The protection of voting rights, particularly of African Americans and other people of color, is the focus of the novena for the month of October 2020. Along with your creative acts for racial justice, &&& encourages your participation in this string of the novena, as well as during the month of November (for Police Reform) and December (for Reform to the Criminal “Justice” System). 

As described in our Introduction to Street Novenas, materials, such as candles, photos, and other creative expressions and ex votos are, like everything else, optional and adaptable. What else may be done prayerfully and politically, contemplatively and actively, to bring about a more just and compassionate community? We encourage you to share your practices, suggestions, as well as any other feedback here. (For more information, please visit these links to past &&& Issues, including our “Introduction to ‘Street Novenas," our "Introduction to the Yearlong Street Novena for Racial Justice," and our description of "'Let It Shine' Yearlong and Beyond Beaded Novena for Racial Justice.")

For some participants, the Street Novena practice involves walking. However, several weeks of record heat, wild fires, and dense smoke have kept many of us, especially those of us living on the West Coast, and who are privileged enough to have roofs over our heads, indoors. Those who cannot or prefer not to incorporate walking, whether due to environmental, mobility, or other issues, may engage other practices.  For example, during September, when the smoke was especially thick, I joined other local Benicia artists in painting creative campaign signs as a fundraiser in support of the environmentally-and-art-friendly candidates who are running for our local mayoral and city council election (once again with interference by  big oil). I approached this project as life/art and as prayer.

I am also working on a series of small canvases and rekindling two larger paintings, that have been and are still in progress. I also picked back up macrame, a craft I did for work as a pre-teen, in the seventies, proto “gig economy.” In addition to the familiar beading and knotting, my current macrame practice upcycles repurposed and found objects: a visual affirmation, not so much of lofty notions such as transformation or redemption, but as a way to recognize and venerate what may be otherwise overlooked, diminished, or desecrated. Rather than my feet moving over the earth in strings of nine days of prayer, my hands become a means for meditative action and conduits of grace.

What I am finding most enlivening, transformative, and fruitful during these times is this: "art for life's sake," ethical aesthetics, theopoetics, and art/life, thanks in large part to the influence of such luminaries as Deborah J. Haynes, Linda Mary Montano, and other contemporary visionaries who attempt “to dissolve the boundaries between art and life" (Montano), sacred and secular, personal and political, process and product, and ritual and performance.

Along these lines, and as &&& continues our yearlong novena journey, we invite you to join us for nine days of inspirations with Maren Hassinger, drawing on whatever may call to your imagination – for example, after voting, tearing and twisting strips of pages from your Voter Information Guide into material for a mandala. Of course, the community aspect of transforming newspapers into collaborative sculpture is an important aspect of Hassinger’s work. But, perhaps, even during a pandemic, we can discover ways to safely inspire our neighbors, near and far, to work together on such art/life practices.

Day 1: “The air is full of fear. Be like the river.” 
2020, from the Hirshhorn Artist Diaries project, that “captures contemporary international artists’ responses to the worldwide pandemic.”  Runtime 1:12

Day 2:  “Use it properly and use it carefully.”
2019, Art Forum interview: what we make from what is given, our influences and guides, the political and personal impact of our creative acts, and using them as a platform. Runtime 5:50

Day 3: “...that all of our voices are heard and we’re  together as one going forward into the future…. It represents all of us working together … and happily talking, and sharing, and being. And, why can’t we be this way all the time?”
2019, at Allentown Art Museum: “Artist Maren Hassinger visited the Allentown Art Museum on August 25, 2019, to perform ‘Women’s Work,’ a participatory collaboration during which she and her audience manipulate newspaper into fibers and then use those to create a sculpture.”  Runtime 1:47

Day 4: “It’s not exactly about art. It’s about working together.”
2019, "Afrocosmologies": from The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.  Runtime :50 

Day 5: “It’s possible, with all you are, and all your identity to make it and to make it in your way.”
2019, artBMA: on the planning and purpose behind the video piece Daily Mask. Runtime 5:14

Day 6: "My goal is to find a way to unify people in this our worldly space and this our home.”
2018, “The Spirit of Things”: a film by Eric Minh Swenson, co-presented by The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Art + Practice and is organized by the BMA’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman. Runtime 5:06

Day 7: “I believe in the power of the previously disenfranchised and the possibility for a cumulative joy, a recovery.” 
2008, National Museum of Women in the Arts:  on “Wrenching News.” Runtime 1:15

Day 8: “Just don’t stop.”
2011, Hammer Museum, Now Dig This!: on “her process, the importance of friendships, and what it was like to live and make art in Los Angeles in the 1970s.”  Runtime 5:50

Day 9: Our Art/Life Novena Practices
Reflecting back on the Toni Morrison quote at the beginning of this newsletter: in this beautiful, blessed, broken, bruised, and bleeding world, what unheard, stifled, and involuntarily silenced cries do you hear? How may you, or we, respond to them contemplatively, creatively, and collaboratively?

As we are a community of learners, we invite you to please share descriptions of your practices and reflections here. If you would like to share any images, please email them to carrie@epiphania.net.