Fear Not was a community-based art project that was active from 2008 to 2012 and invited participants from around the globe to create a multimedia, anti-fear environment, both on the street and in art spaces.
It included the Fear Not Library, Fear Not Radio, and Fear Not Indirect Mail.
The inspiration for Fear Not began in the fall of 2007, when I read an interview with Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donahue in which he mentioned that the phrase “Do not be afraid” occurs 366 times in the Bible.
Imagining the person who had gone through over a thousand pages looking for that one message connected with my ongoing interest in revealing the ways we filter the information around us.
At the time, I was reading The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner, which compiles and explores research into the ways as human animals, it is natural for us to choose to focus on and communicate about what to be afraid of. It makes us feel safe, and when we were hunter/gatherers, it actually served that purpose.
But in our current culture, where we are surrounded by information from around the globe, this results in an overwhelming and disorienting amount of fear-focused messages, both in the information we share with each other and in our mass media. We often wind up fearing too many things, and the wrong things. Including each other.
With the Fear Not Project, I sought to address this addictive culture of fear, which cuts across communities and contributes to divisions in our society, by inviting people to consciously deliver anti-fear messages to each other and create – and resultantly experience – a culture of Fear Not.
The messages told people not to be afraid, but the power of the messages was not necessarily in the words. It was in the reminder that we can choose to find those words in the world around us and that we can then choose to pass those words on. It was in the fact that someone else chose to share them with us, without regard for our race, religion, or political beliefs.
In all of those ways, the Fear Not Project sought to emphasize how the power to shape our emotional environment, and the kind of world in which we choose to live, lies with us. And its immersive, multimedia installations, as well as its website and toll-free phone line hosting Fear Not Radio, gave people the opportunity to experience the non-fear-focused environment of their own creation.
Fear Not was featured in solo and group exhibitions at Root Division, the Red Poppy Art House, the Box Factory, Trickster Arts Salon, and a.Muse Gallery in San Francisco, at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, at LACDA in Los Angeles, at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center, and at the Brisbane Public Library, as well as at the University of South Dakota and at MAMU Gallery in Budapest, Hungary. It was also short-listed for both a Black Rock Arts Foundation grant and the Infecting the City festival in Cape Town, South Africa.
