ARTISTS & ELDERS
As a response to worldwide shelter-in-place ordinances due to COVID-19, For You has launched a new project that brings artists and elders together. Our desires are simple: connect artists and elders while we’re all sheltering in place, create and exchange art in the spirit of gift-giving, and inspire new forms of distant socializing.
Since 2017, For You has pursued two objectives: 1) Devise performance gifts for audiences based on and for specific individuals; 2) Bring strangers together for intimate and surprising encounters.
In making this work, we’ve learned that listening is a valuable mode of creation; that everyone has a story, desire, or way of being in the world that is worth responding to. As a response to worldwide shelter-in-place ordinances due to COVID-19, and with awareness that many elders are at risk in terms of infection and the compounding hardships of isolation, we’ve launched a project that brings artists and elders together. Currently, we have 30+ artist/elder dyads working together:
In some cases, artists are developing creative-gifts for their elders.
In other cases, artist-elders are working in collaboration with younger artists.
Some are family members discovering each other anew.
Some are strangers, meeting for the first time; our team functions as a dating service between the artist and elder, and we meet with both parties separately to determine potential matches.
In our many meetings with elders and artists we’ve discovered that we all share in experiences of isolation, restlessness and uncertainty. Our desire is to kindle new and creative forms of distant socializing. As a curatorial project, our aim is to collect documentation of these exchanges across the great divide and see the emergent shape of that cooperative effort. We imagine these gifts coming together, on the other side, as a portrait of our creative-mutual-aid.
We are currently working with Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Court Theater/University of Chicago to generate Artists & Elders in their local communities.
Special thank-you’s to Cathy Michalec at Little Brothers Friends of the Elderly (San Francisco Chapter), Evan Johnson (The Cosmic Elders Theater Ensemble) for connecting us with so many elders in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Pat and Eric B. for their generous donation.
We are offering micro-commissions to participating artists through the generous support of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and an anonymous donor (Thank you, whoever you are!). We are especially committed to getting money into the hands of artists who have lost income due to the recent crisis. We would love to be able to continue growing the project and are looking for partners and sponsors.
“I think we should begin by reframing what we’re doing right now. “Social distancing” was the wrong term to begin with. We should think of this time as “physical distancing” to emphasize that we can remain socially connected even while being apart. In fact, I encourage all of us to practice “distant socializing.”
“If distancing always affirms that which it distances, then social distancing affirms the social – my bond to my nearest neighbor, across the divide. In this zone of isolation, how do we gather? We find our way as we find ourselves, flung apart, groping in the new twilight, signaling across the expanse. How do we prepare for the day when we will re-enter, dancing through the eye of a needle, the vast evacuated theater?”