Feature Friday w/ E.C. Buckley
What is the role of the artist in social and racial justice activism work?
I think if you choose to do that kind of work you need to focus on the movement/issues you’re trying to advocate for and remove yourself from the forefront. In that genre of artistry, I feel your role is to depict the experience of those around you who are affected by the social/racial issue and elevate their voices. Of course if you’re within the community you could include yourself, but I feel like when creating work explicitly advocating for others you should consider more than your own thoughts and feelings on an issue. Personally, I am not really an artist activist—or at least I wouldn’t label myself as such. My work doesn’t exist to necessarily bring about change or rally for anyone. Certainly an argument could be made that in creating work highlighting these issues it is an act of activism, but that is not generally my main goal. Truthfully when it comes to race in relation to my work, my goal is usually to simply tell the story of my community and in general showcase racial diversity.
Please speak to the importance of Black history in your life as an artist in the 21st century
I feel like I touched on this in the first question, but I guess I would say a lot but also not much at all. Much of my work is just artistic chronicles of how I experience life. However, I am Black, and for me that means I typically deal with race in some regard in my work. Even if that is not the main focus, about 8 times out of 10 there is a racial element to my work because my blackness is integral to my identity and plays a key role in how I experience life. I also make work about being LGBTQIA+ and mental health issues, and while I consider these things to be important parts of my identity, none are quite as obvious as my Blackness. No matter what I will always be back, because upon first glance you might not recognize that I am Nonbinary and you certainly wouldn’t be able to tell my mental conditions, but you will always recognize my Blackness. I am aware of the racial element in my work, it is not something I reject and I love the subtle undertones of it in nearly everything I do, because I am proud to be a Black artist.
How does your own racial identity influence how and what you create?
Considering I am Black, I would say black history is extremely important to me. It is the history of my ancestors. As a Black American, I find Black history to be one of the most important pieces of history, because so much of it was stolen and hidden from us. Going through the American public school system, I didn’t learn much about Black history. It was pretty much a short unit quickly glossing over slavery and the civil rights movement. Fortunately, I have a mother who took it upon herself to make sure I learned my history. She would sit my siblings and I down and show us videos and have us read books so that we would understand not only what our people had been through, but also that black history is so much more than just slavery. Not to say that is not an important piece of the history, but there is so much more that is simply not widely taught. So essentially—to make a long answer short—Black history is important to me as a 21st century artist because it connects to my identity.
