Support for Art and Social Justice

Remarks by Brown, arts director of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, at FOCAS (Focus on Community Arts South: The Intersection of Art and Activism), an Alternate ROOTS conference in Lexington, Kentucky. Brown spoke on a panel titled "Community-based Art: The National Perspective" on April 19, 2002. She talked about her foundation’s journey toward broadening the field of community-based arts by supporting "art and social justice" programs.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation was founded by Nathan Cummings, who was the founder of Sara Lee Foods. It is a family foundation that is 11 years old. From its inception, its arts program dealt with programs for youth. When I first came to the foundation in 1995, we talked about "at-risk youth" but, after doing a number of site visits, I realized that there are very few youth who are not at risk, and it was inappropriate to label a specific group of ethnic youth as "at-risk." We also realized that many of the young people who were in arts programs were incredibly resilient. They self-selected to be in these programs and were fighting for their own lives. So, we changed that language.

Concurrently, we began to look at stabilizing small to mid-sized community-based and culturally specific arts institutions. This meant that everyone in our foundation had to look at organizations differently. Many of our board members have a long history of supporting and sustaining mainstream cultural institutions in their communities. Most had less experience with small to mid-sized groups. So, it was really important for us to demonstrate to our board the significance and potential impact of working with these groups. During our annual board retreats, we did site visits all over the country so that our board members could witness the work of small to mid-sized organizations. We wanted them to see how much they got for the dollar as well as what a significant difference their investments made.

In the meantime we were getting brilliant proposals from the mainstream institutions declaring that they were community-based institutions. We recognized that we needed to clarify what we meant when we said "community-based." We posed four questions that we continue to use, which we believe have helped us think critically about this issue. The first one was: Do your board and your staff represent the constituency you are supporting? It seems really basic. But we had groups that were very creative in their responses. One group said, "We are all single women raised by single parents and that makes us qualified to teach any child who is growing up in a single-parent household." We weren’t just looking for missionary work. We were looking for people who were doing the work, and who understood the constituency they were serving

The second question that we asked was: What is the quality of the conversation you are having in your community? We really wanted to know whether the organization accepted suggestions from the community, or whether they had an advisory board that advised them. We recognized that groups can be very selective about what they listen to and what kinds of advice they take. So, for instance, if a group had done an exhibition and the public hated it, we would not tell them what to do, but we would ask them what they had done. Did they call a town meeting so that they could have the artists present to talk about the work? Did they do another exhibition of earlier works by the same artist so that they could show an evolutionary process? What kind of conversation did they think they were obligated to have with the public? Or did they say the audience was slow, they just didn’t get it, let’s just move along? Lots of groups did. Lots of groups wouldn’t even answer that question.

A third question was: What kind of cultural citizen are you? We were asking who do you partner with? Who do you collaborate with? What is the nature of your partnerships? There are some groups who answered in the future tense. For instance, "We will collaborate with X in the spring." These were often groups with no previous history of collaboration. They couldn’t talk about lessons learned. They couldn’t even begin to think about the power dynamics in partnerships. One of the things that we heard a great deal about was the dynamic between big organizations that partnered with very small organizations. Very often the smaller groups were very happy to get a pittance of money from the bigger group. But more often then not, these small groups had no real veto power.

As a result of learning these lessons from our grantees, we began to look at established organizations that had really figured it out. We ran across one organization that not only invites community members to serve on advisory boards, they also require their staff to sit on the advisory boards of smaller community organizations. The kinds of partnership opportunities that were presented to this cultural institution were very different. Their relationships were much more longstanding, and the programs were mutually beneficial.

The final question that we asked was a question that was raised because I didn’t want to give grants to organizations that had just discovered their communities the day before they wrote the grant. However, we realized that there were individuals who had great track records and we didn’t want to penalize brand-new organizations. So, the question that we asked was: What is the track record of the people working on this project? People hustled to create a track record. There were some people who had never worked in the community that they were serving, but had worked in their church community.

This was one of those questions that raised class issues, even in culturally specific institutions. So, for instance, there was one organization where the very middle-class or upper-middle-class people of color on the board said, "No, we don’t want parents on the board because they will ruin everything. We are doing what is best for them. We won’t be able to get business taken care of if we have these people on the board." It was really clear that they didn’t know the people who they were charged to serve, nor did they respect them. We asked these board members how many of their children took classes at this cultural center. None of them did. They now lived in suburban communities outside the city that they had grown up in. They had come to classes at this place as children themselves. Yet their children took art classes outside of the inner city. We saw that class issues can rear their head at a culturally specific institution and be just as destructive as issues of race.

For six years, the foundation funded small to mid-sized community-based organizations throughout the country, and we learned a great deal about the characteristics of strong community-based institutions. We learned how they solved problems and how the workers speak to their constituents. We observed projects being created, and witnessed how they were valued by the public. We recognized that there were a number of compelling issues facing these groups. One was that many excellent projects were being worked on in isolation. Sometimes we would say to a grantee, do you know about that person doing this work on the west coast and they would never have heard of them. We were really conscious of the fact that there was no broad communications strategy that allowed community-based cultural workers to engage in meaningful discourse and share ideas. The other thing about sharing ideas was that most of the artists we spoke with were so hard at work that nobody had documented their process. In some instances, a generation was turning over and processes and practices would soon be lost.

We also discovered that in many of the multidisciplinary art centers, the senior staff was in their 50s and contemplating retirement; they were trying to figure out who would succeed them. Many of these people didn’t have health plans or retirement plans. On the other hand, there were very young people who stayed at an institution for two or three years and then moved on to better-paying jobs (sometimes outside of the arts). Additionally, in many institutions, the younger managers were always managers in the media areas. Unfortunately, many of my more mature colleagues haven’t even turned on their computers. So, there is a crisis around the issue of potential leadership. What will happen with the next group of leaders? Where is the continuity?

Our guidelines changed this January and we began to look at how to broaden the field of community-based arts. We now do something called "art and social justice." It has two components – policy and practice. We support policy practitioners who talk to you, the constituents. We really are not interested in supporting policy think tanks where the really smart people talk to each other. We are interested in think tanks that are developing case studies and confer with those who are on the ground doing the work. The theory and practice must be connected.

We are currently addressing two big policy issues. We are examining First Amendment issues. We think that with a war in place, a lot of people’s speech and expressions are being or will be suppressed. The second issue is the proposed revisions of the copyright law that we believe are really going to have some serious impact on getting work into the public domain. So, helping artists as opposed to big business make money off of their intellectual property is a major concern.

In terms of art and social justice, we decided that there are four kinds of organizations that we would like to fund. One is universities that have community-based art programs. We are interested in supporting universities that train artists from the very beginning of their careers to work with, and to be accountable to the communities that they serve. The second group of institutions that we want to serve are membership organizations or service organizations that do regranting to individual artists who are engaged in community-based work.

The third is arts groups that have had a long history of doing community-based work and that actually have evolved in their practice. For instance, the Bronx Museum has had a residency program for 17 years. The artists who have participated in the residency program not only work throughout the community, but they are now also the people who are programming many of the museum’s public programs. They know which types of programs will attract members of the public who share their interests. We are very interested in cultural institutions that have developed long-term and sustaining relationships with artists that benefit community.

The last group of institutions that we are looking at are social-justice organizations that have the ability to work with artists. We have discovered that if you have a great message, and the message is powerful but it is poorly presented, you can sometimes lose your audience. If we can get great filmmakers to work with groups like Jobs for Justice, we can help them convey their messages effectively.

Claudine Brown is arts director of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. For more information about the foundation’s programs, visit their Web site.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2003