The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,21

here. And if we serve, we last. My faith in art rivals my admiration for any other discourse. Its conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely. I believe.

The Habit of Art

ARTTABLE HAS complimented itself by choosing this year’s winner. As prestigious as the award itself is, its gleam is located in its choices. Your selection of Toby Lewis is another of its compliments to itself as well as to her commitment to so many avenues of creative art and her special devotion to the visual arts.

It is in this latter, visual arts, that I am most impressed. Her collection at the headquarters of Progressive Insurance: there I saw for myself the fruits of her passionate hard work. How, by placing diverse, powerful, beautiful, provocative, thoughtful visual art in the workplace, where the employees encountered it at every turn, all day and responded to it with deep criticism or desperate affection, she encouraged them to begin to create for themselves their own art in their own work spaces. The intimacy she and Peter Lewis insisted upon made me understand what they understood: that art is not mere entertainment or decoration, that it has meaning, and that we both want and need to fathom that meaning—not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities. It was a manifestation of what I believe is true and verifiable: the impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need—whether on cave walls, one’s own body, a cathedral or a religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean.

Art and access is a much-written-about, much-sermonized-upon subject. Artists and supporters alike see an abyss between elitist and popular understandings of “high” and “found” art and try to span or fathom it. The tools for making art matter to ever larger, ever more diverse populations are many: more and more creative uses of funding, free performances, individual grants, and so on. The perception that the chasm remains may be the fruit of an imaginary landscape made real by the restrictions of available resources or by fiat. It is an unconscionable, almost immoral perception.

I want to describe to you an event a young gifted writer reported:

During the years of dictatorship in Haiti, the government gangs, known as the Tonton Macoutes, roamed about the island killing dissenters, and ordinary and innocent people, at their leisure. Not content with the slaughter of one person for whatever reason, they instituted an especially cruel follow-through: no one was allowed to retrieve the dead lying in the streets or parks or in doorways. If a brother or parent or child, even a neighbor ventured out to do so, to bury the dead, honor him or her, they were themselves shot and killed. The bodies lay where they fell until a government garbage truck arrived to dispose of the corpses—emphasizing that relationship between a disposed-of human and trash. You can imagine the horror, the devastation, the trauma this practice had on the citizens. Then, one day, a local teacher gathered some people in a neighborhood to join him in a garage and put on a play. Each night they repeated the same performance. When they were observed by a gang member, the killer only saw some harmless people engaged in some harmless theatrics. But the play they were performing was Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy about the moral and fatal consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead.

Make no mistake, this young writer said: art is fierce.

There is one other anecdote I want to share with you. At a conference in Strasbourg, I spoke to a woman writer from a North African country. She knew my work; I did not know hers. We chatted amiably, when suddenly she leaned in closer and whispered, “You have to help us. You have to.” I was taken aback. “Help who? Help what?” I asked her. “They are shooting us down in the street,” she said. “Women who write. They are murdering us.” Why? Women practicing modern art was a threat to the regime.

What these anecdotes represent is the healing and the danger art provides whether classical or contemporary.

Furthermore, these awful stories are meant to impress upon you that what Toby Lewis has spent a lifetime doing, what you are celebrating today, is no small thing.

I want to say a few words about the necessity of organizations such as