, the first collection of contributions to 

, centers artists in their own voices to spotlight the wisdom of our creative community. Anchored by a set of twelve questions created by artist Chloë Bass to gain insight into practitioners’ work and person, 

 gathers responses, reflections, and expertise from a range of contributors. Exploring the knowledge passed through creative lineages and the ways socially engaged practice proliferates inside and outside of institutions, 

 provides a window into ongoing conversations between friends and mentors.

This inaugural issue emerges from a period of substantial restructuring and transformation for A Blade of Grass (ABoG). In 2021, ABoG adopted a new governance model that put the leadership of our organization in the hands of practitioners with a deep commitment to socially engaged art. This new board of directors embarked on a fieldwide research project in partnership with the Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA). This study brought together artists, practitioners, and community partners to explore key questions about what socially engaged artists need, and what organizational models can most sustainably meet those needs. Convening socially engaged practitioners and their supporters in research gatherings, virtual sessions, and one-on-one interviews was a joyful process and a deeply educational one. Over 150 participants generously responded to ABoG’s research questions and prompts, offering an expansive breadth of perspectives.

Inspired by this process, our inaugural issue gathers knowledge in another way—diving deeper into intimate conversation between practitioners and exploring new forms to share their wisdom and experience. Under conditions where we are presented with limited and insufficient options, socially engaged artists demonstrate another way—another way to exercise creative skills, another way to be in community, and another way to shape the world around us. They create strategies and interventions that make society more just, kind, safe, and free.

This editorial platform and the direction for 

 was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to the organization this year. Risa’s profound history of curating, commissioning, and writing about the work of socially engaged artists consistently demonstrates other ways of responding to the urgent conditions of the moment. This issue was overseen by ABoG Program Director Lee Heinemann with support from Executive Director Lu Zhang and Programs and Operations Manager Ixtzel Reynoso. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Brett Cook, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

. We send our heartfelt thanks to the practitioners who contributed to 

 provides a window into ongoing conversations between friends and mentors.

Another Way

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Website

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Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public

The artist Justine Di Fiore was doing care work when we first met. She was working with a nonspeaking autistic youth—I believe that might have been the first time I’d heard the term “autistic,” that’s how long ago this was. I recall her describing communication with the child that was more sensory than linguistic. This seemed to chime somewhat with her painting practice at the time, which was basically solitary, often self-portraiture, light on surrounding conversation, and hardly was seen outside a basement workspace. But then a little later, Justine got involved in radical organizing, doing grassroots work that was intensely social, and heavy on verbal debate, persuasion, study, and reflection. I was always intrigued by these multiple, uncompromising paths—caregiver, artist, organizer. Finally, after more than thirty years, we had a chance to talk about these modes and how they became a single path.


This is a conversation featuring the painter Justine Di Fiore. Are you a New Yorker, born and raised?

I lived all over, but my adolescent years were in the Bronx. Probably the most important years.

Let me say a few words recapping how I know this artist. That begins a lifetime ago, back in about 1991, when Justine was new to Minneapolis and I was there as well. This was fresh post-college for both of us. Justine was the first person I met of my own age with a demonstrably committed practice as a visual artist. I split town not long thereafter, but Justine stuck around for years and became a true Minneapolitan.

Over the decades we had intermittent contact, less through art and more through grassroots organizing networks. Of course we’re talking about Minneapolis, which was then and remains a city full of radical streaks. Even though I assumed all along that she was painting, I knew more about her involvement in workplace democracy and other projects of a political nature.

Take an opening prompt here: In your estimation, how does the relationship between art and politics around 1991 compare to now, a quarter century into the 21st century?

At that time I was painting in the basement, and I was focused on building my practice right out the gate of undergrad. I was super excited about that. Then the first Gulf War started. I had a buddy, my first friend in Minneapolis. She invited me to go to an anti-war protest. And I'm like, yeah, sure. I liked hanging out with her and I already had a developing consciousness as a young person about world events, cumulative histories, and forces that oppressed people. But I’d never gone to a formal protest.

It was my first anti-war protest, the first time I saw resistance on the street instead of reading about it as history or seeing pictures of it in the news. I felt that the war needed to be addressed in some way, and that painting in the basement wasn’t necessarily going to help that cause. I ended up involved in various organizations, and in grassroots organizing in general. As I met more people, I got more connected, and in particular, to anti-racist youth movements.

So I was continuing with painting, but the paintings that I made weren’t necessarily highly political in nature. But I think it’s a question also as to what is political. At that time, I let painting take a back seat and became active in organized resistance to the war and police brutality.

Did you have a community where you connected to other painters, people who were doing the creative visual art that you were doing?

I did. I was developing that at the same time. They were different ways of being a part of community. I took some extension classes at the University of Minnesota, and I had a show with a couple other artists. There was some momentum there. But over time it became hard to sustain a rigor in both community organizing and painting. So there was a period where painting took a back seat to illustration and drawing for zines or newspapers that I produced in collectives. I continued to paint portraits of people alongside this other work. Compared to my engagement with painting now, it was very different.

It sounds to me like the painting was never entirely solitary. You would do it on your own time, in your own space, but also would do it in a classroom setting or in a group setting, or a workshop setting, or you would engage people one-on-one by doing portraiture. What about your own goals as a painter back then? Was that something of a private sphere, where you’d have, say, five things to master in terms of technique and craft, or mark-making vocabularies?

There was an interest in developing technique, but the main motivation for the work was to allow myself a voice. It’s interesting to think about now, as I was coming into my own as a young feminist, an anti-racist, I was also coming into the idea that my voice as an artist was important to develop. So the work was a lot about personal experience and felt very diaristic. I had a visual journal that I worked in obsessively, the most blatantly political visual work that I produced. Some of it would include text, like a response to something I saw in the media. I was becoming really disgusted with television, which had shaped my identity and the role of young women in society. I was encountering bell hooks’s writing and Andrea Dworkin’s. Everything was turning upside down for me. When I think back, that probably allowed me the ability to have a voice in the public sphere.

One of the projects that was woven into larger radical networks was Emma Center, which you helped to organize. It was an infoshop, a thing back then. Lots of cities had infoshops, usually conveying a low-rent punk rock aesthetic, like the A-Zone in Chicago or 404 in Detroit. These were folks making autonomous spaces informed by anti-authoritarian ways of thinking, experimenting with horizontal structures, consensus, and so forth.

It seems like such a bygone time. It was valuable, being involved in those intense, pre-social media ways of organizing, struggling in person with like-minded values but against differing personalities while actualizing projects. How did that filter into your art making? Did it make your painting more of a refuge?

It was an interesting time to be in Minneapolis because there’s a strong history of collective organizing there. You know, the food co-op movement and all, some of it still going. And a strong history of collectivized workplace structures.

It was in that context that Emma Center came about. I developed relationships with people that I organized with. And there came a time when I felt the need to document these relationships. So I started a series of portraits of young activists who I knew from the scene.

I was painting people from life. It was about the connection, the dynamic between myself and the sitting subject. It was a way for me to connect that felt meaningful. It was quiet, a connection between two humans that was very felt. I enjoyed that and continued it for a while.

I would allow the subject, the person I was painting, to help me decide what the environment of their portrait would be, what the setting would be. I remember one young activist who wanted a halo of paper dolls on fire hovering above her head. There was a collaborative process of creating these images. It was really fun.

Alice Neel comes to mind. A socialist partisan, she had that commitment to finding and even freeing her subjects in portraiture through brushstroke and decisions about color, shape, line, and surface, in a time when portraiture wasn’t in vogue.

Fast forward a couple of decades. At some point you started thinking about, let’s say, professionalizing, going to graduate school and foregrounding your painting practice as your primary activity, and even your livelihood. How did that come to the fore in tandem with the workplace organizing you’d been doing for a while?

I worked for 27 years in Minneapolis as a CNA. In the hospital structure there was a union that organized the nursing assistants, custodians, nutrition workers, and laboratory technicians. That became my primary community.

I phased out of youth-based movements that were predominantly white, to being engaged with communities composed of a diverse array of people living in the Twin Cities. I found myself involved in organizations to address incidents of police brutality, and then gradually became involved in workplace democracy and unions. That was an important transition for me. At the same time I started to feel that the artistic voice that I had been cultivating when I first moved to Minneapolis was a bit muffled and diluted. I had lost touch with that aspect of my creative practice.

I started to crave it. I took accordion lessons. Somehow that opened up my mind to getting back into painting and drawing. I needed that bridge of studying a musical instrument to get me back to thinking visually.

Probably around 2006, 2007. Then in 2013 I attended the Women’s Art Institute, a studio intensive program. I spent a month off of work, which I hadn’t done in about twenty years, and devoted it to painting.

I continued with portraiture, painting from a live model, mostly friends, people who I was interested in spending time with. That catapulted my practice and it continued to ramp up. Certain concerns became an obsession, dealing with light and form and color on a two-dimensional plane. I was thinking about how the figure/the body occupies space. I found these things liberating in terms of processing information.

I think that working in the institutional setting of the hospital and being very regimented put me in a grid-like way of thinking, as Deleuze and Guattari talk about in 

, versus a nomadic, open way of thinking. Understanding this difference really opened things up.

I couldn’t leave alone this desire to think visually any longer. An important connection between my career as a nursing assistant and my current work happened when I received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to do a series of portraits of hospital workers in 2013–14. I made twelve diptychs, twenty-four different portraits. I showed the work at the Mall of America through the initiative called Made Here, which brought artists to vacant storefronts and other nontraditional spaces that reached a wide public.

It was a great experience for me. I was hooked and invested in continuing along this trajectory. That project was a way for me to out myself at the hospital as an artist, and it was a way for me to out myself as an artist who was a hospital worker.

From Emma Center to the Mall of America, that’s quite a range of public exposure.

It’s interesting, you might think a radical infoshop would be the more public venue, the place where you’d be reaching people. But that community, which was beautiful and had a lot to offer, and impacted people’s lives in important ways, was insular, protected, and isolated from other people’s experiences. Of course, thinking about the mall as this completely opposite site, and an expression of corporate capitalism that promotes homogeneity, all these things that punk rock butted up against—yet in some ways the Mall of America is a more public space, a context in which to connect with people of all different experiences.

So let’s take that to your painting from recent years, having relocated to Los Angeles after graduate school. Now, most days you’re painting, maybe for many hours a day. Can we see any of these long-brewing histories in the work?

One thing I started to think about in grad school was, what is the function of my work? It was a big change of identity. Until then I identified as a worker. Not that grad students aren’t workers. What I mean is, I identified with that class of people that worked in a hospital; that was my comfort zone.

I began to think more about how I represent figures, the motivation and the intention. Where do the marks that construct the figures come from? This activity of touching the canvas—what was it related to for me? I began to integrate my experiences as a worker and painter. I thought about the differences between my perspective as a caregiver versus as a student of the figure, a cool and distant perspective versus the up-close perspective that you experience when washing, supporting, holding bodies, physically turning bodies. All of that informed how I understand the figure in space. So I experimented while at UC Davis, triggering my muscle memory, in particular, of washing bodies, beginning with a process of wiping paint on a surface using the gestures of caregiving. It started with painting on bed sheets, and then evolved into using plastic because I could paint on plastic and transfer it onto my canvas.

This horizontal nature of painting on the floor simulated the patient in bed. I found the figures in the paintings and the contours of the body through the gesture of washing the body. All of that brought me to an interest in depicting the figure in states of being held by another. Now all of this is part of my vocabulary of painting. I’m remaking the figural form in painting through the labor of caregiving.

Let me go back to that first question of 1990 versus 2025. What is your view on how, both as an artist but also as a citizen of this country, of this world, what are we left with? How do we act in this world given that corporate contexts like the Mall of America are the biggest physical stages, while the radical work we do tends to be at a micro level that doesn’t reach many outside of our own lives? Now living and working in LA under an awful regime we’re trying to survive, how are you thinking now?

I think that all these modes of expression and action in the world are necessary. We need a community that engages on lots of different levels with ideas, with free thought. I don’t know what the right formula is.

I teach painting and drawing, and when thinking about private and public activities, even teaching is, in my opinion, a very public activity. One of the things I notice in studio classes is that technology, while it is really important for us all, also limits our ability to think. It’s another example of a constrained grid structure.

Students are preoccupied by what is on their phone. It’s a puzzle, figuring out how to teach interpretation of the visual world. That is what I can do, engage with students to open up their perception. Art education is a space for students to develop a voice through mark-making, and an understanding of shape and form. It’s a very human need that goes back to Paleolithic times.

A follow-up then on your reentry into intensive painting through bridging your history of hands-on care work and the painter’s canvas. Maybe the word political is too superficial. This seems like a deeper values kind of project, almost spiritual in what it’s after. You may be onto something that all of us need to grapple with in order to preserve our humanity in the age of catastrophe. Can you say something about this, considering that we sit here talking in Los Angeles, a city associated with the fetishization of bodies, of appearances, of individual wellness?

Well, that the personal is political, taught to us through the work of different movements, especially the feminist art movement, holds true. It’s a legacy that I feel is important to hold onto. Maybe a better way to think about it in the current context is that survival is political. Speaking to what is personal can be an act of survival. When artists use their experience to generate content their work has the potential to speak to people more broadly. If there is one thing that stands out in the last decade it is that identity and personal experience drive a lot of creative work. It seems to be one of the unifying features of this period of post-post- modern art. It is more than a trend, it is a manifestation of our time and born out of necessity.

For me it has become a question of how caregiving and the labor of caregiving can enter my work. I’m continuing to explore how touching and marking the canvas can contain experience, like some kind of experience of caring for the body. Can that energy be transferable? Compassion as medium, words borrowed from the title of an essay written by Clarisse Abelarde about my work, is a brilliant way to summarize not only what I think is important in my practice, but what is important in our lives as communities here in LA and around the world.

How can I put that into my work, and can I construct a figure bearing that weight and light of compassion? John Berger and Leon Kossoff wrote about these questions in their letters to each other, and in an essay in Berger’s book 

. In their discussion it came up that there was a visually impaired person whose understanding of light came through touch. This is very interesting to me, how light manifests in a painting through how one touches the painting as it is being created. I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.

Justine Di Fiore

I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.