The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Turn the proverb around a time or two and you might be able to locate yourself and your allies in the confusing terrain of the present.

The question of how to define an enemy as distinct from a friend has been a longstanding preoccupation of politics. Today, some conventions for deciphering alliances have become complicated. For instance, you can’t look into someone’s eye or shake their hand while safely practicing physical distancing, and still others are intensified as the ability to track a person’s positions through the convoluted archive that is the internet. Those ideological signposts that render some as perpetrators of oppression and others sided with the angels have also experienced some surprising movements in the current climate as fundamental concepts of health and safety encourage surprising alliances. In this moment, masking has become an electoral issue and the movement upsurges following the murders of Black civilians by police have forced a reckoning with racist conceptions of justice from every imaginable form of organization. And turning the question on oneself to examine complicity has become a worthy and dizzying preoccupation of the moment as sometimes the most urgent question can be what if my friends’s enemy is me?

In this issue of A Blade of Grass Magazine, we engaged an inspiring group of thinkers and makers to consider what it looks like for various socially engaged art practices to venture into enemy territory. As socially-engaged art has become more institutionalized, the risk has been that it becomes more ameliorative, but for many artists the possibility of using art to engage conflict is increasingly urgent. We hope that by sharing these examples we can all learn what crossing these lines can lead to, and to move from healing to accountability. Furthermore, knowing this issue was coming out on the eve of the 2020 elections in the U.S., in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, and in conversation with a wave of uprisings against racial injustice, we felt it all the more important to include cultural practitioners who may not all define themselves as socially engaged artists, but who encompass a wide range of collaborative creative practices that seek to confront facist tendencies and redress the trauma of historical violence…

A Blade of Grass Magazine

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