We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jason Reed. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jason below.

Alright, Jason thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

All of the most meaningful work in my career has been centered around the stories and voices of young people. After completing my MFA degree I worked for a year in Albuquerque, New Mexico as part of Americorps (think Peace Corps but in the U.S.). My job was to work in community arts, so that meant one day I was at a low-income senior center and the next I was facilitating after school arts projects with youth at a Native American charter academy. It was during Americorps, particularly in projects working with youth, that I learned how to listen. This experience informed my collaboration with a long time friend and public school teacher Ryan Sprott in our founding of Borderland Collective, an arts and education project that utilizes collaboration between artists, educators, youth, and community members to build space for exchange and dialogue.

One of the most significant and meaningful experiences in more than a decade of projects with Borderland Collective took place in San Angelo, Texas (my home town) working with the kids of migrant farmworkers. We facilitated two week-long workshops, in 2018 and 2021, with middle and high school students who used photography, drawing, mental mapping, and storytelling to collaboratively explore and share their family histories, daily lives, and dreams for the future. This region of Texas has long been one that relies on the labor of migrant farmworkers, mostly from Mexico and Central America. They serve as the backbone to the agricultural economy, doing the hard labor on the dairy farms and in the cotton gins so that we can all have the things we rely on like milk on the shelves and t-shirts available at the store. Yet, migrant labor is also the most devalued in our nation and their voices are often excluded, and only talked about in abstract political terms. This project tried to break through that and focus on storytelling. It was meaningful to me, but also to the larger community of San Angelo because we were able to learn about the dreams and ambitions of these young people and their creative, imaginative, and expressive views of the world around them. On the last day of the project, the youth participants came up with the project title, La Esperanza de Ser Yo – The Hope of Being Me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am an artist and educator based in Texas, exploring the cultural, social, and political landscapes of the Borderlands and the Great Plains. More specifically, I am a photography professor at Texas State University and run a community-based arts and education project called Borderland Collective. Much of my work, whether collaborative or my individual photographic practice, is about unpacking the complex web of our world and building moments for contemplation.

My family comes from Oklahoma and Texas, and I grew up in West Texas, where the desert meets the grasslands. From an early age I have been interested in the way things look and the histories of place. This is largely due to my dad, who is a serious and very skilled amateur photographer and artist, and taught me from a young age the power of observation and the importance of looking slowly. One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver calls this a “practice of attention.”

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

There are two greatly rewarding aspects of being an artist that go hand in hand with each other.

The first is the reward that comes from being able to spend time quietly, intently, and obsessively thinking about one thing – for me this is sitting and watching the light change on a field of cotton or working for hours and hours on the sequencing of a photo book. This level of focus and attention is hard to come by in our world and I value that aspect of my life as an artist.

The second most rewarding aspect is the exchange that happens when you put art out into the world and share with others the slow observations that have been simmering in your mind. It is quite a vulnerable act, but the reward of a meaningful conversation with another person – and all of the insights, learning, and discoveries that accompany that exchange – is the reason I do this.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

There is so much to say about how society can and should support artists and help build a creative ecosystem. I’ll start with basic values – society needs to (re)recognize that to be creative is to be human. This is what distinguishes us as a species – humans tell stories through art making, whether that is cave paintings of the animals in neolithic France or by posting photographs of prairie grasses on Instagram, humans make art and share it. If we strip that away, we have nothing meaningful left. These values ebb and flow across the historical record and we seem to be in a moment where artists and creatives are devalued.

If we can shift those values and realize the significance of artmaking as intrinsic to being human, then I think we can work to build robust government and non-profit/community-based programs that support both arts education throughout K-Higher Ed and artists working in society (think about the impact of the WPA sending out muralists across the country). Huge subsidies go to support such industries as farming and oil extraction because they are seen as vital to our economy – the same could be done for the arts. But I also think artists should be more fully integrated into for-profit businesses and corporate life – the creative spirit and imaginative thinking that artists bring to the table is inherently innovative. In Texas alone, arts and culture generates $7 billion annually for the state economy. More subsidies, grants, government funding, and arts integration will create an even more thriving arts and culture ecosystem.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jasonreedphoto.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonreedphoto/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-reed-92733711/
• Other: https://borderlandcollective.org/

Image Credits

All images credit Jason Reed