Spiral Q: The Mission

Today begins the Cardboard to Courage Campaign at Spiral Q. Please visit the website and donate $10-$100 to support this fantastic community.

Spiral Q's mission: Spiral Q builds strong and equitable communities characterized by joy, creativity, can-do attitudes, and the courage to act on their convictions.

To be very clear, Spiral Q doesn't make puppets or any other kind of art object. Spiral Q builds communities first and foremost. Art happens along the way, but it never takes the form of a static object. Art is a living breathing process and at Spiral Q building art and building community are the same process. Spiral Q takes for granted the fact that all humans are naturally creative expressive beings and we all long to tell our stories--be they personal memoirs, creative fictions, lived poems, or community documentaries.

I love that joy is at the heart of Spiral Q's mission, right there in the middle of the sentence. Every social movement, every project for change, needs to have a party and celebrate with joy. This can involve dancing, feasting, worshipping, playing--you must have a party and you deserve to have joy.

All of us are CREATIVE and we deserve to have JOY. Our actions make a difference and we CAN DO the work of making the world around us. When we have the COURAGE TO ACT ON OUR CONVICTIONS, our communities become STRONG and EQUITABLE.

Strong and equitable communities are built on conversation, expression, free assembly, and the constant rejection of the lines that so often divide us--lines of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, nationalism, and ultimately lines of power and silence.

Art is not an object, it's a process, and a SOCIAL process at that. Even the lone artist constructing a painting, performance, photograph or sculpture is COMMUNICATING a message to the social world around her. In the best of cases, art is a SOCIAL PROJECT that constantly defines and redefines what it means to be human.

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