The Community Arts Convening & Research Project held its conference at Maryland Institute College of Art March 16-18, 2008. There were about 150 participants from all sectors of the field. The meeting's design kept us in small groups of 25, so my experience is limited to the group I was in. Therefore I'll report from my own perspective.

The Idea of the project emerged from a core of art colleges loosely known as the CAPi group, so named because they were recipients of grants from the Wallace Foundation to found campus-community partnership offices. (You may learn more about that history from my CAN story "Jumping In with Courage: An Interview with Ken Krafchek.") The community-arts scholars at those schools and a handful of others began talking about a peer-reviewed journal for the field, one that would articulate the best pedagogy, priniciples and practices as they see them. They designed the March convening around a call for papers, and they invited not only faculty members, but also students, practicing artists and community partners to submit essays.

More than 50 submissions came in and were reviewed, screened and briefly edited by the project's editorial board (all artist/academics), with a plan to widen the circle of peers at the convening, where the papers would be further vetted and discussed. In their final version, they will appear on the CAN Web site. I was invited to be on the editorial board but I declined. I felt it was really important that their voice be heard, and I am no academic.

They then grouped the papers under several common themes and posted them on the project's page on the MICA site for all to read. After conference registration closed, they assigned the conference participants to those topics in groups of 25. We were told to read all the papers in our group beforehand. I was excited about this peer-review process in which papers are vetted by a really inclusive group of peers, not just the working artist-academics on the board. Also, our conference name tags only had our names, not our titles or our institutions or our geographic locations, so we were sort of anonymous, all equal, which actually did work. However, the conveners turned out not to be very diverse -- mostly young, white women.

Imagine our surprise when we got to the conference and were told NOT to discuss the papers, but to use them as a jumping-off point for our group discussions, and to emerge after 1 1/2 days with a presentation to the larger group on the PRINCIPLES, PRACTICES and AN ACTION PLAN around what we had chosen to discuss. Imagine the writers’ surprise (all the writers were there, having been paid for by the convening's grant). Many said they had been really interested to see what their peers thought about their papers. They had been asked to boil their papers down to three ideas and three questions. When we entered our meeting rooms, those ideas and questions were up on the wall, grouped in four or five little bunches, but the amount of posted language was overwhelming.

We -- including our group facilitator -- were confused as to how to proceed. We wasted two hours tossing vague statements of principle in all directions, punctuated by questions like, “What do you MEAN by creativity?” Finally two things happened. I said, “This is killing me. I can’t talk in these generalities any more. It seems pointless if we don’t really know what we mean by our terms. It would be better if we broke up into story circles and based our statements on things that happened in real life.” And someone else said, “Your communities are not here and you shouldn’t be speaking for them. Speak for yourselves.” And so we did that.

The facilitator told us each to select one of our own principles and talk about how we had applied it in our own work. In my little group of four, we wound up talking about our personal inner voices and how they had emerged in work settings. Then we met again in the group of 25 and reported the ideas we had talked about, wrote them on the board and selected five of them to talk about in (different) small groups of 4-5. Our group articulated our idea as “acknowledging self-interest as an artist when in a partnership” and 6 or 7 people wanted to talk more about that. After we grouped up, we chose a leader and he said for each of us to say what it was we wanted out of the conversation. I said. “I want to know how you feel when making art and you know you are on the right path. I want to know if it feels like that when you are working in community.” I also said that I felt not all artists should be working in community and that's okay, and it’s important to examine that for yourself.

People went really deep and described the body feelings they get when making choices while artmaking, telling things they said they had never told anybody — like physical antennae and actual visions. It was amazing. We all got goose pimples. But we agreed that working in collaboration with a community feels different. They all said they were compelled to do it, but it wasn’t exactly the same feeling as doing work that is purely for art’s sake, and they felt both were valid. The group bonded fiercely. We had to have two group hugs.

When we came back to the group of 25 — the other small groups had decided to talk about things like social change — it seemed to me that some felt we were differentiating ourselves from them as artists and implying that they were only interested in social work. So when we had to create a 25-person presentation (and it turned out to be a performance art piece, like all the other groups), they wanted to express “tension.” I objected, saying that we are only following our own paths to the soul of the world (per Paulo Coehlo) and sometimes we walk together and collaborate, but that shouldn’t imply that some of us are right and some wrong, or even that we are opposed to each other. Finally, overnight, two of the group members wrote a gorgeous, simple poem expressing many of the things we had talked about, and during the presentation, some of us spoke the poem and the rest performed a movement piece to illustrate tension, collaboration and compromise. We were fine with it.

The general consensus among the people I talked with was that the conference was extremely difficult and mostly unproductive. In a way, it didn't have to accomplish very much, because 50 essays had already emerged from the process. Many of the writers were bitterly disappointed that their papers had gone unreviewed by the group. Some told me this was the first time they had written about the work and they got a lot out of the writing process. For myself, I felt satisfied: I got to listen to these generous artists talk about their souls, and I got to experience collaboration in our group of 25. It was incredibly difficult because we had at least five very forceful and opinionated directors in a milieu that is supposed to be democratic and inclusive. It showed just how hard this work is and how differently many of us approach it.

I have heard no further discussion of the editing of the project's submitted papers. That is all still in process. Look for them on CAN in future. As of now, you can still read them on the MICA site in their unfinished (and un-copy-edited) state: http://www.mica.edu/communityartsconvening/article.cfm?entry=93.

   

Comments

Linda-

Thanks very much for this thoughtful and personal recap of the meeting. It was enheartening - I too was frustrated at times and found the style of the meeting to be challenging - forcing us to talk and think in ways far outside our normal synapse-paths, making it an immense opportunity to grow in how we talk about our work - both with each other and with others. For me, the connection with new friends and members of the field and around discussion of new projects, innovative methodology, and interesting little tidbits were the best parts - for the actual agenda, I think I’d like to be more deeply involved in designing it, as a group / as a field, rather than the design we endured.

MichaeldelVecchio | March 24, 2008 02:09 PM

   

I was glad to be alerted via the API newsletter to your blog post about the conference. Although I had my frustrations with various aspects of the Convening, I benefited enormously from the conversations with peers that took place in the margins of things.

In the future, I would recommend the Open Space Technology format - I think more is accomplished when the agenda allows for people to create and find the topics spontaneously, as well as the peers (and there is the flexibility to move around as well). I know that the Convening folks had an agenda to meet, but it often felt like we tackling issues ass-backwards. I appreciate Linda’s story about her group realizing the need to go back to the individual’s stories to reach the deeper theoretical, social and aesthetic issues.

Finding the right structure and the appropriate people to facilitate that structure with passion and confidence is enormously challenging. I respect what a huge task the organizers faced. I deeply appreciated the cross-generational dialog, as well as the diversity of the group who came.

Perhaps those who have facilitated or participated in successful gatherings of interdisciplinary peers can share what strategies worked for them in the past.

Also I left before the end of the various group’s presentations, soon after lunch, and was wondering what the final revelations were from that afternoon.

Beverly Naidus | March 31, 2008 06:32 PM

   

This is very interesting to read. I also feel like I benefited tremendously, but I too can only speak from my group experience. It was also, as Linda experienced, mostly white women. There had been some men, but, we lost them by lunchtime on the first day.

That said, my overall feeling was that those who remained (approximately 18) had a very productive time. Our facilitator really did a wonderful job. We also had several other members of the group who were very proactive in facilitating the larger group. There was a great collective energy in our space.

We ended up breaking into smaller groups very early on based on very specific interests (and that seemed very invigorating for a lot of people) but then also were able to reconvene and work quite collaboratively as a larger group.

I think the format was a definite experiment and a risk. In the case of our room, the risk seemed to work. So, perhaps following the above suggestion on getting feedback not only from those who have facilitated previous successful gatherings, but also feedback from the facilitators of what may have been the more successful groups within this conference would be useful.

Marianne Petit | April 3, 2008 08:46 AM

   

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