Supporting Artists to Create Dangerously
The Immigrant Artist at Work
Janelle Triebitz & Nayantara Sen
Part 1: About the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategies
The role of the immigrant artist in creating work that centers truth, humanity, freedom and interdependence amidst dangerous cultural conditions has been practiced and written about extensively. In 2012, the GIA Reader published a review of Haitian immigrant and writer Edwidge Danticat’s stirring book, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, for arts funders to learn about what it means to “create dangerously, for people who want to read dangerously.” Danticat wrote in her book, “This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
Since then, the socio-political dangers for immigrants, migrants and refugees have increased dramatically. As anti-immigrant sentiments have been stoked for political gain over the last decade, we have seen how narrative has been the instrument to manipulate fear and sow division. Toxic narratives from “border chaos” to the Great Replacement Theory have made even the most modest, long-standing immigration programs seem controversial, and have facilitated a major right-ward shift in attitudes toward immigrants. In 2018, research commissioned by Unbound Philanthropy revealed that even people we count in our base of support have conflicted feelings about immigration.
It was in this environment that Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy was formed, in order to build power for effective narratives that honor the humanity of migrants, refugees, and immigrants, and advance freedom and justice for all. The Butterfly Lab sought to support narrative visioning and experimentation with movement leaders, cultural strategists, and artists; resource and grow their narrative capacity; and conduct narrative research to better understand what might move audiences to embrace a world where everyone has the freedom to move and thrive, regardless of status.
The Butterfly Lab was led by multi-hyphenate Jeff Chang and unfolded over 2.5 years from 2020-2023. In Phase 1, it included a cross-disciplinary narrative and artistic cohort that was resourced with funds, a learning community, and research support for prototype projects and for collaborative narrative and visioning work. In Phase 2, the Butterfly Lab included field-building programs for movement research, narrative workshops for organizers and cultural workers, as well as the Chrysalis Lab grant program to test and scale narrative projects.
In a short time, the Butterfly Lab catalyzed tools and frameworks that supported narrative collaboration, risk-taking, and experimentation for pro-immigrant narratives in the field. The Lab also co-created and tested a narrative toolkit to support the design of strategic, arts-integrated, narrative-centered projects. The Butterfly Lab Narrative Design Toolkit became the most downloaded resource in Race Forward’s history, and the tools within it were successfully used in the field by artists, cultural strategists, community organizers, policy advocates, and other immigrant rights leaders to integrate narrative strategies and rigor into their artistic, cultural and movement work.
Part 2: Narrative Tools for Artists
The Butterfly Lab’s research showed us when we dig deeper most people, even conservatives, dream of a better future, believe immigrants should belong and thrive, and want a better immigration system. But fear and bias often overshadow their pro-immigrant values, and drive people to act on anti-immigrant beliefs. Here is where the role of artists becomes essential. Narratives are the most effective tool we have to move culture. Artists have the power to unlock and guide imaginations, to lay out a vision of the better future and make it feel possible. Artists are narrative stewards, and they can be our most powerful allies when narratives are weaponized against us.
To achieve a pro-immigrant society, we need to resource artists to engage narratives. But even though artists are skilled, equipped, and positioned to do narrative work, they don’t always have the narrative tools to effectively engage in collaborative narrative design and strategy. When working with artists to advance narratives, we recommend supporting them with narrative tools designed with them in mind - to give them the freedom they need with the necessary creative boundaries to make their work both unique to their vision and also narratively strategic.
Fortunately, there are wonderful cultural organizers and strategists in the field who are creating powerful, accessible, and easy-to-use tools specifically for artists and creatives who want to integrate narrative strategies into their artistic work. Artists can lean on these tools to experiment with narrative project design, research and audience engagement strategies, and strengthen the rigor, reach and efficacy of their narrative projects and activations.
The problem is that often artists, arts-serving organizations and arts funders don’t know about which tools are out there in the field, and how they can be connected, implemented and activated to support (or turbocharge!) artist-led narrative projects. It’s now really important for philanthropic leaders to learn about these various types of design tools and frameworks, and better connect and support artists, grantees and field members to tools and to each other. Below, we want to offer here a few of our favorite examples of tools that support artists to create narrative-centered art and cultural projects.
Narrative Design Toolkits
Toolkits offer step-by-step guidance and are a very useful aid in planning out the details for a project. They help artists make sure that their work is narratively strategic. They can be used in tandem with any of the other narrative tools included here.
Example of a toolkit:
Created in the Butterfly Lab, this toolkit helps artists (or anyone) get started in designing a narrative-centered project or campaign. It helps folks analyze the narrative terrain, sharpen their narratives, and identify and reach specific audiences. Although the examples are from the pro-immigrant movement, these tools can be applied to any theme or issue.
Narrative Guides
Narrative guides are usually grounded in a particular goal or issue area, and lay out the narratives that need to be advanced to achieve a desired goal or vision. Narrative guides act as open invitations to artists to create from shared narratives. They offer strategic narrative directions for artists to explore, but do not mandate any of the specifics of what or how artists should approach their storytelling. The result (especially if supported with funding for artists) is a wide variety of content that all advance particular narratives and has the power to move multiple audiences.
Examples of narrative guides:
created by Erin Potts and Kirk Cheyfitz for Culture Surge, aimed to provide narrative guidance for artists creating civic engagement content for BIPOC audiences around the 2020 Presidential election. This guide uses the language “story threads” to describe its narrative themes. You can read more about the creation of this tool here.
created by Kat Evasco and Janelle Treibitz for the Center for Cultural Power. The guide was part of a broader narrative strategy to shift away from a deficit-framed narrative of the border, and towards a more nuanced and self-determined narrative that reflects the dignity, truth, aspirations, and struggles of migrants and border communities.
created by Janelle Treibitz (in consultation with many others) for the Center for Cultural Power in the first year of Covid-19, this guide aims to inspire artists to create based on narratives that would “tell a shared story about who we can be in times of crisis and who we want to become.”
Creative Briefs
Creative briefs are usually used to provide artists with specific guidelines for commissioned art. In the context of narrative work, creative briefs include useful clarity and structure around narratives and sometimes even recommended storytelling approaches. Creative briefs can outline “story threads” or narrative priorities and throughlines, which can be flexibly adapted into artistic and creative processes and products. Briefs like these are incredibly supportive and useful to artists, because they provide grounded and clear narrative goals, while also not restricting or affecting the creative interpretation and adaptation processes for artists.
Examples of creative briefs:
was created by Center for Cultural Power and Whole Story Group with the goal of commissioning art “to create compelling public narratives that inspire our city to invest in Oakland’s BIPOC arts and culture communities in unprecedented ways.” This brief uses the language of “story threads” to describe its narrative themes.
offers an extremely useful template to help anyone write a creative brief. It does not include narratives, but narrative priorities, themes, or any other narrative guidance can be added.
Part 3: Supporting Artists to Engage Narrative Strategies
Narrative grantmaking is now growing into a robust field of practice, especially in social justice philanthropy. We look forward to seeing more and more arts funders resource the intersections of arts, culture, narrative and social justice work — especially with a pro-immigrant, anti-racist lens. However, as practicing artists and strategists, we also know that resources for narrative power-building cannot begin and end with funding individual BIPOC artists alone (although certainly that’s important!). Building narrative power will also require resourcing BIPOC and immigrant artists to build their capacity, rigor and communities for narrative alignment, integration and experimentation.
The Butterfly Lab is joined by many others in the fields of narrative and cultural strategies, artist development, racial justice and immigrant, migrant and refugee justice in advocating for arts philanthropy to implement these two following recommendations [1]:
Resource networks, cohorts and Lab programs for BIPOC and immigrant artists and cultural strategists to do collaborative narrative work.
Resource BIPOC and immigrant artists with tools and narrative capacity, while democratizing access and honoring their narrative leadership.
Recommendation 1: Resource networks, cohorts, and Lab programs for BIPOC and immigrant artists and cultural strategists to do collaborative narrative work.
It’s difficult for independent, under-resourced artists to do narrative work alone. Narrative networks, cohorts and Labscan provide valuable support to BIPOC artists who are yearning to grow their narrative impact and stretch their creative practices. The Pop Culture Collaborative’s Becoming America Fund is an innovative grantmaking model that resources historically marginalized artists to create powerful work within narrative networks. And in the field, many organizations, Liberation Ventures as one example, are beginning to seed narrative Labs and cohorts for artists — these efforts need increased attention and resourcing.
Also, narrative labs work! Labs can be run at any scale of movements, and can result in a body of shared learnings that build capacity and accelerate processes of narrative and cultural change. Labs can bring together artists, cultural organizers, culture bearers, strategists and movement leaders to experiment with various scales, audiences, tactics, and forms — and provide access to narrative research, design tools, learning communities, funds, technical assistance and coaching. These kinds of narrative communities, designed for BIPOC artists and creatives, provide crucial structure, support, relationships, resources, and rigor. These are now essential for catalyzing narrative power through the arts.
Recommendation 2: Resource BIPOC and immigrant artists with tools and narrative capacity, while democratizing access and honoring their narrative leadership.
Many, many artists are already intentionally or instinctively practicing narrative work, even if they don’t use the language defined by the folks in the narrative strategy field. And most BIPOC and immigrant artists need access to resources, including the types of narrative design toolkits, guides and briefs we shared above. Connecting and resourcing artists with tools and capacity for collaborative narrative work can support them in risk-taking, experimentation, and rigor, and can help them to bring narrative strategies more deeply into their existing creative practices.
In the section above, we’ve offered a small set of illustrative narrative tools, made with artists in mind. There are, however, many other resources, guides and tools available that support narrative praxis. And there is a robust community of narrative and cultural strategists who collaborate with artists to grow their impact and power.
Rather than just parachuting in “narrative experts” to work with artists in a hierarchical education model, we encourage field and philanthropic leaders to listen to artists about what they feel they most need to build their narrative capacities. That might be narrative tools or access to narrative practitioners or audience research or testing capacity. When narrative practitioners are desired, we recommend looking for folks who have deep experience with collaborating with artists and communities, and whose practices are rooted in reciprocal, accountable pedagogies (including but not limited to: socially engaged art, popular education, and participatory narrative development).
If we’ve learned anything in our time working in this field, it is that narrative strategy is not rocket science. It’s about building narrative alignment with long-term visions, understanding our audiences, learning from each other, and experimenting with storytelling. In other words, it’s something anyone can learn to do — especially because every single person already understands the world through narratives. Knowledge of narrative strategy is not held by only a group of organizations and strategists who then bestow that knowledge on the uninitiated. Narrative strategy is something being done by many peoples across many cultures, including in spaces that have been consistently overlooked by arts philanthropy (like indigenous culture bearers and immigrant and diasporic creators and artists).
Part 4: A Closing Invitation
Our challenge to funders, then, is to invest in our ability to learn from each other, align with each other, and to readily connect artists and practitioners with experimental and field tested narrative tools, made by and for artists. And in doing this, stretch towards practices that democratize learning and access, and honor the overlooked narrative leadership of BIPOC and immigrant artists and culture bearers.
BIPOC artists, immigrant, migrant, and refugee artists — and those of us who ally with them to fight for a pro-immigrant future — will always be out there loving, organizing, making art, and creating dangerously. We believe the liberatory future we all deserve is possible — and that the way to this future is through growing our narrative power. We invite arts funders to purposefully and joyfully join in this journey, as fellow co-conspirators, collaborators, dreamers, creators, and narrative organizers.
NOTES
[1] For our more extensive set of recommendations for funders interested in resourcing the intersections of immigrant, migrant, refugee justice and narrative, arts and culture, please see pages 6-8 of the Butterfly Lab Phase 1 report.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategies was launched in 2020, and closed its wings and sunsetted in February 2023. Our team was comprised of Jeff Chang, Kana Hammon, sára abdullah, Baby Angelica Tolentio, and us two authors. The narrative practices, values, and ideas shared in this post have been deeply informed by each team member as well as the sizable community of advisors, friends, research partners, and influences named on page 101 of the Part 2 Butterfly Lab report.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Janelle Treibitz is a cultural strategist, political organizer, and puppeteer. She works with social movements to build strategies that can shift narratives. Janelle has 15+ years of experience collaborating with local, national, and international organizations and grassroots campaigns helping them to incorporate culture-based strategies and creative tactics into their work. She previously worked for The Opportunity Agenda, coordinating their annual Creative Change Retreat and supporting their network of artist activists. Janelle has been working with the Bread and Puppet Theater for over a decade. She is a contributor to the book We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation (AK Press).
Nayantara Sen is a Bengali immigrant, a trilingual storyteller and fiction writer, a narrative and cultural strategist, and a social justice educator. She is the director of Field and Funder Learning at the Pop Culture Collaborative, the lead designer and narrative strategist for the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy, and the previous director of Narrative and Cultural Strategies at Race Forward. For the last 15 years, Nayantara has worked at the intersections of arts and culture, narrative and story-based strategy, racial and gender justice, immigration, movement strategies and equity-building for arts institutions. Nayantara is a recovering arts administrator who has previously held staff, curatorial and consulting roles in museums, film festivals, theatre and community-based arts organizations. Her artistic background is in oral history, creative fiction writing, and Theatre of Oppressed.
