Art Isn’t For Everyone. | Jordan Wiebe | 2.23.2025

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The night before the exhibition, I sat in my car outside Saint Joaquin, a small wine bar a friend owned in downtown Fresno, staring at the thirty panels, 12 inches by 12 inches each, painted black and stacked in the backseat. I had no plan for them, only a feeling, something that needed to be pulled from me, excavated, given form. Living in Minneapolis, I had shipped in some large-scale Xerox collages, layered, fragmented experiments. But the real weight of the exhibition was in those thirty black panels, arranged in three rows of ten.

Growing up, I felt the weight of Fresno before I had words for it. The city exists in a state of tension: expansive yet insular, steeped in history and reluctant to reckon with it. The land itself is a record of transformation and erasure: irrigation canals carving through arid fields, water rerouted to feed an agriculture industry built on displacement — of people, of histories, of the land’s original rhythms. The same hands that shaped the landscape into something profitable did so by erasing what came before, burying its past beneath rows of crops and the illusion of timelessness.

The Yokuts lived here for thousands of years before the United States government encouraged settlers to seize the land, massacring entire villages in the process. Later, redlining policies and restrictive covenants pushed Black residents to the west side of Highway 99, cementing racial and economic divisions that persist. Meanwhile, Mexican laborers, vital to the region’s agriculture, have been systemically devalued, personally dehumanized. During World War II, Japanese families in the area were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to internment camps. Their farms were left behind, their livelihoods stripped away in an instant. This was not a distant history — it happened to neighbors, classmates, entire families who had been integral to the community. These forces remain embedded in the region, shaping who belongs and who remains invisible.

In the world I grew up in — among Mennonites in Reedley — these histories were not discussed. If they were mentioned, it was at a safe distance, framed as something unfortunate but long past. To bring up these histories in a real way, to push against that narrative, was awkward at best and socially isolating at worst. There was a mist of collective denialism, primarily out of a deeply ingrained cultural tendency to avoid conflict, to maintain harmony, even at the cost of truth. Any mention of these stories disrupted the social fabric in ways that made people uneasy. And so, like the city itself, this silence became part of what I carried.

It’s one thing to know this history. It’s another to feel it emerge in your body, like heat rising from Blackstone on a July afternoon. That’s what I carried into the exhibition. That’s what I was trying to paint. The oppression, exploitation, and violence — rooted in racial and economic power — aren’t just historical footnotes; they echo through the present. The region’s failure to acknowledge its past hasn’t been the only thing keeping it stagnant, but it’s created an inertia, a weight in the way it moves — or doesn’t move — forward. I had absorbed these histories in ways I didn’t fully understand. That weight wasn’t abstract. It lived in the air, in the landscape, in the ways people engaged with the past.

I painted every panel black and started carving into them with a palette knife, scribbling, layering, scraping. I was trying to move something out of me. Each movement of my hand and arm traced some bit of knowledge I had gained — fragments of history, perspectives of others, moments of recognition that had reshaped my felt understanding. The act of making wasn’t just expression; it was embodiment, a way to pull the static from my body, the tangled mess of history and inheritance, silence finding voice. It didn’t feel like making a painting. I wasn’t thinking about immutability, about the work’s longevity, about whether someone might want to buy it someday. The land was holding ghosts, and I was trying to mark them down.

The more I carved into the surface, the more something in me came undone. The weight I had been carrying - this dense, unspoken thing - was shifting, becoming something I could touch, something I could see. By the end, the act of painting had become something else. The ghosts felt like they were coming out, as if I had cracked open a space where they could finally be acknowledged. I needed grounding. I called Gia, my partner, holding the phone to my ear like an anchor. I don’t even remember what I said, only feeling the long bout of silence before my voice interrupted the crisp December night and the only words that came were: "This land is haunted."

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Before a thought becomes a thought, before language shapes it into something nameable, there is a moment of pure perception - a flash of color, shift in rhythm, the space just before the breath in your chest. That moment, before interpretation, before classification, before meaning - it’s always there, beneath, before everything, an undercurrent beyond and eternal. Art, at its best, pulls us into that space. It doesn’t require an argument or proficiency in mental gymnastics; it only requires being, an unfolding process that dissolves the barriers between artist, audience, and meaning itself. More, it’s not just about the artist’s intent but about the invitation it extends - to step into an experience, to engage rather than observe, to dissipate the passive role assigned to the audience. At times, it can be experienced as moving energy, transformation, expansiveness; in others, stillness, without concept, direct.

The fine art world, its dominant institutions, galleries, communities, has fundamentally misrepresented what art actually is. It mistakes material longevity - the preservation of a material object deemed economically valuable - for transcendence. This isn’t just about hoarding wealth; it’s about controlling meaning. It turns art into an asset to be possessed rather than a force to be encountered. This system thrives on exclusivity, sustaining the illusion that cultural value is dictated by a select few. Beneath it all, it thrives on ego - the illusion that artistic value comes from hierarchy, from gatekeeping, from permission granted by the right institutions. The system is designed to make people feel as though they don’t belong.

I've seen it firsthand - people stepping into a gallery, hesitating, scanning the walls, then quietly retreating, uncertain of how to engage. That discomfort isn’t a personal failing; it’s a deliberate outcome of a system designed to uphold its own authority. The silence, the sterility, the cold cement floors, the white walls, the feeling of being observed rather than welcomed — it all sends a message: this isn’t for you. Art is framed as a language spoken elsewhere, by others, beyond your reach. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t “get” art, it’s not because you’re missing something — it’s because we’ve been conditioned to believe that art’s meaning and power reside outside of us. Over time, this conditioning doesn’t just exclude; it shifts perception entirely, severing people from the direct, visceral experience that art is meant to provide. 

But art’s significance isn’t contained in the object itself — it’s in the energy the object contains, the connections it sparks, the way it folds into something greater inside each of us. Engaging with art directly, before thought, dismantles the illusion of exclusivity, revealing that it's never been separate from anyone. Through participation in making, art can move beyond acquisition into shared experience, a sublime kind of interconnectedness. It moves through us, unbound, belonging to no one and everyone at once.

For a long time, I believed in the existing structure. I thought legitimacy came from acceptance — that if my work made it into galleries, maybe even museums, then I would matter, that my work being seen, appreciated would resolve the tension I've held inside. I saw the art world as a path to being taken seriously, as if external validation could grant my work its true weight. (Hello, ego, you old friend.) But the deeper I went, the clearer it became: recognition in that world is is limited, disfigured and obscured from building an opening to new worlds beyond conception - it was about mastering a closed system, one built on status and gatekeeping over genuine, direct experience.

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Last month, I started a sewing circle, a digital space where people can come together, work on art projects, share stories, and connect in a no-pressure environment. During one session, a participant casually mentioned her shift from making quilts in a Mennonite community during childhood to focusing on "art quilts" as an adult. There was an obvious distinction in the way she made the comment. I let the comment slide in the moment, but it stuck with me later.

Mennonite women have been quilting for generations, passing down knowledge, encoding patterns, and building a visual language rich with history and meaning. These quilts were not merely functional objects but tangible records of resilience, identity, and artistic expression, the collective interior experience of a community that valued craftsmanship as a form of storytelling. The Star of Bethlehem pattern has been a recurring motif, symbolizing guidance and faith, while the intricate diamond-in-a-square designs often carried generational stories within their stitches. Mennonite quilting is both practical and artistic - providing warmth and physical comfort, each stitch carrying prayers, wisdom, and histories often left out of official records, maps of lineage and survival, vessels of inherited knowledge. And yet, because they serve a purpose beyond display, they are often dismissed as craft rather than art, as if their deep communal and personal significance somehow makes them lesser.

Sewing circles, in particular, have long been spaces of quiet resistance for Mennonite women — one of the few places where they could gather outside the oversight of men, where knowledge was passed, where community was formed in the act of making. These gatherings were not just sites of craft; they were sites of power, places where women exerted influence in ways the broader patriarchal culture often denied them. More than just creative and social hubs, sewing circles functioned as informal economies of mutual aid and knowledge-sharing. Here, women decided together how to distribute resources, shared strategies for navigating their restricted roles, and built networks of support that extended beyond fabric and thread. In a society that often treated their autonomy as secondary, these spaces provided an avenue for collective decision-making and cultural authorship. To dismiss that as mere craft is to erase the significance of these networks and the political power they quietly held. Meanwhile, traditionally male-dominated art forms - like painting and sculpture - have long been recognized as "high art," whatever the hell that means, their creators canonized while the deeply intricate, generational work of quilting remains categorized as domestic labor. It’s no accident — it’s a deliberate framing that upholds existing dysfunctional hierarchies of artistic value.

That moment stayed with me because it wasn’t just about quilting — it was about how we decide what counts as art and what gets dismissed. The art world utilizes both soft and hard forms of cultural inaccessibility - on deciding who gets remembered, whose work is preserved, and whose creativity is relegated to storage units or the back of closets.

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The more I thought about it, the more I started seeing the fences all around me — not physical barriers, but the invisible lines drawn to keep certain people, traditions, and histories out. Fences that weren’t meant to be seen outright, but felt — a quiet reinforcement of who belongs and who doesn’t. It was the same mechanism I had felt growing up in the central San Joaquin Valley, where history was buried under layers of silence, where the land itself bore the weight of erasure. The same way redlining had mapped out who belonged where, the art world built its own boundaries. Artists like Hilma af Klint, whose groundbreaking abstract work predated Kandinsky but was largely ignored in her time, or Bernice Bing, whose contributions to the Bay Area art scene were overlooked for decades, stand as prime examples. More, the art world has constructed an essential yet largely fictional narrative around the myth of the solitary genius—the idea that certain artists are divinely gifted, while the rest are mere hobbyists. This illusion isn’t just about prestige; it’s a marketing tool designed to create artificial scarcity. Jackson Pollock’s chaotic drip paintings became legendary not just for their innovation, but because they fit the narrative of a tortured, isolated visionary. But all art, even the most groundbreaking, is shaped by collaboration and shared influence. The Harlem Renaissance was a deeply collective movement—painters, poets, and musicians building on each other’s work, proving that art doesn’t emerge from isolation but from a network of creative exchange. The Harlem Renaissance was a deeply collective movement — painters, poets, and musicians building on each other’s work, proving that art does not emerge from isolation but from a network of creative exchange. Still, the art world clings to the myth of the lone genius because it sustains its own logic: only a rare few can be truly great, and because they are great, they must have worked alone. This circular reasoning justifies why some artists are canonized while others — whose work may be equally vital — are erased.

Canonization is a loaded word — once reserved for saints and spiritual figures, now repurposed as an economic anointment, turning certain artists' work into high-value assets. It’s easier to commodify a lone genius than to reckon with a decentralized, collective force of creation that resists ownership. Artistic breakthroughs rarely happen in isolation; they emerge in conversation, in community, in the spaces where influence and the non-conceptual undercurrent moves freely, unbound by any market-driven illusion of rarity.

If artwork’s primary value is tied to its economic utility and thus preservation, a false forever, then storing it in a vault should be the ultimate form of protection. Freeports - vast, tax-free storage facilities — house an estimated $100 billion in unseen art, held as financial assets rather than cultural works. These spaces don’t preserve art; they neutralize it, stripping it of its energy and reducing it to a placeholder for wealth, prioritized for scarcity and status over attunement and participation, reinforcing the idea that the world's finest works' highest aim is to be locked away in an industrial yard on the outskirts of Baltimore or Geneva. When art is hoarded as capital, its absence diminishes not just culture, but the collective imagination that helps give it meaning.

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Not all galleries, artists, museums, or institutions operate this way - many community-driven spaces actively resist these structures and foster deeper engagement. But the dominant institutions at the top reinforce this model, dictating how we collectively experience and value art. The result isn’t just a disconnect between artists and audiences; it’s a cultural atrophy, a constriction of creative access that diminishes our shared perceptual landscape, painting a woefully incomplete image of art's transformative capacity. Even as some institutions attempt change through inclusive programming, free days, and community engagement initiatives, the foundational structures often remain intact, limiting how deeply these efforts translate into a significantly more expansive perceptual norm.

Social conditioning against direct experience starts early. As children, we’re given crayons and paper, encouraged to create freely. But as we grow older, we’re educated out of participation. Art classes shrink or disappear, replaced by subjects deemed more practical. This isn’t just about school funding; it’s about cultural messaging. Creativity, once seen as a natural part of learning, becomes an extracurricular luxury. If we continue making art, we’re often met with condescension — the familiar refrain that it isn’t a ‘real job.’ The expectation isn’t just that we stop creating — it’s that if we do continue, we must justify it economically. The professionalization of art reinforces the idea that creativity only holds value if it produces measurable outcomes, reducing artistic engagement to a privilege experienced by few.

Critiques of the art world’s exclusivity, its gatekeeping, its commodification — none of this is new. Artists, writers, and organizers have been pushing back against these structures for generations. But what I don’t hear as often is a shift away from structure entirely, a movement beyond the conceptual frame itself. Not just a reimagining of institutions, but a fundamental reorientation of perception — toward the space before thought, before interpretation, where art’s innate dynamism opens to us fully.

What happens when we sever that direct encounter? We’re left with a system that stockpiles meaning, conditioning us to admire art from a distance, to treat it as a spectacle rather than a lived experience. This is not incidental — it is by design and we all lose because of it. The illusion only works if we believe it and accept the terms it’s set. The alternative has always been there, beyond the borders of institutional control, social conditioning and collectors’ preview events. Art doesn’t require permission, and it never has. Participation becomes a pathway. We can bypass these structural barriers by shifting our perception — by recognizing that art’s power is in the direct, inner encounter it awakens. The undercurrent is already moving, has always been moving; all we have to do is open within.

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If art’s true power is in its unique access to visceral, direct experience, then the question isn’t whether we understand it or have access to it — it’s whether we’ve opened ourselves into that space. What dissolves the separation? What leads us there? Every tradition has its own answer: movement, sound, making, stillness.

Years ago, I went to see Sylvan Esso perform in San Francisco. My ex-wife and I stood side by side, both aware of the slow unraveling between us. Then the music hit — a resonant voice cutting through the room, the layers of sounds from the synthesizer shaping a bedrock of current for us. And we moved. No conversation, no negotiation - just movement, instinctive, whole. For the first time in months, we weren’t caught in separate minds. We were both within.

This may sound abstract, but the feeling isn’t unfamiliar. You’ve already been there — music doesn’t require analysis before the body responds. There’s no waiting for permission, no hesitation before the rhythm syncs with the breath, no need to “get it.” That’s why music is such an immediate entry point into the current — because it bypasses thought entirely. The beat hits, and you’re already there.

When I started quilting a few months ago, something shifted. Unlike painting, which had always carried an awareness of audience, the attention pull of the market, quilting moved me somewhere else — into rhythm, into the simple repetition of stitch after stitch. My great-grandmother had done this, my grandmother, their mothers before them. And as my hands followed their path, something in me quieted. The awareness of self, of expectation, of outcome — disintegrated.

Repetition has the ability to dissolve self-consciousness. The ego shrinks, absorbed into the act itself. This isn’t just for artists, or people who already feel at home in creative spaces. Everyone has access to this. This is why monks chant, why drummers fall into trances, why runners search for their high, why quilters sit for hours, pulling the needle through fabric. It’s about the rhythm that carries you beyond the thinking mind, into something older, more instinctive.

A year and a half ago, I was untethered, drifting, deeply alone. Then, in meditation, a space opened into a vision, or something like one. A council gathered before me: three of my grandparents, Jean-Michel Basquiat, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Bernhard Klaassen, the great-great-great-grandfather who led the first Mennonites in my family to America. They said nothing. They only looked at me. Yet the message was clear: We are here. We are for you. You are part of us.

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Some entry points require motion. Others ask us for absolute stillness. In either, the mind empties, and something deeper rises. The moment of quiet before a thought forms, before meaning crystallizes. This is where awareness lives. The art world would never design for this. It can’t. Because it has built itself on the opposite impulse, on making art something external, something to be possessed, analyzed, categorized, a collective subconscious exercise in maya. In a certain sense, this essay is its own contradiction, attempting to put language to something that exists before words. That’s the paradox of language and categories and analysis and paintings — they can only ever point at the thing, never be the thing itself. A truly integrated art world wouldn’t just change where art is — it would change how people experience it, not as something to admire outside of themselves but as something to enter within, an embodied participation.

The first time I stitched quilt blocks, my shoulders relaxed in a way they never had with painting. I felt something stretch behind me — generations of hands pulling thread, turning scraps into something whole. As one stitch found another, something settled within. Not just a joining, but a recognition. A belonging.

It was never about permanence or possession. Only the current within, alive, unfolding, shifting, still, all at once.

If this piece sparked something for you, I explore these ideas—art, perception, creativity, and what it means to really pay attention—in my newsletter The Correspondence. It’s slow, thoughtful, and low-pressure.