Artist, educator, entrepreneur and doll maker Sherri Lumpkin has been thinking a lot lately about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—an island of man-made trash twice the size of Texas. Around Earth Day last year, she co-led a mermaid-making workshop with the author of a children’s book about a Black girl who works to protect the oceans.
Ahead of the event, Lumpkin spoke on a panel about environmental and social justice, where she discussed the legacy of slavery, the justice implications of fast fashion and the way capitalism deprives Black and Latino Americans of access to nature.
Yet somehow, when a friend told her to apply for Anacostia-based organization Social Art and Culture’s new Environmental Justice Artivist Fellowship, Lumpkin thought: “But I’m not an activist… I’m a doll maker. I know nothing about environmental stuff.”
Fortunately, she applied anyway. Now Lumpkin counts among nine Artivist Fellows selected to engage with environmental experts and community members to execute public art projects that advance environmental justice in the District. The program kicked off in mid-March and runs through November.
“I would like the Anacostia to be clean because I know that for so many generations it hasn’t been,” Lumpkin, whose parents and grandparents grew up in Ward 7, said. “If I can impact that and leave some kind of impression of artwork that I’ve done with my cohort, that will make me very happy.”
The cohort of DMV-based artivists—a term that combines “artist” and “activist”—will spend the next eight months focusing on environmental justice issues in Wards 5, 7 and 8.
“It’s just another layer of us making sure that art is viewed as a vehicle for social change,” said Karen Baker, co-founder of Social Arts and Culture (SAAC). “How do we ensure that people have artists at the table… talking about policy and talking about how community is going to engage with the information and the resources around climate and environmental issues?”
How It Works
Baker said the nine fellows are split into three “sub-cohorts,” with each group focused on one D.C. ward. The program centers around five topic areas: clean air, water quality and safety, land pollution and waste, clean energy and equity in food systems.
SAAC developed the fellowship program in collaboration with an arts-centered initiative from the Aspen Institute, an international nonprofit founded in 1949 that aims to “promote a free, just, and equitable society.” The fellows attended the Aspen Ideas: Climate summit in Miami last month.
“Artists are vital voices in the conversation about climate change,” Danielle Baussan, director of Aspen Institute’s Arts Program, said in a press release. “The work of these artists and others reveals the fate of inaction, and the future we should all strive toward.”
The whole group convenes monthly, Baker said, to learn about the issues through roundtable discussions with subject matter experts. Since the Aspen Climate summit, the fellows have met once for a training on activism tactics led by the organization Beautiful Trouble and another time for a conversation with experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“[This is an] opportunity to train artivists, not just give them money to create a solution but to train them with the right language, the ability to have a new skill,” Baker said. “It’s going to be life-changing.”
There’s also some money involved, though—mostly provided by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Each sub-cohort will receive $7,000 to use for a public art project, and the program also offers individual artivists a $1,500 stipend for their participation in the nine-month project.
What to Look Forward to in November
The sub-cohorts are still in the earliest stages of developing their project concepts, but there’s no shortage of ideas. Baker said she’s heard fellows mention everything from murals (a public art staple) to riverside play spaces.
Artivist fellow Jaren Hill Lockridge, longtime food justice advocate and chair of the Ward 8 Health Council, said she’d love to incorporate a working compost setup into her group’s project.
“The thing that I’m really most excited about is using food as the entry point,” Hill Lockridge said. “How can people get involved with the food system by way of composting, and how composting will then be a part of the food system, that’ll then become the rich soil that then our farmers and growers will have access to, that will then be the place where our seeds are planted.”
Lumpkin said she’s inspired by the way the other artists in her Ward 7 sub-cohort have woven live, continually updating data into their artwork and wants to see whether that idea could be incorporated into her own medium.
“If I could find a way to add their data to a doll somehow, it would be quite amazing,” Lumpkin said. “How would it impact the world? … The human form, and then you have the mermaid tail, and then you have the water. That’s how we connect.”