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

WHAT MUST HAPPEN FOR THIS FIELD TO DEVELOP?

R&D: Recognition, Support, Collection, Dissemination

It is our recommendation that this new R&D energy be recognized. The community-based arts practitioners engaged in it must be identified and supported. Their findings must be collected, analyzed, codified 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 flourish along a continuum between the arts and the community, drawing resources from each end of 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, along with new perspectives, language, models and resources. Successful existing community-based arts programs will be sustained and replenished, and new collaborative initiatives will emerge that are of benefit to the arts and to the community.

CCD organizations, funders, educational institutions and corporations must recognize the need for this kind of R&D and support artists in that quest and in finding ways to apply and share their experience and knowledge within the field. This might come in the form of rewritten job descriptions, paid time off, paid internships and fellowships, as well as healthy support for truly ambitious cross-disciplinary experiments.

Support must come too for connecting these researchers and their ideas via journals, working conferences and online collaborations. New programs must be created for researching and codifying best practices for various methods of boundary-crossing inquiry, both by analyzing existing knowledge networks and by fostering developing of new networks. There must be support for the dissemination of this knowledge to the broadest possible number of practitioners in the field, including a prolific and pervasive marketing and public-relations campaign.

Beneath these new initiatives must lie a strengthening of the existing CCD field in the following ways.

What Practitioners and Institutions Can Do

Practitioners must take responsibility for parts of the infrastructure. They must:

• Seek out and use the tools that already exist — such as API’s Community Arts Network online archives or its list of training sites.
• Be responsible for making their own information available to others via networks, Web sites and gatherings already in existence.
• Read and write for journals and newsletters in the CCD field.
• Help create an annotated bibliography of written, media, and online materials pertinent to the CCD field.
• Seek funds outside of the traditional community of arts funders, and through earned-income strategies.
• Share their own survival skills as entrepreneurs, showcasing their techniques for relying more on earned income.
• Continue to make a serious effort to ensure that their work is considered “valid” within the arts world by seeking visibility for CCD within arts networks.
• Showcase community cultural development in other fields, by making presentations to their peers through journals, online materials and at conferences.
• Seek public office or serve on boards where they can influence the shaping of cultural policy.
• Seek and find the balance between using their own value-oriented language and the language of other fields.
• Look both ways across the arts/community spectrum; some new creative strategies for CCD might be found within the arts — from the traditional disciplines to the avant-garde.

Funders, institutional leaders, corporations and other community leaders must take responsibility for parts of the infrastructure. They can help the field these ways.

• There must be a publisher, or publishers, willing to publish and disseminate written information.
• There must be at least one physical archive where historical material, current printed material, images, CD-ROMs, DVDs and videos can be stored, as well as an online index to material in digital format. This would ideally be at a college or university with an already established presence in the field, willing to maintain, catalogue and expand the collection. Such an archive should also help locate and collect materials from other fields.
• There must eventually be a regular gathering where practitioners and trainees can meet to exchange ideas, face-to-face. We recommend a variety of gathering styles, from Open Space convenings that include people from other fields to more conventional gatherings where innovators like Borrup, Aprill, Atlas, Perlstein, Davis, Malpede, Ameri and Chew can present papers to a broad audience, bringing their cross-disciplinary knowledge to a big table.
• There must be a systematic examination of the benefits and feasibility of a central service organization for the CCD field.
• Funders already committed to providing resources to community cultural development must actively assert their commitment to this funding within their own networks, demonstrating that community cultural development is not “fringe” but is in fact a valid and important part of the arts spectrum — perhaps more important than ever before in terms of overall social impact.
• Foundations must strengthen their cross-disciplinary programs, making it possible for CCD practitioners to undertake serious study in other fields and countries.

Participants' Commitments

At the end of the Gathering, each participant pledged to take certain personal actions to further the development of the field. Specific pledges can be found in Appendix V. Paraphrasing, they can be clustered as follows:

All committed to explore the CAN Web site to see what already exists and how we can use it and participate in it to grow our “membership,” share best practices, investigate theory, share curriculum, engage in conversation.

Some (22 participants) committed to work to inform people about the community cultural development field, and its potential as a partner in the cause of social justice.

• We will inform people via arts networks to which we already have access. Specifically mentioned were the American Association of Museums, Americans for the Arts, the Arts Extension Service, The Association of American Cultures, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Minority Consortium. In particular, we will write — starting with reports of this conference — to members of these networks via journals and newsletters; and we will meet with key individuals in these organizations to explore areas of overlap and to investigate common ways of addressing the overlap.
• We will inform people via non-arts networks to which we have access. Specifically mentioned were Asian American Journalists Association and the Asian American Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy, and other associations of people of color.
• We will investigate new, hitherto unexplored, collaborations with people in other fields with which we have no formal current connections, such as Legal Aid, Head Start and drug-policy activists.
• We will sponsor convenings of cultural workers, perhaps broadening convenings already planned.

Some committed to fearlessly engage in political advocacy, re-finding their activist voices.

• We will create a national Image Bank on how people can use their artistic creativity to speak out on issues of deep concern — the war in Iraq, invasion of privacy, the decline of civil liberties, the polarization of wealth. Work samples will be banked at the SPARC Web site (done, as of this writing).
• We will write a cultural policy plank for the platform of the political parties, circulate this as widely as possible for signatures, and ensure that it reaches the parties prior to their national conventions (done, as of this writing).
• When we write checks to political parties, we’ll write “Artists for [Candidate]” on our checks to increase our visibility.

Some committed to share, or continue to share, information with one another such as:

• Training curricula and other means for training and learning, such as mentorship
• Program information and publications, especially from other fields such as the field of aging
• Research that articulates the unique value of work done by community artists
• Documentation and analysis of community arts projects that have had a “permanent transformative outcome” in their communities
• Documentation of practices by groups (including non-arts groups) with success in building economic, social, cultural bases in communities
• Those within the Academy committed to articulate how they frame their work, to work to create and ensure a continuing place for community cultural development degree programs, and to link these programs to practitioners outside the university and to non-arts programs within universities.

Some committed to do what they can to increase resources for the field — bringing information from this gathering to the funding sources with which we are affiliated.

Some committed to participate in international collaborations and to connect with the ongoing cultural conversations around globalization.

Some committed to seek to identify a suitable archives/repository for the field [conversations in progress, as of this writing].

Some committed to bring younger practitioners to gatherings such as this one.

One individual committed to distribute information about retirement programs to the group [done, as of this writing].

Goal: Evolution, Revelation, Revolution

The authors of this paper have a deep belief in artists and their ability to find new answers to the toughest questions. That is why we heartily recommend support for research and development in this field, particularly the new energy for deep cross-disciplinary inquiry. It will bring back rewards a hundred-fold.

"Like a school of fish, when the tides are coming we swim that way but we keep together, and we keep our shape, we keep who we are. And that’s how, in difficult times, we can reinvent ourselves,” said Lily Yeh.[35]

This new energy emerges at a time of crisis in world culture; we believe that urgency is what is lending it power. Community cultural development practitioners are deeply concerned about the fate of democracy in the United States, as well as justice for the people who live in the United States. We believe, passionately, that creative, artistic exploration among people, catalyzed by an artist, is an important key to addressing injustice and to enabling the United States to live up to its great, but unfulfilled, promise of a democratic society.

We have taken many important steps. There are many more steps, both minute and enormous, that lie ahead.

We will do what we must to take these steps. Failing to try is not an option. The stakes are too high.

[Next: Appendix I: Roster of Participants]  [Table of Contents]

Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland are the co-directors of Art in the Public Interest and its primary initiative, the Community Arts Network. They are co-editors of CAN's Web site and its newsletter, APInews. They were the editors of High Performance magazine (1978-1998), the founding artistic director and executive director of the 18th Street Arts Complex. Burnham was a co-founder of Highways Performance Space. Burnham is a widely published, award-winning writer on community arts and performance art. Durland is a visual artist and Web designer.

Maryo Ewell is a contributing editor to the Community Arts Network. An award-winning arts advocate, keynote speaker, educator and writer, Ewell is a consultant in community arts and development and she was associate director of the Colorado Council on the Arts, 1982-2003.

This publication was made possible in part by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

[35] Lily Yeh, from transcript