MY VOICE MY LENS: Part 1 - Leadership and the Arts
PART 1: LEADERSHIP AND THE ARTS?
“I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling, and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.”
- Gustavo Dudamel Music Director, El Sistema: Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela and Music and Artistic Director, The Los Angeles Philharmonic
Dovetails, Dieter Limeback, My Voice My Lens, Cohort 1, 2016
“Leadership-wise, this feels like a team. To me dovetails are the perfect symbol of a group of things working together to accomplish something as a unit. It's difficult to know where one ends and the other begins, no particular dovetail stands out, and they come at things from different angles and meet in interesting intersections. It's the entire assembly that's beautiful.”
- Dieter Limeback Product Design Leader, Certified Coach, Startup Advisor - My Voice My Lens, Cohort 1, 2016, Wave Financial
Welcome back!
In this essay, I begin a 3-part series dedicated to elucidating the prolific connection between “Leadership” and “The Art of Self-Portrait Photography”. I will draw on My Voice My Lens’ first workshop “Introducing Myself” which engages with My Voice My Lens’ foundational raisons d'être: “Why the arts?”, “Why the art of photography?”, and “Why the art of self-portrait photography? Indeed, these are the Big Questions participants have consistently posed, as they begin their journey with My Voice My Lens.
LIVING THE BIG QUESTIONS
Q/1: How can a meaningful creative experience be a strategic tool for enriching leadership qualities and practices?
BACKSTORY/1:
Perhaps the beginning of the answer can be found on the walls of a ca. 36,000-year-old cave in the south of France - one of a multitude of stone-age wall or ceiling paintings discovered world-wide. Deep in the recesses of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave we find hundreds of beautifully rendered figure drawings of animals, including reindeer, bison, horse, ibex, woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and megaloceros.
Even though we have this visual record, we cannot explain this Upper Paleolithic culture, its stories and visual traditions responsible for the art have long since disappeared. So, we draw on our life stories, personal identities, professional experience, status as we live the questions:
Lions and Bisons, Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, France, ca.36,000 B.C.E
Is this an affirmation of a presence, marking natural borders and traditional territory?... does a painting of a bird depict an eagle, a supernatural spirit, or a shaman whose soul has taken flight...and... is a horse really a horse, or a human transformed?
What we can come close to understanding is that an artist or artists collective was assigned the role of visually documenting these magnificent images. The evidence: a handprint! - stencilled to the rocky wall, made by blowing pigment around the artist’s hand (the only ‘human figure in the midst of this jam-packed bestiary!).
Mammoth, Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, France, ca.36,000 B.C.E
Rhinoceros, Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, France, ca.36,000 B.C.E.
Cave Paintings, Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, ca. 36,000 B.C.E.
As an art educator and picture maker, I recognize this a primal human need to shout out and affirm:
“ I made this!”, “I am here!”, “this is my creative voice, even after I disappear!”
Artist’s Handprint, Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, ca.36,000 B.C.E.
BACKSTORY/2:
Flash forward on a 36,000-year trajectory: we continue to experience artmaking in all of its creative spheres as a lived experience - for those who create it, and, equally, for those who experience it.
As a fluid mode of expressivity, the arts – have the expansive potential to:
* amplify the life skill of “looking and seeing”
Reach Out to The Impossible, Sakshi Daral, My Voice My Lens, Cohort 8, 2018, Wave Financial
* empower an active, energetic engagement with identity
(Then) Cayuse Warrior, Edward Curtis, 1910
(Now) Ancestral 9, Meryl McMaster, 2008 - from the Ancestral series
* enable the art of resting in stillness
Peace, Maryam Babaloa, My Voice My Lens, Cohort 7, 2019, Wave Financial
* capture moments of great intensity
Protest ,Tokyo, Shomei Tomatsu, 1969
* unveil secrets
Gold Mine Diggers, Para Brazil,1980, Sebastiao Salgado from Workers, An Archaeology Of The Industrial Age, 1995
* reveal poignant meditations on visibility, gender, race
Untitled, Finn Howell, My Voice My Lens, Cohort 10, 2021, Wave Financial
* convey the complex ways we construct ourselves and challenge stereotypes
Self-Portrait, Zanele Muholi,1972
- from series Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail, the Dark Lioness)
* chronicle the power of play in the face of hardship
The Power of Play, Sahel, Mauritania, Steve McCurry, 1986
* inspire
Homage to Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, Judith Leitner
Montagne Noire, Laurentides, Québec, 2019
BACKSTORY/3
The transformative power of the arts lies in their enduring capacity to illuminate the simplicity and/or the expansive complexity of all that we imagine, know, feel, fear, question, and to interconnect us by throwing light upon our shared commonalities and manifold differences. That being said, I have always been acutely mindful of the challenges inherent in easing my students into an artist’s mindset - asking each to be introspective and open to sharing his/her/their humanity, to take creative risks, to see and listen with empathy to diverse ways of thinking, share one’s personal ‘way of seeing’, and, most importantly: to embrace the flow of time as a trusted enabler of “imagining the possible” and...declaration “I am here!”
And... thus:
A: As I see it: “Leadership” is indeed an artform in and of itself - a creative endeavor that intuitively draws on the artist’s mindset. So: we begin each My Voice My Lens workshop with a pictorial investigation into the transformative power of the arts – an implicit portal to ‘the art of leadership” and overture to the idea that a leader is ‘one more member of the orchestra, in the way that one leads, but also respects, feels, and builds the same way for all the players to understand the music’.
and.... lest we forget:
BIG QUESTION/2
Q/2: What’s the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait?
A: Simply put: MINDFUL, CREATIVE INTENTION!
Elevate, Ghazaleh Sommerville, My Voice My Lens, Cohort 2, 2017, Wave Financial
Inspirational Teachers I Draw On
* José Antonio Abreu Anselmi
Founder, El Sistema:Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela, leader,
orchestra conductor, musician, educator, political activist
* Ashira Gobrin
Leader, Chief People Officer at Wave Financial, Executive Coach,
2021 Woman of Distinction, Certified Graphologist and Brainspotting Therapist
* Paleolithic Artist/Hunters ca. 40,000 -14,000 B.C.E. Creative leaders,
imaginers, inventors
* Dr. Eleanor Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) - in conversation with her alien father
(shape-shifter) Ted Arroway (played by David Morse)
- in the moving picture “Contact”, directed by Robert Zemackis, 1977
Eleanor: “What happens now?… Do we get to come back?”
Father: ”You go home… it’s what we’ve been done for billions of years…
small moves, Ellie, small moves.”
In my next blog entry “Leadership And The Art of Photography?” - Part 2 of this 3-part series “My Voice My Lens: Leadership Through Self-Portrait Photography”, I delve into the follow-up ‘Big Question’ regarding how picture making can impact on The Art of Leadership. I continue to draw on My Voice My Lens’ first workshop “Introducing Myself”, which I initiate with a quote by the great photographer and teacher Edward Steichen: “The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself”.
* please forgive the gender discourtesy in this quote!
Looking forward!
