In For Freedoms' New Monograph, Rujeko Hockley Asks: When I Call, Who Listens?

Last month, artist collective For Freedoms published its first-ever monograph, For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? (Monacelli/Phaidon). The tome is partly a survey of the organization’s long-running artist billboard commissions; every one of the 550 installed across the U.S. by the likes of Derrick Adams, Jeffrey Gibson, Jenny Holzer, and Jesse Krimes is featured. They’re in turn framed by texts by Rujeko Hockley, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and For Freedoms co-founders Eric Gottesman, Claudia Peña, Hank Willis Thomas, Michelle Woo, taylor brock, and Wyatt Gallery.

The book’s publication three weeks before the 2024 General Election speaks to the artist-run coalition’s mission to awaken the public from a state of apathy and enlist today’s leading artists to inspire them into becoming civically engaged members of society. In her essay, Hockley pens an ode to the time-proven power of energizing a collective through call and response. The curator deftly connects the dots between the ways that enslaved Africans globalized call and response as a “participatory music ritual,” and how it then lived on in the music of Prince, the guerrilla installations that comprised Alfredo Jaar’s Studies on Happiness, 1979-1981 in the face of Chile’s military dictatorship, and finally in Jaar’s own For Freedoms billboard nearly 40 years later. —Jenna Adrian-Diaz

Below, find Hockley’s essay in its entirety, as it was published in For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here?

Will it bring us down?

In music, call and response is a tool of composition, one voice or instrument putting down a phrase for a second to pick up, repeat, or retool. It is an interaction, akin to a conversation. Derived from the participatory music rituals of sub-Saharan Africa, it was carried throughout the world by enslaved Africans whose descendants made it a staple of the blues, gospel, and the African-American church tradition. One of the many places to which that tradition leads is to Prince. “Let’s Go Crazy,” 1984: the call— “Tell me, are we gonna let de-elevator”—the pain and ugliness of this world, the baggage of history, other people’s perceptions of us or our abilities, challenging circumstances, etc.—“bring us down?”—and the ringing response: “Oh no, let’s go!”

Prince is talking to himself, but also to us—to me, and you. He does the simplest of things—he calls on us, he asks a question—and we can’t help but participate, can’t help but join him in shouting our response. This affirmation, this refusal to be brought low, weaves its way through our bodies until by the song’s end it is a crescendo, a rolling tidal wave of possibility. All that incantatory energy, from a single question.

How do you keep your heart open?

A question is a powerful thing; an open-ended one, even more so. And what about one you happen upon unexpectedly, in public space—one that has been placed there just for you, but also for everyone? I think of Omahans driving past Christine Wong Yap’s For Freedoms billboard in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, isolated in their homes and maybe in their hearts, being asked how they keep those hearts open. Whizzing down the freeway, worrying over every breath: How do you keep your heart open? As crises pile atop crises, as the things that could bring us down weigh heavier and heavier, I return to this question, and to Yap’s description of what keeping our hearts open might look like.

She says: “It is to heal wounds with scar tissue alive with nerves.…” The opening of one’s heart is not in the avoidance of pain, wounds, or scarring, but in the healing— with sensation intact.

¿Es Usted Feliz?

In 1979, Alfredo Jaar began his Studies on Happiness, 1979–1981 project on the streets of Santiago, Chile. It started with public surveys directed at a population then living under a brutal military dictatorship and an unadorned, intangible question: “¿Es usted feliz? [Are you happy?]” Over the next three years, Jaar continued to ask this question of his fellow citizens, eventually intervening directly in public space and placing it guerilla-style on billboards throughout the city. In a violent and repressive state in which surveillance was rampant and to speak freely was to put one’s self and loved ones at risk, it was no small thing to ask such a question. And it was no small thing to answer it, to engage with a stranger asking a strange question, and yet Chileans did. This question, basic yet profound, was no less resonant almost forty years later, when Jaar represented it on a For Freedoms billboard in Austin, Texas, this time with the hope that “a hundred million voices would join [him] in an emphatic rejection of the Trump regime.”

Since its founding in 2016, For Freedoms has invited hundreds of artists to design billboards for locations across the continental and territorial United States. All of them are in direct lineage with Jaar’s. Though they speak across hemispheres and perspectives and nearly half a century, they are in dialogue. The billboard campaigns co-opt public space most commonly devoted to advertising and instead devote it to art. They attempt to “create new ways of thinking and talking about contemporary civil issues in America,” just as Jaar did in Chile. Call and response.

When I call, who listens?

In the first lines of “Let’s Go Crazy,” Prince addresses his flock, his dearly beloved, saying, “[W]e are gathered here today to get through this thing called ‘life.’” How do we do that? By resisting “de-elevator” through art, through relationships, through living now, through keeping our hearts open. By putting out our own calls and heeding those of others, and listening until we hear, until we can respond. And then, responding, even—especially—when we are scared, or uncertain.

For Freedoms has worked in this vein for nearly a decade, drawing on the power of collectivity and the generational wisdom of its ancestors, artistic, historical, and otherwise. Its members have thought consciously and conscientiously about what it means to be a “future ancestor,” about how to hear the urgent calls of yesterday and today, projecting responses into tomorrow. We know nothing we need to know, and we know everything we need to know.

Answer the call. Let’s go!

This text has been excerpted from For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? (Monacelli 2024) by Hank Willis Thomas, Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, Wyatt Gallery, and taylor brock