What is your truth? The CAUSE COLLECTIVE’s ongoing project In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth) made a stop at Larkin’s Deli & Restaurant on Thursday, September 6, 2018. It is an interactive project in the form of a 15-foot-high inflatable speech bubble. Inside the booth, participants were invited to make a two-minute video responding to the open-ended prompt “The Truth is…” The resulting videos are compiled, edited, and accessible at insearchofthetruth.net and in a documentary film to be screened at the Coleman Center. The ultimate goal of the project was to capture Sumter County’s definitions of the truth.
“This project is not only a public art tour, a website, and a documentary video project—the Truth Booth is also a generosity project,” explains CAUSE COLLECTIVE co-founder Hank Willis Thomas. “The goal is to provide Americans with a safe space to share their thoughts, ideas, dreams . . . or anything that inspires them.”
The event was the second stop on a four-part tour that included our organizational friends Pike School of Art in McComb (MS), Uniontown Public Library in Uniontown (AL), and Arts Revive in Selma (AL).
In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth) is a part of For Freedoms Initiative, a platform for greater participation in the arts and civil society. Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941)—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—For Freedoms Federation uses art to encourage and deepen public explorations of freedom in the 21st century.
The CAUSE COLLECTIVE is a team of artists, designers and ethnographers creating innovative art in the public realm. Their projects explore and enliven public spaces by creating a dynamic conversation between issues, sites and the public audience. By exploring ideas that affect and shape society, they seek to add the “public” back into public space and art.
In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth) was generously supported by the Alabama Council on the Arts, The Educational Foundation of the Arts (theefa.org), and the Daniel Foundation of Alabama. Thank you to everyone that shared their #TRUTH, Larkin Restaurant & Deli, WLYB FM, and the Sumter County Record Journal.