Your Art Manifesto (2025)
Typically my first writing challenge for myself as a new year approaches is to select my One Little Word to guide me into the year and more recently that process has also included selecting a poem (or two) to support that intention. However, when I shared a post-election episode of Vibe Check with the Rebel Cartographers we were inspired to make manifestos our writing challenge for January 2025.
The New
Vibe Check typically closes out with the hosts making recommendations that often include poetry, music, or pop culture, but sometimes include life hacks. I think two of these recommendations can provide inspiration for your 2025 Art Manifesto, but I will start with the final recommendation (49:35 time stamp) made by Saeed Jones. He also shares his poem on his substack. His poem came out of making a list of self-care he wanted to prioritize and checking in with his friends (especially black women and poets) for advice. One of those friends was Maggie Smith (of Good Bones fame) and she said that she was creating her own Project 2025 and top of her list was “no more self-abandonment.” See her A Poem for This Day here. But Zach Stafford’s recommendation (47:35 time stamp) is equally interesting because it challenges us to ask what questions our pop culture favs and comfort watches are asking us to consider. I think this is a really interesting practice and might provide additional fodder for inspiration. Bonus: Sam Sanders discusses this theory and so much more about the idea of sacred texts and what they teach us as well as the usefulness of personifying our emotions/struggles in How To Talk To Yourself When Things Suck. A final note: Maggie Smith has a book, Dear Writer, about writing and creativity coming out in April and she has a poetry reading with Saeed Jones on April 1 that will explore the 10 elements that Smith has identified for a creative life: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection and hope. What elements of your life do you want to focus on in 2025?
The Old
For several years now my first semester college writers wrap up our journey together with a unit exploring the question: What if you changed the world with your story? Our What If work was inspired by Marvel’s What If animated series and the butterfly effect combined with the explorations offered by the #WalkMyWorld Project. The journey began by exploring three questions:
We then culminated in a multi-genre manifesto that offered something Unique, meaningful, and fun to a specific personal audience. My writing invitations to my students as we begin dreaming up our manifestos include:
- How much of our truth do we dare to tell and how much we must we tell slant?
- What song of hope or stone of defiance do we want to send out into the world?
- What truth do we need to share to positively change the world – or at least our little corner of it?
“Artists,” he said, “are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
One of the specific challenges I offer to my students and is taken up by many is to create an art manifesto and that is something I want to focus on this first week (or month depending) of 2025. In fact, the artwork on this post is inspired by the Red Alan Manifesto which is one of the art manifestos I share with my students. What kind of manifesto do you need to face 2025? A song, a protest, a poem?
The Borrowed
This final section is going to be pretty rough as I’m relying on my very faulty memory and this invitation is already a manifesto in itself. I failed to take notes for all the things but this nebulous idea that I want to guide my own Art Manifesto, 2025, is to think about what measures I will use at the end of the year to measure success but keeping The Serenity Prayer in mind:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.
I am at a season of life where success is more about joy and contentment than career advancement so it might be useful to think about a list of what is important for all the dimensions of my health (for example Sam Sanders lists moving, eating, sleeping, and connecting) or the elements of joy (borrowing from Maggie Smith’s 10 elements of creativity). I am leaning into my sacred texts and inspiring conversations such as The Formula for Happiness (with Dr. Laurie Santos) to guide my 2025 but I am not creating a roadmap for the journey as I know therein madness lies. When I first contemplated this idea I was thinking more politically but so much of my self-care since Nov. 6 has been to focus what is in my control and that is what I think and feel and do. I know my Advent of Hope writing challenge provided great inspiration including William Stanley Brainthwaite’s It’s a Long Way. What form will my Art Manifest, 2025, take is anyone’s guess? What do you think yours will be?
Examples
- A Manifesto by Roxane Gay: 10 rules for loving and being loved well
- I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
- As the Amazon Shrinks, the Message Grows Louder
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay
