The Artist as Citizen

This essay was written as an introduction to Part III: The Artist as Citizen section of "The Citizen Artist."

We have often said that art is essential to the life of the community, and if we're right, then every community ought to have its own artist: a professional who is called on when the town plan is being laid or revised, who consults on celebrations and events of all kinds, as essential to the town as the plumber and the schoolteacher and the mayor.

As far as we know, only a few artists have ever had this job. In 1986 art historian Moira Roth wrote about one: David Harding, the Town Artist of Glenrothes, Scotland, from 1968 to1978. Glenrothes was one of five "new towns" in Scotland run by development corporations. They were to be holistic, homogeneous places for living, work and leisure. Each of these towns hired an artist for a period of time to work in varying degrees on the built environment. Harding got his job by answering an ad for an artist who would work with the architects, engineers and planners of Glenrothes. The term Town Artist was coined in 1970 by a friend of Harding's to describe his role. Here Roth asks him what his job entailed and how it affected the town and Harding himself.

Harding is a visual artist who, even in art school, sought out collaborations with architects. John Malpede is an artist who traveled a very different path to serve a radically different community: the homeless of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Malpede was a New York performance artist with a background in philosophy and street theater when he visited Los Angeles during the Olympics in 1984. He was so struck with the drama of the homeless on downtown's Skid Row that he stayed, got a job with a free law center there, and began putting up flyers in the neighborhood for a free performance workshop.

Malpede soon gathered a conglomeration of inner-city denizens—artists, drifters, singers, actors, writers, lovers and fighters well acquainted with life on the street. They began presenting performances as the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), and were soon touring the U.S. and Europe with performance projects, including LAPD Inspects America, a week (or longer) residency in which LAPD invaded a city and gathered information about homelessness by meeting street people in the places where they gather. Talent shows and workshops were staged in streets, parks, shelters and social-service agencies, and from these local performers were recruited to take part in a performance in a local artspace or theater. The piece is an ever-changing saga that follows LAPD's experiences in this whole process. Almost the opposite of a bleeding-heart liberal approach to depicting life among the unfortunates, LAPD work is street life itself. "You want the cosmetic version," says LAPD Inspects America, "or you want the real deal?" Here we include a conversation between Malpede and actress Elia Arce in which the two artists discuss the unique method employed in getting this act together and keeping it on the road.

The Roadside Theater story reveals another way for artists to serve their community and take its story on the road. Their community is Whitesburg, Kentucky, in the coalfields of the Appalachian Mountains, an economically depressed area that in 1969 was suffering high unemployment and devastating exploitation of its resources by multinational corporations. The now-defunct federal Office of Economic Opportunity opened a film and video workshop there for unemployed youth as part of its War on Poverty. Young people were empowered to make their own images and tell their own stories. When the OEO discontinued the program, the community raised money to continue on its own, and it grew into Appalshop, with an arts and education center that includes film and recording companies, a television and radio station, the American Festival Project and Roadside Theater. Here Donna Porterfield, who has worked with Roadside Theater for 20 years, tells the story of how the theater partners with the people of its town and also takes its stories into the wide world.

What should an artist expect when partnering with a community? Most art schools don't prepare artists properly for community-based work, and many have learned some hard lessons on the job. In "The Cutting Edge Is Enormous" we shed some new light on the artist's job by looking at two of the most accomplished community-based artists in the U.S. Choreographer Liz Lerman vastly expands our view of what's innovative and important in dance, and Richard Owen Geer turns the job of theater director upside-down.

Some artists prefer working with communities inside institutions, and they go there with a wide range of motives. The Imagination Workshop at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles was founded by an actress who was intrigued by what she perceived as the common ground shared by actors and psychiatric patients. William Cleveland writes here of Margaret Ladd's discoveries about the use of the imagination in a therapeutic setting, and tells some moving stories about the transformative energy of art.

Most performing artists conduct workshops in their areas of expertise. Dancer Blondell Cummings considers her community workshops a part of her own creative process, using them to help her focus on the issues raised in each new piece. She gleans autobiographical text and spontaneous movement from her workshops, and sometimes adds them to the text of the new work. Cummings sees this whole exercise, including the performance, as a form of storytelling. Veta Goler interviews her here about the aesthetics and ethics of this process.

Social change is the openly stated goal of some artists working in communities. This is no more true than in the work of Elders Share the Arts, a New York organization nationally recognized for its intergenerational work with elders and children. Theater artist Susan Perlstein, ESTA's director, claims there is no avoiding social change, anyway, when you live in New York, a city of ceaseless flux that isolates people, fragments families and separates the old from the young. For decades, ESTA has been binding up rips in the social fabric, working all over the city in senior centers, hospitals, nursing homes, schools and neighborhoods. Here Perlstein shares some of the tools ESTA uses every day.

Pleasure is not one of the benefits that come to mind when you think of working in a prison, but that is what it came to mean to choreographer Leslie Neal when she realized she had bonded with her students at a maximum-security women's prison in Florida. When she wrote this story for us, Neal and three of her dance company members had been going to Broward Correctional once a week for two years. For them it was more than a job; it was a labor of love and personal growth. Her first-person story goes deep to the heart of her commitment to this work.

Arts programs in prisons are some of the most difficult to fund. Why, many ask, should convicted criminals be getting arts programs when the arts have been cut from school curricula all over the country? After 17 years and 50 prison residencies, poet Grady Hillman probably knows as much about arts-in-corrections programs as anyone on the outside. In our interview he talks about some crucial issues: Are these programs necessary? Are they worth money? Do they do any good? Can you prove it?

One of the magnets that draws artists into community work is the desperate need to do something about social problems affecting the places where they live. Southern artists are particularly sensitive to the issue of racism, and some have even made its eradication their life's work as artists. This is particularly true of artists in Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theatres South), a multiracial organization of more than 200 artists in the Southeast especially committed to making and supporting original art in their communities. The Selma Project is a case study of an arts project in the civil-rights city conducted by a ROOTS theater ensemble from Tennessee, The Road Company, that partnered with Selma organizations to bring eight southern artists together to work on healing the wounds of racism. Road Company director Bob Leonard tells the tale.

John O'Neal has been applying his theatrical craft to community issues and activism since the early '60s. He's representative of a large group of artists for whom the concepts of artistic creativity and community involvement were never mutually exclusive, and whose creative energy is invested as much, or more, in the process of developing the work as in the final product. O'Neal and his theater company, Junebug, are part of a large coalition of artists and activists attempting to use the arts to make environmental change in their region. Here educator Mat Schwarzman writes in detail about the meticulous partnering process of The Environmental Justice Project in Louisiana.

Artists experienced in community residencies are often called to work in regions far from home. What tools do they take with them? Atlanta writer Alice Lovelace has been working in schools and communities for decades, but not long ago she began work on a master's degree in conflict resolution; her experience had taught her that conflict resolution is a basic human skill—absolutely necessary for our time—and that poetry can access deeply held values and beliefs about conflict. She wanted to craft a method of teaching students how to use poetry in this way. When she was invited to Oklahoma to work with young girls, she took her new tool-kit with her, including some of the revolutionary theater exercises of Augusto Boal. We asked her to let us in on how things went.

Since the 1950s, Brazilian director Augusto Boal's methods for Theatre of the Oppressed have been working for artists and communities all over the world. Boal, also a political activist in his own country, created his method as a group problem-solving technique, with the aim of liberating people for action towards social change. In our interview, he talks about how his theater differs from traditional theater.

Sensitivity to the community is an important topic in dialogues about public art in the '90s. For most of the 20th century, we have been content to commission monuments and installations—also known as "plop sculpture"—that invade public space without any consideration for the people and the environment surrounding them. In our story from 1996, Los Angeles artist Richard Posner says the journey from the studio to the street demands a change of mind and heart. "The public art administration process," says Posner, "requires the eye of a journalist, the ear of a poet, the hide of an armadillo, the serenity of an airline pilot, and the ability to swim."

Artists who work with nonartists in community settings often articulate their frustration with the way their work is written about and categorized. Even when critics and funders find such work valuable, they tend to separate it from the artist's "real" work. For most artists with whom we have talked, there is no difference between their "community work" and their "own work"—the artwork they do as soloists or with a company of trained professional artists. Here choreographer Stuart Pimsler takes the opportunity to write about his work with doctors, nurses and other caregivers, and finds the thread that binds this work to his own history as an artist.

One thing we've learned over the 20 years of listening and writing about art is that it is at its best when an artist invests his or her own artmaking skills in a community of individuals. When art is allowed to flourish in society, it can help develop communities, address social ills, heal sickness, protect the environment and renew the urban landscape. But art works most effectively when the artist is at the energetic center of the community, not attached prescriptively at its edges.

For our final two essays in this collection we have stories from two artists, each of whom is heavily invested in a community of individuals and deeply concerned about the issues of her community. For Marty Pottenger, that meant making art in the heart of the world she has been a part of for 20 years—the world of manual labor where humans are building the infrastructure of a city. For Aida Mancillas it meant becoming an integral part of the renovation of her own neighborhood, and planning to stay. And for both it also meant writing about the work, sharing what they have learned about art's place in public life. They know their job is not finished until they have told the tale.

We are lucky that they, and all the writers in this book about art and life, understand the importance of the tale.

This essay was originally published in 1998 as part of "The Citizen Artist 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine 1978-1998."

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002