WexCast: Sonnets and Cinema 2025

Transcript

Melissa Starker: This is WexCast, from the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. For this episode, we’re excited to share the original poems by local poets that were read as part of the January 2025 Sonnets and Cinema film series. Guest curated by poet, Matter News columnist, and Streetlight Guild founder Scott Woods, the series focused on three documentaries that touch on the question of whether art can change the world. Each screening was preceded by readings by Woods and another Columbus poet: Sayuri Ayers for Jodorowsky’s Dune, Aaron Alsop for Museum Town, and Hanif Abdurraqib for Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. Woods also offers an introduction to each film and shares his thinking behind the selections. In case you missed the films, links to watch each are in the blog post that accompanies this podcast at wexarts.org. Head of film/video Dave Filipi kicks things off.

Dave Filipi: Good evening. I'm Dave Filipi, the head of film and video here at the Wexner Center, and I'd like to welcome everyone to our second year of Sonnets and Cinema. The series is the brainchild of Columbus poet, activist, author of the regular column “The Other Columbus” for matternews.org and Streetlight Guild founder, Scott Woods. Scott selected the films and invited the three poets who will read with him this month.

Last year's series was so well received and showed how interesting it can be when these two art forms rub up against each other that we wanted to do it again this year and we're grateful to Scott for putting together such a thoughtful series. I should mention that Scott's recent poetry collection, Black Night Is Falling, came out in November and is available in the Center's bookstore. Tonight's film is the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, one of the greatest—and yes, there are more than one—films about a film that was never made. And joining Scott this evening will be Sayuri Ayers. Now, it's my great pleasure to welcome Scott Woods to the stage.

Scott Woods: Good evening.

Audience: Good evening.

So, let's start off with a little bit of thanks. Thank you to the Wexner Center for the Arts, especially Dave and the film crew upstairs, but also Matt Reber and the Wex Bookstore, and the marketing department, which really went all out this year. Special note to Austin Dunn for making the sexiest little commercial that I've ever received. So, I am of the belief that all functions, all meetings, everything should kick off with a poem. And so I'd like to invite Sayuri Ayers up to perform a new work commissioned for this event, followed by a poem by myself, also new. And then I'll follow that up with a proper introduction to the films. Does that sound OK to everyone? Good, because that's what's happening.

Sayuri Ayers is the author of three poetry collections, The Woman, The River; Mother Wound; and Radish Legs Duck Feet, and one creative nonfiction collection, The Maiden in The Moon. Please welcome to the stage a dear, dear friend of mine. I've known Sayuri since she was, but a sprightly young college student many moons ago and we have been through the poetry wars for many years, and it is a great honor and pleasure to have her here tonight, Sayuri Ayers.

Sayuri Ayers: Well, thank you so much Scott, and thank you so much to the Wexner Center for allowing me to perform this poem for you all. So, as Scott said, this is a new poem for the film Jodorowsky's Dune. And as you may know, David Lynch passed away, we just got the news today. So, I'm also just like in remembrance of David Lynch and also for the visionaries in all of us.

So, this poem is titled “Sand Worm's Song.”

I am the others and the others are me

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Before your fathers, fathers, fathers stirred in ancestral darkness

I have outlived the light and heat of a million suns

I have no need for golden tomes to guide me

For behold with a twist of my body

I sloth off a thousand shards

Each cell chanting its glinting song

I bear the essence that will unfetter you

You who once clawed unseeing and night's mantle in search of stars

What is life but creation

And the purpose of God, but to transform

For you, I drown myself in madness

As you sip from my ruin, your mind unlatches

A portal swinging open to release a roiling flood.

You become the creature uncoiling

erupting from darkness like a flare of blue flame

Behold, I am you. You are me.

Entwined makers transforming crumbling dunes into fragrant waves

What is created must bend to its master's light

What is created ripples in eternity's sea

Come, let us rebuild the world in our image

Come, let the vision I gift you set you free

Thank you.

Scott Woods: I should have went first. [Laughs]

All right. My poem this evening is a new one entitled “Artist Unknown.”

All of the sculptures from Africa are by unknown artist

Anonymous, they say, impossible to know

Except I have a cousin that looks like the queen mother pendant mask

Two aunts built like Chiwara sculptures carrying Molly on their heads

I have seen my mother strike a Dagon pose

In the last pew of Church of Christ, her cooking arm over the back of the bench

The manifest of my people says Nelsonville and Georgia

Maybe Cherokee, if you give my grandmother enough brandy and coffee.

Blood is our providence and our destiny

Apparently, no one is escaping high blood pressure

My people are models and then still life, and then dust

No one will remember their names either

Or the curves they cut into the land, and a welfare line

Even now I'm fuzzy on the trail

The front of the family Bible run cold

The tree forever stuck in autumn, all root, no leaves

Waiting on some curator to come along and see our merit.

By way of introduction, here we go. So, this year's Sonnet and Cinema film series seeks to answer a basic question that already has a well-worn answer. Can art change the world? The answer is yes, and everyone present tonight could likely come up with a unique example of how that's true and we would all be correct. And if I asked you tomorrow and you had to come up with a different example, you could. And if I asked you over the weekend for a different answer, you could. And we would all be right three times at the same time. And I will tell you a secret, that will happen for as long as I can ask the question and you can give an answer.

Art makes a lot of seemingly specious claims about being a change agent, but it's really a case of the hype being real. Art is so ubiquitous that the question seems not only basic, but moot. Who has not been moved by their favorite song? And in the moving are not certain actions decided upon. Who will Sade, it's her birthday, tell you to love today and how deeply? And if you take her advice, how far will those ripples extend through your living room to your job, into the future? The answer is eternally yes. So, art is already changing the world all the time. It is the political ad in the cereal commercial. It is the million dollar painting and the one string blues song. So, maybe a better question is, if art is everywhere and it changes the world to varying degrees wherever it is, why is the world turning into trash?

There are lots of reasons why this is true. Chief among them is capitalism. Capitalism will always be the enemy of art. And while art can change the world, the God of capitalism owns it. Somewhere along the peninsula of the artist's work, stretching into and across a sea of possibilities. The artist realizes that the turning waters are capitalism. How can art hope to change a world driven by materialism and greed, and power, lust? If you define the world as something that is very large with lots of people on it, there are only a handful of ways to actually change something that big. Disaster, war, migration, commerce. But art doesn't seek to affect change in that way. Even art that aspires to world domination.

Art understands that the artist does not, that powerful change can come from the process of creating art. Change can come even when art fails to excite or incite. Such is the story of power we have come to see tonight. For me, Alejandro Jodorowsky embodies one principle above all others and it will be very present in this film. Passion. Everything about how he creates comes from that place. He burns to create. He brims with it, so much that he graduates to a pen-like deity. Nothing matters but the passion, not even if the story is good.

If you tell it, I mean it is Dune, if you tell it with passion, then it is good to him. No project that he's completed exposes this more than one project that he did not. You don't need me to tell you about Dune. The movie's story has been made several times over in film and television, and I'm sure almost everyone here has watched the effervescent, Timothée Chalamet riding a big worm at this point. Some of you have may have heard that the famed director David Lynch passed away today. A filmmaker revered for his surreal catalog, though justifiably lambasted for his take on Dune in 1984. Some of you may even be making morbid connections at this very moment about the timing of his death to the showing of this documentary, to which I say, I hope the Wexner Center is alibied up.

One of Jodorowsky's goals was to create a film so mind-boggling and pioneering that it would, as he put it, change minds all over the world. His passion was such that even in not completing the film, his vision and strategies changed cinema forever. He is the definition of shooting for the stars and still landing on the moon if you don't make it. I do not agree with all of his analogies and the way he occasionally dissects the creative process is wildly abhorrent. I would be remiss if I did not mention that he briefly likens adapting a written work as sexual assault. In panning the gold to otherwise be found in this film, that's a nugget we should all throw back in the river. Edgar Degas once said, "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

It is nearly impossible to watch this film and not activate whatever creative spark resides in you. You will leave here wanting to make something, to sing or paint or dictate a line or two into your phone. I implore you not to fight that instinct, kill the voice in you that says you are not an artist. You may not be, but don't let that voice stop you. It is a thing that wants to keep the world as it is, to maintain the status quo and you hardly need me to point out how sorely this world needs changing. Thank you and I hope this film gives you something you can use in all of this darkness…

Dave Filipi: Tonight's film is the 2019 documentary Museum Town about the founding of the arts destination MASS MoCA in the then unlikely town of North Adams, Massachusetts. Joining Scott this evening to read will be Columbus poet Aaron Alsop. Now, it's my great pleasure to welcome back Scott Woods.

Scott Woods: Good evening.

Audience: Good evening.

Scott Woods: I know it's cold. Let's just get that out the way. You made it. I'm of the belief that all functions, all meanings, all anything should start with poems. So, I'd like to invite Aaron Alsop up to perform a new work commissioned for this event. That'll be followed by a poem by me and then that'll be followed by an introduction by me. So, that's how the night's going to go. Aaron, Scott, Scott again, movie. There's a slight biography for Aaron, but I know Aaron as a poet obviously, but in several other capacities as a person and I love all of those capacities. He is one of the most intelligent, brilliant people that I know and he's the only person that I've ever agreed to do a podcast with, which is racy stuff. So [laughs], please welcome to the stage as he begins his long track from the middle of the theater. Aaron Alsop everyone, Aaron Alsop.

Aaron Alsop: Hello. So, I have a poem. My goal is always to see if I can get Scott to take back these things he's saying about me. But no, I'd too like to thank the Wex, Scott for including me in this, you all for showing up.

Yes. Scott told me, asked me if I want to do a poem for this. I was like, "Sure. Is there a theme?" He said, "Yeah. Something about art and its ability to make social change." And I was doing that thing where you look over your shoulder. I was like, "You want, because you know me, you want me to do it?" I was like, "OK. Hope I don't blow up your spot." OK.

So, this is what I came up with. I'd like to start out with a quote from Virginia Woolf: “How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn't pull the trigger?”

This poem is called “The Greatest Mixed Media Story Ever Told.”

So, it's art in place of change

I feel bad for a cynic like you

The world for you must be bleak and weary

Unfolding before you as a never-ending terrain of snowy tundra and Bob Dylan lyrics

Iced over lakes where boats once rocked gently

Where lovers on the shore used to talk

And watch lightning bugs

And swat mosquitoes on each other's necks

There must be no summer in your world, no thaw

The music sparse

Scratchings on the cave walls made while waiting for the dark to creep in

For the blood to run or the herd to vanish

Only hunger deep set, in eyes circled quiet around a fire.

Art as distraction alone

But I myself am an optimist

I embrace a broader view

Of canvas, of score, of material, of instrument

Nat Turner drumming against the walls, for example

A beat starting sporadic, then settling into time

At first, steady and functional

A baseline, an under painting

Slowly gaining confidence

Building to a rhythm into something that will support a song

Two in the morning at the big house door

Bare feet sliding across the kitchen floor

Bolt the back window so they won't escape

Now let's go see what kind of trouble we make

Make our own music ‘cause we're about to be free

After that, everywhere is the place to be.

His grip on the ankle firm

The body dangling limp and in weight

The swings gaining in force

The brush head arcing across the ceiling like its sky

Like somebody took the roof off

And you could look up and see it like a rainbow

From the ground to the wall, spraying a path to impact

Again and again like you could bank on it

Like it was inevitable

Each thud turning musical, tuned

Each landing an explosion of color and time

The release, a controlled unpredictability

Hues ranging around the walls

Texture, building in spots, layering, fixing itself

Otherwise running, streaming down like the stains of tears.

The bristles stick here and there, he leaves them

The tools become the work

Providing of themselves the pigment, the clay, the glaze, the melody

Who knows?

If you saw it, you might recall the tune

Start singing a low hum of pain versus indifference

Of looking up at a ceiling traced with the arc of freedom

Like maybe this is what it looks like

What it feels like

What it sounds like

When the roof is broken through

When the sky becomes the limit

When you can look up and imagine

What it would be to have that kind of freedom.

See, if you understand the breadth of canvas

The breadth of material available

Then you have to be an optimist, as Nat Turner was

Transforming the walls of the house

From scrubbed white

To an explosion of reds and purples, and blues

Bright and deep

And before you talk any kind of shit

Step back and see what the patterns of the sacred work tell you

Do you see the web of Anansi connecting all things?

Or the palace across the passage

With the blood of 41 contemporaries in the mortar to bind the walls?

So, when it's either be blood there or be blood here

All you get to do is decide how

What it will mean

What you will bind

What your sacred number will be

In this case, as many as they could get their hands on.

Here or there, those gods or these

As many as you can get, will always be

The sacred number of the downtrodden

As this will always be what creation can be

What a moment of freedom might sound like

How it might look

What it might cost

To make art that really stands the test of time

That burns an image so bright you can close your eyes and see it for centuries

A rhythm so deep it echoes down through time to tell us

Which houses to paint, which bones to break

For change.

Thank you.

Scott Woods: Nice try. I'd done messed that poem all up, it’d been all this whole Bob Ross thing, I done messed that all up.

My poem by contrast will be, for me, it is short, but that's because I'm being mindful of the time and I have a long introduction. So, here we go.

This piece is entitled “The Corner.”

Just give me a corner

I will sweep the litter from its face

But water the weed in its cracks

Drench it until it blooms, all unnecessary with the beauty

I will build a mound around it made of all the glass and dancing plastic you have left as offering.

A ballast of balled-up hot wings paper

A styrofoam rampart from a lunch had quick on the way to nothing

Plant a flagpole made a split straw

Fly a flag made of CVS receipts and expired bus passes

I will stream yellow police tape around it

So that you can avoid its piss-mote

And make a drawbridge from a glove stiff from begging and call death

I will call all of this the world

And claim I have changed it

And maybe I have

Or at least until winter comes for it

But what you cannot say

Is that I did not change the world

Even if I had to make the world change for it.

Thank you.

My mother is the hardest working woman I know. She was raised in Nelsonville, Ohio, born at the midpoint of both the Great Depression and the Harlem Renaissance. Not that she experienced any of this in Nelsonville, Ohio. She grew up dirt poor and I mean that literally. For years my grandparents raised a gaggle of children in a shack that had an actual dirt floor. I know it is not an old black woman's hyperbole because I have seen pictures of it. Eventually, they moved into a proper abode. The house I would visit as a child on the corner of Patton and Back Street.

She was the first person in her immediate family to attend college. A literal escape from poverty in all of the small town indignities visited upon a black family in the first half of the 20th century. She had an indomitable work ethic, committed to multiple jobs, owning a small business on the side. She was an educator, eventually retiring from the Columbus public school system. She believed in hard work, pretty much above all things. Despite never missing a week of church ever, her true religion was work. At the time, I could not discern if she even believed in hobbies.

The one thing that seemed to go against the grain of her all-consuming labor campaign was her belief that all four of her sons must take piano lessons. Our home had an upright piano. I do not know whose idea that was, hers or my father's, whom she divorced when I was not quite two years old. I know that all of us were required to take the lessons. We didn't have to be good at it or stick with it if we turned out to be trash. The lessons weren't free after all. But we did have to try. What I didn't understand about my mother's musical stipulation back then was that it wasn't about raising some Jackson family of musicians, so that we could all get rich and buy pet chimpanzees.

It was about becoming well-rounded people, being able to appreciate things beyond what we could acquire, about learning how to listen. And yes, toil over a practice. What you could never say was that Sister Woods raised bad citizens. She worked so that we could learn. My mother required us to do other things as well, sports and reading. But art seemed to be the frivolous one, the one that we were getting away with. On the days that the piano and I got along, it was an outright fun activity. So, I was certain I was pulling one over on my mother. No way had she intentionally set up something in my life to be fun.

And this is how many of us see art's place in society, as optional. Good work if you can get it. As if art is not always around us, always informing how we do everything, recording our lives for all of time in one capacity or another. Anything that can preserve your society with the range and reach of art is more powerful than any media platform you can conceive. Art is many things, but it is a response to what happens in the world. It's how we handle the world, how we get our arms around it, how we process what it does to us and how we fight back against its storms. It is also soft and quaint, and expensive, and therapeutic. But it is again and also hard and angry and critical. It is all of the things that people are and that culture is and can be, which is why it is important and deserving of our respect and protection.

I hardly need to tell you how important it is now and will be moving forward. I don't need to sell any of you on art's importance. I only need reveal it. Reveal how it is already in your life in important and necessary ways. Even a woman as tough as my mother thinks so, in her fashion. I don't want to unduly color whatever you may take from the documentary we are showing tonight, but I may not get to speak to many of you afterwards, so I want to say a couple of things up front. For most people, Museum Town is inspiring.

It directly answers the question that this whole film series seeks to address. Can art change the world? If you work at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, it sure feels like it. The work exhibited there is epic and transformational, and arguably world-class by any definition. The venue itself is a triumph of public will and governance. If, however, you work at a mom and pop shop around the block from it, you may feel it hasn't changed much of anything. I don't want to spoil anything. So, let me attempt a landing here by saying, it's OK to like or even love what MASS MoCA represents.

It is also OK to be critical of it to say that perhaps it hasn't considered all the local impact beyond what they say to get funding, it's OK to gauge what cultural institutions are doing right and wrong. If they are to change the world and almost all of them suggest that is their mission, even the one we're in right now, then the world gets to tell you if your change is real or productive or healthy or art, or change. Look no further than in the concept of creative industries to see how art capitulates to power. We are in a moment where institutions are leaning in directions they have rarely leaned before or for fear of being eradicated by a government growing more despotic by the hour.

Unfortunately, the answer of many proponents of the arts is to lean into the gears of the machine, turning artists into cogs, if they bother to use them at all. Creative industries is big on the industry part, not so much on the creative side of the table. Alas, time precludes me from being able to drill into this with the heft it deserves. Just know that it is not the job of art to make power feel good. If anything, the opposite is true and we should seek out and support art that does that. Without it we are lost. Culture is not optional. It happens around us whether we acknowledge it or not, but we get to build it. We can guide it, we can determine its value, which is to say we can determine its priorities. Priorities are how values manifest in the real world and art helps us determine our values. So is there an answer in Museum Town? Absolutely. Several. But there are several important questions too. I implore all of us to find and interrogate those questions.

Thank you for coming out...

Dave Filipi: Tonight's film is the 2012 documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about the life and work of the renowned dissident Chinese artist. Very timely as well with everything that's going on in the world. Joining Scott this evening will be a writer who has taken the stage a few times at the Wex himself. Hanif Abdurraqib, whose most recent book, There's Always This Year is also available in the Wex store. I'd like to thank Scott and all of this month's poets for all of the work they have shared with us this month. It's truly been a memorable three events. Now it's my pleasure to welcome Scott Woods.

Scott Woods: Thank you my friend. Good evening.

Audience: Good evening.

Scott Woods: Oh, you all got the memo. I'd like to invite Hanif up to perform a new work commissioned for this event, that will be followed by a poem by myself and then an introduction by me as well to the film. And then we can watch this amazing movie. Yes? Does that sound OK?

[Audience applause]

OK. So, by way of introducing Hanif, we have been in this position before where I introduce him, he introduces me. And what's interesting is, in these situations, is that even when I'm introducing him, there's all these people who don't know who I am. And so, hello all of Hanif's fans. Who are like, "Who the fuck is that?" So, I'm Scott and I will let Dave's introduction stand as resume for me. That was awesome. And without further ado, I will be bringing up my dear friend, an amazing writer, a dope poet, but most importantly, especially in light of the subject tonight, an amazing person. Please show your love for Hanif.

Hanif Abdurraqib: Good evening.

Audience: Evening.

Hanif Abdurraqib: It's funny to me to be Scott and imagine that people living in Columbus don't know who he is and yet somehow would know who I am.

It's good to be here. And I was talking about how sometimes as poets, if you're working on a prolonged project, at least for me, I guess I can't speak broadly for everyone, but my brain has a hard time detaching from its obsessions. And so, at first I was excited to get to this piece. I was like, "I'm glad Scott commissioned me for this." It'll give me, I'm writing this book length project about religious skepticism. The overarching question of what if heaven isn't real? What does that mean for our limits of forgiveness? And what if God is actually cruel? What if we have misunderstood what we believe about deities?

And I thought, OK, well I'm just have a little fun. He has that sunflower installation, I was like, "I'm just going to write about sunflower seeds. This will be great." And I looked at the poem and I was done. I was like, "Nope. That's the same..." I used sunflowers to do the same thing I've been doing, in a good way. And so, this was great to write and a lot of fun to write, and I'm glad I got to write it.

This poem takes its title from a lot of other poems that have the same title, “Under its Umbrella.” And thank you all for hearing me.

There are more ways to show devotion

Folklore says to hold a sunflower under the tongue will bring one luck

Though it never says whether the luck is good or bad

I once slept with a sunflower seed under my tongue

And in the morning, I pulled a long stem from my mouth

It had no head.

It belonged to nothing.

It grew incomplete.

I trust no thing that takes its orders from the sun.

The chasing of light requires a kind of luck.

But the night is promised.

The jarred firefly dies not from a lack of air,

but from a lack of darkness.

We've all got our tricks.

Under the tongue of my brother's brother was a blade.

He carved across into the cheek of a man who wanted him dead.

The distance between a blessing and a warning is all about the temperature of blood.

The darkness flowering between the blocks were old grudges sleep.

Under the mattress in the cage,

my brother's brother slept

were bags of yellow sunflower seeds.

He traded them for cigarettes.

He held the smoke under his tongue

and blew it out over the barbed wire.

It severed into looping flower heads with no stems.

What drove him mad

Was the light flickering outside his cell at night.

The chasing of light requires a kind of madness.

The darkness is an unreliable parent

And yet so much survives its cruel transactions.

The dead firefly at the bottom of the glass

Still has a light that flashes dimly

And your children's children will see it when they close their eyes.

Let me spare you the labor of emotional math.

Whatever cross you carve your life into

Has you under its tongue.

Gods are established by power and never luck.

To put it another way. It wasn't the madness that drove my brother's brother to the grave,

But the small pile of sunflower seeds he held in his mouth

Before falling asleep

While looking up at the stars,

Each of them small enough to hold on the edge of a finger

Big enough to be a threat.

Thank you.

Scott Woods: Dave, note for next time, I go first. I can't. I keep blowing this. All right. So, here is my poem. It is short for me, but because my intro will be long. So, heads up.

This poem is entitled “Peace Sign.”

Every time I turn off the freeway toward home

She throws a double peace sign through the windshield into the sky

It took me three times before I noticed

Because that James Rowe Curve is no joke

It's for the surveillance camera she says

Which no one can miss

Shooting into the sky on top of a needle tower

Sauron surveying his kingdom of blight

Poking into the eye of God and anyone who loves sunsets

She tells me that one day someone's going to look through the tapes

And if the hour is right

They'll notice a 13-year-old Nissan giving them peace signs

And if they notice it once, they may look for it again

And they will laugh

And the overseer will turn to his comrade and say

Look at this car with the peace signs

And the two of them will laugh

And scroll through the time stamps and they will find it again a day later

Two black peace signs shot through the screen

And each of them will stop looking at their own monitors

The whole team fixated

On counting how many peace signs they've missed.

One might be inclined to say

Look, look how you have brought joy to the mundane

How you have brightened a day at night

How even your oppressors have given way to laughter

But in my house we say

Keep their eyes on the funny parts

And the fleeting fingers of peace

While all of the revolution is happening one screen over

And they realize too late

That we were throwing gang signs against their very existence.

Thank you.

You're very kind. So an introduction to the film proper. As I have said throughout this series, the question whether or not art can change the world is basic. It has already been answered by the time you walked in the door tonight or woke up this morning. It was already answered when black folks made hip hop and blues, and slave hollers, and gospel, and country. It was already answered when we hung quilts to guide runaway slaves out of bondage. It was already answered by a cave painting in what would become France. I could have just hit you with hip-hop, that black and brown concoction. If I had to pick one art form to make a case for changing the world, it would be hip-hop.

Hip-hop changed everything about society that you can change. It changed music, it changed art and language, and notions of what it means to be American. Hip-hop changed politics, changed the academy, hip-hop changed literature and the economy. It is without question the most impactful musical form of the last half century. And while we can debate whether or not those changes were all good or for the betterment of society, what we cannot debate is whether or not the world would be the same without it.

I was born right before hip-hop. I grew up on art that did not do what hip-hop did, or at least to the same extent. By the time hip-hop became something that you could find in Columbus, Ohio, its impact was immediate. Almost overnight, the clothing of my peers changed, the way we spoke to one another became infused with the tongue we had learned from records and cassettes. Hip-hop changed our value systems, the way we courted and kissed. I used to say that hip-hop revealed and encouraged values that were already present in my circle, but frankly, hip-hop brought new values into view. Values that would change the course of my life and the life of my friends and my peers and my enemies.

For a time in the early '90s, I even took to rapping. It was a short stint, only a handful of embarrassing years in rec centers and unfinished basements bent over boom boxes. But it gave me a strength that no other art form I engaged with offered and I tried them all. Hip-hop was truly my first earnest foray into reinvention. Now you can do that by creating a new profile on social media, but back then you had to carry your identity. You had to wear it and speak it, and share it with the world hands on, face to face. And hip-hop let us do that as far as we could afford or compose or dance into existence.

If each of us took the time to reflect how art came to us and affected us, we would have to confess that whatever it made us feel or think or consider was changing us. And that is the very simple math of art and change, that if you can be affected by art, then your decisions become different, your interest and values change. And once we change our values, we change our behavior. And once we change our behavior, we change our outcomes. And outcomes are what the world is made of. So, that's the basic answer to a basic question. Congratulations, you have all had your lives changed at this point and it will keep happening whether you are cognizant of it or not.

But how do we answer that question in a world that requires a deeper, more profound, more pragmatic answer. More pointedly, how do we answer that question, in a world that seeks to do more than entertain us in Plato's Cave? How do we answer the question of art's ability to change the world around us in a world that is actively trying to do us harm? How do we get past the meme or the political cartoon or the T-shirt or the snappy social media post? How do we create artistic things, intent on changing outcomes that comprise the world?

Tonight's film answers that question as plainly as it can be stated by any single artist. Ai Weiwei creates art that challenges perception and politic and power. It is not apologetic art or art that seeks to entertain very much. It is not art for sale. It is work that, to put it mildly, challenges its audience and its subjects. When he sets his sights, his enemy is clear, which is why the Chinese state has attempted to demolish not just his ability to create but his very body. He is considered so dangerous to the state that DeepSeek won't even mention him in its capacity as an AI agent, which is to say an agent of the state. If you thought AI was a problem before, consider that it deflects questions about the most famous living artist in China.

If you ask it about Ai Weiwei, it reportedly states, "I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses." As if such erasure is not a harmful response. Even the horrific ChatGPT will at least pretend he exists. And yet he persists. You can go on his Twitter, X page right now and see him in action. Ai Weiwei generates enormous art installations and scores of tactile information, and piles of photographs, and any other way that he can conceive of to drive home the point that both art and his people are not free.

No matter how much success or attention or accolades he may receive, he does not perceive himself as free so long as the state oppresses people. He does not merely claim his people's struggles or use them for subjects in his work, he recognizes that their struggles are his struggle. That if your art is shackled to oppression, there are things it cannot be. Whenever someone questions, either themselves or the art that they see in the world, the relevancy or purpose or place of art in light of all the horrors and political damage that the world thrust upon people, we must note that artists are people. They're not a species unto themselves, protected in some way by their ability to make pretty things. Artists are always on the front lines of protest and change because we are as much the targets of political and state systems as anyone else.

As I've stated, tonight's film is the boldest answer to our primary question on any level that I could think of in this moment. As a Black American, I figured my next four years in this country would be challenging. All American years are challenging to Black people. What I did not foresee was that we would become America's boogeyman. I mean beyond the slick and indirect way, we are usually used. I mean in a very concentrated and public way. In a manner that suggests we should be blamed for anything the state gets wrong, as if there were enough Black people to create these problems or as if there were Black people in the industries or spaces where these problems exist.

Sure, DEI means lots of things when you're part of the team that's being oppressed and it's a big team. But the media and the state have made it clear that it mostly means one thing and you don't need to be a Black pilot or a Black flight attendant or even a Black victim for the state to fix its eye on you. And let me tell you, it is an unenviable position. I get antsy when the state comes begging for my vote, let alone when they want to blame me for disasters. I get that not all of us are artists and not all artists are Ai Weiwei.

You do not have to broadcast or signal your virtues here. Not to me. I am not asking for that. I am not taking a survey, but I am looking for your work. I am looking for the things you are willing to do in public out loud. I am looking for the nature poem that knows what time it is. I am looking for the landscape that understands what it must get its arms around. I am looking for the drill song that wants to burrow into the foundation of this sick world. I am looking for the dance that keeps time with destruction. I'm even looking for the TikTok willing to reveal the evil plan to put the liquor in the chicken store. I am looking for the new words that we will attach to our work and our fights, and our wins, not just our struggles. That our enemies cannot replicate with forked tongues and use against us in a year. Words that will set their throats aflame when they try. We should always question art under the thumb of oppression, but never the need for it.

Thank you and I hope you are inflamed with a desire to change the world.

Melissa Starker: That was Scott Woods, Sayuri Ayers, Aaron Alsop, and Hanif Abdurraqib, the poets of Sonnets and Cinema 2025. For more information about our Film/Video programming and all things Wex, go to wexarts.org. For the Wexner Center for the Arts, I’m Melissa Starker. Thanks for listening.