Hannah Rose Johnson, Tucson, AZ, USA, SSH Blog Correspondent
Hey Baby! Art Against Sexual Violence is an exhibition series that uses art as a vehicle and tool to end street harassment and sexual violence. After participating in this year’s shows, in April and May, I wanted to know more about this art movement. I wanted to know more about the people I passed in my office hallway, who I breezed by on 4th Avenue, who were doing this work. I wanted to piece together a genealogy. So I sat down with Wendy Sampson, an organizer who originally brought Hey Baby! to Tucson, and Manuel Abril, a current Hey Baby! organizer (and SSH board member).
This is what I learned: (it’s not linear and it’s not a history).
Rewind to 2010. Hey Baby! was a copycat of an event that happened in North Carolina, which Sampson’s friend suggested they organize in Tucson. Sampson said, “The one in North Carolina was a one-time event and we just planned a one-time event as well. We were like oh, this was a good idea, we should do it here.”
Sampson presented a really interesting analysis on the relationship between street harassment and intimate partner violence. She said that complacency with a culture of street harassment infiltrates our relationships with each other. That if we are willing to treat one another like shit on the street, we are willing to behave like that in intimate settings. But she also said people can more easily rally around street harassment; that “people have a tangible reaction [to street harassment] and are steady in that reaction than intimate partner violence, which is messier and complicated and drains you in a different way.”
Putting on Hey Baby! provided a break amidst the emotional exhaustion of the intimate partner violence work that she was doing. Sampson said, “I remember being excited about the art we had. I remember feeling that ANGER, that can get drown out through exhaustion, and to share it with other people was really rejuvenating.”
No one knew that it would get taken up again by other activists or be institutionally grant funded for a while, and eventually come out again on its own, unhinged. After Wendy organized the event she left Arizona. For four years. She admitted that she didn’t remember much about the actual event because she was so exhausted from the accountability processes. Though she did say, “I remember putting art up…I remember someone doing poetry…there was a lot of art being laid out and a lot of things people could take home, like posters…”
I asked Abril to fill in the gaps. What he said about the ebb and flow of transitions actually isn’t the most relevant. We’re talking about a genealogy here, a series of connections that produces something that may mean something else depending on the timing and environment. And Hey Baby! got taken up with organizers, non-profits, and sexual violence prevention educators at different times and places.
What he did say that I thought was interesting was about the show this year: “We wanted to recapture the feeling of connecting with a kind of playfulness where we didn’t feel suffocated by everything that could go wrong.” The kind of wrong that comes from building a complex analysis that isn’t easily palatable.
Messiness.
Abril said that before inviting people to participate this year, “We told ourselves that we are going to f**k up and that’s going to be a part of our process…we wanted stuff that was messy and that didn’t have a predictable outcome in terms of how people were going to receive it…. And a lot of came from that…[artists and organizers] felt relieved not having to tell people what we already knew. Like depart from the place where we know rape culture exists, and pull in the other things, conditions that we live in that are socially or institutionally imposed. And try to make connections to those.”
Organizing against street-harassment is complex because when we examine the conditions of sexual violence we enter a multi-dimensional zone. Hey Baby! Art Against Sexual Violence brought together art as resistance, art as distance, and as a creative strategizing tool. We wrote, painted, collaged, sculpted and performed new narratives that exposed the intricacies from where sexual violence departs from and seeps into. Pieces that examined street harassment, catcalling, rape, date-rape, partner violence, state-violence, mental illness, incarceration, abuse within activist communities, victim-blaming, and challenging perfect-victim narratives.
After talking with Sampson and Abril, I had more questions. Curiosities about anti-street harassment movements, art as activism, and where are these people in North Carolina who organized the first event? [Editor’s note: My 2010 book on street harassment features the North Carolina event!]
I had some more tracking down to do.
For more information about Hey Baby! Check out www.facebook.com/HeyBaby.Art or www.heybabyart.tumblr.com
Hannah Rose is writing from Tucson, Arizona and Lewiston, Maine (US) as she transitions from the Southwest to the Northeast for a career in sexual violence prevention and advocacy at the college level. You can check her out on the collaborative artistic poetic sound project HotBox Utopia.
