Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Creative Maladjustment
Eddie Torres
Grantmakers in the Arts is sending this message to express our grief and outrage that our current federal government is using taxpayer monies to kill our nation’s residents in the streets and in privately-owned, for-profit, and publicly funded detention centers, jails, and prisons.
As we have just celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day, GIA reflects the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. warned our nation about the relationship between domestic police brutality and militarism at home and abroad. GIA embraces Dr. King’s concept of creative maladjustment.
As John R. Stomberg, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director of the Hood Museum of Art, wrote, “[Dr. King] argued that ‘there are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will.’ He went on to list racial discrimination and segregation, religious bigotry, militarism, and physical violence as just the top of the list of things to which we should never become adjusted. And in conclusion, he noted, ‘through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.’”
GIA lifts up Dr. King’s call to creative maladjustment as our federal government continues to cut – and threatens to further cut – public funding for health, science, education, and the arts, and as it accelerates the hunting, caging, shooting, and killing of racialized people, allies, and Native American communities.
GIA is horrified that our federal government is doing this anywhere, including in a community we have so come to love. GIA is so honored to have hosted our 2025 National Conference in Minnesota. As you know, the 2025 GIA National Conference included a public sector track because GIA provides professional development on advocacy and engages in advocacy for changes to public policy. GIA focuses on advocacy because we believe that our nation’s residents must have a voice in how public money is used. We advocate for public monies being used for communities’ cultural self-determination, and we are explicit about how we believe public monies should NOT be used.
These are not partisan issues. Our current president first campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform as a point of contrast against sitting President Barak Obama – omitting the fact that the then-sitting president had overseen a record-breaking high number of deportations at the time. President Biden then embraced an immigration policy that undermined the right of individuals fleeing dangerous conditions to seek asylum in the United States. GIA believes that no public official from any political party should be willing to accept these uses of public monies.
GIA believes that public monies must be used for cultural self-determination for all our nation’s residents. Artists and arts leaders have been engaging in creative maladjustment throughout our nation’s history and will continue to do so. Artists expand our ability to think and feel and deserve our public and private support. Continue to support artists and public policies that serve them – and all of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eddie Torres is president & CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts
