The Artmaker as Active Agent: Six Portraits

By Susan Monagan

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Certain artists bridge levels of expertise and challenges of language and interpretation in order to make their work meaningful and relevant to diverse audiences. These artists are often engaged in what has become known as a community-based art that involves community participants in roles beyond that of the passive spectator. Though the field is struggling to emerge and define itself, those who practice this type of work generally see themselves as serving communities and interpreting the experience of places and communities through artwork. Often this artwork is made by or with non-artists.

This project asks several questions of those who make community-based art as well as broader questions about whether community-based artmaking can be used to enhance participation in public life. Through a process of interviewing six artists as well as engaging in document research, the project focuses on three questions:

• How did each of these community-based artists come to this way of working?
• What are they doing now? What is their experience?
• What sort of meaning-making or theorizing do they do about the work they do and make?

This first chapter provides an overview of this project. The second chapter describes the project methodology and the researcher’s personal involvement in the project. Chapters three though eight are the interpretive, written portraits of the community–based artists who were interviewed and researched. This work concludes in chapter nine with a discussion of the findings of this research along with their implications and recommendations to the field of community-based art.

Six artists are represented here:

Martha Bowers, choreographer and founder and artistic director of Dance Theater Etcetera (DTE) based in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating “large-scale events designed to bring community members together with professional artists as performers in site-specific works,” (Dance Theatre Etcetera, 2005, Para. 7). She is also an artist-educator and is presently teaching at New York University’s Tisch Drama Program.

Marty Pottenger is a performance artist known for creating multi-year, multi-partnered artistic collaborations that are inquiries into current social and cultural issues. The products of these inquiries range from theatrical performances to video to websites. She lives in Manhattan.

George Trakas is an environmental sculptor whose work is represented in collections throughout the world. He is currently engaged in several public works projects through the “Percent for Art” program. He lives in Manhattan.

“Barnaby Evans is an artist who works in many media including site-specific sculpture installations, photography, film, garden design, architectural projects, writing and conceptual works. …Evans is best known for WaterFire, a sculpture that he installed on the three rivers of downtown Providence.” (WaterFire, 2005, Para. 1)

Jennifer Miller is the artistic director, and an original founder, of Circus Amok. “A New York City based circus-theater company, Circus Amok addresses contemporary issues of social justice to a diversity of neighborhoods throughout the NYC area,” (The Gunk Foundation, 2005, Para. 1) by giving free performances in public parks.

Doug Rice is the Executive Director of ARTWalk in Rochester, NY. “Conceived by local residents, ARTWalk is a permanent urban art trail and an interactive outdoor museum, connecting the arts centers and public spaces within the Neighborhood of the Arts,” (Rochester ARTWalk, 2004, Para. 1).

As the United States continues to move into a post-industrial, service-based economy, some regions, cities and communities have been more successful than others in retooling their economies to take advantage of opportunities for growth and development. Successful communities have often engaged creative thinking and arts-related initiatives to fuel positive community growth. Any discussion of the revitalization of downtown Providence, RI, for example, must take into account the success of Barnaby Evans’ “WaterFire.” Joseph C. Thompson’s Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) has transformed the town of North Adams, MA. Mass MoCA’s mission reflects a central commitment to linking community and economic development and the arts.

If MASS MoCA's mission is to foster and present exciting new work of the highest quality in all media – and in all phases of its production – we also work hard to position the arts as a vibrant catalyst for community revitalization: indeed, the creation of new markets, good jobs and the long-term enrichment of a region in economic need is one of MASS MoCA’s driving purposes. We at MASS MoCA are convinced that advancement of the arts, increased tourism and community participation, and regional economic redevelopment are mutually reinforcing and inextricably linked, and we act forcefully on that belief. The arts create and bestow community identity. Identity rallies hope, productivity, pride and economic vibrancy. These are the base conditions for a healthy community; they cannot be created, however, without risk, creativity, adventure, and the willingness to embrace the new… (MASS MoCA, 2005, para. 3)

Successful communities and institutions can take advantage of the fact that artwork and artistic events are great gathering moments. Mass MoCA, for example, hired interviewee Martha Bowers to create “The Dream Life of Bricks,” which explored, through movement, the social and psychological history of change as represented by the museum’s buildings. When people in communities are drawn to sites and events they have the opportunity to craft and define their community life. These opportunities can lead to improvement in the more traditional indicators of community health such as lower crime rates and economic metrics such as higher property values and wage rates.

Discussions about the role of the arts in community development have been going on within the art world for at least fifteen years. More recently, artists, art advocates and associated institutions along with public policy and community development experts have begun to explore ways of publicly supporting concrete ways of reinterpreting existing public art programs with community goals in mind. In November 2003, the “Bruner/Loeb Symposium on Transforming Communities through the Arts” invited sixty “architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, journalists, artists, philanthropists and community developers” (Borrup, 2003, para. 2) to listen to the artists who have successfully engaged communities and discuss adopting appropriate critical and theoretical lenses for viewing this work and its impact on communities.

Many studies such as the New England Foundation for the Arts’ 2001 “The Creative Economy Initiative: A Blueprint for Investment in New England’s Creative Economy” have looked at the impact of the arts on community development and economic recovery but few have focused on the role of the individual artist, choosing to focus on institutions instead. This study seeks to begin to fill this gap in the research.

Private funders such as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have also sought to foster a link between the arts and community development. Rockefeller’s PACT program:

supports US-based community cultural development projects-projects undertaken by artists and other cultural professionals in collaboration with other community members to express identity, concerns and aspirations through the arts and media, building cultural capacity, and contributing to social change. (Rockefeller Foundation, 2005, para. 1)

The Ford Foundation’s has underwritten Americans for the Arts’ “Animating Democracy” initiative. Animating Democracy,

fosters arts and cultural activity that encourages and enhances civic engagement and dialogue. It is based on the premise that democracy is animated when an informed public is engaged in the issues affecting people’s daily lives. The arts and humanities can contribute unique programs, settings, and creative approaches that reach new and diverse participants, stimulate public dialogue about civic issues, and inspire action to make change. (Animating Democracy, 2005, para. 1)

Public policy makers have begun to enter the conversation as well. In 2003, New York State launched “The Culture Zone Project” and began discussions about how the state might create policy by which communities, cities and regions of the state can take advantage of the economic and quality of life benefits a thriving arts community can bestow.

In short, there has been new and sustained interest on several fronts in putting the power of community arts initiatives behind social problems. The positive benefits to be derived from artists and their artistic products and processes, cannot be extracted from those products, processes and persons, themselves, however. It is clear that the successful implementation of the Culture Zone Project, for example, must include conversations with the artists who have considerable experience in engaging individuals and communities through their work. Artists should not be seen as a tool or a means to an end, but as key shapers of the future direction of community life. This study gives evidence of the direct leadership qualities of community-based artists as well as of their ability to analyze self, product and process in order to invigorate the public art policy conversation.

Community-based artist/practitioners such as those profiled here have emerged from a market-driven field described by curator Mary Jane Jacob as follows:

The mainstream contemporary art world focuses on the production (artists and works of art) and the distribution (museums, galleries, and publications) of contemporary art. Mediation between the work of art and the audience is usually the purview of professionals designated as educators… (Jacob, 1995, p. 50)

Artists working within this production/distribution paradigm have been expected and trained to hone their expertise through consideration of formal issues and exploration of universal themes. The community-based artist must address the formal challenges of her field while developing her expertise in working with specific materials and engaging in the hard work of developing her own creative process. But working with communities demands that she also be able to bridge her expertise to non-experts and across disciplines, academic and professional. These artists may find themselves presenting or persuading at community planning board meetings or engaging in classic community organizing techniques, pitching their project idea to potential participants in a senior citizen center. They continually choose to stretch their definitions of themselves and their work and then translate these definitions in order to engage individuals and groups and meet their objectives. They develop a skill set that meets the needs of interpersonal politics, one that is neither taught nor valued by conservatories and fine arts schools. It is important to these artists to develop these skills in order to address social problems through their artmaking.

Critic Patricia Phillips presents the taboo notion that art be acknowledged as “useful.”

Public art needs to pursue and support strategies that encourage artists, critics, and audiences to accept the instrumentality of art, (Phillips, 1995, p. 69).

The overall design of the community-based project and its process of engagement are often of more value and more reflective of individual artistry than the end product itself; this work has the greatest value to those engaged in it and their immediate communities. Community-based artists often remark that their work builds a community’s capacity for participation and helps build an active citizenry. Another characteristic of community-based artists is their commitment to using their art to directly address issues of power, especially in relatively powerless or less legible communities. A community-based artist might tackle these issues thematically in the subject or structure of the piece itself, as Barnaby Evans does in WaterFire, or through process by actually creating artwork with representatives of groups that have heretofore misunderstood or mistrusted one another, as Martha Bowers did in Blue Train.

In the introduction to Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Suzanne Lacy writes of community-based artists,

Until recently such artists have not been linked to each other in the critical discourse. They have been examined within their artistic disciplines – performance, video, installation, photography, or murals, for example – or seen as isolated and idiosyncratic examples. If they are contextualized at all it is as socially conscious or political artists, more or less in vogue, depending upon the currency of their subject matter; that is, the unifying characteristics have been seen as subject-specific. The structural models and underlying assumptions of their works are specific to their topics and personal styles, to be sure, yet there are major points of unity, (Lacy, 1995, p. 12 ).

So which are these “points of unity”? The six artists interviewed, researched and described in the portraits that follow each have had twenty or more years experience in working with communities. All came of age during the political, social and cultural upheaval of the 1960’s and 70’s and have had experience as activists in the social movements of that era, having participated in civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, feminist and/or gay and lesbian movements. They participated in these movements as citizens but, as artists, also felt the need to have their art respond to and serve their political goals and objectives. Just as traditional political and social systems were revealed to be oppressive concentrators of wealth and power, cultural systems were intertwined with these structures and contributed to inequality. This inequality is represented by contemporary artistic creation that is viewed and interpreted only in an “art-historical” context, that is, art that can only be understood and fully experienced if the observer has the education to place it within the cultural, social and aesthetic movements that shaped it. These artists sought to make art more inclusive, representative and to highlight unheard voices and undervalued experiences.

Nearly all of these artists describe a watershed moment of having run up against the hierarchy of their disciplines and to have sought an alternative career path that would honor their social and political commitments to change. These artists may represent a generation of artist practitioners, steeped in the issues of their day, but they also describe careers that have evolved toward greater engagement over time. Artists do not typically leave formal training programs with the intention of working with communities. These artists were pushed from or repelled by the commodity model of artistic production and toward a way of working that would result in a broader impact and more direct contact with their audience.

Patti Phillips continues:

Many of the artists first drawn to the sense of possibility in public art shared a feeling that the prevailing conventions of the traditional art world were limiting and exclusionary. Yet their interests and intentions varied widely, and the work they created reflected this diversity. Public art excludes no media, materials, or process. It can require years of planning, consultation and approval to develop, or it can occur spontaneously and unsanctioned. It can be momentary or lasting. It can at once excavate the past and envision the future. With a broadening of the conception of public, it can happen at almost any time, with anyone, and virtually anywhere. Although there are a small number of memorable examples, public art can even occur in galleries, museums and other private settings, (Phillips, 1999, para. 4).

This study gives evidence of some of these “memorable examples” as seen through the eyes of those responsible for them.

Next: Chapter 2 - Methodology
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