The Arts and Community Strengthening

The script of a talk given at a conference of the Michigan Association of Community Arts Agencies, November 8, 2000

INTRODUCTION

The topic for today is "The Arts and Community Strengthening." Community strengthening, community building, community development — whichever phrase you use, it’s being talked about as a new idea. It isn’t new, really — if you subscribe to the notion that ideas move in cycles, as I do, then it’s an old idea whose time has come, again. I am using the word "community" to refer to geography today — a neighborhood, a town, a watershed. I’m not referring to the "community of Jamaicans in Detroit," the "community of users of America Online," the "community of gay people." I am referring to places where people who are different from one another live together and try to carve out a good life together. I’m using it in the sense that Lewis Thomas, the biologist, did when he said,

…[there are] no independent creatures. The life of any given individual, of any species, is dependent on other individuals, on other species . Moreover, the existence of a given species depends upon the genetic diversity of that species. You don’t want to plant field after field of the identical hybrid corn — a disease would wipe out absolutely everything. Instead, you diversify so that the economy still survives — even if one brand of corn is wiped out.

This morning, I want to do several things. First, I want to tell you a little about the arts and community strengthening lineage that the arts people in this room share, even if they don’t know it. The stories are important: if you’re going on a long trip, it helps to know the background and service record of the car you are driving. Second, I want to throw out a couple of observations for the community arts organizations about the crossroads that I think these organizations are at. Then I want to suggest an array of possible new goals for our work, the shared goals that we have with the many partners in this room, and give you a couple of stories about these (sometimes, stories are easier to remember than more abstract lists of things).

A SHORT HISTORY OF COMMUNITY ARTS

Now, I want to mention some movements and characters that led the arts people, knowing it or not, to be here today, and more importantly, to be poised — no, maybe mandated! — for significant work in their communities. Storytelling lets you know where you started, how far you’ve come, where you’re going and what it all means. Most cultures know about that — look at the almost sacred role given the storyteller, storyholder, griot, across the world. It’s the way that community wisdom is shared and passed on. Indeed, that could be the best image to hold in your mind as you do your community work — the activities you’re doing to build your communities are simply descendents of the stories, the petroglyphs, the dances and ceremonies from the first people on this continent. I suppose I could stop right here, but MACAA gave me 50 minutes, so —

Village Improvement, Beautiful Cities

Let’s leap ahead a couple thousand years. To Anglo cultures in the United States. We’re in 1853 when the Village Improvement movement started in Massachusetts. It addressed issues of ugly billboards, need for community trees, paving the roads and recreational facilities. By 1900, there were about 3,000 such groups in the United States, trying to develop a sense of place through aesthetics. This in turn led to the "City Beautiful" movement, exemplified by the architectural ideas showcased at the Chicago World’s Fair at the end of the 19th century that emphasized a return to grand, classical architecture for public buildings (think of the Museum of Science and Industry, the Aquarium, the Midway). At about this time, Frederick Law Olmstead was stressing the importance of parks in cities, and a few public art commissions were created in urban areas. Two things slowed all of this down, though — first, the idea that grandeur was classist, an amenity for the wealthy, and second, efficiency was replacing aesthetics as a value. There were a few voices raised in opposition to this — a notable one was Frank Lloyd Wright’s, who believed that the middle class had every right to aesthetics that the upper class did; he even designed a line of wallpaper, drapes, and so forth, to be marketed through Sears. In any event, this story holds our roots of involvement in public art and design.

The Grassroots Circuit, Chautauqua

Let’s jump back to the early 1800’s and follow another thread. In this story, Josiah Holbrook of Massachusetts started inviting his neighbors to his home for discussions of books. Gradually, he started inviting professors and the discussions were expanded to encompass new ideas. This led eventually to the founding of the American Lyceum Association in 1831; by 1850 there were about 3,000 of these groups. But then someone had the ideas that discussion leaders should be paid honoraria and the discussions should become lectures. The next logical step was to put lecturers on "the circuit," and James Redpath started a management organization to do exactly that. He valued efficiency, so naturally favored lectures in communities that could afford the fee and that were on the railroad line. The grassroots movement — begun as discussions by ordinary folks in people’s homes — began to wither as this more "professional" movement grew. Now, cut to Chautauqua, New York, where Rev. John Vincent was experimenting with the use of the arts to teach the Bible. This approach proved very popular, and pretty soon, Rev. Vincent’s study packages were being shipped to scores of local Chautauqua Circles. Now, cut back to the Redpath agency, where now-manager Keith Vawter had a big idea. He had lecturers. The Chautauqua Circles were a network of potential presenters. So he brought the two together and if the lecturer was hot enough, but the town was small enough, he even provided tents for the lecture. Do you see in these stories your presenting roots? But more, the linking of the arts to the introduction of new ideas and new ways of thinking? As well as the notion of learning about a given topic through the methodology of the arts? But do you also see the shift from grassroots participation to a one-way lecture situation? What can we learn from this?

The First Community Arts Councils, The Settlement House Movement

Thread #3, the growth of the arts themselves. There were theater companies in America in the 18th century, of course, especially in the urban areas, though a performance by a so-called professional company was reported in rural Kentucky in 1797. There were performances on showboats and there were Mexican vaudeville companies traveling throughout the southwest. It was said that in the Rocky Mountain West, the first building built after the assayer’s office and the saloon was the opera house, and in many places that was probably true. Artists like Edwin Booth and Sarah Bernhardt were seen in many small towns. Redpath’s idea of traveling lecturers spawned groups like Columbia Artists Management and suddenly there were Community Concert Series growing throughout the country. Community-based arts were growing, too, in small towns. Fargo, N.D., had an art league well established by 1911. Quincy, Ill., had an orchestra with a paid conductor by 1947. In 1944, the Junior League of America took it one step further, offering consulting services to communities wanting to expand the number of arts activities and to coordinate existing arts activities. Interestingly, Virginia Lee Comer, the woman behind this idea, was insistent that, when she visited a community, she should talk to all groups of people — not just arts groups — about creative activity in the community; she saw churches, union halls and housing projects as obvious places for arts activity because people gathered there. Ms. Comer’s manual on assessing, coordinating and stimulating arts activities in small communities, and her work in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1946-7, probably led directly to the institution of community arts councils — one branch of the community-arts tree. Here you arts folks probably see your roots of coordinating, of cultural planning, of the notion of breadth of access to the arts.

Hop back again to the turn of the 20th century. In urban areas, you see the Settlement House movement. I’m sure you all recognize the name of Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago to provide entry points, orientation points, for new immigrants to the United States, and to provide basic social services for them. She was adamant that poverty, that not speaking English, should not mean disenfranchisement from one’s culture. Her comprehensive social-service program included meals and helping to locate housing; but it also included a gym, men’s and women’s clubs, programs in native languages as well as English, a library, art classes and an art gallery, a drama group. The National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, whose membership must pledge that no one will be turned away for lack of ability to pay for lessons or lack of so-called "talent," traces its roots directly to Hull House. Here we see the start of the integration of the arts and social services.

The University Extension Service, The Civic Theater

Meanwhile, at the same time in rural areas, the Extension Service of the land grant universities was doing similar work. They were producing opera in Iowa, encouraging folk arts in Kentucky, inserting the arts into community planning efforts in Ohio, linking arts and recreation, arts and homemaking, arts and the meaningful use of leisure time. Some individuals stand out: In upstate New York, Alexander Drummond was disgusted by the quality of so-called "rural plays" marketed by Samuel French, which portrayed rural people as hicks with no deeper concern than a new dress for the big dance. So Drummond called for farmers who might want to write plays, and deployed his graduate students in theater as the dramaturgs to help them do so. In North Carolina, Frederick Koch believed that, because of the nature of the American ideal, America’s culture could only be recorded by ordinary Jo(e). So he got people in his theater program to start writing so-called folk plays — plays about their background, about people in their communities. He insisted that his program be a mix of rich and poor, sharecropper and landowner, black and white. Literally thousands of these "folk plays" were written in North Carolina during his time on the faculty. Alfred Arvold, in North Dakota, was passionate that a community was an organic whole, and that the arts must not be broken off from the ongoing life of the community. To this end, he promulgated the notion of the community center where there would be a wonderful jumble of activity — it would be a recreation center, science center, arts center, government center, where sometimes you couldn’t tell where one began and the other left off. In 1917 he wrote,

A community center is a place, a neighborhood laboratory, so to speak, where people meet in their own way to analyze whatever interests they have in common and participate in such forms of recreation as are healthful and enjoyable. The fundamental principle back of the community center is the democratization of all art so the common people can appreciate it, science so that they can use it, government so that they can take a part in it, and recreation so they can enjoy it. In other words, its highest aim is to make the common interests the great interests. To give a human expression in every locality to the significant meaning of these terms — "come let’s reason and play together" — is in reality the ultimate object of the community center.

In Wisconsin, Robert Gard’s initial dream was to get every Wisconsinite writing; this ideal grew from the notion of populist government that prevailed in Wisconsin at the time. This "Wisconsin Idea" interrelated civic involvement, public education, access to the newest ideas and fulfillment of creative potential for all of the citizens of the state. In 1955, he wrote in Grassroots Theater about the deep relationship between art and "sense of place." But Gard’s dream kept expanding, and in the Arts in the Small Community, 1967, he admonished arts groups to work with athletic groups like football teams, churches, organizations serving various ethnic groups, senior citizens and others, in the service of a healthy whole community. In these stories, we see our commitment to empowering the individual, and the notion of the role of the arts in whole communities.

Another individual, working a little earlier than Gard, was Baker Brownell. He was a philosopher from Northwestern University, brought to Montana in the 1940’s to help small towns think about their future, especially their economic future. He believed that this process started with a review of the community’s economic, religious, creative, ethnic and educational histories; the self-study process that he designed culminated in the production of a pageant that didn’t just recite these histories, but used them as a way of addressing the future. Brownell believed that there are periods where specialists are needed in a society, giving way to periods where generalists are needed. It is tempting, for it’s easier to remain in a world of specialists, but he saw overspecialization as the path to the death of the soul and of society. Generalists must stride forward — people who applied their knowledge to issues of the whole, to the integration of society and he saw artists as people with this special knowledge. Brownell juxtaposed the "human community" to the "culture of specialism." In the human community — which would be a place where the scale would be shrunk so that people could know one another as whole persons - he saw the arts as a tool in community planning, but more importantly, as the way to reclaim a society’s soul. He believed art to be a verb — that everyone is latently creative and thinking, but that the art system in too many places reinforces passivity, and the way of passivity is the way of death.

Ours is a culture of displaced persons. It is tattered with escape and wandering, and as such is a culture founded on being lost…. What the Germans did to millions in the concentration camps, and the Russians to tens of millions in the mass deportations, the western world in general does less dramatically but as effectively to hundreds of millions swarming homelessly to centers of vicarious and secondary culture. Their lives die out, love rots, and hope is replaced by avid stimulation.

We still make pious statements in support of the integrity of life. But we do not live it. With the radical decline of the community the ideals of wholeness of life have become more and more a succession of whitewashed phrases….There is no substitute for wholeness, no alternative for the integrity of human life. It is a norm which underlies all responsible conduct, all ethical conduct, and indeed sanity itself.

In all this, art may become merely one of the seducers to death. Or it may become the insight of life and survival itself.

Literally, he tied artists to the life of a society and this, too, is something we are awakening to, today.

Rachel Davis-Dubois (no relation to WEB Dubois, though she worked with him) was an educator in New York working in the 1930-50s.. Her lifelong devotion was to multicultural education, K-12. But even more than this, she articulated the notion of "cultural democracy" as being the third leg of the American stool, along with political and economic democracy — but the leg that had not yet been attended to. She believed that the American dream could not be realized without equal emphasis on cultural democracy. In 1943 she said

The melting pot idea, or "come-let-us-do-something-for-you" attitude on the part of the old-stock American was wrong. For half the melting pot to rejoice in being made better while the other half rejoiced in being better allowed for neither element to be its true self…. The welfare of the group…means [articulating] a creative use of differences. Democracy is the only atmosphere in which this can happen, whether between individuals, within families, among groups in a country, or among countries. This kind of sharing we have culled cultural democracy. Political democracy — the right of all to vote — we have inherited…. Economic democracy — the right of all to be free from want — we are beginning to envisage…. But cultural democracy — a sharing of values among numbers of our various cultural groups — we have scarcely dreamed of. Much less have we devised social techniques for creating it.

Indeed, the more I think about her words, the less I like the concept of "outreach," except, perhaps, as a marketing term. The word "for" — in the sense that she is using it, the "come-let-us-do-something-for-you attitude" — has joined my list of "f" words.

Much of her work was about enabling groups to study, understand and value their own cultures, and to equally value, and delight in, the cultures of others. Here, again, I’m sure you see some of your roots.

Finally, in the first half of the 19th century, you see an articulation of the responsibility of the artist to building a stronger civic society. Percy MacKaye, from a long family of theater people, articulated the responsibility of the artist to explicitly think of himself or herself as building civic infrastructure; and certainly, the artists later in the century, who were put back to work by the WPA, wrote and produced plays and murals that challenged and raised questions while they also beautified and delighted.

The Civic Theater idea, as a distinctive issue, implies the conscious awakening of a people to self-government in the activities of its leisure. To this end, organization of the arts, of the theater, participation by the people in the arts, not mere spectatorship, a new resulting technique, leadership by means of a permanent staff of artists (not of merchants in art), elimination of profit by endowment and public support, dedication in the service to the whole community: These are chief among its essentials, and these imply a new and nobler scope for the art of theater itself.

Our roots here, too, are obvious.

COMMUNITY ARTS NOW: QUESTIONS, STRATEGIES

Community Arts in the Present Tense

Now let’s look at the present — at two moments and two movements that I’ll bet you remember. Moment #1: the creation of the NEA in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and a few years later, the creation of CETA by the Department of Labor — both of which re-introduced the idea, dormant after the WPA, that arts are a public good and should be supported by the taxpayers in the interest of a Great Society. Moment #2: the Bicentennial. Scores of communities came together to review their history, or histories, and many Bicentennial celebrations led to the establishment of permanent organizations — ArTrain, here in Michigan, was a Bicentennial activity intended to spawn community arts celebrations wherever it parked, and I suspect many of your arts councils were ArTrain babies.

And the two movements: the Civil Rights Movement, which involved the public in urgent issues of justice and multicultural coexistence; many artists and arts groups joined the front lines of this movement. And the other was Reaganomics which, as a result of terrific cuts in social service, community development and arts budgets, led to a modus operandi of entrepreneurialism for arts groups.

So arts councils grew and flourished. Nonarts organizations like hospitals and recreation centers began to include the arts in their programs. Cities began to recognize the importance of creative activity in building healthy communities. That’s why you are all here.

But I think that, today, Baker Brownell’s signposts are smack in front of us. I believe that we are emerging from an era of great specialization. We have achieved unbelievable things in the last century in terms of what we know and what we know how to do, and I’m not only talking about technology. No matter how specialized it is, you can find a club for it, a magazine for it, a myriad of books and Web sites about it, probably a college degree in it. We have taken specialization to a new level. We have almost perfected the art of being community arts councils, for instance. So Brownell’s choice would be, we can continue to specialize, and our society will become overripe, sick, un-human. Or we can declare ourselves champions of the human community, and begin to integrate all that special knowledge, all those interest groups, all those departments that don’t talk to one another, all those individuals whose "community" is people just like them whether they find their "like" folks in clubs, on the Internet, or at work. That is, I believe, the challenge all thinking people face right now. But I also believe that this is a special moment for the arts - because they are about questioning and about bringing people together and about creating safe spaces for everyone to try out ideas, experience one another and laugh and cry together. I actually think that this is our moment of moral choice.

Our Role as Healing Generalists: Some Basic Questions

Now, the specialty we arts folks have is more, and better arts, accessible to more people — one of the stories you heard. You may decide that that’s enough. But If we choose to enter the public arena as Brownell’s healing generalists I hope that we do — I believe that we must! — it means that we need to go back to some basics and rethink our role in the community. That rethinking can begin in conversations in the care today with the folks you came with. It can begin in those horrible insomniac moments that I, for one, seem to be experiencing more and more these days. It can begin in conversations at the dinner table with your kids. In your board meeting. I suggest that you aren’t really prepared to play in the new civic arena until you’ve arrived at perhaps embarrassingly simple, but intensely personal, answers to certain questions. Think about how Rachel Davis-Dubois, Baker Brownell, Percy MacKaye and the others might inform you as you ask questions like:

• What does it mean to live in a democratic society? Am I unafraid to live with the implications of my answer? For instance, if I say that democracy is about the equal empowerment of everyone, am I unafraid to live with decisions made by people not like me?
• What is a community? Right now, "community" has become one of those feel-good words that have to be used if a certain brand of Internet access is to sell or a politician is to get elected, and pretty much it means whatever; but the fact that we respond so powerfully means, I think, that we are hungry for "it." Is community more than an address and if so, what? To what extent should my community be dependent economically and culturally on the "outside world?" In a society where demographics are shifting dramatically, and fast, what is — or isn’t — the significance of that community’s history and way of doing things?
• Is the community ever more important than the individual? Is the individual ever more important than the community? When?
• We say that multiculturalism is the goal, that a single generic culture is not; what does this mean for me and for my daily life? Do I view people’s participation in their own culture as a right to fight for, or a hobby to be acknowledged?
• Are there universal human rights, and if there are, to what extent do have a responsibility to ensure these for people?
• What is a meaningful human life?
• What am I willing to give up in order to achieve my vision of a good community? It’s a world of tradeoffs, after all, and no, you can’t have it all despite what TV commercials tell us: what will I give up?

When I was in planning school, my mentor-professor required us to do what he called a "personal practice framework" before he felt we were ready to do any real-world work. First we had to outline the things we believed to be true in the universe — those ideas like god and truth that, for each of us, just were. Then, we had to state our beliefs about people — what human being were all about. From these two things, we had to outline our personal beliefs about the community development or community strengthening process. And finally, we had to derive from these things a personal code of behavior and ethics. I challenge us all to do some version of this, or update one that we may have thought through long ago.

I don’t think that any of us in this room can do community strengthening work by ourselves. Government can’t do it without the nonprofit sector, and the nonprofit sector can’t do it without the for-profit sector. To be the generalists needed to help heal a society in which children are killing one another, in which desperation is becoming a norm, in which communities are being controlled by headquarters somewhere else, in which the wealth and power gap is getting greater and greater, in which we avoid really having dialogues about ideas - to be these healers, we will only be able to do it together.

For the arts people in the room, I say, don’t worry about "quality" and don’t worry about "audience development." Heretical? Distant from your core mission? Just "chasing the money?" I don’t think so. Raise them if you must; but put them aside. First, we’ve learned that you put the best artists you know in residency situations because the impact is greater. We’re never going to stop doing that. And, many of the artists I know who are doing this type of "community arts" are starting to see it as an emerging art form — the "cutting edge of contemporary art" for many — with its own quality standards and tools. To be part of the creation of a new art form, only now in the process of inventing its own vocabulary — how much more aesthetic excitement, commitment can you possibly seek? Finally, since your mission is probably something like, "to better our community through the arts," I would say: then community art-making in the service of community betterment IS your core mission. If you are defining "community betterment" as "more art is good for people," and working primarily in the area of audience development, well, I guess I would urge you to stretch a little. Using excellence as your means, not the end, compromises nothing, does the "value added" thing, and gives you an audience in 10 years as your dividend (where too much audience development activity, these days, is just about marketing, not about the community, and will leave you with empty seats when your temporarily-expanded audience dies off).

For the nonarts people here, I say, everyone is talking about creative thinking these days, creative problem-solving. The arts folks in the room may not have much cash to bring to the table, but they have, and have access to, almost unlimited creative capital. A small example of what I mean: I know a man who was Mayor of the City of Manitou Springs in Colorado. He had an artists’ advisory committee and whenever he had a public works situation he needed to deal with, he invited the artists to come up with a cheaper, more interesting and more creative solution for the community. If you go to Manitou Springs now, you’ll see their wonderful legacy.

In short, we need each other.

What the Great Stories Teach Us: Shared Goals

So let’s revisit some of those stories for a moment after we’ve thought about our true motivations. From them, what can we derive as goals that you might share, that these old stories can shed light on? Here are the shared goals that I see that you choose from:

• A better physical community — one that is more beautiful, better planned, provides more access, more gathering places. This is the story of the Village Improvement and City Beautiful and Frank Lloyd Wright movements.
• A more thoughtful community — one where people engage in genuine dialogue, questioning, critiquing, leading to more informed personal and collective action. This is the story of Josiah Holbrook and his discussion groups and the Chautauqua clubs.
• A multicultured community, where people understand and prize the cultures of one another as they value their own. This is the legacy of Frederick Koch, of Rachel Davis-Dubois.
• A community of empowered individuals, where each person explores his or her own creativity as a means of arriving at a sense of personal value and dignity. This is the story of Alex Drummond, Robert Gard, the Extension Service.
• A human community, where acting within a scale that is small enough, people come to know one another as whole persons so that they can move forward as a community — not as groups of special interests or "constituencies." This is the story of Alfred Arvold, of Baker Brownell.
• A just community, which provides decency, dignity and tolerance for all. This is the legacy of the Settlement House movement and the Civil Rights movement
• A civic community, where everyone sees himself or herself as responsible to the community and its public processes — improving the caliber of civic dialogue, asking questions about public values, engaging people in thinking about what it means to be a citizen there. This is the legacy of Percy MacKaye, of the artists who participated in the arts programs of the New Deal.

I suggest that you first need to agree on shared goals — even lofty, overarching ones such as these (maybe you call it a mission or a shared vision; I don’t care. I mean, the overarching thing that is so important that it makes you almost embarrassed to talk about because it touches something so deep in you.)

As you articulate what it is you’re trying to achieve you’ll start defining your playing field. You’ll write your strategy, moving from a couple of you having a great conversation in the car to actually getting the involvement of your organizations. Who are other potential players that might share this goal? How do you get them involved? What, organizationally and personally, do they need to get out of working with you? ? Do public decisions need to be made along the way? Can you imagine how the community will change as your work is successful? What resources do you need to get the job done — not only money, people and time, but authority, credibility, power, and how do you get those resources? Along the way, in particular, how will the arts be involved?

Let’s Get Started: Six Essential Strategies

I see arts activity as clustering in the following six "action groups" to help move towards these common goals. Perhaps listing these will be helpful, for each has a different function, depending on what is needed at a given time, which depends, of course, on your strategic outline:

• Activities that CELEBRATE the things that we do have in common. Ever seen the movie "True Stories?" It’s about a little town in Texas whose sesquicentennial celebration is "The Celebration of Specialness;" but they are constantly saying, "But we’re so ordinary — how could we be having a celebration of specialness? As the move unfolds you discover layers and layers beneath these "ordinary" exteriors. Creative layers, too!
• Activities that EDUCATE US ABOUT OURSELVES. In Larimer County, Colorado, a small group of people determined that folks there didn’t know how to talk to someone different from them very well, and that this ability to listen and communicate was a necessary first step if they were ever to move forward on complex issues of land use. Twenty-five artists and twenty-five "non-artists" volunteered for the "Corn Project." Pairs of people were randomly assigned. There were a couple of rules: 1) you couldn’t have ever met the person you were paired with, and 2) you agreed to meet for coffee three times and talk about anything you wished. At the end of these three coffees, you’d decide whether you wanted to make a piece of art together, which contained each of your ideas, each of your creativity, equally — the artist couldn’t simply interpret her companion. Twenty-three of the twenty-five pairs finished their art project even though they all described their initial encounters as "we saw we had nothing in common, but we agreed to meet three times… We were really surprised that we determined to complete this project, and we are finding it wonderful." A realtor and an actress "who will probably never afford my own home," a baker and a writer, a choreographer and a farmer, a music therapist and a hog farmer — the projects, displayed or performed at the fairgrounds on Labor Day did, perhaps, make the first step to true communication in Larimer County.
• Activities that EDUCATE OTHERS ABOUT US. In Crested Butte, Colorado, which depends heavily on tourists for its economic life, the buses that transport skiers to the ski area are all painted with something important about Crested Butte — its history, people who live there, even the dogs that everyone knows who live there — so say, "We live here. Don’t just spend money here: respect our place and people. Get to know us."
• Activities that MOBILIZE people. In Los Angeles, the Bus Riders Union has collaborated with Cornerstone Theater to create a series of mini-plays which are performed literally on the buses by a small team of players who board dressed in costume, do their playlet — which has to do with some issue faced by bus riders, distribute leaflets, and get off the bus several stops later.
• Activities that PREVENT hardship or disaster. Why not have a performance by the community theater during a town planning process — Act I would portray the community if growth, say, continues as it is currently going, Act II would portray the community if a certain decision were made about growth. Act III might show the community if another decision were made about growth. It gives people a way to truly envision their future.
• Activities that HEAL. The Oklahoma City Arts Council was critical in helping to re-build Oklahoma City after the terrible bombing at the Federal Center. Artists who had been in residence at Columbine High School were among the first people that the school turned to after the tragedy and within 2 days the artists were offering activities to students and teachers — the first of a series of activities that are ongoing to this day, two years later.

Before I close, I want to say again that I believe it’s imperative for the future of our society that we engage in this work. It’s hard. It will make us think, maybe sometimes more than we want to. It may knock us off the center of what we think we know. But it is essential work. It is our moment. Lives are at stake. Let me close with this quote from Robert Gard:

If you try, what may you expect?
First a community
Welded through art to a new consciousness of self:
A new being, perhaps a new appearance…
A people proud
Of achievements which life them through the creative
Above the ordinary…
A new opportunity for children
To find exciting experiences in art
And to carry this excitement on
Throughout their lives…
A mixing of peoples and backgrounds
Through art; a new view
Of hope for mankind and an elevation
Of man…not degradation.
New values for individual and community
Life, and a sense
That here, in our place,
We are contributing the maturity
Of a great nation.
If you try, you can indeed
Alter the face and the heart
Of America.

Maryo Gard Ewell is associate director of the Colorado Council on the Arts, with a specialty in community development and the arts. She is the founder of the neighborhood Cultures of Denver, which pairs artists with community organizations in low-income areas of the city; the Arts Education Equity Network, increasing the prominence of the arts in local schools; and a regional folk-arts program in which the state’s four folklorists work in a community-development capacity. She has won several national awards for her work in community arts. Ewell is the daughter of grassroots-theater pioneer Robert Gard.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2001