BIPOC Artists Building Narrative Power for Social Change

Artist Disruptor and Culture Bearer Fellows in the Constellations Culture Change Fund and Initiative, housed at the Center for Cultural Power, were paired with partner organizations and worked collaboratively on narrative change projects. (Photo credit by Noemi Gonzalez)

“We’re truth tellers and lightworkers. We make the world go ’round. We’re building the life of our dreams…” —Mariah J, from her song “Inheritance”

In community halls, on zoom calls, in rehearsal and board rooms, social justice organizers are mapping their post-2024 election path. In the face of narratives of fear, whether on immigration, reproductive rights, or the economy, artist activists from communities impacted by oppression continue to create and share narratives that mobilize us to envision and take action for a just world. How can we activate, support, and sustain them?

“I’ve definitely stepped into an artist leadership role,” says Dayton, Ohio-based Mariah J, now curating her own shows, collaborating with and mentoring other artists, and connecting them with paid work. But for this poet, musician, and choreographer, the road to unleashing her power led her through a storm; the killing of George Floyd, the pandemic, an economy in freefall, and persistent and historic obstacles that BIPOC creatives face in a system that starves the arts.

Mariah J. drew strength from an artist collective with a focus on narrative strategy. Narratives are stories we tell ourselves about the world, how it works, and our place in it. They shape a person’s worldview. Narrative strategy leverages storytelling and culture to change the underlying beliefs that guide people’s behaviors. In moments of major cultural change, the way stories portray an issue (marriage equality, say, civil rights, or gender justice), change our attitudes and behaviors.

BIPOC artists have often banded together to get their vision of justice into the world. We are learning how we might build their narrative power sustainably when we 1) understand and incorporate their lived experiences, 2) cultivate spaces and ecosystems that boost narrative collaboration between BIPOC and other values-aligned artists, Culture Bearers, and movement groups on immigration, climate, gender, and racial justice, and; 3) identify elements of power building through research. These efforts honor the work and sketch a framework for the field’s focus and collaboration. (For our purposes here, we define Culture Bearers as artists and carriers of Indigenous, ancestral and/or traditional knowledge.)

A Model Built by and for Cultural Strategy

There is no culture change without support for artists to become agents of change.
Mariah’s story reflects a personal and collective transformation and shines light on how we might create conditions for and measure narrative power building.

“Power building,” according to Million Voters Project, is when “grassroots organizing groups build a base within communities most impacted by injustice and collectivize their power through alliances and coalitions to transform oppressive systems.” For The California Endowment, organizing is not just a campaign tactic: “rather than viewing advocacy as the strategy that uses organizing as a tactic to achieve a win, it views organizing as the overarching strategy.” They recognize the long-term work required of narrative power building, “but when alternative narratives take hold and reflect the experiences and desires of communities, the conditions for profound change are put in place.”

Movement groups taking on narratives that perpetuate domination, extraction, and division need resources and tools. The Million Voters Project provides a playbook based on three California advocacy campaigns. With specific recommendations for building infrastructure for narrative power, they make the case for aggregating “the power of the many movements for racial and social justice happening across California.” Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab offers examples on how they took up the charge, specifically designing tools for artists and Culture Bearers building narrative power on immigration. They spread what they learned through trainings and a field report that included the research basis for the work as well as toolkits.

At The Center for Cultural Power (Cultural Power) we have a unique lens and metrics on how artists build power, evolving from The Culture Group’s first-ever Guide to Cultural Strategy, Making Waves,
which describes ways to engage artists in movements and the potential of arts and culture to move minds toward a more just and equitable world. Our model complements organizing and base-building groups within a power building ecosystem, as described in the USC Equity Research Institute’s framework. As Mona Shah of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation points out in a USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center report, “narrative change…has to be done in partnership with power-building, movement- building, and strategic communications.”

In practice, our model convenes and resources artists, offering them time, community, and a way to explore and generate stories that strengthen narratives of justice. Cohorts vary by region and theme. Mariah J. participated in the Midwest Culture Lab, a six-week stipended cohort of 35 artist-activists convened by Cultural Power. She attributes her persistence and those of her lab members to “being in spaces that helped us realize what our impact is as artists to culture…”

Cultural Power cohorts feature a series of workshops and coaching in cultural and narrative strategy and creative entrepreneurship. They culminate in art-making that springs from core narratives co-created with artists and Culture Bearers which are set out in a narrative guide. The guide includes additional resources and makes big, complex issues feel accessible and personal.

In the cohort model, artists move along a trajectory of creative and personal sustainability. The graphic describes how an individual artist disruptor builds power in community to fuel and sustain creativity, livelihood, and work in social justice–an arc that bends toward replenishing other artists and collectives. On the horizontal axis we mark phases of sustainable practice, and on the vertical axis we mark the degree to which the artist is engaged in social change. Inspired by the trajectory of artists in the art market, ours describes the creator at the “formation” stage earning occasional small art commissions with a growing consciousness as a social change maker. In the “activation” phase, we see the artist solidly identifying as an agent of social change, using narrative strategy, and broadening visibility on platforms. The “expansion” stage finds the creator consistently making art aimed at shifting worldview, sensing financial viability, and mentoring emerging artist activists.

Click to enlarge (Illustration courtesy of the Center for Cultural Power)

“I have a band now,” says Mariah J., “creating what I want to see and where I want to perform and how I want it to look like and curating from top to bottom.” She notes a growth in her fan following and in the type of venues she plays. Her role as an artist disruptor continues to expand and regenerate by giving back to other artists. She also took on a position at Dayton libraries as a cultural organizer, bringing artists and community together. “It’s definitely put me in a position to uplift other artists and creatives.”

Importantly, our workshops aim to embody cultural strategy where each interaction leans on relationships; collaborative arts-based facilitation, culturally relevant community building techniques, centering artists’ needs and lives. In practice this might mean adjusting meeting times, timelines, formats, payment, and recalibrating moment-to-moment. So when we measure impact, we value the process of co-creating with artists, not just the outcomes (the changes in artists’ and audiences’ behavior, mindsets, and attitudes; and policy wins from campaigns), as traditional evaluations would. Being responsive to artists’ needs and experiences and tracking how
we do what we do has value for us and for the field.

Giving artists the skills to ask for what they need, says Mariah, not only strengthens artists, but her own role as an artist disruptor. “I have the opportunity to help artists create a budget for themselves and support them and what they should be asking organizations for when it comes to resources, or even what they have the opportunity to ask for.”

The evidence we’ve gathered shows that positive shifts in participants’ mindsets around community, confidence, and their role in social change can contribute to professional sustainability over the long term. Participants report that seeing themselves as part of a network has ripple effects like leveraging resources for their communities and an expanded audience and distribution network for their art and advocacy.

(Other cohort examples include an Oakland Futures cohort charged with building narratives of community-led economies that challenge gentrification and budgets skewed toward policing. The Reclaiming the Border Narrative Project was a multi-year collaboration and investment in artists, Culture Bearers, writers, and immigrant rights advocates working to change narratives about the U.S.-Mexico border region.)

What Our Research Tells Us About a Power-Building Mindset

During her time in the Midwest Culture Lab Hive, Mariah J wrote a song, produced a video, and tapped artists in the cohort “to get the work out.” Her song lyrics for “Inheritance” were sparked by a “sense of purpose from that group, what it means to disrupt mainstream culture and speak truth to power… and I gave myself the title ‘artist organizer’ … me stepping into my own power… and using my platform intentionally.”

While there is a growing body of research into narrative strategy, few focus on evaluation of narrative strategy with artists and Culture Bearers. Cultural Power’s in-house Research and Impact Team seeks to name and measure the elements of power building and the artist networks and infrastructure needed to create a more just world. These dimensions of BIPOC artist power building are borrowed from education and public health, political science, and organizing research, and our metrics on artist-organizers’ growth mindsets can be applied across issue areas. They include:

• Sense of community (belonging)
• Confidence in their art and storytelling
• Sense of self as change agent (awareness of injustice and how to combat it)
• Sustainability of artistic practice (financial, physical, spiritual, etc.)

To date we have gathered power building data from four years of The Disruptors Fellowship for BIPOC screenwriters, early partnerships with artists and movement groups, the Ford Foundation-funded Reclaiming Border Narrative Project,
and 3 years of our Creative Entrepreneur cohorts, which focus on building skills to help artists break through the “starving artist” (or organizer) mindset and reality. Our preliminary data from surveys and interviews show increases in participants’

• confidence, connection to core narratives, professional sustainability, sense of learning community and identity as change agents.
• understanding of narrative strategy, including how audiences respond to their art
• professional benefits that support their ability to earn, sustain, and expand audience and distribution networks and
• hunger for more networking and opportunities to share with the field.

An innovation in our culturally responsive approach to research has been collaborating with artists on audience response testing. We use online randomized control trials with a national or regional audience to look for changes in audiences’ specific attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors (such as intent to vote, to get vaccinated, or to act) after viewing the art. Artists have a hand in designing the tests, guided by their curiosity and goals. Our report Building Narratives of Joy, features four case studies derived from this testing on topics like gender justice, immigration, and civic engagement. After running audience response testing on a clip from his Undocumented Tales web series, creator and producer Armando Ibañez noted that self-identified “liberal” and “conservative” audiences responded positively at nearly similar rates and remarked, “it’s changing my perception about my own work, just incredible.”

As we continue our learning journey in narrative power building for BIPOC artists and movement groups, we consider:

• A growing need to develop culturally responsive research tools to learn how 1) cultural organizers train artists in narrative strategy, how 2) the art they create engages and mobilizes audiences, and 3) ways to measure audience response at in-person events and activations such as festivals, art exhibitions, performances, and showcases.
• Learning how Culture Bearers shape the artist power building model. Culture Bearers are the original narrative strategists who embody millenary knowledge that they pass along through their arts, cultural creations, and storytelling. We want to look at what it means to not just organize and build power with BIPOC artists but also alongside Culture Bearers.
• Building longitudinal tools that help us understand the artist disruptor trajectory and Culture Bearer journey
• Strengthening narrative infrastructure, including pillars of leadership development, networks, funding and other resources, tools and technology, spaces and approaches that foster community and coordinated action.

Now is the time to build on the thought leadership of Shanelle Matthews, Aisha Shillingford, Trevor Smith, and others who have called for a field focus on narrative infrastructure. Essential to that is the work of fostering and unleashing the creative superpowers of artists and culture bearers.

“Nothing that is worth doing is done alone.” —Organizer, author, and educator Miriam Kaba

We close where we began by seeing lived experience and relationships at the heart of power building. When artists are invested in—when they have the confidence, capacity and community to activate their inherent superpowers of imagination and world building—we fortify the soil for narrative change.

Connecting our work to transformational movements remains our north star. So when we speak of an individual’s trajectory as an artist disruptor, we see their evolution in the context of much broader change.

Those committed to a vision of justice and well-being play the long game. Mariah J dropped her first album Unfolding in 2023. Promoting her music and vision on a local Dayton morning show, she self-identified as an artist activist, and artist disruptor, “What it means for me is using my art to reflect the times and also to inspire my community and an entire generation, hopefully.”

Read more stories by Haleh Hatami, Anna Maria Luera & Melanie Meinzer.