. At the intersection of these issues, she advocates for public art and community-based cultural institutions. “Many artists don’t want to be locked up in a museum somewhere, where our community members are unable to visit. We need to ensure what we put out for New Yorkers is available to and in our communities,” she says.
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Across ancient cultures and healing traditions, gathering and creative expression have long been vital. Western science is only now catching up, with recent trauma recovery studies demonstrating the benefits of nurturing relationships, somatic therapies, and the arts. Despite the evidence, America—where pharmaceutical companies have astounding policy influence—still disproportionately favors drugs, especially for our most vulnerable. From 2001 to 2012, the Departments of Defense and Veteran Affairs spent nearly $2 billion on psychotropic drugs, despite evidence that some are no more effective than a placebo in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Compared to the privately insured, low-income patients, especially children, are far more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic medications for mental distress. These drugs often have severe side effects, including lifelong physical problems.
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“Drugs cannot ‘cure’ trauma; they can only dampen the expressions of a disturbed physiology,” psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk notes in The Body Keeps the Score. “They can help control feelings and behavior, but always at a price—because they work by blocking the chemical systems that regulate engagement, motivation, pain, and pleasure.” Put another way, they suppress pain by suppressing what makes us human. And it is our most vulnerable who are doubly harmed: first by structural injustices that inflict harm and trauma, then by an ethically compromised health care system that denies them effective, humane treatment.
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Healing often requires confronting and processing pain experiences. Phingbodhipakkiya understands this. More than an art show, GATHER offers a path through grief. It was only when asked to write on her vessel did Erica express her deepest grief. Its rituals call us back from numbness and guide us in naming, sharing, and being witnessed in our anguish; in doing so, they help us move toward healing.
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Art helps us connect and see one another. It helps expand our imagination about what our world can be; in doing so, it restores hope, our most precious resource. Marginalized communities, like all people, deserve to heal via the arts. Indeed, studies show that gallery and museum attendance improves mental health and reduces anxiety and depression. It is thus imperative that all communities have equal access to these sanctuaries. For cultural justice is health justice is healing justice.
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Read the Article: Grieving and Healing Through Creative Communion​

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