Dr. Tamika Lamb-Sanders: Participation Through Art and Poetry, Arizona

In early 2020 (just weeks before the pandemic), Smithsonian staff and their storytelling partners at the Peale, Baltimore, traveled to multiple states in the U.S. to ask residents of those states about voting experiences, the current state of American democracy, what issues brought them to the polls, how they made a difference in their communities, and what Americans' civic responsibilities were, among other complex questions.

Dr. Tamika Sanders (00:00): Hello. My name is Dr. Tamika Sanders, and I am an arts advocate, a poet, an educator, and a mom of twins, and from Phoenix, Arizona. And as an artist, a lot of times I use words important. And I grew up using words as kind of the staple of my poetry and spoken word as this platform for me to be able to get my story out, to make people listen that otherwise probably would not listen to a little brown girl from South Phoenix. They would just get dismissed.

(00:30): And so a lot of times with my art, especially during the voting season, we used that. We have, all over the country, I think last year, a couple years ago, they had the election monologues. And so it was, every city had this and I got to participate in it. And you literally, you wrote poems, stories about what it was like, your election, the process, the voting, what it meant to you, how you felt during, after. And those were some of the things. And we had lots of poets. We had a lot of youth that were under 18 and that were there. But then we also had our college students in that 19 to 23 age also there talking about their experiences, about their hope, about their disappointment, about why they vote.

(01:13): And so I think with my art, a lot of times it's being able to showcase those voices. And again, the voices that can't vote right now, but the decisions we make today are going to affect them. And so they should have a say and they should be heard so that hopefully they can influence the people who are voting, who are making the decisions for them. So that's how I use my art. It's a lot of poetry, it's theater, it's storytelling, but it's all coming from people and looking at everything you can think about - power dynamics, youth, looking at religion, sexual orientation, and right now it's going to be civic engagement and voices, mostly whose voice is being heard and whose voices are being left out.

Asset ID: 2022.34.06.a-b
Themes: Voting, Art, Poetry, Poets, Voices, Civic Engagement, Youth, Theater, Storytelling, Advocacy, Artists
Date recorded: January 25, 2020
Length of recording: 0:02:00
Related traveling exhibition: Voices and Votes: Democracy in America
Sponsor or affiliated organization: Arizona Humanities
More information or related assets: https://azhumanities.org/smithsonian-exhibition-voices-and-votes-democracy-in-america/