March 3, 2026 • 37 mins
Ashley Hunt discusses how research and lived experience shape his creative work. Beginning with his evacuation during the Los Angeles wildfire, the conversation expands into his long engagement with mass incarceration and the systems that structure punishment in the United States. He reflects on art as a way to examine power, the importance of historical context, and the responsibility artists carry in understanding their own position in the work they make. Ashley also explores the idea of speaking alongside communities rather than for them and why art remains a space for critical thinking and possibility.
2:28 Evacuating Topanga Canyon and Community Response
6:22 Climate Crisis and the Educational Mission
9:30 Incarcerated Fire Crews and Exploited Labor
12:12 Two Californias and the Scale of Incarceration
15:12 Teaching, Criminalization, and Early Inquiry
18:21 Research as Artistic Practice
21:43 Profit Motives and Private Prisons
22:16 Counter Narratives and Media Mythology
24:54 History, Slavery, and the Prison System
27:03 Self Awareness, Privilege, and Accountability
27:59 James Baldwin and Rethinking Whiteness
30:28 CalArts and VCFA Coming Together
31:58 When Is the Right Time for Graduate School
35:04 What Unapologetically Creative Means
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
One of the things that's been a resource, I'll just say one
thing that's been a resource to me is, is changing the idea of,
of the artist's role as speakingfor somebody to what Trenti
Minha talks about is speaking alongside.
Is there a way to as an ally or somebody who's not from a
particular community to to speakwith that community?
(00:29):
Welcome to Unapologetically Creative, a podcast from the
Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we celebrate bold
artistry, transformative creativity, and the audacious
voices shaping the future of thearts.
I'm your host, Andrew Ram Sammy,and in this series we dive into
honest, inspiring conversations with artists who are pushing
(00:53):
boundaries and redefining what it means to create work that
resonates and indoors. Ashley Hunt is an artist,
activist, writer, and educator best known for his photographic
and video work examining the American prison system, mass
incarceration, and the prison abolition movement.
(01:13):
He's currently a faculty member in the School of Art at the
California Institute of the Arts.
We begin this conversation with Ashley reflecting on evacuating
his home during the Los Angeles wildfire and what it meant to
watch a city and a community respond to crisis, and how
collective experience shapes identity.
From there, he traces the early experiences that led him into
(01:35):
teaching and the questions that eventually pushed his work
towards investigating incarceration, private prisons,
and the systems that govern punishment in the United States.
Throughout the episode, we talk about art as a way of
understanding power, research asa creative practice, and how
creative work can help us see the systems that shape our
(01:55):
lives. Ashley, welcome to
Unapologetically Creative. Thanks very much.
So actually, let's start there. We were all here together,
gathered in January here at Cal Arts, all set ready to go.
And then literally all hell broke loose and the world was
(02:16):
kind of on fire and all all of our phones were collectively
going off. For you is a a much more
different experience because youhad a home in the path of the
fire. Yeah, we were a couple of
canyons over in Topanga Canyon. That's where where we live and
gratefully still live. I think I had attended, I'd
(02:38):
shown up, attended the first lecture of that day.
I was supposed to do some critiques and with students and
then give a lecture the next day.
And yeah, I start getting, I start getting an alert that
there's a small brush fire in the Palisades goes from half an
acre to 10 acres to 50 acres to 100 acres really quick.
(03:03):
And I, I realized I had to excuse myself and head back
home, pick up our kid out of thepreschool that's nearby and see
if we're going to need to evacuate that night, which we
did. And then we were evacuated for
almost 2 weeks. Oh, wow.
And we got very lucky. There was the fire came within
(03:24):
about 1/2 mile of our house. Some of our friends and
neighbors, their houses got hit.But the Canyon, Topanga Canyon
is a kind of unique community. It's a little more on the high
end or side now, but but it has a real bohemian history, a
strong artistic history and cultural history as a kind of
(03:47):
hippie Canyon and stuff, 60s and70s.
And there's still a lot of kind of amazing people there who a
lot of whom stayed behind and ina really, a really amazing way
protected the community. They, they formed kind of
informal Fire Brigades, a numberof us who were evacuated with
(04:11):
our kids and stuff on the outside of the, the outside of
where all the roads were closed.We would bring supplies of fire
extinguishers and hoses and fireprotective clothing for them to,
and we could kind of like pass it to them across the police
barrier. The police would let us do that.
And then they would drive it back in and put out spot fires,
(04:32):
help identify where things were flaring up for the, for the
actual firefighters, or I shouldsay actual, but the formal ones,
there's city and state firefighters.
I guess where it was most inspirational for me as an
artist was seeing how, how the community came together, how
(04:53):
community identity is formed. We, we've been living in, in
Topanga Canyon since 2020, so almost five years.
But there was nothing that made us feel like Topangans more than
than having been through this experience where there's
(05:15):
something that is identifying all of us with one another based
on some kind of, you know, adversity or, or kind of
collective experience. So I guess in relation, since
you framed the question in termsof art making and stuff, you
know, or being on one's path andso forth, it was seeing that
(05:38):
collective experience. How collective experience shapes
our identity, our sense of the world, our place in it and so
forth. That is what.
Yeah, I feel like that's what I took away from it.
Yeah. Makes me think about the
possibilities of what art at itsbest can do.
And I mean, there were immediateimpacts to us even here at Cal
(05:59):
Arts. A lot of folks who worked at Cal
Arts or were trying to get to Cal Arts, literally their paths
were blocked from being able to to come here.
And that kind of confronting of that immediate large scale
crisis. Did any of that shift your
perspective as an artist and as an educator?
(06:22):
Well, the, I mean, the majority of my work for the last 25 years
has been around mass incarceration.
So I'm pretty used to working around crisis conditions of
crisis and the crises that feed systems like mass incarceration.
But I think I think in terms of this particular one, what maybe
(06:48):
what what I connected with in that in terms of that was, was
having our educational experience here be interrupted
by something that is in the fluke, right.
That is something that is a, a, a new and growing feature of our
(07:11):
world. Which in terms of climate
change, in terms of the the increased risk and vulnerability
to these kinds of weather eventsthat affect us just in terms of
the security of our home, affectus in terms of insurance prices.
Rather we can actually afford tolive in a city and so forth.
(07:31):
All these ways that that that fire settled, you know,
interrupted our daily life and our expectations and what it
means. You know, if I were a different
educator, I might say, hey, let's not let that distract us
from our educational mission, what we're doing here.
I mean, on a certain level, I yes, we have to continue the
(07:54):
educational mission. But for me as an educator and as
an artist and just to I guess how I existed, I see myself
existing in the world. I don't see that as outside of
the educational mission. The educational mission is to
think is to see there's relatives what's happening and.
Relevance to that? Right.
Yeah, That it right. This is the world we, this is
(08:16):
the world we live in. This is the world we make art
in. This is the world our art will
go into and either have something to say about this or
not. And that's a choice we make in
our in our work. Not everybody.
I don't think everybody has to make work about climate change
at all, but but I think for us, each of us as an artist has to
(08:38):
think about what's my position, what's my voice?
What, what do I have to say that's different than somebody
else? And, you know, that unavoidably
changed my sense of like, oh, this is, look how this is
changing my life on a daily basis.
And it did bleed into a, a project that I would have been
working on for two years and then became a, you know, the
(09:03):
became a part of, became a big part of that project after.
Yeah, because. There is a connection between a
lot of these hotshot crews and folks who are incarcerated,
sure, who are on hotshot crews. Yeah, especially in California.
Especially in California. Can you tell us about that?
What? That I, I didn't know that.
Yeah. When I heard that, I was, I
don't know what to say. Shocked, but like it's forced
(09:28):
labor. Yeah, it's, I mean, in a
certain, a certain from a certain direction, it is.
I mean, I think that there's, there's, there's absolutely a
kind of exploitation aspect to it.
And that's, you know, that's, that's the most important
starting point. I think at the same time,
there's, there's a way in which people who people who are
(09:55):
imprisoned also look for opportunities to build, build
their skills, build a path for something to do other than just
be imprisoned and to try to figure out what their life on
the outside is going to be when they're released.
Because the vast majority of imprisoned people get released
at some point. And, and so I think there's,
(10:20):
there's a certain amount of pride that I, as far as I
understand that for people who kind of work in those crews and,
and, and a certain kind of ability to learn how to do
something, you know, in the world and so forth and be useful
in that way. But I think the context in which
(10:40):
that takes place, right, there may be some aspects to that that
we think is what prisons should be for in terms of helping
people build their skills for when they come back out.
But the context in which that takes place, which is
exploitive, which is people not getting, you know, I don't know,
I don't know the exact wages, but like getting paid like a
dollar a day or something like that.
(11:01):
You know, there's that connects that connects it to a long, a
long history of California and the United States of using
unfree labor to to build the state.
You know, whether that's the history of building roads,
railroads, industrial infrastructure and and having to
(11:27):
take on a certain amount of riskthat the state wouldn't
redistributes to that unfree population.
So. Did you find that interesting,
finding that those things out, that in a place that most people
consider to be so liberal, that those liberal ideals didn't
necessarily transfer themselves to the folks who we would think
(11:53):
should probably be given the greatest opportunities to redeem
themselves? It didn't surprise me because I
know the history of California and.
So it surprised most people to find those things out.
You would write in your work anddoing your work as an artist to
bring that to light. I think, I think most people are
(12:13):
surprised by a lot of things when they start to learn about
mass incarceration and, and whatit is and where it is and how
much their taxes go to pay for it.
Or, you know, there's kind of like if we use the 2, the two
cities of the two Americas analogy, there's there's people
(12:38):
who have the privilege of not knowing a thing about the prison
system. And then there's people who have
no choice but to know about it, whether that's because of their
own personal experience directlyor through a family member or
students they teach, which is kind of how a part of how I came
into this work and so forth. So if I were to take that
(13:01):
analogy further, are there 2 Californians?
Sure, absolutely. Tell us about those two.
Californians. Yeah.
I mean, I mean in terms of what I was just saying that
particular to California's, there's the California that sees
(13:24):
itself as a kind of space for openness and progress, right?
That this is a place where progress starts and we kind of
like model industries and that we send out to the world in
terms of tech and whatever. And, and, but also policy
models, right? On the political level, there's
(13:45):
a lot of kind of legislation that's, that starts in
California that with an, with aneye on it becoming a model for a
national standard or an international standard.
So fuel efficiency standards, right, start in California, but
(14:06):
which the Trump administration is trying to roll back right
now, right, like when electric cars will be mandated to be
replacing combustion engines andso forth.
But the But California also has California, I think would have
(14:28):
the third or fourth highest incarceration, largest prison
population of the world if it was its own country.
Wow. I'm I'm not sure the exact
statistic, it's somewhere close to that, but.
That's still, yeah, that says a lot.
Yeah. So the United States has the
largest, the highest incarceration rate of any nation
(14:50):
of modern history Outside that'snot a slave society.
The only the only societies in which there's been this many
people locked up per in relationto the population, this higher
percentage of people locked up has been slave societies.
Why were you interested in this work?
What Drew drew you to this topic, specifically around mass
incarceration? I, it was a long time ago I had,
(15:17):
there's just different, different aspects of my life
that were kind of where that waspressing in, in different ways.
Not me, not me personally, but some, some family members and
then also young people. I, I taught.
So I, I, before I went to Graduate School, there were I, I
was, I taught in LA Unified school districts.
I was a substitute teacher, which is a good gig after you
(15:40):
finish undergrad if you're not going to go straight into
education. And I had some long term
positions and some kind of like communities that where I saw
very clearly how kids who look different than me growing up
white in a suburban part of LA were actively being criminalized
(16:02):
on a day-to-day basis. And I saw the same thing when I
was doing doing similar work in the South side of Chicago when I
was getting my grad graduate degree there.
And so that like wanted to understand that wanting to do
something about that or have have have my work be some kind
(16:23):
of a, a resource or something that contributes to solving that
as a problem rather than not became something.
I mean, I was also interested. I mean, one of my personal kind
of artistic questions had been how are our personal identities
(16:45):
shaped by the economy and thingslike capitalism?
What does that, what does that kind of political economic
system do to us in ways that we don't necessarily see?
And so, yeah, I don't know, I with that kind of inquiry, I was
like, well, how is that affecting these these kids who
I'm working with or these kids who were held up on a cop car
(17:07):
for? That's why they were two hours
late to to my workshop today, you know, for no reason, you
know, or for a very particular reason, you know.
You just said something that kind of inquiry.
Yeah. What is that?
I guess the like the the frame of a question, taking the frame
(17:28):
of a particular question out into the world and using that as
a so inquiring right, based on that question into what's going
on around me. Why is this?
Why? Why?
Why are these young kids going through this experience and why
did I not go through that experience, for example?
(17:48):
Or is are the things that we're told that police and prisons are
actually for in our society whatthey actually do?
Is that the way they actually work or is there something else?
(18:09):
Where would then that take you? Where would that inquiry then
lead you towards or what would that require you to do to
investigate that inquiry? Where has it taken you?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, on a general level, it
would take you to research. It would take you to and
different kinds of research as an artist especially, right.
There's like book research and going to the library and looking
(18:31):
up stuff on the Internet or whatever.
But then there's also visual research going around and and
seeing how things appear and don't appear around you in the
world. Where it took me individually
was was to a news story that kind of came across my my desk,
(18:57):
so to speak, of private prisons that were a kind of newer
phenomenon that well, no, there was a very old phenomenon in the
United States that had kind of come back through.
They'd been they'd been made illegal in the United States in
the early 20th century and then they came back as a model of a
(19:20):
kind of like form of incarceration or expansion of
the the prison system that wouldbe based on a for profit model.
So, and this seemed to this seemed to be some an interesting
entryway into asking what else could be at work here in these
(19:47):
kids being targeted, these prisons expanding, the United
States having the largest and highest incarceration rate in
the world. The epidemic of police brutality
that, you know, even though it wasn't a part of the national
consciousness then like it is now was completely active then.
I, I become a part of some circles talking about that and
(20:09):
and and working around that in Chicago at the time.
And where, where that inquiry was led me to, there was this
kind of for profit system where you could see in the most naked
way how capitalism and its logics or its ways of operating
(20:31):
allow profit to motivate our values.
So, and in this case you had, I mean, Michelle Foucault is
someone who, who many of us who studied the prison system will,
will, will study. And, and one of the things he
talks about is that the, the prison system and the, the, the
(20:55):
state force, forms of state force are not negative, right?
They're not to negate things. They're actually productive.
They produce things, right. So the carcerality of the modern
state of the contemporary, our, our society today, the
carcerality of it produces spaces, it produces identities,
(21:16):
it produces bodies that wouldn'tbe produced in that same way if
if we had a different set of ways of thinking about how we
deal with each other and how we deal with problems, how we deal
with. Because the incentives are there
for the for profit model, so youhave to create the model in
(21:38):
which you always have a constantstream of.
Supply, yeah, you get paid per bed per day, right?
Do you think there's an over romanticizing of prisons?
And you know, when we think of of films like Shawshank
Redemption and you know, all of that, that it's it kind of
varnishes over the realities of what people truly experience
(22:00):
inside of prison. Yes.
And then what is then your role then as an artist?
Is your role then to to play thecounter to that narrative, or to
just establish A narrative that is not even reflective because
you're not countering something?It's, it's a little of both, you
know, I mean, I sometimes there's something like the work
(22:20):
I did in Louisiana. A lot of that was, was really
trying to create a counter narrative to the one that we get
from, from, from the police state, you know, so or what some
folks call Copicanda or right. But so some of it has been
responding much more directly to, to the system and its
(22:42):
ideology, which is which is the mythology that we all are
taught, right, That the police are there only there to protect
you and uphold law, You know, law and order and law and order
is something we all want. We all define that the same.
And the prisons are there for people who deserve to be there.
So. Well, not even just top and fed,
(23:03):
right? I mean, if we look at especially
the local news and how local news has shaped narratives,
yeah, absolutely. If it bleeds, it leads to 95.
It's and it's, you know, that over and over and over.
So how do you, how do you deal with that incessant over and
(23:24):
over of what typically happens in the mainstream, which is very
easy to produce, very easy to kind of replicate, but very
little resources that goes into the actual impact of all that?
And very, very little context, right?
Like, like the, there's some interesting studies that talk
(23:45):
about how the, how the amount ofcoverage of crime in in nightly
news and stuff and cable news isso directly out of proportion
with what else is going on in the world that it makes people
have think that there's much more crime around them than
there actually is. And it's part of that.
(24:07):
If it bleeds, it leads like, right, it's it's, it's the thing
that gets eyeballs. So which they're in thereby gets
advertisers and so forth. So, yeah, one, one way is to
contradict that stuff, bring in other voices that that, that put
that stuff in better context. And then there's history.
(24:29):
I think bringing in history of things.
If you are thinking about the fact that the American prison
system, mass and mass incarceration grew out of
slavery, right? Not in some separate gesture,
right, but directly grew out of slavery.
Well, that might make you ask a couple of the questions, because
at least you've been taught slavery in most In most places,
(24:50):
you've been taught slavery's bad.
As someone who is white, what doyou feel is your role in asking
that question or or what role doyou have in actually then you
know, answering that question? Especially because I think
that's my, my, I have a strong burden to, to, to answer that
(25:13):
question and to and to, I think it's, I think right now there's
a lot of, there's a lot of ways we think about, especially
online around are you, are you the right person to speak about
this? Right?
And I totally respect that. And that's been a question.
I've been, that's been importantto me as an artist since, since
(25:35):
I started doing this work, right.
But for me as a, as a, as a white person that, I mean, it's,
it's always such a strange thingto come out of my mouth because
it's not something I really choose to identify as.
I mean, I know that I'd benefit from the privilege that comes
with that. And I, I don't question that in
any kind of way. But, but at the same time, it's,
(25:57):
it's not really a position that I kind of chose to be on that
team. And also a lot of my ancestors
were from Ireland, which was which, which were the racial
other to England, you know, So I, I always feel like that.
But it's important. Is it important?
And I know that you don't say that you necessarily identify
(26:18):
with that, but it's important torecognize that as an artist,
where you sit in that in terms of, you know, not, again,
identifying for the purposes of this conversation, but at least
in saying I do bring a certain level of privilege to this.
Yeah, a certain level of perspective.
(26:40):
And you had just described earlier perhaps personal spheres
that might have been impacted asa result of these things.
How important is that kind of self-awareness in what you do?
And what should artists think about in understanding those
connections between their self-awareness and the work that
they do and the responsibility and carrying that?
(27:02):
Yeah, I think it's crucial. It's not everything, but it's
crucial. I think every artist we need to
think about, and some of us havemore of it.
Yeah, we, we, we need to think about what is my position and
what I'm in relation to what I'mtalking about or what I'm
interested in or just what does it mean for me to be an artist
(27:24):
as opposed to the next person? But in terms of this question, I
feel like it's important to listen to the critique of why
certain kinds of positions have been critiqued.
There might be sometimes when asa white person, this just not my
thing to talk about right at this moment in this context.
(27:46):
But there's also a way in which that that also has to do with
the tradition of, of being or history of, of that identity
being the one who gets to be theonly person who talks about
something, right, Right. So I mean, one of the greatest
teachers of white whiteness for me, and what whiteness means is
James Baldwin. I learned so much about white
(28:08):
people from James Baldwin in terms of how he understands it
as a fragile identity, as a contingent identity and an
identity that is like every other identity in crisis and
needing to be remade and fortified and so forth.
And so I, I think that one of the things that's been a
(28:29):
resource, I'll just say one of the things that's been a
resource to me is, is changing the idea of, of the artist's
role as speaking for somebody towhat Trent T Minha talks about
is speaking alongside right. That is there, is there a way to
as an ally or somebody who's notfrom a particular community to,
(28:51):
to speak with that community in a way that isn't exploitative,
isn't extractive, isn't privileging your narrative.
But back to your original question around like, is it, is
it my, do I see it as my role tospeak to something like the
history of slavery in the UnitedStates and how the prison system
(29:12):
grew out of that? Absolutely.
Because it's partly my ancestorswho built that fucking system.
You know, like there's there's accountability that we need to
be able to have that sometimes if we just say, oh, that's not
my place to sit to talk on that right.
Or, or it's too hard to build the trust with people who are
not you to it's just easier to just navel gaze and make work
(29:36):
about your, I don't know, whatever is easy to make work
about. Then, then the only people who
have the burden to talk about that history are the people who
were directly exploited in that history.
And I don't think that that's fair That, that, that's the,
that you have to explain that shit over and over and over
again forever. And, you know, at a place like
(29:58):
Cal Arts, you're like, maybe you're 1 of maybe you're the
only African American kid in theclass, you know, or artists in
the class. And, and do you want to be the
only person who, who has, who bears, who has bonsibility?
Yeah, exactly. I've had a number of students
who've complained about that to me, you know, and that's helped
me understand that too, you know?
People with the least amount of agency are suddenly thrusted
(30:22):
into the responsibility of Having the most amount of agency
on behalf of an entire group of folks is an incredible way to
bear. Well, this will be a a terrible
Segway, OK, but nonetheless A Segway.
Speaking of two houses that wereseparate and are now coming
together, Calarts and VCFA. You're on the faculty of
(30:46):
Calarts. You were formerly associated
with VCFA, and now we're here. What does this kind of
homecoming feel like for you nowthat VCFA is here on the campus
of of Calarts? It's great.
It's, it's like one of those weird dreams where different
parts of your life come togetherin ways they're not supposed to,
you know where. But in terms of the, the ethos
(31:10):
and the, the, the sense of what's urgent about art right
now in our world and what the place of art in our society is,
how we teach that who has the right to be an artist and so
forth. I felt those those things were
really consonant between Cal Arts and VCFA and the VCPI knew.
(31:31):
What do you say to students now or even prospective students,
whether they be the traditional student or the non traditional
which I. Hate you, they even.
Hate that word non traditional student post traditional student
that would come to VCFA and say look Ashley, I get it.
But now's not the time. Now's not the time to be doing
(31:51):
this. I can't, I can't start my MFA
journey or even just a creative journey.
What do you say to that person? Wait, wait till it's the right
time. I think, you know, it doesn't do
anybody any good to let's say onthe traditional model, go
straight out of undergrad, undergraduate school because
they've never been out of schoolbefore.
(32:12):
They don't know anything else. So my sense, my feeling that
I've come to learn over the years is that there's a the the
time for grad school is when youout there in the world and
there's something you've been trying to do that you haven't
been able to do on your own. And you, you realize that you
(32:36):
want, you want a community within which to learn how to do
that, that has the know how has facilities, things that you
don't have otherwise. But most important is the
community and their relationships.
Learning from other artists, being with other artists,
especially if you live in a place which I know VCFA always
(32:59):
has kind of made this possible for people who, who can't leave
a small rural town, you know, but they can, they can fly out
for two residences a year and get helped in making their their
work. I don't think there's any loss
of relevancy of art. I think there's a, there's a
(33:21):
compromising and a, and an impoverishment of a sense of
what art can do right now. In certain circles, it being
overly commodified and or it's, it's life as a commodity
becoming too dominant in what wesee its purpose as.
And in schools, I think that that, that, that same problem
(33:44):
comes in through questions of, of sustainability of educational
institutions, right? So what kind of jobs are people
going to be able to get when they get out of here and stuff
like that? You know, but I have, I mean, I
feel like we have a pretty good answer to that a lot of time,
which is that no matter how the,the, the job market changes,
there's never a job for an artist coming out of school.
(34:07):
But what there is from a good art education, right, is the the
critical thinking skills and theability to know what your voice
is and the ability to know how to make something on your own in
a way that few other disciplineshave, right, that that you leave
(34:31):
here in a way, ready to do that.And that allows you to continue
to be an artist, but it also allows you to go to law school.
Like 3 of my alumni from my program at Cal Arts right who've
who've said I was not disadvantaged by the fact that I
didn't do pre law or law as an undergrad.
My critical thinking skills and thinking about the world
(34:52):
critically in the photo and media program like Cal Arts
Little Plug there prepared me for that.
What does unapologetically creative mean to you?
Well, I can't help but think about my 6 year old right now
and the dance between as you become a person, learning how to
(35:13):
abide by the rules and conventions and norms of what it
means to be a person. And what is it that you do with
that other part of you that doesn't fit into those norms,
those habits, that discipline, right?
And I feel that there's some part of creativity that I just,
I just think is like how our brains and our emotions interact
(35:38):
and, and the fact that we move through the world, we're not
static. We are always changing the world
around us. But then there's this thing
called art, right? That is a space that is
importantly undefined. And a part of it is a part of
its values of art. A part of the art values of art
(36:00):
is to is to be open to the things that it doesn't yet know
how to be, as opposed to other disciplines of like, well,
that's not what we do in engineering.
That's not what we do in America.
That's not medicine, right? It only it would fall, people
would die. Yeah, right.
I mean, I've had plenty of people tell me that's not art,
but it's activism, right? And that's been an interesting
challenge to think about how to show them that they're wrong,
(36:23):
right? And that maybe that's a whole
another podcast, a whole another.
Podcast. But I think that place where
does my 6 year old put that energy and that part of herself
that's very real, where is she able to nurture that, able to
still be that even though it's being disciplined out of her
(36:44):
somewhere else? And I, I think a, a part of me
feels that art at its most fundamental is, is a space in
which we could get to continue doing that.
What stays with me from this conversation is the way Ashley
thinks about making work throughresearch, through teaching,
(37:04):
through sustained attention to systems of power.
His practice reminds us that artis not separate from the world,
it is one of the ways we come tounderstand it.
From wildfire to classrooms, from incarceration to education,
Ashley shows us how creative work can move slowly,
deliberately, and still change the way we see what is in front
(37:27):
of us. And in a moment when the
relevance of art is often questioned, this conversation
offers a clear reminder art doesnot stop mattering.
Thanks for listening to Unapologetically Creative.
Be sure to follow the show and stay tuned for more insightful
conversations in the episodes ahead.
(37:48):
To learn more about the Vermont College of Fine Arts, visit
vcfa.edu.
One of the things that's been a resource, I'll just say one
thing that's been a resource to me is, is changing the idea of,
of the artist's role as speakingfor somebody to what Trenti
Minha talks about is speaking alongside.
Is there a way to as an ally or somebody who's not from a
particular community to to speakwith that community?
(00:29):
Welcome to Unapologetically Creative, a podcast from the
Vermont College of Fine Arts, where we celebrate bold
artistry, transformative creativity, and the audacious
voices shaping the future of thearts.
I'm your host, Andrew Ram Sammy,and in this series we dive into
honest, inspiring conversations with artists who are pushing
(00:53):
boundaries and redefining what it means to create work that
resonates and indoors. Ashley Hunt is an artist,
activist, writer, and educator best known for his photographic
and video work examining the American prison system, mass
incarceration, and the prison abolition movement.
(01:13):
He's currently a faculty member in the School of Art at the
California Institute of the Arts.
We begin this conversation with Ashley reflecting on evacuating
his home during the Los Angeles wildfire and what it meant to
watch a city and a community respond to crisis, and how
collective experience shapes identity.
From there, he traces the early experiences that led him into
(01:35):
teaching and the questions that eventually pushed his work
towards investigating incarceration, private prisons,
and the systems that govern punishment in the United States.
Throughout the episode, we talk about art as a way of
understanding power, research asa creative practice, and how
creative work can help us see the systems that shape our
(01:55):
lives. Ashley, welcome to
Unapologetically Creative. Thanks very much.
So actually, let's start there. We were all here together,
gathered in January here at Cal Arts, all set ready to go.
And then literally all hell broke loose and the world was
(02:16):
kind of on fire and all all of our phones were collectively
going off. For you is a a much more
different experience because youhad a home in the path of the
fire. Yeah, we were a couple of
canyons over in Topanga Canyon. That's where where we live and
gratefully still live. I think I had attended, I'd
(02:38):
shown up, attended the first lecture of that day.
I was supposed to do some critiques and with students and
then give a lecture the next day.
And yeah, I start getting, I start getting an alert that
there's a small brush fire in the Palisades goes from half an
acre to 10 acres to 50 acres to 100 acres really quick.
(03:03):
And I, I realized I had to excuse myself and head back
home, pick up our kid out of thepreschool that's nearby and see
if we're going to need to evacuate that night, which we
did. And then we were evacuated for
almost 2 weeks. Oh, wow.
And we got very lucky. There was the fire came within
(03:24):
about 1/2 mile of our house. Some of our friends and
neighbors, their houses got hit.But the Canyon, Topanga Canyon
is a kind of unique community. It's a little more on the high
end or side now, but but it has a real bohemian history, a
strong artistic history and cultural history as a kind of
(03:47):
hippie Canyon and stuff, 60s and70s.
And there's still a lot of kind of amazing people there who a
lot of whom stayed behind and ina really, a really amazing way
protected the community. They, they formed kind of
informal Fire Brigades, a numberof us who were evacuated with
(04:11):
our kids and stuff on the outside of the, the outside of
where all the roads were closed.We would bring supplies of fire
extinguishers and hoses and fireprotective clothing for them to,
and we could kind of like pass it to them across the police
barrier. The police would let us do that.
And then they would drive it back in and put out spot fires,
(04:32):
help identify where things were flaring up for the, for the
actual firefighters, or I shouldsay actual, but the formal ones,
there's city and state firefighters.
I guess where it was most inspirational for me as an
artist was seeing how, how the community came together, how
(04:53):
community identity is formed. We, we've been living in, in
Topanga Canyon since 2020, so almost five years.
But there was nothing that made us feel like Topangans more than
than having been through this experience where there's
(05:15):
something that is identifying all of us with one another based
on some kind of, you know, adversity or, or kind of
collective experience. So I guess in relation, since
you framed the question in termsof art making and stuff, you
know, or being on one's path andso forth, it was seeing that
(05:38):
collective experience. How collective experience shapes
our identity, our sense of the world, our place in it and so
forth. That is what.
Yeah, I feel like that's what I took away from it.
Yeah. Makes me think about the
possibilities of what art at itsbest can do.
And I mean, there were immediateimpacts to us even here at Cal
(05:59):
Arts. A lot of folks who worked at Cal
Arts or were trying to get to Cal Arts, literally their paths
were blocked from being able to to come here.
And that kind of confronting of that immediate large scale
crisis. Did any of that shift your
perspective as an artist and as an educator?
(06:22):
Well, the, I mean, the majority of my work for the last 25 years
has been around mass incarceration.
So I'm pretty used to working around crisis conditions of
crisis and the crises that feed systems like mass incarceration.
But I think I think in terms of this particular one, what maybe
(06:48):
what what I connected with in that in terms of that was, was
having our educational experience here be interrupted
by something that is in the fluke, right.
That is something that is a, a, a new and growing feature of our
(07:11):
world. Which in terms of climate
change, in terms of the the increased risk and vulnerability
to these kinds of weather eventsthat affect us just in terms of
the security of our home, affectus in terms of insurance prices.
Rather we can actually afford tolive in a city and so forth.
(07:31):
All these ways that that that fire settled, you know,
interrupted our daily life and our expectations and what it
means. You know, if I were a different
educator, I might say, hey, let's not let that distract us
from our educational mission, what we're doing here.
I mean, on a certain level, I yes, we have to continue the
(07:54):
educational mission. But for me as an educator and as
an artist and just to I guess how I existed, I see myself
existing in the world. I don't see that as outside of
the educational mission. The educational mission is to
think is to see there's relatives what's happening and.
Relevance to that? Right.
Yeah, That it right. This is the world we, this is
(08:16):
the world we live in. This is the world we make art
in. This is the world our art will
go into and either have something to say about this or
not. And that's a choice we make in
our in our work. Not everybody.
I don't think everybody has to make work about climate change
at all, but but I think for us, each of us as an artist has to
(08:38):
think about what's my position, what's my voice?
What, what do I have to say that's different than somebody
else? And, you know, that unavoidably
changed my sense of like, oh, this is, look how this is
changing my life on a daily basis.
And it did bleed into a, a project that I would have been
working on for two years and then became a, you know, the
(09:03):
became a part of, became a big part of that project after.
Yeah, because. There is a connection between a
lot of these hotshot crews and folks who are incarcerated,
sure, who are on hotshot crews. Yeah, especially in California.
Especially in California. Can you tell us about that?
What? That I, I didn't know that.
Yeah. When I heard that, I was, I
don't know what to say. Shocked, but like it's forced
(09:28):
labor. Yeah, it's, I mean, in a
certain, a certain from a certain direction, it is.
I mean, I think that there's, there's, there's absolutely a
kind of exploitation aspect to it.
And that's, you know, that's, that's the most important
starting point. I think at the same time,
there's, there's a way in which people who people who are
(09:55):
imprisoned also look for opportunities to build, build
their skills, build a path for something to do other than just
be imprisoned and to try to figure out what their life on
the outside is going to be when they're released.
Because the vast majority of imprisoned people get released
at some point. And, and so I think there's,
(10:20):
there's a certain amount of pride that I, as far as I
understand that for people who kind of work in those crews and,
and, and a certain kind of ability to learn how to do
something, you know, in the world and so forth and be useful
in that way. But I think the context in which
(10:40):
that takes place, right, there may be some aspects to that that
we think is what prisons should be for in terms of helping
people build their skills for when they come back out.
But the context in which that takes place, which is
exploitive, which is people not getting, you know, I don't know,
I don't know the exact wages, but like getting paid like a
dollar a day or something like that.
(11:01):
You know, there's that connects that connects it to a long, a
long history of California and the United States of using
unfree labor to to build the state.
You know, whether that's the history of building roads,
railroads, industrial infrastructure and and having to
(11:27):
take on a certain amount of riskthat the state wouldn't
redistributes to that unfree population.
So. Did you find that interesting,
finding that those things out, that in a place that most people
consider to be so liberal, that those liberal ideals didn't
necessarily transfer themselves to the folks who we would think
(11:53):
should probably be given the greatest opportunities to redeem
themselves? It didn't surprise me because I
know the history of California and.
So it surprised most people to find those things out.
You would write in your work anddoing your work as an artist to
bring that to light. I think, I think most people are
(12:13):
surprised by a lot of things when they start to learn about
mass incarceration and, and whatit is and where it is and how
much their taxes go to pay for it.
Or, you know, there's kind of like if we use the 2, the two
cities of the two Americas analogy, there's there's people
(12:38):
who have the privilege of not knowing a thing about the prison
system. And then there's people who have
no choice but to know about it, whether that's because of their
own personal experience directlyor through a family member or
students they teach, which is kind of how a part of how I came
into this work and so forth. So if I were to take that
(13:01):
analogy further, are there 2 Californians?
Sure, absolutely. Tell us about those two.
Californians. Yeah.
I mean, I mean in terms of what I was just saying that
particular to California's, there's the California that sees
(13:24):
itself as a kind of space for openness and progress, right?
That this is a place where progress starts and we kind of
like model industries and that we send out to the world in
terms of tech and whatever. And, and, but also policy
models, right? On the political level, there's
(13:45):
a lot of kind of legislation that's, that starts in
California that with an, with aneye on it becoming a model for a
national standard or an international standard.
So fuel efficiency standards, right, start in California, but
(14:06):
which the Trump administration is trying to roll back right
now, right, like when electric cars will be mandated to be
replacing combustion engines andso forth.
But the But California also has California, I think would have
(14:28):
the third or fourth highest incarceration, largest prison
population of the world if it was its own country.
Wow. I'm I'm not sure the exact
statistic, it's somewhere close to that, but.
That's still, yeah, that says a lot.
Yeah. So the United States has the
largest, the highest incarceration rate of any nation
(14:50):
of modern history Outside that'snot a slave society.
The only the only societies in which there's been this many
people locked up per in relationto the population, this higher
percentage of people locked up has been slave societies.
Why were you interested in this work?
What Drew drew you to this topic, specifically around mass
incarceration? I, it was a long time ago I had,
(15:17):
there's just different, different aspects of my life
that were kind of where that waspressing in, in different ways.
Not me, not me personally, but some, some family members and
then also young people. I, I taught.
So I, I, before I went to Graduate School, there were I, I
was, I taught in LA Unified school districts.
I was a substitute teacher, which is a good gig after you
(15:40):
finish undergrad if you're not going to go straight into
education. And I had some long term
positions and some kind of like communities that where I saw
very clearly how kids who look different than me growing up
white in a suburban part of LA were actively being criminalized
(16:02):
on a day-to-day basis. And I saw the same thing when I
was doing doing similar work in the South side of Chicago when I
was getting my grad graduate degree there.
And so that like wanted to understand that wanting to do
something about that or have have have my work be some kind
(16:23):
of a, a resource or something that contributes to solving that
as a problem rather than not became something.
I mean, I was also interested. I mean, one of my personal kind
of artistic questions had been how are our personal identities
(16:45):
shaped by the economy and thingslike capitalism?
What does that, what does that kind of political economic
system do to us in ways that we don't necessarily see?
And so, yeah, I don't know, I with that kind of inquiry, I was
like, well, how is that affecting these these kids who
I'm working with or these kids who were held up on a cop car
(17:07):
for? That's why they were two hours
late to to my workshop today, you know, for no reason, you
know, or for a very particular reason, you know.
You just said something that kind of inquiry.
Yeah. What is that?
I guess the like the the frame of a question, taking the frame
(17:28):
of a particular question out into the world and using that as
a so inquiring right, based on that question into what's going
on around me. Why is this?
Why? Why?
Why are these young kids going through this experience and why
did I not go through that experience, for example?
(17:48):
Or is are the things that we're told that police and prisons are
actually for in our society whatthey actually do?
Is that the way they actually work or is there something else?
(18:09):
Where would then that take you? Where would that inquiry then
lead you towards or what would that require you to do to
investigate that inquiry? Where has it taken you?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, on a general level, it
would take you to research. It would take you to and
different kinds of research as an artist especially, right.
There's like book research and going to the library and looking
(18:31):
up stuff on the Internet or whatever.
But then there's also visual research going around and and
seeing how things appear and don't appear around you in the
world. Where it took me individually
was was to a news story that kind of came across my my desk,
(18:57):
so to speak, of private prisons that were a kind of newer
phenomenon that well, no, there was a very old phenomenon in the
United States that had kind of come back through.
They'd been they'd been made illegal in the United States in
the early 20th century and then they came back as a model of a
(19:20):
kind of like form of incarceration or expansion of
the the prison system that wouldbe based on a for profit model.
So, and this seemed to this seemed to be some an interesting
entryway into asking what else could be at work here in these
(19:47):
kids being targeted, these prisons expanding, the United
States having the largest and highest incarceration rate in
the world. The epidemic of police brutality
that, you know, even though it wasn't a part of the national
consciousness then like it is now was completely active then.
I, I become a part of some circles talking about that and
(20:09):
and and working around that in Chicago at the time.
And where, where that inquiry was led me to, there was this
kind of for profit system where you could see in the most naked
way how capitalism and its logics or its ways of operating
(20:31):
allow profit to motivate our values.
So, and in this case you had, I mean, Michelle Foucault is
someone who, who many of us who studied the prison system will,
will, will study. And, and one of the things he
talks about is that the, the prison system and the, the, the
(20:55):
state force, forms of state force are not negative, right?
They're not to negate things. They're actually productive.
They produce things, right. So the carcerality of the modern
state of the contemporary, our, our society today, the
carcerality of it produces spaces, it produces identities,
(21:16):
it produces bodies that wouldn'tbe produced in that same way if
if we had a different set of ways of thinking about how we
deal with each other and how we deal with problems, how we deal
with. Because the incentives are there
for the for profit model, so youhave to create the model in
(21:38):
which you always have a constantstream of.
Supply, yeah, you get paid per bed per day, right?
Do you think there's an over romanticizing of prisons?
And you know, when we think of of films like Shawshank
Redemption and you know, all of that, that it's it kind of
varnishes over the realities of what people truly experience
(22:00):
inside of prison. Yes.
And then what is then your role then as an artist?
Is your role then to to play thecounter to that narrative, or to
just establish A narrative that is not even reflective because
you're not countering something?It's, it's a little of both, you
know, I mean, I sometimes there's something like the work
(22:20):
I did in Louisiana. A lot of that was, was really
trying to create a counter narrative to the one that we get
from, from, from the police state, you know, so or what some
folks call Copicanda or right. But so some of it has been
responding much more directly to, to the system and its
(22:42):
ideology, which is which is the mythology that we all are
taught, right, That the police are there only there to protect
you and uphold law, You know, law and order and law and order
is something we all want. We all define that the same.
And the prisons are there for people who deserve to be there.
So. Well, not even just top and fed,
(23:03):
right? I mean, if we look at especially
the local news and how local news has shaped narratives,
yeah, absolutely. If it bleeds, it leads to 95.
It's and it's, you know, that over and over and over.
So how do you, how do you deal with that incessant over and
(23:24):
over of what typically happens in the mainstream, which is very
easy to produce, very easy to kind of replicate, but very
little resources that goes into the actual impact of all that?
And very, very little context, right?
Like, like the, there's some interesting studies that talk
(23:45):
about how the, how the amount ofcoverage of crime in in nightly
news and stuff and cable news isso directly out of proportion
with what else is going on in the world that it makes people
have think that there's much more crime around them than
there actually is. And it's part of that.
(24:07):
If it bleeds, it leads like, right, it's it's, it's the thing
that gets eyeballs. So which they're in thereby gets
advertisers and so forth. So, yeah, one, one way is to
contradict that stuff, bring in other voices that that, that put
that stuff in better context. And then there's history.
(24:29):
I think bringing in history of things.
If you are thinking about the fact that the American prison
system, mass and mass incarceration grew out of
slavery, right? Not in some separate gesture,
right, but directly grew out of slavery.
Well, that might make you ask a couple of the questions, because
at least you've been taught slavery in most In most places,
(24:50):
you've been taught slavery's bad.
As someone who is white, what doyou feel is your role in asking
that question or or what role doyou have in actually then you
know, answering that question? Especially because I think
that's my, my, I have a strong burden to, to, to answer that
(25:13):
question and to and to, I think it's, I think right now there's
a lot of, there's a lot of ways we think about, especially
online around are you, are you the right person to speak about
this? Right?
And I totally respect that. And that's been a question.
I've been, that's been importantto me as an artist since, since
(25:35):
I started doing this work, right.
But for me as a, as a, as a white person that, I mean, it's,
it's always such a strange thingto come out of my mouth because
it's not something I really choose to identify as.
I mean, I know that I'd benefit from the privilege that comes
with that. And I, I don't question that in
any kind of way. But, but at the same time, it's,
(25:57):
it's not really a position that I kind of chose to be on that
team. And also a lot of my ancestors
were from Ireland, which was which, which were the racial
other to England, you know, So I, I always feel like that.
But it's important. Is it important?
And I know that you don't say that you necessarily identify
(26:18):
with that, but it's important torecognize that as an artist,
where you sit in that in terms of, you know, not, again,
identifying for the purposes of this conversation, but at least
in saying I do bring a certain level of privilege to this.
Yeah, a certain level of perspective.
(26:40):
And you had just described earlier perhaps personal spheres
that might have been impacted asa result of these things.
How important is that kind of self-awareness in what you do?
And what should artists think about in understanding those
connections between their self-awareness and the work that
they do and the responsibility and carrying that?
(27:02):
Yeah, I think it's crucial. It's not everything, but it's
crucial. I think every artist we need to
think about, and some of us havemore of it.
Yeah, we, we, we need to think about what is my position and
what I'm in relation to what I'mtalking about or what I'm
interested in or just what does it mean for me to be an artist
(27:24):
as opposed to the next person? But in terms of this question, I
feel like it's important to listen to the critique of why
certain kinds of positions have been critiqued.
There might be sometimes when asa white person, this just not my
thing to talk about right at this moment in this context.
(27:46):
But there's also a way in which that that also has to do with
the tradition of, of being or history of, of that identity
being the one who gets to be theonly person who talks about
something, right, Right. So I mean, one of the greatest
teachers of white whiteness for me, and what whiteness means is
James Baldwin. I learned so much about white
(28:08):
people from James Baldwin in terms of how he understands it
as a fragile identity, as a contingent identity and an
identity that is like every other identity in crisis and
needing to be remade and fortified and so forth.
And so I, I think that one of the things that's been a
(28:29):
resource, I'll just say one of the things that's been a
resource to me is, is changing the idea of, of the artist's
role as speaking for somebody towhat Trent T Minha talks about
is speaking alongside right. That is there, is there a way to
as an ally or somebody who's notfrom a particular community to,
(28:51):
to speak with that community in a way that isn't exploitative,
isn't extractive, isn't privileging your narrative.
But back to your original question around like, is it, is
it my, do I see it as my role tospeak to something like the
history of slavery in the UnitedStates and how the prison system
(29:12):
grew out of that? Absolutely.
Because it's partly my ancestorswho built that fucking system.
You know, like there's there's accountability that we need to
be able to have that sometimes if we just say, oh, that's not
my place to sit to talk on that right.
Or, or it's too hard to build the trust with people who are
not you to it's just easier to just navel gaze and make work
(29:36):
about your, I don't know, whatever is easy to make work
about. Then, then the only people who
have the burden to talk about that history are the people who
were directly exploited in that history.
And I don't think that that's fair That, that, that's the,
that you have to explain that shit over and over and over
again forever. And, you know, at a place like
(29:58):
Cal Arts, you're like, maybe you're 1 of maybe you're the
only African American kid in theclass, you know, or artists in
the class. And, and do you want to be the
only person who, who has, who bears, who has bonsibility?
Yeah, exactly. I've had a number of students
who've complained about that to me, you know, and that's helped
me understand that too, you know?
People with the least amount of agency are suddenly thrusted
(30:22):
into the responsibility of Having the most amount of agency
on behalf of an entire group of folks is an incredible way to
bear. Well, this will be a a terrible
Segway, OK, but nonetheless A Segway.
Speaking of two houses that wereseparate and are now coming
together, Calarts and VCFA. You're on the faculty of
(30:46):
Calarts. You were formerly associated
with VCFA, and now we're here. What does this kind of
homecoming feel like for you nowthat VCFA is here on the campus
of of Calarts? It's great.
It's, it's like one of those weird dreams where different
parts of your life come togetherin ways they're not supposed to,
you know where. But in terms of the, the ethos
(31:10):
and the, the, the sense of what's urgent about art right
now in our world and what the place of art in our society is,
how we teach that who has the right to be an artist and so
forth. I felt those those things were
really consonant between Cal Arts and VCFA and the VCPI knew.
(31:31):
What do you say to students now or even prospective students,
whether they be the traditional student or the non traditional
which I. Hate you, they even.
Hate that word non traditional student post traditional student
that would come to VCFA and say look Ashley, I get it.
But now's not the time. Now's not the time to be doing
(31:51):
this. I can't, I can't start my MFA
journey or even just a creative journey.
What do you say to that person? Wait, wait till it's the right
time. I think, you know, it doesn't do
anybody any good to let's say onthe traditional model, go
straight out of undergrad, undergraduate school because
they've never been out of schoolbefore.
(32:12):
They don't know anything else. So my sense, my feeling that
I've come to learn over the years is that there's a the the
time for grad school is when youout there in the world and
there's something you've been trying to do that you haven't
been able to do on your own. And you, you realize that you
(32:36):
want, you want a community within which to learn how to do
that, that has the know how has facilities, things that you
don't have otherwise. But most important is the
community and their relationships.
Learning from other artists, being with other artists,
especially if you live in a place which I know VCFA always
(32:59):
has kind of made this possible for people who, who can't leave
a small rural town, you know, but they can, they can fly out
for two residences a year and get helped in making their their
work. I don't think there's any loss
of relevancy of art. I think there's a, there's a
(33:21):
compromising and a, and an impoverishment of a sense of
what art can do right now. In certain circles, it being
overly commodified and or it's, it's life as a commodity
becoming too dominant in what wesee its purpose as.
And in schools, I think that that, that, that same problem
(33:44):
comes in through questions of, of sustainability of educational
institutions, right? So what kind of jobs are people
going to be able to get when they get out of here and stuff
like that? You know, but I have, I mean, I
feel like we have a pretty good answer to that a lot of time,
which is that no matter how the,the, the job market changes,
there's never a job for an artist coming out of school.
(34:07):
But what there is from a good art education, right, is the the
critical thinking skills and theability to know what your voice
is and the ability to know how to make something on your own in
a way that few other disciplineshave, right, that that you leave
(34:31):
here in a way, ready to do that.And that allows you to continue
to be an artist, but it also allows you to go to law school.
Like 3 of my alumni from my program at Cal Arts right who've
who've said I was not disadvantaged by the fact that I
didn't do pre law or law as an undergrad.
My critical thinking skills and thinking about the world
(34:52):
critically in the photo and media program like Cal Arts
Little Plug there prepared me for that.
What does unapologetically creative mean to you?
Well, I can't help but think about my 6 year old right now
and the dance between as you become a person, learning how to
(35:13):
abide by the rules and conventions and norms of what it
means to be a person. And what is it that you do with
that other part of you that doesn't fit into those norms,
those habits, that discipline, right?
And I feel that there's some part of creativity that I just,
I just think is like how our brains and our emotions interact
(35:38):
and, and the fact that we move through the world, we're not
static. We are always changing the world
around us. But then there's this thing
called art, right? That is a space that is
importantly undefined. And a part of it is a part of
its values of art. A part of the art values of art
(36:00):
is to is to be open to the things that it doesn't yet know
how to be, as opposed to other disciplines of like, well,
that's not what we do in engineering.
That's not what we do in America.
That's not medicine, right? It only it would fall, people
would die. Yeah, right.
I mean, I've had plenty of people tell me that's not art,
but it's activism, right? And that's been an interesting
challenge to think about how to show them that they're wrong,
(36:23):
right? And that maybe that's a whole
another podcast, a whole another.
Podcast. But I think that place where
does my 6 year old put that energy and that part of herself
that's very real, where is she able to nurture that, able to
still be that even though it's being disciplined out of her
(36:44):
somewhere else? And I, I think a, a part of me
feels that art at its most fundamental is, is a space in
which we could get to continue doing that.
What stays with me from this conversation is the way Ashley
thinks about making work throughresearch, through teaching,
(37:04):
through sustained attention to systems of power.
His practice reminds us that artis not separate from the world,
it is one of the ways we come tounderstand it.
From wildfire to classrooms, from incarceration to education,
Ashley shows us how creative work can move slowly,
deliberately, and still change the way we see what is in front
(37:27):
of us. And in a moment when the
relevance of art is often questioned, this conversation
offers a clear reminder art doesnot stop mattering.
Thanks for listening to Unapologetically Creative.
Be sure to follow the show and stay tuned for more insightful
conversations in the episodes ahead.
(37:48):
To learn more about the Vermont College of Fine Arts, visit
vcfa.edu.
Popular Podcasts
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com