ARTS & CULTURE
ART FOR THE FUTURE LINKS THE PAST TO THE PRESENT By Ashley Gomez
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f we can simply witness the destruction of another culture, we are sacrificing our own right to make culture. Anyone who has ever protested repression anywhere should consider the responsibility to defend the culture and rights of the Central American people.” This rousing message was written on the original poster created by artists involved in the Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America movement, which launched in the 1980s. Art pieces created by members of Artists Call are featured in the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) exhibit titled Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, on display at both the Medford and SMFA campus until April 20. The exhibit weaves together the past, present, and the future effects of US intervention policies in Central America. “Artists Call was essentially a group of over 1,100 artists coming together in solidarity and raising money for various causes in solidarity with Central American folks… and to further the self-determination of Central American people,” explained Abigail Satinsky, co-curator of the exhibit. “Those were their goals and [the artists] had all different ways of trying to achieve it. They did protest actions in the street, they had exhibitions in galleries, in museums, and they had poetry readings.” The exhibit provides historical context for the United States in Central America through the lens of artists and activists on the ground, and students are picking up on that. Anneke Chan, a second-year combined degree student who works at the gallery and is a member of TUAG’s Student 14 TUFTS OBSERVER FEBRUARY 28, 2022
Programming Committee, reports that she is really impressed with the quality of work Tufts exhibits. “It seems to me like a very historically grounded exhibit,” Chan said. Historically, imperialist American policies have defined the United States as a nation that has violently and illegally disrupted countries around the globe. In the 1980s, US intervention in Central American countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala contributed to
“IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT OUR PERSPECTIVES AS CURATORS BUT MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES ON THIS EVENT, ITS LEGACY, WHAT IT TELLS US, HOW WE CAN THINK ABOUT SOLIDARITY AMONGST ARTISTS.” political strife and bloodshed. For example, in 1981 the U.S aided the Salvadoran Army to carry out El Mozote, a massacre of more than 1,000 indigenous Salvadorans. This genocide is widely understood by historians to have been a violent attempt to suppress leftist politics and take away agency from Central Americans. The exhibition has also made audiences aware of the omission of certain histories in high school education. Chan explains that the Artists Call movement and its cause is understudied. “There were a lot of things I didn’t learn in my high
school education,” Chan said. “I went to public school for high school, so my experience shows the way the US [education system] neglects US intervention… It’s very eye-opening.” Art for the Future brings attention to the movement’s legacy, while also demanding that this history needs dire attention from people in the US. Art for the Future came to be when Satinsky approached co-curator Erina Dugan about her work on another exhibit, titled Northern Triangle, which featured the Artists Call poster with its original demands and signatures of the artists that supported it. Satinsky reached out to Dugan for more information about Artists Call: “[Dugan] said she found this drove of materials, and [she thought] it’d be great together if we put on a show, and that’s what ended up happening,” Satinsky described. “We asked the artists to look at the archives with us. It wasn’t supposed to be about our perspectives as curators but multiple perspectives on this event, its legacy, what it tells us, and how we can think about solidarity amongst artists.” Most of the art and archival information displayed in the exhibit were produced during the original Artists Call movement in the 1980s; however, integrating certain pieces produced after the movement reminds us of the ways US intervention is still present in Central America today. When creating the exhibit, Satinsky said, “We
