Center for Arts in Medicine

Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America

Performing Public Health: Unique Precarities

A digital drawing of the face of person with glasses, looking up. They are detailed in black and white, with shirt green hair, and a bright yellow and orange sunburst behind them. To the right, yellow words in a shaded box read "Practice solidarity with disabled folks: self-isolate and wash your hands." A black box in the upper right-hand corner reads "Sins Invalid." Credit: Rafi Darrow, Sins Invalid
A digital painting of three people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in front of a pattern of desaturated rainbow concentric circles. The person in the center has a rainbow mohawk. They have one hand. The person on the left has a mask and a cane. The person on the right has nasal tubes, as if for an oxygen tank. Above them are the words "Nobody is disposable" in a muted burnt orange color.
#careforall. A digital drawing of three women wearing face masks and coveralls, flexing their biceps like Rosie the Riveter, surrounded by photographs of women of color doing the same. Credit: The National Domestic Workers Alliance
A digital hand-drawn image of a woman in a wheelchair, in pastel colors. The words "Justice means a disability centered response to COVID-19" drawn over swaths of sea-foam green on a light blue background.
A digital poster of two indigenous elders embracing over a mountainous landscape with Buffalo. Light and dark blue stripes radiate out behind them like the rays of the sun. The words "Protecting all that is sacred is both our right a responsibility, RESPECT our sovereignty and borders, STAY HOME" hover at the top of the image.
A black and white photo of an elderly Man of Color. At the bottom right of the image, the words "COVID-19 deaths are higher in disproportionately black rural and small metro communities. #wearedonedying."
#respectoursovereignty. A piece of wood painted white with red lettering reads "R-E-Zpect our Sovereignty!" with a painted red hand facing palm out, and a circle of red triangles, pointing outward and topped with two additional triangles at the end of each point, facing inward like the letter "M." Credit: Pine Ridge Reservation
Grainy black and white hands with wool sweater writs tug downward on the end of a drawn green line, which forms shapes below like buildings or plants. Scrawled atop the line in black are words that read "Everybody's got a right to live."
A digital painting in dark and light purple of two people embracing. One of them is wearing nasal tubes, as if for an oxygen tank. Above them are the words "Protect Disabled Lives," in light purple, surrounded by hearts.
A digital drawing of a Woman of Color wearing a mask caring for an elderly white woman. Above them both, on a pink background, are the words "I am putting my life at risk every time I go to work. I've cut down on the number of clients I care for to try to protect my health. But that means my income has gone down and I have family to support. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't have paid time off or health insurance. If I don't work, I don't get paid.-- Tzehai, Home Care Worker, California."
A woman with bare shoulders, a bolo necklace and gold earrings faces the camera with eyes closed. On her face in gold and green writing are the words "No Body is Disposable." Her eyelids are striped in the same colors.

The following resource was created by an interdisciplinary team of artists and researchers to support artists and creative communities, ask important cultural questions, and center artists’ knowledges during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. We encourage the use of these resources as a means of bringing lessons from the pandemic into a new reality. Download key takeaways from the project authors here: Key Takeaways & Coded Conversations.

WE ARE PRECARIOUS. 

If you’re afraid, that’s ok, so are we sometimes. Of the virus, of the economic cost, of being alone, of not being able to protect our loved ones. No matter where or how you live, whether you are afraid for your life, the life of someone you love, your economic position, or you just have the seed of doubt which says something might be wrong in the world. Things aren’t the way you thought. The way things have been going is not sustainable. In order for you to survive, for communities and ecologies to thrive, we need each other. We need the land, access, imagination, communication, listening and Love. We’re here too, and we’ve been here all along, surviving in the liminal spaces, letting that seed of doubt grow into something nourishing- sometimes learning something new. Other times, simply enduring. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and laid bare the deep inequity of American society. Precarity and vulnerability to the virus are distributed unequally, shaped by long-seeded historic and structural inequities. Precarity “describes the way that the precariousness of life is exploited.”

WHAT ARE UNIQUE PRECARITIES? 

Artists and communities who hold intersecting marginalized positions have a different baseline for surviving and safety during such a crisis. Yet these intersecting margins, or what we’re calling Unique Precarities, can also create knowledge, strength and wisdom born from the necessity that compassionate survival demands. When an artist is uniquely precarious, they may be navigating multiple threats to their health, wellbeing, creative practice and survival. We know from the work of Kimberlee Crenshaw and other Women of Color that marginalizations intersect: people cannot be reduced to a single vulnerability, a single aspect of their own identity. Further, these precarities differ between individuals and groups, so we speak of marginalized communities in the plural.

WHAT KNOWLEDGES STEM FROM PRECARITY? 

Artists with unique precarities hold multiple layers of vulnerability and strength. We occupy an important space at any time, but particularly during a pandemic. Using our connections and skills to articulate our experiences, we provide means of processing, a way for workers, healthcare providers, policymakers, and the general population to feel the urgent moral cry of this moment in history. Artists are experts at remaking the world.  

In addition to voicing the challenges posed by a pandemic, artists with unique precarities sometimes possess expertise that is uniquely suited to Remote Cultures. In the extreme context of a pandemic, how might we support artists and communities with Unique Precarities while respecting and learning from their specialized expertise? How can we recognize these hard-earned knowledges?

By inviting you in, we expose not only ourselves but also, as James Baldwin said in 1963, “the society that produced us.”. That’s the task of all artists across time. So now that you know, it’s in your hands, too.  

--- Charlee Huffman, Marina Tsaplina, Meghan Moe Beitiks

RESOURCES

We’ve compiled these resources created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by artists and activists from uniquely precarious communities, and paired them with research and guidelines from the medical, bioethics, and legal fields. We are centering artist/activist/community response in the dialogue between public health policies and the research being published by clinicians, bioethicists, lawyers, and scholars. In this way, we hope to honor the experiential knowledges arising from the communities most heavily impacted by policies that often were created without their representation. If we are to be inclusive, all domains of knowledge — personal, communal and academic — must be acknowledged as holding value.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Rather, we offer this as a prompt for further thinking about the creative work coming from these communities and cultures during COVID-19. 

--- Charlee Huffman, Marina Tsaplina, Meghan Moe Beitiks

The full listing of Unique Precarities Resources which have been curated using the following questions:

What are Unique Precarities made of?

Who is Uniquely Precarious?

*We talked a lot about what this means. Black, Communities of Color and LGBTQ+ Communities have been particularly impacted by the pandemic, due to systemic inequity and institutionalized racism, and these oppressions are experienced intersectionally. We hesitated to follow the CDC’s labeling of “Racial and Ethnic Minorities” because it implies intrinsic biological fallibility when the parameters that make these communities more vulnerable have more to do with shared housing, geographic location, economic precarity, etc, all of which are symptoms of inequity. See “COVID-19 and The Naturalization of Vulnerability” for a discussion of these issues, as well as the Creating Healthy Communities White Paper for a discussion of racism as a Public Health Crisis.

Unique Precarities project citations can be found on the PPH Advisory page.

Performing Public Health
What are Unique Precarities made of?
Who Is Uniquely Precarious?
Unique Precarities in the COVID-19 Arts Response Repository
COVID-19 Arts Response Resources
PPH Project Takeaways

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