Making Just Art in an Unjust World
A Feature Review of
Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives
Mitali Perkins
Hardcover: Broadleaf Books, 2025
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Reviewed by Rachel Lonas
Every first Thursday of the month our local art museum, the Hunter Museum of American Art, allows anyone to come in for free from 4 to 8 p.m. It features creativity in all its manifestations — glass sculptures, sweeping landscapes, enormous canvases, captivating photography, digital art, showcases from local students. While the museum has so much to offer (including an impressive Kehinde Wiley!), my favorite piece to point people to is Black Star Family, first class tickets to Liberia by Bisa Butler. Butler is known for her innovative quilting style that includes using vibrant fabrics and 3-D texturing as she weaves stories of black dignity into each finished piece. Working from real life black and white photographs as inspiration, Butler makes forgotten faces known. In other words, once you see any Bisa Butler quilt, you won’t forget it.
Author Mitali Perkins hasn’t forgotten it either, as she uses Butler as an example of creativity that “manifest(s) this powerful combination of divine activity: salvaging, bolstering, gathering, beautifying, ordering, and transforming imperfection into beauty” in her new book Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives (17).
Perkins separates her book into three sections: Creativity and the Just Life, Why We Stop Making, and How to Keep Making. Within every section she keeps a needed focus on the individual artist, but also how the community contributes to and shapes the art and artist’s heart. Seeing the community as a teacher and a guide is one helpful distinction that keeps this book from being another narrow, “all about the artist” self-improvement or productivity book. Perkins’s warm personality and her own Bengali heritage is woven throughout these chapters as well as other immigrant artists she has met or read about along her own journey. Perkins’s curiosity about other cultures and a deep understanding of her own gives a richness to how to make art that is just and considers the marginalized. She affirms that art is for everyone.
I found much of her book to be practical in how to build up courage as a creative person in a world that can often devalue art and the artist’s place. Often that advice starts with believing in your own worth and the work you are called to do. Investing in your art is one of the hardest things to do when you (and your budget) feel pulled in so many directions. Putting time, money, and energy into your creative process rarely comes with an immediate payout. Thoughts often marinate over many days, weeks, months, years, the ideas sometimes feel like they are on an eternal tumble dry cycle. But Perkins assures us it is stewardship of talent regardless of what form it takes — a weekend retreat, 15 minutes of art in the morning, an online class, a book, a mentor.
Art also has a healing property to it, not just what it can do for you as the creator but what art becomes when you keep the receiver (if you know them) or the potential receiver (imagining who they might be) in mind. Perkins reminds us of the embodied awareness of art saying, “At times, we don’t know what we’re feeling until we make art. The body itself expresses emotion through the creative process, the art speaks as well, and then the mind begins to grasp what the heart is feeling” (18). This is a point the monthly writers’ group I am involved in would attest to over and over again as we share our poetry, devotions, and deeply personal essays with one another; it’s the act of creating and discovering what feels unknowable. Perkins relates art to being its own kind of therapy, not to replace a skilled practitioner, but as an acknowledgement that therapy is a privilege that not everyone can afford or have access to. She states that communal art creates equity, agency and a way of being known stating, “The sharing of emotions and narratives as women make art together is a way that even the least powerful people can participate in therapeutic conversations and environments” (21).
Finding colleagues and encouraging one another is a vital way to keep the maker spirit alive. Whether that’s other published authors on Zoom, longtime friends, or a local knitting group, having a trusted community gives an open space for delight, burning questions, venting, and solutions to the artist’s obstacles. Our friends remind us that as artists “we are not beggars; we are givers” (109) and our craft should be considered worthy as we move in different seasons and spaces. Though she tells us that those encouragers can be found all over the world, blessing our actual day-in-and-day-out neighbors with our gifts completes a full cycle of giving and receiving that is truly a treasure. She asks us to consider what our art and voice would look like if we started our sharing in our particular place.
One of the sections that spoke loudest to me was her emphasis on generational art that is not necessarily tied to income. Women and men doing artisan work that has been handed down from generation to generation or functional work like baskets, sewing, and pottery that serve their families and villages in everyday life. Perkins recognizes that not all art needs to be monetized, and yet the necessity of these art forms must survive in communities to avoid being lost entirely. Recently, when I was on a ministry trip to Hawaii, one of the locals said they were having a young women’s retreat to teach the next generation the foodways and handicrafts of her Micronesian heritage. It’s this kind of intentional loving-your-neighbor community that Perkins says restores dignity and purpose in creation. Many artists in places all over the world keep making despite daily setbacks and lack of safety. She says, ”women who lack power and privilege have made beauty and created order during chaos, deprivation, and suffering. They have lived the creative life in the nooks and crannies of cultures across the planet” (9). This leads her to give a needed reminder about creating just art: do not take on art that is not your work to do (cultural appropriation, or telling someone else’s story because you feel an impulse toward it), but rather amplify others’ voices and create your work in ways that root out pride, envy, and other vices that hinder your art. This inclination toward thoughtful art can look like practicing fasting, silence, an intentional retreat, collaboration, gratitude, reflection, rest as a part of your creative process. Incorporating these things can keep your art from shifting toward the didactic, giving your audience a chance “to think, feel, and respond in freedom” to your work (142).
At the end of the book, Perkins really ties back to her main points of advice. She gives her readers a chance to respond honestly through reflection and open-ended discussion questions based on her 3 sections in the book. This is a great way for artists to get curious about themselves and others as artists after they have digested the information given throughout the chapters. They get to name both the internal and external forces that are holding their work back. With her infectious optimism, grounded faith, and desire for change in the world, Perkins’s words are a cheerful and vulnerable guide to getting in the habit of making just art in an often unjust world.
Rachel Lonas
Rachel Lonasis a writer and educator specializing in literature and composition. Several of her pieces can be found at Fathom Magazine. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her husband,
Justin, and their four daughters. She enjoys all things creative—watercoloring, nature journaling, landscaping, and being inspired by botanical gardens.
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