Request from Robert Shetterly:
Everywhere I go, kids, and adults, want to know how you got started. What was the defining moment that triggered your dedication to fighting for justice or peace, or the environment? What was your epiphany? Your AHA! moment? Were you a child or adult when this awareness came about? What kind of change was necessary in your life? What courage?
We want to put your story up on the Americans Who Tell the Truth website right next to your portrait. We think it will add a personal quality that will help young and older people identify with your work, and help them make the decision to act themselves. It will demystify the movement from bystander to activist…. that little leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Natasha Mayers’ Awakening
In 1982, I read an important book that stirred my conscience, Bitter Fruit, by Stephen Kinzer, about the overthrow of the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala by our CIA.*
I went to a teach-in about Central America and heard a remarkable German theologian (Erhard Kepler?), urge us to action: “Every drop counts, even if you think it is like pissing in the ocean. No matter how insignificant your action might seem, you must do it to get beyond the powerlessness, the cynicism, the paralysis.”
I was nearing 40, I had a young child, and had this new sense of responsibility for the state of the world. If I wasn’t going to do anything, who would?
A march was organized in Portland to mark the anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination in El Salvador. Peter Gourfain designed a banner that was so beautiful that I cried. I made a boring poster. I didn’t know how to make a visual statement without words and I wanted to.
I wanted to make art that could move people to action, that could stir their souls.
I thought the only way I could learn how to do it was to go to Central America and see it firsthand.
There was an artists’ brigade, “Arts for a New Nicaragua”, which formed out of Boston, invited by the Ministry of Culture to come down and paint murals with Nicaraguan artists. Some of us painted a mural on the outside wall of a soap factory in Granada. Workers made suggestions about content and told stories. It became a talking wall. Even the food vendors would park in front of it because it drew so much attention. I also helped a group of young people paint their own compelling vision of the new Nicaragua.
That gave me a new awareness of what an artist can do. I saw a government that validated and recognized its artists. I saw a community of artists at work It changed a lot of my attitudes about the power and effectiveness of art, what my art should be about, and what my role as an artist in the community of artists and non-artists could be.
