Ordinary.

Ari Weinzeig looks at the power of ordinary ...

One of the best things I learned from studying anarchism was to let go of the sort of hierarchical thinking I described above. It took years for me to really change the deeply rooted beliefs that I, like most modern Americans, had been raised with, but over the years I have stopped looking only to those at the top—the people in the spotlight, the celebrated superstars—and started paying attention to what was happening at the edges. I began to assess things from the ground up, from the “front lines” back. I long ago arrived at the conclusion that one can almost always evaluate the quality of an organization’s work by the energy of the people you first come into contact with.

Further on ...

As the remarkable artist Ruth Asawa (of whom I wrote a lot last fall) once said, “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.” This same approach is very much what the artist and musician Lonnie Holley, whom I’ve been writing so much about, does as well. Triad City Beat writes, “Holley’s mind is like a kaleidoscope. With each new turn, a differing perspective emerges … Ordinary objects are rearranged and transformed to tell profound stories.”