"What are the grounds of hope in this world of wrecks?" Rebecca Solnit asks in her book Hope in the Dark. Over the course of her career, Solnit has pondered the relationship between causality and history (particularly as it relates to the power of small groups or individuals). In doing so, she has often contemplated whether artists really contribute to social transformation in any significant way. Does their work have any particular power? What do we do with the fiddle while Rome is burning? In this lecture, Solnit examines the role of art in activism and discusses the ways in which artists and culture contribute to both the spread of ideas and the shaping of imagination.
Rebecca Solnit is a writer and activist whose work focuses on issues of time, place, politics, and process. Her most recent books are River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Solnit lives in San Francisco.
Note: no ticket is required for this event.
Credits
Rebecca Solnit
Panelist |