Xavier Tavera Castro quoted in ARTnews on perspective as Minneapolis artist
Tavera Castro is assistant professor of art at Carleton.
Xavier Tavera Castro, assistant professor of art, was quoted in an ARTnews piece titled, “‘Risking Your Life is Unbelievably Inspiring’: Minneapolis Artists Put Their Bodies on the Line Against ICE.”
Artists have been doing all the things you might expect them to do in such moments: making signs, banners, posters, flyers, buttons, and all the rest. Beyond that, they’re involved in extensive mutual aid programs, getting food and rent assistance to people who have been too terrified to leave their homes for as much as a month. They’ve also been physically intervening, putting their bodies and their lives on the line, trying to stop federal agents from abducting their neighbors.
For the moment, in some ways, “We have put the label of artist to the side,” Xavier Tavera Castro, a Mexican-born artist and assistant professor of art at Carleton College, in Northfield, south of the Twin Cities, told ARTnews.
At the same time that artists are taking action, there is a widespread feeling of paralysis among many in the community—“both artists I know and also students taking my classes,” said Tavera Castro, the Carleton College assistant professor of art. “There’s the feeling, Why are we doing this? I’m going to be in front of twenty-five kids and tell them, Let’s get excited about photography!, and they’re looking at me like, What the fuck is wrong with you? But I do believe that art is tranformative.” Keep making art, he tells them, “because I believe that if we stop doing it, they win and we lose.”
Everyone in the art world is singing from the same hymnal about one thing: The situation on the ground is worse than you probably think, even in view of extensive press coverage and social media exposure.
“It’s very tense,” said Tavera Castro. A local for thirty years, he lives in South Minneapolis, just a few blocks from George Floyd Square and a few blocks from where Renee Good was killed. “It’s highly chaotic. It’s living in constant fear, not only for myself and my family but for neighbors and people we know in all of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The situation is rough.”