The Artmaker as Active Agent: Six Portraits

By Susan Monagan

CHAPTER 8: DOUG RICE

Figure 8.1. 2002 ARTWalk Anniversary Party

I want to live in a place I like.

Background

Including Doug Rice as a subject for this project paper marks an exploration into yet another facet of community-based art. Doug Rice does not self-identify as an artist; he is a sound engineer. He does not have any formal training in the arts, nor does he have an artistic practice per se. He does, however, play an essential role in the development of community-based art and his personality and unique skills resemble those of the other five profile subjects. Likewise, he shares with them core populist and democratic values that surface his concern for developing capacity for participation in communities.

Martha Bowers remarks, “there is no substitute for the time it takes to have people go through a set of experiences that inform and educate, develop trust and familiarity.” Marty Pottenger adds, “For me, the art was as much in the daily organizational activities – the contacts with people, the phone calls, the public relations, permissions – as it was in the final performances, the exhibits, the video installations.” Doug Rice takes this role one step further into the relational and organizational realm and explores the creative contribution of the person variously described as the “cultural animator.”

In her article, “Telling and Listening in Public: Factors for Success,” Linda Frye Burnham describes this character on the community arts stage.

The term "cultural organizer" is sometimes used interchangeably with "cultural animator or animateur." Adams and Goldbard have used this definition: "'Animation' is derived from the French ‘animation socio-culturel’ and refers to the work of the animateur, a community worker who helps people to build and participate in community life, to articulate their own grievances and aspirations in a public context, and often, to make art from the material of their daily lives."

Erica Kohl adds: "When I was working with social-service and arts and culture organizations associated with a public-school collaborative, we really needed a cultural organizer or outside facilitator to help build relationships and common goals. Someone to bring people together who normally don't interact, work under different conditions or institutional systems, and have different styles and approaches to the work, but are all attempting to strengthen the community through participatory and locally directed means. This is not always an easy job, because turf, funding competition, reporting procedures and community credit and accountability can injure these big collaboratives. It would take someone who understands a bit about each perspective but is not directly affiliated with any of them. Someone who can listen to everyone and be able to pull out the common interests and goals to reflect back to the collaborating groups…” (Burnham, 2001, para. 47-48)

In the early 1990’s, neighbors and property owners in the University Avenue area of Rochester, NY led by Rice began to gather to broadly map out an ideal future for their community and to produce a neighborhood plan. This series of planning meetings led to the neighborhood’s decision to designate itself the “Neighborhood of the Arts”, building on the presence of the George Eastman House and the Memorial Art Gallery in the neighborhood. Though the ideas in this neighborhood plan were not immediately implemented, it became an important blueprint when, in 1998, the community was faced with the reconstruction of its main thoroughfare, University Avenue. Also, the precedent of having come together to plan collaboratively prepared the community to gather again to give collective voice to concerns over the proposed reconstruction project.

In short, the city wanted to widen the Avenue in order to move traffic through the neighborhood. The residents wanted to narrow the Avenue and implement changes to the road that would make it more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly. What emerged from this impasse was an extraordinary multi-year process of co-learning between neighborhood residents and city engineers and designers as they studied concepts of traffic calming, for example, and looked at successful models around the country. This process, conducted in a civil and respectful manner, created ties between city agencies and the neighborhood that have been long lasting and productive. In concrete terms, the neighborhood group CURB (Citizens for University Ave. ReBuild), was given charge of the money to design and help create the sidewalk amenities. The aesthetic, artistic and pragmatic decisions about those enhancements came to be known as “ARTWalk”.

Once the crisis that generated CURB had passed and the Avenue had been rebuilt, ARTWalk picked up the momentum and channeled the planning energy of the neighborhood. The “task force” organizational format that had characterized CURB gave way to ARTWalk’s more formal Board of Directors along with committees organized around specific issues and tasks. The Executive Committee seeks representation of equal numbers of artists, neighborhood residents and neighborhood business owners throughout the organization’s Board and committees.

Doug Rice describes his participation in the formation of ARTWalk the organization and ARTWalk the physical place:

Different skills are needed at different parts of the organization, I think that whatever skill set or obsession I had, drove well towards building strange partnerships that made this happen.

A Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reporter spent a day walking with Rice in the neighborhood and made these observations about the experience.

With Rice on the scene, University Avenue suddenly feels a bit like Sesame Street. Every shopkeeper, resident, firefighter and businessman seems to know him. People wave at him from their cars. They stop to chat with him. They call out to him from their front stoops. It helps that Rice is so visible - he stands well over 6 feet tall. It also helps that he insists on talking to people face to face. When he does, he seems to get what he wants. …Rice admits that his persistence isn't always welcome by some. … He even annoys himself sometimes, he says, with his unyielding, never-say-never attitude. It tires him out. But his approach clearly nets results. And it may have come somewhat naturally to him: Rice's father, the Rev. James Rice, was a community activist who helped form Friends of FIGHT, a group of white people who supported the FIGHT movement for equality of minorities in cities. (Liu, p. 4F)

The Work

According to Rice, the vision of ARTWalk is,

someday, you’re going to walk down that road and nothing will have been bought off the shelf. Every single thing will be custom created whether it be a fire hydrant, a red light, a stop sign. Some of those things are unlikely to ever get there but that’s a fantasy: to have this little world created by artists broadly defined.

In 2002, ARTWalk became designated as a museum by the New York State Board of Regents and presently operates as a not-for-profit charitable institution. Rice likens the process of planning for and choosing art for ARTWalk as a machine for facilitating the interaction between art and community, a specific technique for the community to use to determine the aesthetic design of its neighborhood. The unique appearance of the neighborhood has attracted attention but, perhaps even more importantly, the open process of working collaboratively as a community to consider aesthetic implications appears to have built capacity for democratic participation among local residents. Moreover, Rice believes the success ARTWalk has had in interfacing with city agencies has put community participation and aesthetic considerations on the city’s design agenda permanently.

Ideas for artwork along the walk have emerged either from the ARTWalk Board or from outside groups that have viable schemes for funding their ideas. All ideas, however, must be subjected to a detailed juried process. Juries are composed of equal parts artists, local residents and representatives from local businesses. For example, in 2002, to honor the successful collaborative effort that took place between the city engineers and the community during the University Ave. redesign and construction, and to commemorate their 150th anniversary, the American Society of Civil Engineers commissioned a sculpture along the walk. Though the organization was allowed to choose four members of a seven member jury, the commission was subjected to the ARTWalk process even though the Society was the sole funding source. Rice recounts the movement of the engineers’ sculpture through the ARTWalk process:

Like with the engineers. It’s like, “well maybe it should be a hammer, maybe it should be a bridge.” “Let’s step back. Let’s write down what’s important about engineers.” … The one that got selected, if you looked at it you might not think it has anything to do with civil engineering. But you read the statement and the piece is called “Balance.” Each piece signifies balancing technical requirements with community requirements with functional requirements. The engineers were like, “that’s beautiful!” But if we’d gone with the very first draft … that wouldn’t have been allowed. The whole reason of doing the open call is that we’re going to get something that we can’t think of.

Sometimes the community is directly involved in the creation of art as was the case in the lightpole artistic mosaic project (LAMP). In 2001, ARTWalk commissioned an artist/advisor to work with the community to create mosaics on eleven lightpoles on University Ave. This ongoing process of creation took place on Sunday afternoons over the period of a year and eventually involved more than 500 volunteer/creators.

Rice makes his own artistic contributions as visionary producer of the performance events that ARTWalk regularly holds to raise money, draw attention to the neighborhood and commemorate ARTWalk’s anniversary. ARTWalk invites dance troupes and other groups to perform, but Rice goes beyond the typical, commissioning, for example, the “Frontloader Fantasia” for the 2002 ARTWalk Anniversary Party (see Figure 8.1). Frontloader drivers literally “danced” their machines down University Avenue in a choreographed piece. As Rice recounts:

That is a way of recognizing the creative side of people in a way that isn’t typically understood as creative and I think that helps people who don’t think of themselves as artists realize that maybe they are artists. One of the frontloaders – and I have no reason to doubt him but I never saw it – he said “I can take a bottle of wine, put it down, uncork it and pour it into a glass with my frontloader.” And I see no reason to doubt it and … that’s a commitment and a passion and a skill and an art and part of my whole thing is what is art? And that’s part of what drives my passion is y’know functional art, art in everyday life

The Meaning

Rice’s commitment to the ARTWalk process reveals his populist theoretical roots and a belief that communities, if integrated and involved in an open process can make the best decisions about their future and devise appropriate action plans to move toward that ideal. Rice reflects on his theory-in-use:        

what is public art?... Is public art Nelson Rockefeller buying a sculpture and putting it in front of a building and we are just all grateful that he did that or were we part of the process of getting it there? Our version of public art is that the public is part of the process of getting it there and are vested in it and it’s not like, “here’s ten great sculptures, go ahead and thank me now.” We’re grassroots. The process is the important part.

In introducing The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William Whyte writes,

This book is about city spaces, why some work for people, and some do not, and what the practical lessons may be. It is a by-product of first-hand observation..I…began looking at city spaces. At that time, direct observation had long been used for the study of people in far-off lands. It had not been used to any great extent in the U.S. city. (Whyte, p. 10)

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) Modernist planning critic and urban theorist Jane Jacobs bases her theories on her own careful and systematic observations of what works on the ground. Like that of Gramsci’s “organic intellectual,” Rice’s working theory of ideals for urban living is built upon a personally motivated study of trial and error. Rice places his ideas within the academic context, “I have no schooling in any of this but I pretty much came to these conclusions that all these other people did.” For example, Rice discovered, as Barnaby Evans did, the power of the social-relational phenomenon that William Whyte describes as “triangulation.” And applies it as he describes the “common object that is unusual” in the passage below. He also references Robert Putnam’s influential book on the erosion of “social capital” in communities throughout the U.S., Bowling Alone.

We wanted a stronger community, we feel that there’s a lot of things in … [the] modern world that naturally pull you away from community … like Bowling Alone and … so we wanted to, with a little forethought, try to create some simple things that would help build community. And we figured that basically if you just created a space where people were more likely to want to walk and more likely to want to linger then statistically, gradually more people would walk and more people would linger and more people would interact and therefore the community’s getting built. As I like to really say purposefully building, purposefully designing something to allow random interactions to build community … so it’s like a purposeful design to encourage the random. Like, the dog walker, the person sitting on their porch, those are all important parts of building community. And one way of trying to get people to stop and comment to each other would be a common object that is unusual that you could look at, “Look at that beautiful building, look at that piece of art, look at that piece of junk over there why did we waste money on that? Look at that great thing.” But it doesn’t matter what it is; it’s the opening line. It’s dipping your toe in the water of getting to know your neighbor and that’s part of the point.

Like WaterFire, ARTWalk gets very little voiced negative reaction. It gets support from funders and city officials because many of their objectives are intertwined. ARTWalk seems to have helped raise property values, and, thereby, taxes, in the University Ave. neighborhood. Rice, himself a landlord, owns about 40 units of housing in the neighborhood. At this point, he is able to reconcile his instrumental motivations, including financial motivations, with his personal preferences and worldview. Another major ARTWalk proponent is also a landlord in the neighborhood.

In a September, 2002 Rochester Democrat and Chronicle article, “Neighborhood of the Arts” residents commented upon the change ARTWalk has brought to their neighborhood.

While aesthetically pleasing, ArtWalk has also produced practical improvements, said Scott and Maureen Terzo. On Sunday, they watched the festivities from the porch of their University Avenue home. More people now come to visit the neighborhood, there are fewer problem tenants and property values have risen, they said. "People come with cameras," said Maureen Terzo. "(Neighbors) spend a lot more time outside, so you get to know everybody." Before improvements were made to the neighborhood park, it was an all-day hangout for about 25 men who sometimes drank alcohol there,” said Scott Terzo. "Now there are families with strollers," he said. "The circle of the good neighborhood is getting bigger." (Jackel, 1B)

The unasked question is, “where is the bad neighborhood going?”

Interaction

Figure 8.2

Though Rice is not an artist, he interacts with his community in both the “analyst” and “activist” roles. The analysis has been a way of understanding the activism which is grounded in a belief that lasting change occurs when decisions are made by those who must live with the results of those decisions. He is clear about the boundaries of his activism, however, and what ARTWalk can and cannot do. He believes that the process surrounding ARTWalk decisions is effective because it is non-confrontational.

If you want to build community hand gestures a little bit a little bit, safe. And … art is frequently a way of giving people a way to enter and become engaged at their own pace and in a non-confrontational, not necessarily …supervised, observed way, …. Whereas that’s not always true of a lot of other things. And you get your toe wet before you jump in the water a lot of time. And I think that’s what a lot of people don’t realize is one of the benefits the arts has … it’s not just the five kids fingerpainting at the table that are building the community. It’s the parents sitting in the car outside or all the stuff that goes around it. The arts are just a nice, non-threatening thing … It doesn’t have to be like okay we’re going to organize for these rights or those rights or for this or against this. Which are good unifiers as well, but they tend to be a more focused group a less diverse group because of people sharing whatever their common interest is whereas art can be seen as an activity. It can be seen as a process. It can be seen as an end result. It can be seen as an entertainment and five people can be doing it and thinking they’re doing something different. But that’s not true of a lot of other activities. It’s really malleable and really a good way to let people kind of at their own rate get involved. And … that’s why it ends up being so successful. As long as you keep your expectations low, I don’t mean low, but think about process, not products.

Audience

Figure 8.3

Clearly a reconsideration of audience and the relocation of power in art-choosing and art–siting processes is central to ARTWalk’s mission. As mentioned above, each piece and event may begin with a different originating group or individual but all must be subject to the “ARTWalk Process.” The idea for the sculpture “Balance,” for example, originated with the American Society of Civil Engineers but the two inner circles (“origination and responsibility” and “collaboration and codevelopment”) were then replaced by the jury and potential artists as the process unfolded. Once the piece is chosen, built, and sited, the audience for it becomes the neighborhood’s residents and visitors, though the jury may have been comprised of some of these same people. Finally, as “Balance” becomes integrated within the larger picture and story of ARTWalk, it enters into the purview of the “audience of myth and memory,” and the story the community residents tell themselves about determining the aesthetic and social design of their community through an open, participatory process. Because the work is permanent, it, like Trakas’ sculptures, permanently alters the “users” perception of, and interaction with, the place of University Ave.

we have the mission of essentially building community through the arts simply put … I’m not saying we’re a perfect organization: it’s constantly fluxing and we have many lofty goals as far as an open accessible process for everyone. We’re always having discussion about the balance between open process and cumbersome process - they’re kind of both ends of the same spectrum - and finding where to put our energies. But we feel strongly that everything we acquire is through an open process so that builds community in a number of ways that you might not expect.

As the keepers of the ARTWalk process Rice and others on the ARTWalk board are in a privileged position. They are challenged to define and articulate this process and to know when it’s being stretched beyond its intentions.

ARTWalk would have fifty sculptures on it by now if we just let everyone who stepped forward to volunteer put a sculpture up. But that would have been contrary to the mission and that’s a very difficult thing to tell someone, y’know? So I guess what I’m saying is even though it’s a community building tool and a lot of people are motivated to come forward and a lot of creative people with ideas end up kinda being, because it wasn’t so clearly defined at the beginning either, exactly how it was going to be. So there’s a certain volunteer base that would be our natural base that doesn’t get out of it what they would want to get. You know it’s like, “well I’m going to put in fifty hours and what am I going to get out of it? Oh, nothing, okay, other than helping build this bigger vision and that’s too long term for me to get.”

Rice must perform the cultural animator’s delicate dance of gathering and dispersing power among diverse constituencies. Not only must he consider the needs of individual volunteers as described above, but he must be capable of tactfully wresting control away from funders as well.

What we’re doing lately with funders is there’s of course the whole SNAFU of what to do with you get someone to come up with the money but … you have to tell them “you have to fund this but you can’t choose it.”

Intention

Rice describes the overarching intention of ARTWalk as:

maybe a rallying point, a point of pride, something to help people’s interest in being vested in the community and being less transient … taking more ownership in the community and all the benefits that come from that …

He sees ARTWalk, because of its structure, as being uniquely suited to building small relationship pods that intersect and reinforce one another. The ARTWalk selection process privileges local artists who gain exposure for their work by submitting to calls for designs. Rice has seen as many as 30-50 local artists show up for informational meetings about submitting designs for the work ARTWalk has commissioned over the years. A handful of these artists will be selected to build models of their ideas. These models will be on public view – and will be subject to public commentary - while the jury makes their decision to choose one to fabricate. He feels that these meetings, viewings, and subsequent private discussions about designs strengthen local artists’ networks. Rice specifically uses the phrase “building social capital,” when describing the effect of these networks.

we feel strongly that western New York has some of the most creative people in the world so why snub them? You know give them opportunities, create opportunities to keep people from moving to New York, Chicago ....

The jury is another staple of the ARTWalk process that has the capacity to build relationships across affiliations within the community.

…a jury of generally it’s been 7 to 9 people with a specific eye on trying to get a variety of people on board like someone who has a kid, someone who’s older, someone who’s in the arts, someone who’s not in the arts but maybe more of a technical person, kind of a variety of social status and all that stuff and so that little group gets its own little bonding thing going

Effectiveness

The careful development of and commitment to arts-based planning in the Neighborhood of the Arts through ARTWalk appears to have had the positive effect of attracting outside attention as well as capturing a neighborhood identity which has made residents want to stay, grow and produce within the community. Rice believes that the process of “curating” the neighborhood has built skills of participation that influence other aspects of planning in the community as it honors and helps identify local knowledge. Rice is confident that ARTWalk has had a permanent impact on city planning in Rochester.

As far as the organization goes, … I have a certain amount of maybe pride about having built a consensus and gotten disparate parties together and actually liking each other and communicating. There are so many relationships that were built as a part of this and it’s not just cause like I’m no nothing super great or anything I mean a lot of people stepped forward and put themselves on the line and went above and beyond the call of duty: from the commissioner of environmental services to the director of street design to staff at street design. And it wasn’t easy all the way but we kept it respectful and kept going, “look we know we can get through this” …and what ended up happening as part of the process is city street design will never design a road the way they used to.

Indeed, the “ARTWalk process” though not fully articulated, has been referenced by other groups and individuals involved in community development in Rochester and Rice has been sought out by other neighborhood groups to consult on specific projects.

We both learned a lot …now there’s a lot of connections between community and design and City Hall that never were there that are long lasting.

The following story about the University Ave. rebuild illustrates Rice’s personal definition of success and his power of persuasively prodding.

One defining point was … at the beginning of it all we’re talking with a staff person and then as things get more contentious then a manager then a supervisor and then a whatever! So at the very beginning one of the engineers … I just remember the first time we said “we’re going to make this a two lane road not a four lane road.” I remember him starting to shake and get red in the face … That was just unfathomable that you could even think that! …There’s a physical reaction like, “you people are just ridiculous!” But then a year later when … we kind of reached our compromise design and it was being presented … someone from the community stood up and said, “but won’t that impede traffic and cause traffic problems?” The same guy stood up and said, “traffic calming is a whole different thing then traffic congestion” and defended it.

Figure 8.4. Doug Rice

Next: Chapter 9 - Conclusion
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