The CAN Report

The State of the Field of Community Cultural Development: Something New Emerges

A Report from the CAN Gathering, May 2004

By Linda Frye Burnham, Steven Durland and Maryo Gard Ewell

Published by Art in the Public Interest, July, 2004

Table of Contents Summary The Charge of the Gathering, Its Methodology and Terms Comparing the Field: 2001 to 2004 Emergence of a New Energy What Must Happen for This Field to Develop? Appendices

SUMMARY

In May 2004, Art in the Public Interest convened 27 longtime practitioners of community-based arts to reflect on the current state of their field of endeavor. In the context of that meeting, this paper will review changes in the field since it was reviewed by Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard in 2001, and make recommendations for field advancement.

In 2001, Adams and Goldbard had observed that the field was characterized by the absence of infrastructure, by professional atomization, by marginalization and by the lack of adequate resources. At this gathering, participants recognized the remarkable effectiveness of many existing programs as well as a significant evolution of field infrastructure, but also they showed a frustration that many of the same problems identified in 2001 remain. The field, as it has developed to date, does not meet their needs.

These practitioners, among the best people doing this work, have exhausted the available intellectual and fiscal resources inside the field without achieving any real stability.

Based on past thinking, it is logical to assume that this work has progressed to the point where it needs a professional service organization to centralize resources and tend to the needs of the field. But these practitioners resist founding such an organization, knowing from experience how massive the task would be.

As the group struggled for ideas, we noticed an exciting energy that focused not inward but outward, in other directions — and this energy may be the leading edge of the work. In reflecting on this group conversation, we feel that in asking about the state of the field we have been asking the wrong questions. Practitioners are not focused on community-based arts as a field, but on something else — on something new.

The most significant discovery resulting from this convening was the emergence of a new energy: a vibrant hybridity, an accelerated fusion of community-based arts and other fields of activity, such as community development, activism, education, aging, civic dialogue, cultural policy and globalization. The center of activity is not a "field," but an intersection of interests and commitments.

While these practitioners have always collaborated across disciplines and outside the arts, they have tended to identify primarily as arts-centered, hence the need to describe the work as its own field. There is now a hunger to do more than collaborate. There is an appetite for learning. Community-based art is in a stage of intense research and development. The most energized practice is in an evolving, dynamic metamorphosis. Many of these practitioners are undertaking serious study of other fields, looking to them for wisdom, mining them for language, models and resources. More specifically, they are moving from collaboration and partnership with non-arts groups to integrated thinking. What they are thinking and learning must be shared.

It is our recommendation that this R&D energy be recognized. The community-based arts practitioners engaged in it must be identified and supported. Their findings must be collected and disseminated among practitioners. This energy must not be confined within the parameters of the arts, nor allowed to completely disperse into other disciplines, but must be encouraged to flourish along a continuum between the arts and the community, drawing resources and sharing wisdom all across the spectrum.

It is through the recognition and support of this new hybrid energy — and through the collection, analysis and dissemination of its findings — that a synthesis will emerge, successful existing community-based arts programs will be sustained and replenished, and new collaborative initiatives will arise that are of benefit to the arts and to the community.

In support of that recommendation, this paper will examine the Community Arts Network Gathering of May 2004.

[Next: The Charge of the Gathering]  [Table of Contents]