Demand a better world

48″ x 48″ x 1.5″ acrylics on canvas.

Do you get overwhelmed with the state of the world sometimes? Me too. It’s too easy to see only the dark stuff. That’s why I look for inspiration in acts of hope and resistance.

Earlier this year, I did a painting inspired by ‘joy is resistance’—the idea that to have joy in spite of oppression is a form of resistance, a refusal to accept a life of despair.

The idea is rooted in scholarship about people who were enslaved in the Atlantic world–by carefully extracting their stories from archives of the enslavers. By and large such archives are the only sources available.

In just the last few years, new online databases of such sources have been released. Here are just a few of my favourites:

1. https://www.slavevoyages.org/ 
2. https://freedomonthemove.org/
3. https://enslaved.org/
4. http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/en/explore/online/slavery/index.aspx (enslaved people in Canada)
5. https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/ 

It’s kind of humbling, don’t you think? Refusing to accept the world as it is and instead, generate joy by demanding a better world. 

Hence the title of this new painting: ‘Demand a better world’. It’s a message of optimism, implying that we can manifest something better. But we must want it bad enough that we do the work to demand it.