WiserEarth Suggestions

Syracuse Cultural Workers (SCW) is a peace and justice publisher founded in 1982. We create and publish visual materials, like calendars, posters, and cards, that are feminist, lesbian/gay allied, racially inclusive, and honor elders and children. We also distribute selected products, like books, music and video, to complement our offerings.

Our mission is to help create a culture that honors diversity and celebrates community; that inspires and nurtures justice, equality and freedom; that respects our fragile Earth and all its beings; that encourages and supports all forms of creative expression.

We see cultural work as an essential part of and support for political and economic change. Many of our materials celebrate movements for social change and their leaders, thus helping to legitimize history that is largely ignored or trivialized by commercial media and school textbooks. SCW also helps to unite socially concerned artists with a growing audience hungry for meaningful artwork.

Art is a critical complement to activism, lending soul to a function which is often brain heavy and spirit thin. No matter how brilliant our attempts to inform, it is our ability to inspire that will turn the tides.

When we look for hope, we turn to works of socially responsible artists which address the richness, the sacredness and the crisis of the contemporary human family. We are inspired by work that relates matter to spirit, that transforms a chunk of honest reality into profound possibility by a change of tone or throw of light. Art created with a sense of integrity has a redemptive power, a healing power which helps us transcend the tragic particularities of our culture. We are responsible for creating a culture in our own image. Our work is not simply to expose the evils, display our disrespect for greed and violence, refuse to cooperate with a consumerist culture. We need to build a culture of change. We need political art that is visionary, visionary art that is political.

We are a vast community of resisters and believers, artists and activists. Though we are renewed collectively at political rallies, music festivals, Solstice rituals, what is it that sustains us when the candles are out and the crowd disperses? What is it that keeps us fueled for the fight in our day-to-dayness? Art reflects our visions back to us, bears witness to the triumph of our sensibilities, helps us remember what we need to remember in order to survive. Art and activism is like yin and yang, light and dark - one is nothing without the other.