Deeper than Skin or Gender: Community Arts and Cultural Diversity

My career as a narrative artist has allowed me to work with and in a diversity of cultures and communities; particularly, African-American communities from Langston, Oklahoma, to West Palm Beach County, Florida. In metropolitan Atlanta, I taught poetry to newly immigrated high-school students from around the world. I traveled to small isolated communities throughout the South doing artist residencies for the Georgia Council for the Arts and the Alabama Arts Council. I spent many years working in small, white, rural communities like Whitesburg and Evans, Georgia, to Ozark and Andalusia, Alabama.

These experiences taught me that culture is deeper than skin or gender. I learned to look at culture through the customs we practice and the philosophies we live by.

During my tenure as executive director of Alternate ROOTS, I administered the Community/Artist Partnership Projects (C/APP). The C/APP program exposed me to additional diverse communities and their practices. In Natchez, Mississippi, ROOTS funded a group of visual artists to make their exhibition of African-American art on Main Street visible during the annual Natchez Confederate Days as a way of countering the negative images the event conjured in the minds of visitors. In North Carolina, ROOTS funded a Latino labor organization to use the visual arts as a way to get people involved in helping to define the struggle for labor rights. The community was asked to create symbols of the Latino labor struggle and ultimately to design a logo that would inform and educate the public about their struggle.

My work in the South taught me that while each community is different, there are practices that carry over. That is because the South has played an essential role in the popular struggle for freedom, justice and economic equality. This shared struggle has created its own culture, the culture of struggle. Language and art are modes of communications rooted in this culture. However, because culture can liberate or imprison, we must not be blind pawns of culture. We must recognize that culture is a living entity and we are required to play a role in shaping our own culture.

During the ’70s and ’80s, I was regularly featured at regional social/political rallies. My job was to use poetry to inform those gathered of the issues, to stir their emotions, and to rally them to work for change. However, I wanted my work with activism to be deeper and have more meaning. For several years now I have been working with Project South, a broad-based community-driven organization that develops popular political and economic education and action research for organizing and liberation. Members of this community are all committed to the culture of struggle. They are front-line organizers working everyday on pressing issues of human survival and social justice. They represent movement leaders from grassroots and scholar-activist backgrounds. The issues that unite them in their struggle range from immigrant rights, labor, environmental racism and police brutality to the death penalty.

As a teaching artist, I am particularly interested in the way Project South organizes and uses popular education as a learning process. They understand that education is not limited to attending school, but must be seen as an ongoing process of self-development.

Christi H. Ketchum works with the Project South Youth Council, an open, positive, anti-oppressive group that functions as a collective. The youth make their own decisions about activities and events with a focus on leadership development, social engagement and dismantling oppression. Christi explains that, "Project South uses popular education as a model to educate and develop individuals. Popular education is accessible to people with a variety of education levels and incorporates the lived experiences of people and the issues they face in their communities. The use of dance, skits, songs, games and culture are infused in our work to make activities fun, interactive and bridges gaps between race, gender and class."

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire advises artists to show their support of the people's struggle by giving themselves over to the thinking of the people. Freire cautions us to work with the people to understand through dialogue their awareness of their situation. He advises artists interested in social change to focus on the role of language in human social and political development.

Dwayne Edwards is one of the lead organizers at Project South and has been my primary contact and comrade in promoting art for social change within the Southern community of organizers. "At Project South, we believe that in order for significant change to occur concerning social and economic justice, it requires the masses of people. Historically, we see this in the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. In order to mobilize this block of people, they must be informed about the issues. Many experience this through their day-to day living, others don't. Also, while the ones who experience the different forms of oppression may have some inkling of what they are going through, they may not be able to apply theory to their experience and connect it to other forms of oppression. Art is one way to achieve this connection."

The first lesson I learned about the culture of "struggle" is that art has to be practical, easy to apply and goal oriented. In order to achieve this goal, power analysis has to be at the core of your practice. The role of art is to help participants define, recognize, balance, share and restructure power. The second lesson I learned was how to serve a group of people who are black, white, Latino, Native American and Hawaiian, Asian, etc.; people from rural and urban areas, as well as people who are heterosexual, gay, lesbian or transgender.

As a narrative artist working in a culture of activism and struggle, I use poetry and storytelling within a creative process:

• to balance power within the group,
• as a tool for research,
• to educate myself and the participating community about the issues,
• to help the community define individual and group power, and
• to raise consciousness within the group.

The contribution of social change artists is best described in the words of an activist like Christi: "At every event we include artists like Alice to recite poetry, song and drama to show the importance of culture, arts and creativity to build the capacity of a new movement for social and economic justice. Also, historically, arts have been a vital part of the struggle of people of color, especially African Americans."

Many of the activists who participate in my workshops represent a broad spectrum of the American population. They share an interest in creativity and a desire to learn from the narrative arts processes that could aid them as they strive for social justice. Along the way, I struggle to understand how to enrich my vocation of teaching poetry as literacy and empowerment, and my use of personal/political narratives to draw out personal/political stories of others. My goal is to understand a range of uses for poetry and storytelling in seeking alternative paths to social justice and resolution. When the goal is to raise consciousness, the creation of new metaphors is essential to internalizing and connecting personal values and ethics to the selected readings. In this way, metaphors become invitations to dialogue.

I want to encourage activists to use poetry and personal experience as an essential means of acquiring language to tell the stories that frame their worldview. I want to show them one issue from many angles. That means I have to be knowledgeable enough to contemplate why a conflict occurred and creative enough to conceive of what action(s) could happen next.

Augusto Boal took Freire's charge to the artist to heart and combined his activist calling with his theater experience to create "Theatre of the Oppressed." Boal's experiment in theater proved useful to Brazil's underclasses in its effort to transform their personal and social reality into political awareness and action. Rejecting the popular idea of theater as only spectacle and entertainment, Boal looked to theater as an instrument of education. His objective was to empower the masses of the poor to confront internal and external factors of deeply rooted conflict by increasing their capacity to conceive of change. Boal tells us "it is necessary to pass from the particular to the general, not vice versa, and to deal with something that has happened to someone in particular, but which at the same time is typical of what happens to others" (1979, p. 150).

The obstacles to this work are both external and internal. Artists are by nature inclined to want to be in charge of things. While it might appear that you are leading the process, you must remember you are only one of the group. We have to remind ourselves that this is a shared process. The internal struggle involves overcoming knowledge learned from the media about white, nonwhite and nonmiddle-class people. We must resist our preconceived notions about diversity and culture that could lead us to misunderstand the words and actions of others. This practice requires an artist to remain flexible in order to respond in the moment and be prepared to follow through. People tend to open up when working with the arts, so you must be sensitive to issues of confidentiality.

According to Dwayne, "This is where popular education comes in. Through the use of various art forms, such as role-plays/skits, music, drawings, etc., what can be complicated becomes simple. It also provides a focus for those experiencing the oppression and provides them with a sense of empowerment. For those who are not experiencing a particular form of injustice, art can be used as a way to provide them with empathy and understanding. It helps people focus on the similarities of their struggles while providing a pathway toward understanding of their differences. Art puts people on the same page concerning their different oppressions. It also facilitates their taking the everyday moments of their lives and applying this knowledge to a global perspective of many of the issues that are impacting people around the world."

Working with activists over the years, I learned many lessons.

• Before working with a community, know that you share their goals and objectives, that your actions are supported by a broad sector of the community, and that your activities will address the needs of community.
• Try to gather detailed information on the community, then use this information to guide you in your selection of appropriate activities and settings.
• Use a process that will allow participants to draw from their life experiences and that is reflective of their lifeworld.
• Develop deep listening skills and be open to learning from the community

Working with an activist community has forced me to redefine aesthetics and success. My aesthetics are now based on functionality. Success means understanding that no one can deliver a person to resolution; this is something people do for themselves. Freire urges us to work with the people for popular education and social change instead of trying to bring them to salvation. The task is to collaborate with people to understand through dialogue their awareness of their situation. Education in this paradigm is a dialogue. "Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world." (1970, p. 76).

Reality is in constant flux, unpredictable and interwoven. Therefore topics must be taken from the life and times of the participants. To do this we must pay attention to the stories people tell to explain their world. This means listening for the metaphors and symbols as well as for their realities and goals.

As a society, race, class, sexual identity and religion divide us. In our division, we are filled with rage, shame, fear and guilt. The arts offer us the possibility of bridging the social/political caverns we have constructed in our communities, institutions and society. Today, the arts continue to play an active role in the process of justice mediation in the South. "Art takes the complicated, and through re-creation, simplifies it to provide a pathway toward understanding, empathy, and theory." Dwayne reminds us. "It unites people around perspectives that have historically divided them."

Alice Lovelace is executive director of The Atlanta Partnership for Arts in Learning, an arts infusion program housed in the Alonza A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence at Georgia State University. Alice holds a masters degree in conflict resolution from Antioch University in Ohio. Her thesis focused on the role of art in alternative dispute resolution.

Sources:

Boal, Augusto, "Theatre of the Oppressed," 1979

Freire, Paulo, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," 1970

Lovelace, Alice, "Story in Art and Mediation," masters thesis, 2000

Nudler, Oscar, "On Conflict and Metaphors: Towards an extended rationality," 1990

Schwarzman, Matthew, "Out of the Box: Collaborations between artists and organizers in the 1996 community arts apprenticeship program," doctoral dissertation, 1998

Original CAN/API publication: July 2002