My conversation withknowledge producer, artist, facilitator and director of the Artists’ Literacies Institute, Andrew Freiband. Our conversation was recorded, via Zoom, on April 18, 2025. My previous conversation with Andrew was on conscient podcast e13 in 2020 called weaving art into action, when we both participants in the Creative Climate Leadership course USA. Five years later, I was happy to discover that Andrew, informed by the work of British artists and writer Alana Jelinek, continues to weave art into action, notably with through his Systems Thinking for Socially Engaged Artists project, a seminar and dialogic discussion activity that introduces artists to basic concepts of systems science so we fleshed this out and Andrew and also talked about how the arts can be more useful to the near term and long-term future of our species.
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Imagine a world grappling with mass grief during a pandemic, where traditional rituals are impossible. Discover how artists stepped up to create new ways to mourn and connect, revealing the profound value of art beyond aesthetics.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Power of Attention
01:01 Revisiting Conversations
02:50 Art in Crisis: The COVID-19 Response
05:15 Creating the Artist’s Grief Deck
07:16 Rethinking the Role of Artists
10:07 Navigating Systems and Agency
12:21 The Intersection of Art and Activism
13:50 The Slow Work of Culture
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Behind the Story
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, disaster relief agencies faced a challenge they weren’t equipped for: mass grief in isolation. Recognizing artists’ historical role in creating rituals, they sought help in developing new tools for mourning. This led to the creation of the Artist’s Grief Deck, a project highlighting the practical and connective power of art.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Andrew Freiband
If we start to pay attention to what we pay attention to, we start to naturally slow down. You know, we, we disconnect from the urgency, the crisis, and we start to realize that care, and I don't just mean care for one another, although that's a piece of it, but care also for our surroundings, care for our time, care for those, you know, those nearest to us. That is where it begins. You know, that is valuable work that is not recognized. But I think that is what we can do on a day-to-day basis. That over a long term becomes artistic practice and becomes culture.
[00:00:36] Claude Schryer
Episode 233. My conversation with Knowledge producer, artist facilitator and director of the Artists Literacies Institute Andrew Freiband and I had a previous conversation with Andrew on co conscient podcasts episode 13 back in 2020 called Weaving Art into Action. It was recorded when we were both participants in the Creative Climate Leadership USA course. Five years later, I was happy to discover that Andrew is still weaving art into action, this time informed by the work of British artist and writer Alana Jelinek. We talked about his Systems Thinking for Socially Engaged Artists project. Andrew also talked about how the arts can be more useful to the near term and long term future of our species. Care as Artistic Practice
[00:01:42] Andrew Freiband
A lot of place, a lot of starting points I could think of here. So I will think about 2020 to start with, just because that was for me, where I really started to grapple with that question. And in 2020, I'm here in Queens, New York City, in April. We were the epicenter of the global COVID 19 pandemic. And as artists, you know, here in the United States, most of us are what I, you know, what we call part of the precariat, you know, precarious workers without stability or security. That also includes, you know, people that were similarly impacted in their sort of economic stability. You know, delivery workers and part time workers and care workers.
And as artists, as our work dried up, as our economic opportunities dried up, I grappled with, well, what is it that, what is it that we're supposed to be doing in the middle of this crisis? And because of some of the work I had already begun with Artists Literacies Institute, I was approached by a coalition of disaster relief agencies who were asking the same question because they were faced in the midst of this pandemic with something unique for them, which was a, a mass, a mass grief crisis where we were, you know, people were experiencing loss at an enormous scale, but they were experiencing it in A way that I don't think we had really, you know, as a society experienced before, which was in isolation. We would lose, you know, people would lose a family member, but they couldn't enter the room with them.
They couldn't hold their hand, they couldn't. They couldn't sit shiva, they couldn't have a funeral. They couldn't mourn in. In community. And the disaster relief agency said, we don't. We aren't equipped for this.
You know, this is something. We feed people, we house people, we clothe people, We. We know how to care for people, sort of in these terms. But we, you know, we aren't really prepared for, you know, grieving at this scale. And the concern among those who had experience in mental health and grief and care were saying, you know, grief that is unprocessed turns into trauma. And it felt important to process grief or to be able to develop tools or methods to process grief in these new circumstances. And they came to us, came to me, sort of representing artists saying, can you help us develop new rituals?
We have thought, you know, where do our rituals are? You know, our funerals, our, you know, community gatherings, our methods of coming together and caring for one another. Where do those come from historically, throughout human history, and they come from artists and culture producers, you know, so even within the spiritual realm, you would have, you know, artists sort of creating the circumstances and the rituals around through which we would mourn and grieve. And so we were tasked really specifically with, let's develop tools for grieving and isolation. And that was. That turned into the artist's grief deck. So sort of collective, enormous collective response.
We put out a call to artists and care workers and. And death doulas and artists with experience in memorial design and all of these kind of, sort of qualitative, subjective areas of ritual building. And we said, all right, help us develop a tool. Along with the experts, the mental health experts, the grief counselors, develop tools that are rooted in artistic thinking that can serve this really essential practical need. And we built a tool called the artist's grief deck, which is a set of cards that are designed and developed by artists. On one side, there is a. What we like to call a kind of mini ritual that you can enact in private, alone or with a small group of people and.
And then imagery on the. On the other side that are. That is meant to kind of provoke, catch the eye, sort of provoke a response, invite somebody to sort of sift through the cards and maybe stop with an image and, you know, in a kind of ineffable way, like, why do we stop in front of a certain image in the museum, in the gallery?
You know, so because grief is. Is that deeply rooted, right? It is not something that sort of sits at the surface. It's not intellectual. So art is a way to access parts of ourselves, and then once that part has been accessed, we can then kind of intellectualize, use our other faculties to process something profound like loss for us. All of which is, in a lot of terms, like a success for an art project. But that also for me, tells me that here is a role for artists in the middle of a crisis.
[00:07:16] Claude Schryer
You've been working on this notion of what kind of art do we need in this time? Or at least how do we measure it so quickly? Can you summarize what that project's about and some of the things that you're exploring? And maybe we'll have a conversation another time to look at it further in depth, but just to get an idea of what it is through the grief.
[00:07:35] Andrew Freiband
Deck and through my research into what I call artists knowledges or artists literacies. My conclusion from that is that artists are valuable not for the art, but valuable for what they know and how they know it. And these unique forms of knowing, our economy, our society, our civilization, our acculturation of what it is that artists do doesn't acknowledge that artists make art according to most people, including artists who are driven to make objects and sell them. And that could include that object, include a performance. It can include something immaterial. But nevertheless, you know, there's a market.
Systems Thinking for. For artists is a seminar that that sort of marries Daniel's Meadows systems models with some kind of, you know, some theory around what it is artists do and artists the economics of being an artist, and explores how we can value artists as systems thinkers as a unique kind of, for lack of a better term, scientist. So the argument is that what is useful about artists and that it is okay for artists to be useful, that's also something that has been frowned upon in the west for a long time, that art is, like, sacred and special and shouldn't be useful or practical in any way. You know, that it's supposed to speak to the soul or some kind of. I think all of that is, you know, a really harmful mythology for artists and those who are seeking. Seeking help from art. So artists are useful, and they are useful because they are producers of connective knowledge.
So systems thinking explores what is connective knowledge. It explores the systems in which we are already. In which we inh. Are the systems which we already inhabit, which are economic systems and power systems and knowledge systems, academic systems, institutional systems. Right. There are so many systems that we're a part of. But Donella Meadow's systems thinking model gives us a way to view all of this as artists, including our own artistic practice as a system, and to see that it touches a lot of other systems in ways that could be leverageable, that could really activate how an artist might put in meaningful work in the midst of everything that's going on.
[00:10:07] Claude Schryer
So what came out of the workshop? What's next now that you're developing knowledge? Are you going to become free, radical out there and change the art world?
[00:10:18] Andrew Freiband
That has been a project for a while. Part of systems thinking is recognizing that we don't have as much agency or control over the systems in which we're apart as. As we are maybe taught to think within neoliberalism, which, you know, espouses, of course, the power and agency of the individual. And we are. We are taught, we. That you can change the world. You know, that any, you know, any committed individual can change the world.
Which isn't consistent with anyone's experience. Right. Because when we think about it in systems terms, there are a lot of moving parts. And I think that also is nature's design, in a sense, that if any one of us had so much power and agency to change the world, that would be a problem. Right. We don't necessarily want individuals to have this much agency. And so there's a dissonance there about thinking how much we can change the world and then sort of like kind of putting our shoulder behind the wheel and trying to, you know, just push and push and push for impact.
Which is a terrible metaphor which I did get into in the. In the workshop. Yeah. You know, Alana Jelinek is a writer, writer out of the uk, and she has this. This line that talks about activism and art and art and activism and how they have been conflated, you know, in recent years. And not that either one of them is a negative thing, but that when you conflate them and you. And you perhaps approach them with a naive view of power or a naive view of agency.
She said, not only have we been mostly reproducing cliches and mediocre art, but politically we're failing to address power how it actually operates, so that neither the art nor the activism is as effective on its own terms as it could be. I think that very little is effective in the near term. And we are sort of desperately driven into A sense of urgency even by the idea that we are in the midst of crisis. We've been in the midst of crisis for a long time. But the idea that because technology is telling us that things are going haywire this moment we're bombarded by the news, our attention spans are miniscule. So artists are culture producers and culture is the longest wheel of, you know, the sort of concentric wheels of human time scales. You know, culture is around for a long time and you know, the culture we produce today is going to influence the culture of, you know, that turning of that wheel is decades and centuries and even millennia long.
Culturally we still adhere to many of the same tenets that we adhere to a thousand years ago. Cultures outlast countries, cultures outlasts civilizations. And so it can be very hard when we are sort of enmeshed in the extremely rapid time cycle of. I mean Stuart Brown would call it the time cycle of fashion, right? Not to say like clothing fashion, but just what is current? What is the mode? We are caught up in that extremely rapid time cycle.
And that isn't where artists best work is done. I think that artists knowledge is slow. It is hard to work slow when we're told that everything is happening fast and that we have to solve problems fast.
[00:14:06] Claude Schryer
But what would you recommend to our listeners in terms of action points or things to follow up on the kind of work you're doing? What do you recommend they do and think about?
[00:14:18] Andrew Freiband
Pay careful attention to attention. What artists do is in my understanding, not make art, but we care about things, right? So to give attention to something is to care about it. An artist cares uniquely in the world about the color of a shadow, about, you know, the shape of a form. Artists notice and they care about things. And so artists attention is enormously valuable. It's, it's to, to me, I think maybe the key currency of being an artist that we pay attention.
[00:14:55] Claude Schryer
We'll leave it at that for now. Thank you, Andrew.
[00:14:58] Andrew Freiband
Thank you. Thanks so much, Claude.