Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role in the Respond/ Resist/ Rethink Exhibition? 

 

My name is Ellie Schmidt. I’m originally from Colorado and I’ve been living in Alaska for a few years before moving here this summer to start the Master’s in Fine Arts Program. So I’m a first-year grad student in the School of Art and Design. My GSSA [Grad Staff Assistant Position] is working with the gallery and helping put up the exhibits. [And I was] encouraged to put in a piece. The [Respond/ Resist/ Rethink] exhibition [consists of] posters and videos. And I had made this big, bed-sheet poster over the summer that I carried around town, so we included that in the show. 

 

What was the experience of creating that poster like for you? 

 

My family has a beach cottage on Nantucket Island, which is this very wealthy, preppy, vacation-home area. When George Floyd was killed and there was this national outcry, I felt very disconnected from these big city centers where people were protesting and having these conversations. I felt this frustration because I’d drive around the city of Nantucket, where there’s a lot of wealth disparity, and a big socioeconomic divide. There’s the wealthiest of the wealthy and there are immigrant populations from Jamaica and from Southeast Asia. So in this place where there’s a lot of diversity and a lot of potential to have these conversations, it was like crickets. You weren’t hearing anything, nobody was protesting.

 

And so my siblings and I tried to come up with a way to create visibility of this national movement in this isolated town. And so, it’s my piece in the exhibition, but really my whole family helped to make it. We drew a picture of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, these three portraits with flowers and it says “Rest in Power.” We walked it around the city as a memorial and also as a protest. 

 

And so I went downtown with my family and we asked all these businesses, bookstores, and sandwich shops, “Can we hang this on your building?” And every single place we went to over the course of the day all said, “No”  or “We are trying to take a neutral stand on this issue.” They all wiggled out of the responsibility of putting this very large statement on their building. 

 

I mean, what is there to be neutral about?

 

I think it forced me to physically go to these people, one after another, and bring up the issue of race in this town. I’m not a very confrontational person and I think it was a good experience for me to feel that friction and that tension. And I’m not a black person in America and I’ve never experienced police brutality, but I had to look inside myself and be like, “I have never really had an experience like this, where I’m going up to strangers and like jumping into the ring.” So I realized that in my life I’ve been very abstract or academic about these issues, but not confronting them in a person-to-person way.

 

And how do the pieces in the exhibit help us, as a community at U-M, move to a greater place of equity and inclusion?

 

I love the format of the poster because they’re meant to be duplicated, they’re meant to be mass distributed, you can put them on your bedroom wall. The message is more important than the physical piece itself. And I think a lot of the posters have really simple but important messages. Like one of them says, “Quality is a moving target.” Which I think is really important to remind us you have to keep working for it all the time. Some of the pieces have to do with racism toward Asian Americans or other populations. 

 

It’s hard to summarize them because they’re all very different and amazing in their own way. But I think that the poster is a cool format because it reminds you of posters from historical movements and reminds you that this is a historical movement now. And it’s important to take action and to speak out and enter these situations that you might feel uncomfortable in.

 

What has been the most profound part about creating your poster for this exhibition? 

 

I was surprised, I’m kind of embarrassed, but it was a very emotional experience just because of my nonconfrontational nature. I remember just feeling so restrained and helpless when I was reading about all the protests that were happening in these bigger movements, which I felt so cut off from. And sometimes art feels like it doesn’t help the world. Sometimes it just feels like this frivolous thing, but it was really profound when I found myself buying paints and putting my paintbrush to the canvas, it just helped. It just broke through some weird barriers I was having. And it was like, “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to necessarily change the world, but to do something is better than sitting on your phone and scrolling forever.”

 

And so I think it was really interesting to find that release in art, which is something that I’ve done my whole life, but also have a confusing relationship with. But I think just by starting it was really helpful for me to process some of these feelings and definitely gave me an access point into this issue. 

 

And making a poster might not be enough, it’s definitely not enough, but it’s this first step. And that first step is important to creating some sort of movement.

 

What do you hope that students, faculty, staff, or anyone who sees the exhibition are able to take away from it?

 

That’s a good question. I just love the diversity of viewpoints about this very specific time in US history. And so I hope that people who come to see the exhibit will understand the importance of having lots of different perspectives and how impossible it is to distill it into one simple narrative and just how complicated [race relations in the US] are. But I hope people can come in to see it physically, because it’s really both galvanizing and calming to walk around the gallery.

 

Are there any final words that you would like to share?

 

Being out of school for a while, it feels like a really important time to come back to school. I love being in a place where everybody is really passionate about addressing issues like race and police brutality. I feel like U-M is an important incubator to think about these issues. And so inspiring to be around lots of passionate people.

 

Learn more about the Respond / Resist / Rethink Exhibition