Standing before a diverse sea of faces from Rogers Park, Insight Arts executive director Craig Harshaw uses the set-up time between acts in the group’s “Night of Insight” event for a little consciousness-raising.
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Soon he turns the audience’s attention back to the stage. A troupe of neighborhood teenagers calling themselves 15 Stories High performs four vignettes based on real-life stories from the community. Black spoken-word performer Keith M. Kelley presents an ode to creditors and ruminations on racism, violence, and children being tried as adults. The pan-Asian spoken-word group I Was Born With Two Tongues finishes the night with poems that pay homage to parents, a response to a racist and misogynist rap song about Asian women, and an angry, enthralling work entitled “Excuse Me America.”
In helping to found Insight Arts, Harshaw says he was deeply influenced by a book by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian literacy advocate who believed “you have to teach people to read the world in order to read the word.” Harshaw sees empowerment as the ultimate goal of artistic expression. “An artist has the choice to relate to whatever community he or she wishes to,” he says. Events like the Nights of Insight use art to examine complexities and conflict, Harshaw says, instead of presenting diversity “in a Benetton way.”
–Jenn Goddu
