Don't Apologize For Pursuing Your Art: Jabali Sawicki

Do you feel guilty or like you have to hide that you work on your creative projects outside of work? Are you fighting burn out and yearning for a creative rejuvenation? So many of us in the helping professions or mission-driven fields work till we drop and pay a steep price, leaving our creative souls behind or in the closet. Not true for educational leader Jabali Sawicki. Jabali has worked tirelessly as a NYC principal, instructional designer and trainer of new teachers to improve outcomes for underserved kids while also keeping his passion for photography alive and even using it in service of his mission through his Black.Man.Teach blog and street photography.

Read my interview with him to find out why and how he does it.

For years you worked as the Founding Head of School of Excellence Boys Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant. What was that like?

Excellence was my home for 10 years. That’s the longest I’ve been in one place my whole life. So much of my life was tied to my work, my role, the challenges, the triumphs. I derived a lot of my energy and joy from working with kids and families and communities. It was invigorating and meaningful but it was also taxing. I carried a lot of stress with me everywhere. I took it home with me. Managing the daily challenges of serving 700 boys leaves very little time for introspection. There’s even less time to explore other passions and creative outlets. It took its toll. The first thing to go when you are working so hard is your creative spirit. If you cut corners and/or neglect other things maybe. But creativity wasn’t something I got to foster. To the point I didn’t even realize I had it in me.

I eventually left to become an instructional designer at Zearn, the Senior Director of Inspire at Relay Graduate School of Education, an accredited national nonprofit institution of higher education founded in New York State in 2011, where I trained undergraduates to become teachers, and most recently to serve as the Compass Director of nXu, an innovative out-of-school program that helps highly promising NYC high school students explore, identify, and pursue their life purpose and successfully navigate the real world. I can’t imagine being as good a husband and father to my three-year-old if I were still working as principal. Not managing the stress of managing so many people has allowed me to gain perspective and grow in new ways.

When did your own creativity become important to you?

I haven’t talked to people about this a lot so I’m excited. I’ve been photographing for 5 years. I took my first pictures the last 6 months of my last year at Excellence. Once I left I completely went crazy taking pictures. But I didn’t consider myself an artist for the first 34 years of my life. To go way back when I was a sophomore in high school I went to Western Samoa and took a bunch of pictures with disposable cameras. I showed them to my mom and she loved them. She convinced me to put together a 14-image display that I put up in my school library. Ever since then, she’s been telling me I am a gifted photographer and brags about me to the point that it’s nauseating. I tuned her out for 20 years. Then I got an iPad and I downloaded 3 apps and one of them was Instagram and I took pictures and it was like cavemen when they discovered fire. It was immediately magical. Probably more so than the transition from my job, the access to the tools opened up this world for me. And I just started taking pictures and finally got the iPhone and became a madman, taking pictures, looking at pictures and buying every photography book I could find.

Tell me about your project Black.Man.Teach and your street photography.

While I was still at Excellence before I got into photography I would travel around to places for work, education conferences, teacher recruitment fairs. And I would meet really amazing, smart, cool black male teachers. Even at Excellence it was very hard to attract black male teachers. I witnessed the profound impact that many of our black male teachers had on our boys and community. I’d meet all these brothers across the country and I’d be hit over the head that less than 2% of teachers are black males.

I decided I wanted to tell the stories of exceptional black male teachers to motivate other black men to consider teaching and to help us understand who is actually doing the work and what we can learn about them. It started as a video project with a friend of mine at NYU film school where we interviewed five teachers who were part of Uncommon Schools but then I ended up with five hours of video I sat on for half a year.

So instead when I was going to education conferences I thought to take pictures of black male teachers. There is something respectful and powerful in a black and white image of a black male teacher. I started a blog called Black.Man.Teach where I hope to photograph and capture the stories of 10,000 exceptional black male teachers and use these narratives to effect policy change and ultimately drastically increase the number of black male teachers in the country.

In terms of my street photography I got into this thing where I wanted to shoot a photo a day to be in the discipline of creating. It’s become a labor of love. It started with just me taking artistic pictures of my wife standing on the beach with the sun setting and my son smiling, simple early Instagram shots. And then I turned the camera to other things, still life, objects, line and shapes on the street. Slowly the camera was turned outward and morphed into my unique way of articulating about how I feel about the world, things I’m troubled with, things I fear. It shifted to folks on the street, issues of race, class, gentrification and struggle. It moved from abstract to conceptual.

In my mind the two photography projects have been separate. But over time they are becoming the same thing. They are becoming two mediums for me to articulate something about the world. I see Black.Man.Teach as an extension of my day-to-day work. It’s like some creative use of the medium to create timeless art that taps into our mission.

My goal for my street photography is first to just get better. Ira Glass has a great video where he talks about how amateurs are good enough to identify great work but not to create it. That’s where I am. I am enjoying the process of just exploring and I hope that continues for a very long time. Because I’m self-taught there is an incredibly high level of technical skill that I lack and need to develop. Recently I was reading a book about Dorothy Lang and how in a later part of her career she was interested in capturing a picture that captures some secret about the universe and how now she tries to capture a collection of pictures that capture a story or belief. My next project is to put together a body of work that tell a specific story, to look for a consistent theme, to explore depth as opposed to breadth. It’s important to share how we experience our time on earth. If we can get people to believe that black boys can go to college, get funders to believe in our mission, parents to make sacrifices, then we can use our art to have impact as well.

What if all the folks who are doing this human service work, who have tapped into a deep wave-length of the people they serve that no one else has access to, captured what they see? Imagine what kind of art can come from this. They have such a unique perspective. Your efficacy as an educator has to do with your empathy and understanding of how people see the world. There are other fields of work like this. Doctors are connected to people. If they were encouraged to be artists what kind of work could they create?

In what ways has it been a struggle to be an artist while working intensely as a educational leader?

Because I didn’t consider myself an artist for the first 34 years of my life I’ve always been skeptical of art. It seemed too subjective, too self-involved. I didn’t understand the purpose or value of it, as compared to being a principal which has a very tangible set of outcomes. That which people can easily define people tend to give more respect to. When you think of artists. You often don’t think of hard work. You think it’s about some divine inspiration, but not hard work. In the past three years the amount of brain power and sacrifice I’ve applied to create great art has been immense. It has been just as hard and emotionally exhausting as being a principal. If you introduce yourself to someone as a principal there is an immediate respect. If I say “Hi. I’m Jabali. I’m a photographer,” people say something like, “Oh, I’ve seen your work. Nice pictures.” That’s it. Part of the struggle we are going through is there is immediate value when we tell people what we do when it’s something familiar that people understand and have respect for.

Everything I’ve done professionally I’m 100% clear what my efforts will result in. It’s goal-oriented work to help and serve communities that have often been neglected and underserved. There’s a very clear cause and effect that I understand and others understand. As an artist, more than people’s perceptions of me, what I am struggling with is what is the purpose of my art. If art is the cause then what is the effect? I think that is what is hard for educators or people doing art outside of their work. If I take photos what is the purpose of it? That is part of the existential work.

When do you find time to do your photography?

I spend an hour and a half to two hours a day on photography related things. In between meetings or my lunch break I’ll walk around and capture a few shots on the train ride home. Occasionally my wife will grant me a four hour trek, once or twice a month.

What do your creative projects do for you?

They crystalize and help me understand how I see the world and what I value. They give me an impetus to be more compassionate or empathetic to other people. It’s another thing I’m incredibly excited to wake up to in the morning.

The ability to create gives us just as much meaning as a service to others. It forces me to question myself and engage in things I firmly believe and become introspective to be a better person.

Once you commit to calling yourself an artist you become a problem solver and this impacts my ability to do all of my work better. It’s a license to listen to your gut, think outside the box, to not point out problems but solve problems and take yourself less seriously and be playful. I think those are incredibly valuable skills. It forces you to apply that same rigor in how you talk to others.

What is the price we pay by not pursuing our creative/artistic sides?

Stifling any of our dimensions leads to unhappiness. Not pursuing our spiritual, psychological or creative sides causes us to be less present, committed and engaged in life. The richness of each individual can lead to incredible breakthroughs in work and life in general. The more fragmented we are we are not operating at full capacity. That manifests itself as sadness and agitation, which lead us to not be present.

Have you experienced this fragmentation and sadness yourself?

Yes. Psychologically compartmentalizing our interaction with the world is bad. You feel like you are holding something back and then you have anxiety about why you are holding it back. It’s disorienting to think about who you are going to be on any given day. The goal is to integrate all of your sides, roles and titles. They are part of who you are. It takes discipline to do this. I’m still working through it. We shouldn’t be apologetic about having these interests. The goal is to be not apologetic about presenting our whole self to the world. With that will come more peace of mind.

Do you think this feeling of fragmentation is more so in mission-driven professions?

In mission driven work the perception is it is a zero sum game. Any minute you spend is taking away from the lives you could be saving. That’s a heavy burden. I think in corporate America and higher paying fields where lives are not at stake you are sacrificing less and you are in those fields to accumulate wealth and status so you can pursue leisurely activities.

Would you want to do photography full time?

Do you read Seth Godin’s stuff? It’s that fear shit. If I say yes then I’m accepting the fact that I’m not doing what I want to be doing. Yes.

What advice do you have for others working in demanding mission-driven fields yearning to unleash their creativity?

No matter how successful you are you have two goals in life. To better understand yourself and better understand the world. The best way, the most enjoyable way, the most joyful way to do that is to create something and to apply your creativity in a new way. And the best advice is from the movie Babe. It’s when the old farmer had intuition there is something magical about Babe and said, “The little nagging thoughts that never go away are the ones you have to listen to.” Whoever or whatever told you to ignore those thoughts are the evil villains that were sent into your life to prevent you from fulfilling your happiest life.

For more information check out Jabali’s Black.Man.Teach blog and street photography or visit him on LinkedIn.

Julie Friedberg is an executive, business and personal leadership coach. She works with executives, entrepreneurs, changemakers and creative ambitious people to nurture and express their genius, unleash their creativity, expand their impact, launch and grow their dream venture and create the work and life they want. She also coaches polymaths juggling disparate worlds to find wholeness, success and joy. To learn more about Julie's coaching see www.juliefriedberg.com.