Making Exact Change
How U.S. arts-based programs have made a significant and sustained impact on their communities
By William Cleveland

• Table of Contents
• Part One: Introduction
• Part Two: Case Studies
• Part Three: Findings
• Part Four: Recommendations

Part Two: Case Studies

GRACE
(Grass Roots Art and Community Effort)

GRACE community workshop. Photo by Michael Gray, courtesy of GRACE

Basic Facts

Snapshot

The program grew and [Don] Sunseri began, art materials in hand, to visit community centers and hospitals. Now GRACE has a staff of more than half a dozen, with support from foundations and individual contributors. Its activities include workshops, exhibitions and events. GRACE artists have won awards, published books, and been subject to film and television attention.

Of course art-making programs have been mounted in institutional settings for decades, and in pre-thorazine days, art was employed as a pacifying therapeutic. But programs run by artists bring a different agenda. Their goal is not occupation but redemption, the forging of human bonds through the fashioning of form. The power of self-taught art to produce a “third world,” a space where artist and audience may communicate freely, is often strongest when closest to home where iconography and experience is shared. And yet GRACE artists have produced work that transcends barriers of time, place and personal circumstance, to include us all.

Dot Kibbee, an octogenarian who has worked with school-age children through the program, stands as testament to this. Her visual autobiography, “All That Glitters,” has the uncanny ability to inspire personal narrative in anyone who sees it. It serves as a template for others to tell their own stories. Her best-known picture,”’Take My Hand,” thanks God for her deliverance from double pneumonia. It is reputed to have healing powers, and has been passed from hand to hand in the community where she lives.

—Lyle Rexer, 1998[1]

Description

History

Grass Roots Art and Community Effort (GRACE) had its beginnings in 1975 at the St. Johnsbury Convalescent Center located in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Don Sunseri, an artist newly transplanted in Vermont and needing work, found a job doing kitchen maintenance at the nursing home. He was drawn to the residents and began to feel these elders could be a source of learning and perhaps inspiration for himself. Don engaged help from the Vermont Council on the Arts and secured CETA funding for two years of art workshops. He provided materials, encouragement and a supportive environment, using teaching skills and techniques of traditional art classes.

The workshops were received enthusiastically but the “lessons” were for the most part ignored. People would start to work and quickly be off on their own, forgetting the “how’s” and just doing their own thing. Seeing this impulse in the residents, Don responded by dropping the “lessons,” stepping back and letting the residents explore on their own. As a result, nursing-home residents produced a stream of beautiful, often autobiographical art works. The art work was later organized into exhibits, slide lectures and publications. Since that time, hundreds of exhibits have traveled to galleries, museums and art centers, regionally, nationally and internationally.

—“States of GRACE,” 1998[8]

GRACE conducts over 500 workshops a year in many mainly rural sites around Vermont. The workshops are generally two hours in length and are held weekly, or occasionally more frequently, in a variety of community facilities and settings. The populations primarily served are senior citizens and persons with developmental or mental disability, with the occasional addition of children and adults from the general public.

GRACE also mounts exhibits of artworks in many venues around New England, nationally, and even internationally. Usually a site such as a nursing home will display the paintings and drawings of its residents. But in the last several years, exhibits of the works of GRACE artists have been mounted in regional libraries, banks and galleries as well as in New York City, Washington, D.C., and at universities in Vermont and elsewhere. From 1980 to 1998, GRACE exhibited art work in a pine grove at the Bread and Puppet Theater Festival in Glover, Vt., with an estimated attendance of 16,000 people.

Mission/Values

Mission: To discover and develop indigenous, self-taught artists, primarily, but not exclusively, among the population of elders and other special constituencies in Vermont; to promote this important cultural voice through local, regional and national exhibitions, slide lectures, film and video documentation and publications; to assist and train others in the development of similar programs; and to develop and sustain the permanent and documentary collections.

The mission of GRACE is the development and promotion of visual art produced primarily by older, self-taught artists of rural Vermont. The boundaries between “trained artist/teacher” and “untrained person/student” are consciously minimized based on the philosophy that all people, of whatever age, physical capacity or education, have creative potential. Thus, all the participants, staff and clients, are encouraged to consider themselves as artists. “Self transformation is the goal of all art, the GRACE artists no less than others. If one can’t be cured of physical limitations, one can learn to transcend them. The arts provide a vehicle through which to learn this, consciously or unconsciously. The staff make it clear that the GRACE programs are “about art, not therapy. …Them opening up opens us up. We’d rather not know about the clinical diagnoses. We approach each person fresh.”

—Lucy Lippard in “States of GRACE,” 1998

Success and Change

Goals

• Encouragement of artistic expression among seniors and other special populations
• Discovery and promotion of self-taught artists to the local and broader community
• Preservation of this important cultural voice through the establishment of a permanent collection

Defining Success

• The slow organic growth of the organization and sustainability over 30 years
• Ongoing workshops at contracted sites (most for ten or more years), successful exhibitions at recognized institutions, national recognition from NEA, Smithsonian
• Making positive community change (more of a by-product of the mission than a specific goal
• Acceptance of the GRACE approach to working with people and attitude towards the art work produced
• Positive socialization resulting from shared participation in a meaningful activity

Critical to Success

• Consistently high-quality art materials
• Well-trained and experienced professional artists as workshop facilitators
• Respect for all participants as fellow artists
• Development of a supportive, nonjudgmental environment
• Treating perceived dysfunction or limitation as creative opportunities
• Art exhibitions, catalogues and sales that celebrate, validate and document participant work
• Dedicated staff and board members
• Support and validation from staff and administrators at contracted workshop sites
• Ongoing fundraising efforts

Outcomes

No formal evaluation of GRACE programs has been done, although some specific projects have been evaluated. The staff recognizes the value of this for program development and fundraising, but does not at this time have sufficient resources to devote to formal assessment. The following are some specific program outcomes.

• Delivery of 500 open-studio workshops annually
• Validation of participant’s creative work through exhibits and sales
• Additional income for participants
• Reduction of social isolation of participants
• Providing an alternative means of communication to participants with physical or mental limitations
• Providing a new means of expression for individuals who have experienced trauma and loss
• Creating new audiences for artists who have had little or no previous exposure
• Publications and catalogues documenting the artistic output of GRACE artists
• The development of a GRACE artwork collections for exhibit and sale
• The development of a permanent collection to preserve and document the work of regional self-taught artists from within the GRACE program.

Nuts and Bolts

Environment

GRACE is located in northern Vermont, a rural state ranked as the poorest of the New England states. The organization’s constituency is 75 percent elderly, 45 percent mentally or physically challenged, and five percent youth. Within this group, 90 percent have disabilities, nearly 50 percent are institutionalized and 75 percent are women. Over 85 percent of GRACE’s clientele live primarily on Social Security and federal disability benefits (SSI).

Leadership

GRACE started with one artist , Don Sunseri, teaching art to seniors at the Johnsbury Convalescent Center located in Northeastern Vermont. A CETA grant supported Don Sunseri’s efforts in the early years. As the program has evolved from a few introductory workshops to a venerable and respected cultural organization, the program has kept its original identity as an artist’s project. The GRACE motto from that time to now is “Be yourself and do it your own way.” This would be an appropriate caption on the picture of leadership that emerges from GRACE’s history. On its Web page GRACE pointedly avoids the word “teacher” to describe its workshop leaders. They say they are

artists working to share and encourage creativity in others. As people working with people, we learn as much from workshop participants as they learn from us, or perhaps even more. By not teaching and by encouraging participants to be themselves, GRACE facilitates and encourages the process of self-discovery.

Both GRACE’s founder and its current director have approached their leadership of the organization in the same way. Their job is not so much managing as it is creating a supportive environment for creative enquiry and discovery.

Resources

Budget: The annual operating budget is $150,000.

Development: The program is supported by:

• Earned income from the workshops provided for the various sites and from exhibits and the sale of works of art
• Contributed income from grants and donations
• Income from a small endowment

Over the past five years, the budget has been growing at a rate of around five percent per year. A substantial anonymous donation in the 1990s supported the organization’s operations and created a small operating endowment. Since the purchase of the building in 2000, GRACE completed a limited capital campaign and reduced the mortgage debt by 70 percent and completed the first phase of building renovations. Currently, GRACE is embarking on a fundraising plan to finish renovating the building and to provide for its maintenance.

Governance

GRACE is governed by a board of directors of eight members, consisting primarily of community representatives. The board oversees organizational policy and does participate in short- and long-term fundraising efforts. The director sees building the board with a view to fundraising as a need and a goal.

Partnerships

Vermont Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Community Foundation, Town of Greensboro, Town of Hardwick, Howard Community Services, Northeast Kingdom Human Services

Training

The members of the staff of GRACE are professional artists. However, the training required to be a workshop facilitator at GRACE or to develop similar programs elsewhere is not based on formal instruction in a curriculum. Rather, interested persons are sent print materials and then invited to observe GRACE workshops. Their publication, “States of GRACE,” describes the philosophy behind this “training”:

The GRACE style of training, not surprisingly, follows a similar style to that of the workshops. This approach happens to be the style of Lao Tzu’s “Tao te Ching.” Action is really a sort of inaction. Inaction doesn’t really mean no action whatsoever, but action that is allowed to happen naturally, without force or meddlesome efforts. A bit more specifically, the Tao encourages refraining from activity contrary to Nature or going against the grain of things. This is the intrinsic nature of the GRACE program…

At the workshops, we encourage visitors to relax and observe rather than to try to help. The environment is creative and informal, so dialogue with participants is a great way to get a feel for how the workshops are run. Once an artist starts working, however, everyone must back away and let that “special silence” take over. It is what we strive for and treasure in GRACE workshops.

Usually we set aside a time to get together with visitors and talk about the workshops. Questions often arise about the GRACE “method” — the “shoulds” and “should nots.” GRACE staff members are not teachers but artists working to share and encourage creativity in others. As people working with people, we learn as much from workshop participants as they learn from us, or perhaps even more. By not teaching and by encouraging participants to be themselves, GRACE facilitates and encourages the process of self-discovery.

—“States of GRACE”

Constraints

The main constraint is money. As a small, rural nonprofit, they constantly have to worry about running their program on limited funds. Attracting the attention of the large foundations is a related problem, since their rural location and small staff means that they are not able to do the cultivation necessary to “get on the radar screen” of large foundations whose mission coincides with that of GRACE.

Advice to Funders

The lack of operating support from foundations has been a major hurdle. This is a significant issue for organizations after “start-up.” Loss of substantial funding after many years of consistent support caused a budget deficit for GRACE. Grant applications are often cumbersome and require undue staff time for completion.

[Next: Case Study: Isangmahal Arts Kollective]  [Table of Contents]

Notes

1. Rexer, Lyle, “Acts of Recognition: Lyle Rexer Introduces the Work of Vermont's G.R.A.C.E. Program” (Raw Vision magazine #25, 1998)
2. "States of GRACE" (GRACE, 1998)