CCS Arts and Culture Committee is a ‘Happening!’

By Glo McMillan

September 2024

Our new Communications Access (yes!), Culture/the Arts, and Sensitization (CCS) group is starting a few exciting projects that you can join, including talks and fun art activities. 

We invite you to join CCS E-List for The Arts and Activism! Contact: Glo McMillan at scifo200111@gmail.com

With 14 people on the new CCS E-List, we are off to a joyous start. Ideas are flowing in. People have wanted a place to ‘grow’ their creative activism that is inseparable from their artistic personalities. And This is the place.

The CCS Arts Zoom In — To Celebrate Mexican Women (!) on October 1st at 4PM PT

Our theme is Mexican art — women in Mexico and women in government. Brings songs, art, recipes, poems, scripts for street theater. Here in Tucson, Arizona, we are totally bilingual and bi-cultural — we have bilingual schools, bilingual news shows on radio and TV. So, it is fitting that for CCS’s first Arts Zoom, hosted from Tucson, is about a flowering of women in Mexico and our happiness to share in the news. All we can see is color around us this time of year and we hope this will inspire others to share their creativity at this Zoom on October 1st.

Robin Lloyd has graciously consented to share how her Burlington, VT, WILPF Branch makes the arts a part of their racial inclusion work. They are always coming up with surprises in the VT branch of WILPF. We keep hearing good things so find out more and maybe some tips for your own branch arts projects.

How about your branch? Are there artists in your WILPF branch who might be interested in making a national connection via our CCS? What other themes and days should we celebrate with art?

Online Peace Theater: The Planet Zoom Players

Two WILPF members have already shared cyber-space in our Planet Zoom Players productions. These plays were recorded in Zoom, then published on YouTube. This exciting new use of online reading of staged plays can be geared to other plays that feature WILPF history and other scripts done by WILPF members.

Shilpa Pandey (a member of our past WILPF Membership Committee) starred in “Rock the Nuclear Clock!,” a play that showed how humanity in the near future solved its nuclear war problem with a lunar-based QUIZ Show. See our potent satire here!

Margo Schulter (DISARM Committee) played a role in H. G. Wells’s “The Crystal Egg” in which a visionary old man yearns to mean the “others” out there without prejudging and fearing them.

Planet Zoom so far has produced mainly classic science fiction adapted to play form with peace themes. But we have the capability of doing other genres of plays as well in our Peace Theater mode. Please contact me, Gloria McMillan, to join CCA as a reader, designer, or PR role! Scifi200111@gmail.com.

CCS and Recycled Art

In my daily life, I see far too much being wasted. How can we recycle water and make it into art? How about metal cat food lids, rebar from construction or coat hangers? We can make sunflowers and sell these at peace festivals. Many YouTube videos are now out on how to make art from plastic soda bottles, gallon bottles and plastic bags. Mesh bags that harm aquatic life can be saved and made into art, as well. Your branch can launch these projects for sale at public events. Arts + Activism + Ecology!

How about vegetable metal ties? I began seeing them around Romaine lettuce in the supermarket. I knew this could be used in basketry, any cordlike object can, so I came up with these vegetable tie baskets. These will definitely sell at group fundraisers.

I made a few different styles of baskets. Some were tray style baskets to use as a holder for holiday fruit baskets, some are round and can be used to pot plants, for example. Can your WILPF US branch make these? It is easy to do as a branch activity.

Do keep in touch, there will be much more to come.

Photo credit: Glo McMillan