Artist Lecture: Creative Media and Black Visions of Liberation by Terry Marshall

             Storytelling is a powerful medium to bring out concern on social justice. In this lecture, Terry Marshall presented the importance of storytelling in the projects he had participated in. Marshall believed social injustice came from various stories, and gave the example that how slave’s songs referred to their stories of moving to the U.S. In 2008, he moved to New York City and worked in the Healthcare Education Project. The project cooperators tried to figure out what healthcare could exactly help people. Inspiring by the participation of young people in Tea Party election during 2008, Marshall decided to organize the young generation and made them to share their own stories on healthcare. He showed the 6 minutes proposal video during the talk and described the result came out in a very successful effort.

            The effect and action logic were also important when using social media to tell stories. Marshall explained it meant about how you created an atmosphere of changing and examined the actions to see if they fitted into the problem(s) you wanted to relate with. In the respond to the shooting of Antonio Martin, he cooperated with Intelligent Mischief, a hack lab, to create a work called the Black Body Survival Guide.  The project presented in a humorous way but also filled with satire at the same time. The survival tips provided suggestions such as "always be happy", "only wear hoodie at home", "hands up all the time", etc. These tips were taken from people's experiences on police brutality and racism issue. 
             In conclusion of the talk, Marshall summarized that the essential of organization and storytelling was to identify the target audiences, understand the possible effects, and think about the atmosphere of changes. Marshall gave a truly fluent lecture, providing the main points followed by his personal stories. I think the suggestions he gave for the focus of storytelling is very helpful, and also can be applied to any kind of artwork that related to activism.

the Black Body Survival Guide