Smash Notes
A love story about the power of art as organizing | Aja Monet and phillip agnew
In a lyrical talk full of radical imagination, poet Aja Monet and community organizer phillip agnew share the story of how they fell in love and what they've learned about the powerful connection between great social movements and meaningful art. Journey to Smoke Signals Studio in Miami, their home and community art space where they're creating a refuge…
People
Notes
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Philip Agnew and his group of friends created a movement and traveled around the world, and to Palestine in 2015. Aja Monet found her way to books and poems.
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During the impact of Hurricane Katrina, she discovered the impact of poetry. Poetry revealed to her that it was a way for people to not only articulate their feelings, but a way to work toward change and do something about it.
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As the exterior world exhibited so much sadness and grief, Aja sought community. When she met Philip, he brought so much love, truth, and joy in her life, and he pulled her out of isolation.
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On TED Talks Daily, poet Aja Monet and community organizer Phillip Agnew talk about falling in love and about the tie between great social movements and meaningful art. They take the audience to Smoke Signals Studio in Miami, the home and community art space they share, where they are building a refuge for neighbors and creators. The episode presents that room as their answer to distraction, anger, and anxiety. Communities and relationships, in their telling, are not only how movements get built. They are also how serious art gets made, with other people in the room.
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Art is organizing. It is also an anchor, not an accessory to movement. Art possesses rhythmic communication, coded emotional cues, and improvised feelings of critical thought.
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In their TED Talk, Aja Monet and Phillip Agnew say laws never change culture, but culture always changes laws, and that data rarely moves people while great art always does. About five months before they met, Phillip told a friend he would only settle down if it was a collision. They moved into a small house with a big backyard in Miami. Aja says Phillip pulled her out of a stretch of loss in which artists were used to numb people while still collecting awards, and movements felt like funerals. They decided art was organizing: an anchor, not an accessory. The backyard became where neighbors, artists, and organizers came to sit still.
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By what is done, not what one feels. Art as organizing is not only concerned about artists’ intentions, but their actual impact. Great art is a dialogue, not a monologue.
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