Artist collective the Wide Awakes takes NYC this weekend.
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it’s possible for you to fly!
Wearying, weathering, worrying, wondering.
And nope, its not over.
2021 is starting to look like a party Id rather not attend.
(Parties … remember them?)
Security: how to get it, keep it, ensure it.
I fall asleep to this thought; I wake up to this thought.
I fall asleep to this thought; I wake up to this thought.
Rinse and repeat for going on seven months.
The other ones also smart, but the fallacy of safety is hard to swallow.
Are the effects permanent?
Will we ever really know?
Kids are resilient, right?)
Accident, illness, freak occurrence.
In this place, people who look like us arent safe; we never have been.
We are, after all, only human.
Is it possible to grow fully accustomed and inured to the simultaneous assumption of ones own non/superhumanity?
To being both invisible and hypervisible?
Oh, I didnt mean it like that.
You dont have to worry about that that wont happen to you/your family/your friend.
Different from what?)
You have the choice, though.)
How many times have I heard such things in my lifetime?
As the song goes,youre welcome.
(Shout-out to Dwayne Johnson: Maui, ofMoanafame, has kept this multigenerational quarantine household afloat.)
I keep coming back to The Space Traders, lawyer and civil-rights activist Derrick Bells 1992 short story.
In return, all the extraterrestrials ask is every black man, woman, and child in the nation.
Spoiler alert: The trade is accepted, eagerly, and made legal through a quickly cobbled together referendum.
As ever in this American experiment, their wishes are not only irrelevant; they are not even considered.
Bells story is allegorical, but its meaning is clear: We are on our own.
We must make our own way, our own futures, our own happiness, peace, and joy.
To look outside is be disappointed, and even betrayed.
In these moments, I was enlivened, aware, awake Wide Awake, even.
At this critical juncture, in these unprecedented times, it is clear that we need new models.
We need radical new visions, fresh new eyes.
We are the ones we have been waiting for, and we do it for them.
In 1860, a group of young patriots launched a movement to wake up the country.
They put their energies behind a little-known presidential candidate from the newly formed Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln.
We are a community of creative people imagining a future of self-emancipation.
Individually, we are asleep; together we are awake.
In this irreparably changed world, the urgency has never been greater.
Now, though it is far from over, we must continue the work and awaken within ourselves.
It is easy to tear things apart.
The murkier, more difficult path is to build, together.
What shall we build?
Rujeko Hockley is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and one of the Wide Awakes.
