“We need artists to help explain what is happening in this country, to tell the truth and reveal the lies, to be willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to create moral indignation, to envision alternatives, to reinvent language.
“We need artists to help us come together and share our voices and build community around powerful issues concerning our roles in the world and our planet’s survival. Compassion must be translated into action.”
Natasha Mayers’s work marries art and community. She had studied sculpture but expected to teach high school social studies when she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1967. After serving in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, she took a teaching job in Maine and began to study painting. A small sampling of her dozens of projects across 40 years shows why she has been called the state’s most committed activist-artist:
In the late 1970s, Mayers worked with patients and Maine artists to paint murals and poetry in tunnels connecting buildings at the Augusta Mental Health Institute.
During the 1994-95 school year, she helped her town’s fourth and fifth graders paint its history on utility poles, cultivating a sense of place and intergenerational appreciation.
She organized “Warflowers: From Swords to Plowshares,” a 2005–06 traveling exhibit by 44 Maine artists, launching discussion about how to convert our defense-based economy.
Since 1975 Mayers has supervised painting of over 500 murals as a touring artist with the Maine Commission for the Arts. She is an artist-in-residence for Peace Action Maine and was a National Endowment for the Arts Millennium Artist in Portsmouth, Ohio. In 2005 Mayers received the Arthur Hall Award “for an artist whose work, community service and commitment to their craft inspires others around them to reach to their highest potential.” She has encouraged creativity in students from nursery school to college and in diverse populations: immigrants, refugees, prisoners, the homeless, and the “psychiatrically labeled.”
In her own painting, Mayers often explores themes of peace and social justice. By placing images of war on Maine’s landscape in her recent “State of War” series, she effectively asks, How would we feel if it happened here? “An empathetic response,” says Mayers, “requires imagination.”
In 1982, I read an important book that stirred my conscience, Bitter Fruit, by Stephen Kinzer, about the overthrow of the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala by our CIA. I went to a teach-in about Central America and heard a remarkable German theologian, urge us to action: “Every drop counts, even if you think it is like pissing in the ocean. No matter how insignificant your action might seem, you must do it to get beyond the powerlessness, the cynicism, the paralysis.”
I was nearing 40, I had a young child, and had this new sense of responsibility for the state of the world. If I wasn’t going to do anything, who would?
A march was organized in Portland to mark the anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination in El Salvador. I made a boring poster. I didn’t know how to make a visual statement without words and I wanted to. I wanted to make art that could move people to action, that could stir their souls.
I thought the only way I could learn how to do it was to go to Central America and see it firsthand. There was an artists’ brigade, “Arts for a New Nicaragua”, which formed out of Boston, invited by the Ministry of Culture to come down and paint murals with Nicaraguan artists. Some of us painted a mural on the outside wall of a soap factory in Granada. Workers made suggestions about content and told stories. It became a talking wall. Even the food vendors would park in front of it because it drew so much attention. I also helped a group of young people paint their own compelling vision of the new Nicaragua.
That gave me a new awareness of what an artist can do. I saw a government that validated and recognized its artists. I saw a community of people actively engaged in making a revolution work. It changed a lot of my attitudes about the power and effectiveness of art, what my art should be about, and what my role as an artist in the community of artists and non-artists could be.
