Issue #49, August 2003
published by Art in the Public Interest

Whose Agenda Is It, Anyway?
This month we add to CAN's "textbook" on community-based art with another overview essay for one of our Reading Room categories: Film, Video, Photography, Computers. This story, focusing on the documentary arts, is "Whose Agenda Is It, Anyway? Documentary Burdens, Community Benefits" by Lynn McKnight from the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University in North Carolina. CDS has produced such projects as "Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South." Says McKnight, "Documentary work, at its core, involves reciprocity, shared action, common interests and mutual engagement. Practicing the documentary arts always involves tangible connections with the community, from start to finish." She surveys this work across the U.S. and details some CDS methods.

Truth UP
We're also excited to present "Truth UP: 23 insights, admonitions and ideas about youth arts from the great masters" by William Cleveland, director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community in Minneapolis, Minn. Cleveland draws on his many years of working with young people in a wide variety of settings to offer some wisdom about what they want from arts projects. In the list of partners involved in youth-art programs, says Cleveland, we include teachers, youth workers, parents, arts organizations, schools, police departments and youth service organizations, but we often leave out the point of view of the prime constituency – young people themselves. "Truth UP" offers insights gathered directly from young people about successful creative collaborations and partnerships.

Latest on the California Arts Council Budget Crisis
"The legislature has passed a budget that provides $1 million in General Fund monies to the CAC," says Director Barry Hessenius on the CAC Web site. "I expect the Governor to sign the budget without any delay. That works out to be less than 3 cents in per capita support for California. … There are two sad and tragic consequences of this unprecedented 94% cut in our budget: the layoff/elimination of over half the agency's staffing positions from what it was a year ago, and the countless organizations that will not receive funding. … We go from finally beginning to make progress in the growth of multicultural arts programming to taking a giant step backwards in support for communities long underserved."

NEA Funding Vote
Stay tuned to Americans for the Arts' marvelous Online Advocacy Center for the latest on the FY 2004 Interior Appropriations Bill funding NEA and NEH. At this writing, the Senate voted a slight NEA increase, but the House approved a $10 million increase (to $127 million), thanks to unusual Congressional Arts Caucus efforts. Says Americans for the Arts' Nina Ozlu, "Absent were the stale accusations of improper grants to radical artists and elitist institutions. Instead, the House listened to glowing accounts of the accomplishments of both agencies and their wide reach across every state and congressional district." Charts produced by Americans for the Arts showed the economic impact of the nonprofit arts sector, including $11 billion in federal tax revenue

NAAO Is Back
We are glad to hear that there is a significant movement afoot to revive support for individual artists, and artist-led organizations. Several independent granting programs are shaping up and a handful of people have set out to revitalize the National Association of Artists Organizations (NAAO). NAAO was a crucial organizing mechanism when it was founded in the late 1970s as a national connector of artist-run organizations, and it acted as their advocate/voice/proponent till the mid '90s. The body was recently re-energized through meetings in D.C. and Miami. Board nominations are being sought and a national convening is planned for late 2003. For a complete report, see the NAAO Web site.

Light Among Shadows
"Over Troubled Waters: Cultural Response and Human Rights" was a roundtable discussion at the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, Calif., August 2, 2003, examining the role of artists in a globalized world, and featuring Tom Hayden, Jackson Browne and others. It opened "Light Among Shadows," an exhibition celebrating "new heroes of the human-rights movement from throughout North and South America" (through 8/29). The exhibit, originated by the Institute for Policy Studies in D.C., blends historical photographs and documents with written and visual work by Ariel Dorfman, Carlos Fuentes, Judy Baca, Francisco Letelier and others. The show especially honors Letelier's father, Orlando Letelier, murdered in 1976 in Washington, D.C., for his human-rights activism against Chile's Pinochet government.

Is Cultural Diversity Policy Good for the Arts?
"Is cultural diversity policy good for the arts?" is an online debate from the Arts Council of England and spiked-culture. Policy adviser Naseem Khan argues that "the infrastructure of the arts is invisibly conditioned - there are many 'keep out' signs. Arts organizations have to point out this discrimination." Poet Gabriel Gbadamosi explains how he "had to out-maneuver cultural policy's bewildering diversity of mechanisms for definition and exclusion." Reader Cecelia Wee argues that identity politics undermine the value of artistic merit. Munira Mirza wants artists to refute the notion that they are victims: "A healthy cultural climate needs warriors who will fight to persuade the audience of their worth - not wimps that want mothering from the government." (Thanks, Center for Arts and Culture.)

Revisiting the Danville Project
The Danville Project, which we first reported on in APInews #31, is flourishing in Vermont. The citizens of Danville are participating in the redesign of a highway that has long bisected the village green and defined their community. VTrans (the Vermont Agency of Transportation), the Vermont Arts Council and Danville's citizens are still energetically engaged and have enhanced their Web site with video clips from a documentary film produced by Bess O'Brien for the arts council, links to reviews and news articles about the project and slide shows of historical and contemporary photos that capture the ambient character of the historic town. The project, led by artist David Raphael, is slated for completion in 2006.

Boston Artists To Stay in Fort Point
Thanks to the undaunted efforts of an artists' collaborative and a collapsed real-estate market, Boston artists will still be able to find a home at Fort Point, a neighborhood they helped revive, according to Maureen Dezel in the Boston Globe (7/18/03). The Fort Point Cultural Collaborative has announced plans for Midway Studios, a 200,000-square-foot development that will house 89 new artists' live/work studios, a gallery, a black box theater and other cultural facilities that will be part of Channel Center, a four-block residential, office and retail complex that is being developed in three phases by Beacon Capital Partners. An estimated 600 artists lived and worked in Fort Point in the early 1990s. The number has dropped to approximately 400 today.

SECCA's HOME House on the Net
Innovative designs from the HOME House Project at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, N.C., are now on the Web. Part of SECCA's Artist and the Community series, the project challenged artists and architects to propose new designs for single-family housing for low- and moderate-income families using Habitat for Humanity’s basic three- and four-bedroom house as a point of departure. Selected designs will actually be constructed throughout North Carolina and then in other U.S. areas. Homes and sites will be chosen in concert with families and communities in need. Two hundred designs will be on view at SECCA for an extended run beginning October 18, 2003, and 100 will travel to select venues across the U.S.

Urban Bush Women in Michigan
"This is a project about hope," says David Lyman in the Detroit Free Press (7/17/03) about "Community Is Responsibility," an Urban Bush Women summer institute in Flint, Mich., that involved more than 90 Flint community members. "Hope for better schools," says Lyman. "Hope for work. Hope for a safer community. Hope for a beleaguered city that has been in a state of economic near-free fall since General Motors began a series of plant shutdowns that have put more than 40,000 people out of work." The project has involved daily movement classes, storytelling circles and UBW's "Hair Party" for mothers and daughters. It will be part of the Animating Democracy Initiative's National Exchange on Art and Civic Dialogue in Flint, October 9-12, 2003.

Catching up with Animating Democracy (An Attempt)
There's so much news out of the Animating Democracy Initiative (ADI) we can't include it all here. You'll have to write for their newsletter. Their October National Exchange on Art and Civic Dialogue in Michigan has added a preconference: "The Arc of Dialogue: Designing Intentional Dialogue Processes." ADI's Lima, Ohio, project was featured at a conference in South America and ADI projects in Hawaii and California were featured at a Cambridge conference on public art. Liz Lerman's community-based work will be spotlighted in People, Time, Life and Sports Illustrated Cigna ads. ADI's Andrea Assaf performed on Radio Tahrir's "Voices of the Arab/Muslim Community" (on WBAI, N.Y.C.). And Grace Lee Boggs and Lucy Lippard joined ADI's Critical Perspectives writing project. E-mail: adi@artsusa.org.

Rock Solid in Trackside
Huge "art panels" designed by Canadian young people are being installed on the outside walls of a warehouse in Vancouver in the Trackside Art Gallery, a project of The Rock Solid Foundation. Rock Solid was formed by a group of police officers in Victoria, British Columbia, to provide kids with positive solutions to violence, threats, intimidation and aggressive behavior. Trackside is an urban art corridor prone to criminal activity that Rock Solid crews have been restoring as an urban green space. More than 3,000 kg of garbage, metal and waste wood have been removed from the area. Sixteen pieces are already installed in the gallery and Phase II will go up September 13, 2003. Check out the photo gallery online.

New Online Public Art Resources from PAN
The Public Art Network (PAN) of Americans for the Arts is developing Project in Focus, an online exhibition of public art projects that offer new approaches to working in the public realm, including case-studies, images, text and related information. Of particular interest are projects that engage the public and create new types of opportunities for artists. PAN also offers a downloadable "Call for Artists Resource Guide" to help arts organizations develop opportunity listings of public art projects, including definitions and descriptions, a model RFP and RFQ, and a listing of places to send artist calls. PAN has issued its own call for proposals for presentations for the 2004 Public Art Conference to be held in Washington, DC.

European Mapping Across Sectors
This month's busy beehive is a U.K.-based think tank, the Center for Creative Communities, which has debuted a new Web site and newsletter, and launched a bunch of new initiatives, including "Creative Community Building Through Cross-Sector Collaboration, A European Mapping and Consultative Initiative," in collaboration with the Melina Project in Greece, to make a new map of where arts and culture fit into society in theory, policy and practice. The study, reflecting a trend toward policies that combine social and cultural objectives, looks at collaborative practices among culture/arts, education, community development, youth, health and social services in nine European countries. These policies are often expressed as changes designed to "fight social exclusion" by expanding "access" to services and encouraging "participation."

Minorities Celebrated in W.P.A., Says Library of Congress
"Unmasking the Writers of the W.P.A." by Douglas Brinkley (N.Y. Times 8/2/03) reveals new interpretations of the legendary Federal Writers' Project, a program of FDR's W.P.A. From 1935 to 1940, in the heart of the Great Depression, the project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors and researchers, including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, says Brinkley. New research by the Library of Congress shows that project editors believed they could build a national culture on diversity. "They faced a great challenge coming out of the 1920's, where white supremacists, via WASP primacy and the K.K.K. and anti-immigration laws held sway," Brinkley quotes Jerrold Hirsch of Truman State University. "In the Federal Writers' Project, ethnic minorities were celebrated."

Street Artists Win in New York
The 2nd circuit Federal Appeals Court has issued a ruling in "Lederman et al v. Giuliani" in favor of New York City street artists, says NYFA Current (8/6/03). The decision affirms that, in accordance with New York State ruling, street artists do not need a permit to exhibit or offer their work for sale in public places in New York City, and that the City's attempt to enforce permits for street artists violates previous court decisions -- such as "Bery v. City of New York, 1996" -- that extended First Amendment and Equal Protection ground to visual art and art vendors. "Today is a great day for artists' rights," said Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics).

The Facts on Theater for 2002
Although nonprofit theater contributed $1.4 billion to the U.S. economy last year, individual theaters continue to be severely affected by the national economy's instability, according to "Theatre Facts 2002," Theatre Communications Group's (TCG) annual report. For the first time, more than half of theaters surveyed ended the year with a deficit. While federal and local funding has decreased, theaters have experienced remarkable gains in contributions from individuals, including theater trustees. The study is based on information drawn from the fiscal year that theaters completed any time between September 30, 2001, and August 31, 2002 - which includes the immediate effects of 9/11 as well as the economic slowdown that has since ensued. Download it from the TCG Web site.

Shared History
"Shared History" is a family history project established in 1993 by Felicia Dryden, a descendant of William Gilmore Simms, the last slave owner at Woodlands Plantation in Midway, S.C. It explores the 260-year-old relationship between the black and white families who descend from the slaves and slave owners. A sense of history has kept many of the families from Woodlands connected to their past and to each other. The project is gathering historical data about this connection, and Dryden is making a film to be shown on PBS in 2004. In the making of this documentary, says Dryden, descendants are facing the challenge of revisiting their relationships, questioning their honesty and scrutinizing their motives and values, past and present.

Staging America
Sonja Kuftinec's long-awaited book about Cornerstone Theater Company, "Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-based Theater" is out from Southern Illinois University Press. Sure to be welcomed by those who have been waiting for a scholarly examination of the field, the book is billed by the press as "the first in-depth investigation of community-based theater that traces historical affiliations connected with the form while critically examining how community-based theater both enables community and challenges the very notion of 'community' as a stable site." The book is bodaciously academic, and Kuftinec herself says, "Sometimes a dense vocabulary can unpack the delightful difficulties of representation." She spent several years collaborating with Cornerstone in various ways.

On the Borderland
The Center Borderland of Arts, Cultures, Nations in Sejny, northeast Poland, on the border with Lithuania, is using the arts to "gather the wisdom and richness of borderlands." Cultures of the region include Jews, Russian "Old Believers," Tartars, Karaites and Armenians. "We are searching for a path that begins in ancient times and goes toward the present day, for a language which can make the elders' wisdom available to the young generation and can inspire new artistic, pedagogical and scientific research," says Borderland. Activities include Sejny Theater, Klezmer Music Group, the Documentation Center of Borderland Cultures, Papuciarnia Gallery, Memory of Ancient Time, Meeting the Other, Gipsy Art Village, European Borderland School, Open Regions of Central and Eastern Europe and more. (Thanks, Jordan Peimer.)

Swedes Living Longer
People who are involved in cultural activities live longer, at least in Sweden. This according to a well-quoted scientific study "to investigate the possible influence of attendance at cultural events, reading books or periodicals, making music or singing in a choir as determinants for survival." A simple random sample of 12,982 individuals aged 16-74 years were interviewed 1982 and 1983 about cultural activities. They were followed up with respect to survival until December 31, 1991. Conclusion: Attendance at cultural events may have a positive influence on survival. However: "Negative effects of cultural activities could be that people lose their sense of reality and identify with asocial models of behavior and are themselves encouraged towards asocial behavior." The whole thing is on the Web.

The Deck of Hillary
In what we promise will be the last item about decks of cards, we'd like to respond to the APInews reader who says she has detected an extreme-left bias in APInews when it comes to political card decks. She would like us to level the playing field by pointing out that there is a deck of cards available from the extreme-right organization NewsMax.com: "The Deck of Hillary." The product promo claims this deck reveals Hillary Clinton's "outrageous racist and anti-Semitic rantings," and her "bizarre claims that Christians can't be Republicans," "knee-slapping comments about Bill's relative in the KKK" and "shocking response as to why so many women are becoming lesbians." Are we level yet?

Also…

• New Book from Ethical Performance: "Partnership Matters: Current Issues in Cross-Sector Collaboration" (downloadable)
• New Book From National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts: "Ten Steps Toward Starting a Community School of the Arts"
• Report available: "Arts & Minds: A Conference on Cultural Diplomacy amid Global Tensions" (pdf)
• New Hospital Study Proves Positive Health Effects of Art and Music
• New OMB Rules for Federal Grant Applicants: This Means You
• New Federal Rules for Fax Marketing: Might Also Mean You
• New Book from New Zealand: "Creative Solutions and Social Inclusion - Culture and the Community"
• New Directory: "The People Pages: Resources for Social Change"
• Pictures from a Conference: Community Art Ontario's "Kick It Up a Notch"