Center for Cultural Exchange: It's About Form, Content and Letting Go

The Administration of Cultural Democracy:
Intro | Maine | Minnesota | Washington

The Center for Cultural Exchange, Longfellow Square, Portland, Maine View slideshow of additional images. Photo by Tom Borrup

The Center for Cultural Exchange is not something one would expect to find in an old New England fishing and port city of about 65,000. Set on a hilly peninsula on the southern coast of Maine, downtown Portland is a compact collection of 18th- and 19th-century stately brick and wood-frame homes surrounding a vibrant business district of mostly brick structures of three to seven stories. Its historic charm, impressive vistas of nearby islands and a still active shipping port, have welcomed a remarkable range of recent immigrants from around the globe.

The 2002-2003 season program of the Center lists 14 community advisory groups representing Afghans, African-Americans, Somali, Sudanese, Congolese, Cambodians, Franco-Americans, Greeks, Hispanics, Indians, Irish, Italians, Jews and Vietnamese, who have all worked to assemble the most eclectic mix of the world's performing arts one could see anywhere.

More remarkable than how all these and other groups came to live in Portland during the past few hundred years – and in most cases just the past two decades – is the story of how this small performing-arts center came to construct an elaborate approach to building cultural democracy, and to contributing to a more successful multi-ethnic democracy.

The active and significant engagement of this rich mix of people, grows out of the steadfast vision of Artistic Director Bau (pronounced like "saw") Graves. Executive Director Phyllis O'Neill, who is married to Graves, brings equal commitment and management smarts that round out this highly organized experiment.

A pristine and architecturally detailed, three-story, 19th-century commercial building houses the aptly named Center for Cultural Exchange. It sits on a prominent triangular downtown site known as Longfellow Square just blocks away from poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's home, a historic tourist attraction. An enormous statue of the contemplative Longfellow, in a seated position, stares at the center's front door, eyeing the phenomenal comings and goings. A late winter storm left a layer of snow and ice on the sidewalks during my April 2003 visit.

Just months earlier during 2002, Graves took time off from the center, after nearly 20 years work, and produced a 300-page manuscript detailing his philosophies and stories of the center's evolution. In it he recalls how he once blithely engaged artists from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos to share the same bill. He thought the program would shed some light on the commonalties and distinctions across the region and bring together audiences from these fast-growing communities.

"But our Asian communities were unanimous in boycotting the event," he writes. After a small audience of whites showed up, "I reflected on the fact that these three nationalities have been in a state of almost constant conflict for centuries. The artists had been too polite to tell me of my egregious error."

This rude awakening helped lead him to a new approach. "If you don't have the direct participation of the community in the conceptualization of appropriate projects, neither will you have their participation in your programs," he continues.

Graves' soul-searching, and wanting to do the right thing as a cultural programmer, comes through in his generous demeanor and in his manuscript. He writes, "The act of presentation carries with it substantial authority. Through our choices about what to present, and how it is to be presented, presenters wield power over how cultures – frequently not our own – are perceived. We implicitly assume the responsibility for shaping public discourse about the communities that made the art on display."

"Cultural practice in its community setting also provides well-worn templates for the very kind of sustained, inclusive, democratic processes that are the antithesis of systems of domination and exploitation," Graves goes on.

Building on Assets While Seeking New Standards

Born in England and raised in Michigan, Graves attended a now defunct "alternative" college, he joking called "Draft-Dodger U." He came to Maine in 1975 when offered a house-sitting job. He's been there ever since.

As a teenager, he said, he was passionate about music and politics, and found he could combine his interests. After college he worked for a company that programmed high-school assemblies where he booked touring performers. And, as a jazz musician himself, he had opportunities to tour the world. "I was the guy who got the gigs," he told me in April. With the contacts he developed and his passion for artistic exchange, he began to set up tours for other artists.

Building on these skills and his community politics, he and O'Neill began a music presenting series in 1983 to "fill the dark space" at the Portland Center for Performing Arts and to celebrate the eclectic mix of performing arts they enjoyed. This facility, designed to host the Portland Stage Company, was the invention of a real-estate developer who had converted an old downtown building and was trying to attract traffic to the then largely desolate area. Graves' and O'Neill's' program grew and included festival-format events in larger venues. As the Portland Stage Company took over more time at the Center for Performing Arts, the Center for Cultural Exchange became an itinerant producer of events in various community spaces until the current facility was developed.

Graves' yet-unpublished 2002 manuscript is titled "Cultural Democracy." He is a well-read, articulate spokesperson for his beliefs in global cultural equity, broad-based participation in both tradition and innovation, and the leadership responsibilities of those working in the arts to shape a more just world. He writes with authority after more than two decades of front-line engagement in a microcosm of the world's cultures that is essentially a small town.

He approaches his work from a fundamental asset-based philosophy, as he articulates new ways of thinking about the Eurocentric concept of quality. "There are enormous untapped reserves of cultural capital hidden away in American neighborhoods – and those of our relatives globally," Graves writes.

He also sees that culture and cultural organizations play what sometimes appear to be two opposing roles in a complex community. "These two poles – the need for internal cultural development and the desire to demonstrate ethnic vitality to the rest of the world – are the hubs around which cultural democracy turns," he writes. "One is aimed at insiders, and is all about participation; the other is directed externally and involves public presentation."

"All of these questions turn on the relationship between tradition and innovation, an interaction that demands a both/and analysis, rather than either/or. Cultural democracy embraces both new and old, and finds no conflict there," Graves states.

He calls for a new standard that insists upon grassroots participation, "not simply in program activities, but in the shaping of what those activities can be. Not only the products, but also the culture-production process requires democratization," he exhorts.

"Decision making about what kinds of cultural opportunities a town might have represents a kind of power that administrators are reluctant to relinquish. The paradigm of curatorial vision – the notion that the nature of cultural consumption is best left in the hands of educated and enlightened individuals – is solidly entrenched in our arts bureaucracy," he writes.

For Graves and the center, breaking out of this cycle meant giving up control over the choice of artistic product. "We had to create a new process seating the community at the institutional table of public culture, in a primary decision-making role."

Graves goes to great lengths to arrive at "authentic"' cultural experiences that nourish members of each self-identified cultural group, and, if the "host"' culture desires, to bring people of other cultures into the experience for a genuine exchange. He wants to avoid mistakes such as the one he made with the Southeast Asian performers.

Cultural Programmer As Mediator

"Attracting ethnic populations to their offerings continues to be a major challenge for public presenters. We're still a lot better at putting ethnics on stage than at getting them into our seats," Graves says in his book.

His core strategy is to charge the cultural programmer with the role of mediator or facilitator. "This person, or organization – the presenter – must have at least some degree of mobility and access within both the sphere of the audience and that of the performers," he writes. "They must possess enough insider knowledge from both realms to be able to make accurate and responsible decisions about the process of the event."

"No arts administrator is equipped with enough insider information to make the most basic assessments of quality across the divisions of ethnicity, race, class, religion, gender and voluntary association that comprise the American public," he continues. "If you don't have a well-informed guide from inside whatever community you intend to serve – or better, a whole room of insiders who embody at least a piece of the diversity which exists within that community – then you're not going to get it right."

Like the other two organizations profiled in this article, the Center for Cultural Exchange began its journey with community-based advisory groups, and, like the Wing Luke Museum, gave those committee-style groups considerable decision-making power.

Graves found his approach rooted in the work of Jane Addams, founder of Chicago's Hull House, the progenitor of the Settlement House movement in America. He quotes historian Louis Menand writing about Addams: "She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions – the assumption, for instance, that the reformer's tastes or values are superior to the reformee's, or, more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not – is ineffectual and inherently false."

The center made its first steps toward "community-generated cultural programming," in mid-1994 when it built formal partnerships with four local ethnic groups with whom they had previously established good relationships. They convened a series of planning committees including representatives from all the groups' major service organizations, artists, community activists and scholars.

Meetings were devoted to needs assessments, the kinds of programs that could best address community interests, funding strategies and selecting master artists to work in Portland with local performers and tradition-bearers.

"This planning process resulted in the development of short-term micro-cultural plans for each community," he says. "It required the gradual establishment of trust between our staff and representatives of the ethnic constituencies."

Planning with each community started with some basic questions. Graves reiterates them in his manuscript. "What do you like? What don't you like? What does your community already have plenty of? What does it lack? What kinds of programs would have the most positive impact? Who are the target audiences and how can they be reached? We moved on from these to other issues: What specific performance genres are you most interested in pursuing? Who are the artists that exemplify these traditions and are esteemed within your community? Which artists should be avoided? How much should the general public (outsiders) be involved? How should programs be structured so that they have the right feeling, the appropriate presentational format in turn with your community's aesthetic standards?"

All of these meetings and working groups ultimately led to presentations and/or residencies by artists native to the ethnic groups' respective homelands and by artists practicing their traditions locally or from another part of the U.S. They have also led to a lot of community-building work.

"Building and maintaining partnerships … is an essential part of community building." Graves writes. "In the making of art, process serves product; in making community, process is everything. Nobody would want to endure art made by a committee; community building thrives on endless committee meetings."

International Diplomacy at the Cultural Center

The intense work with all these communities has turned Graves into a walking encyclopedia of the social and political histories of immigrant communities and their internal relationships and divisions. And he has plenty of tales to tell of how these have played out at the center. On some days it sounds like a mini-United Nations.

"The way a lot of communities define themselves is through exclusivity. For those of us working from left-leaning values, from ideas of inclusion, it becomes an ethical two-step," Graves told me.

He recounted the Afghan community's division over audience gender segregation at one performance. Some of the committee members told others to "move back to Kabul if you want to live that way." Ultimately the artist refused to perform to a segregated audience, which in turn caused some community members to boycott the event. Graves accepts that the center can't please everyone, all the time.

"We once had a group of Somali elders boycott a residency with a popular dance band when the group's female singer appeared in a photo without a headscarf," he recounted.

He also tells in his book of protracted discussions by the Vietnamese community over whether or not to display the Vietnamese flag at their event, and, if so, which version of the nation's flag. From it, he says, he's learned to raise questions about flags early on so there are no misunderstandings.

"Some Africans came from places with nasty dictators and horrible conditions; they're fearful that their relatives won't get out. The communities are a real mix, filled with historic divisions. Some are from elite families, some came from prefeudal conditions, some can't read or write," he said.

"The horrors that have kept Sudan in a state of continual suffering for a generation had come across the Atlantic with our new American refugees, and were alive and agitated in our conference room," Graves writes in his book.

He recalls a tense and protracted story of working with the Sudanese community to plan a large conference and performance series with visiting speakers and artists. Factions and struggles still taking place in Sudan were very present in the group. A Sudanese facilitator and reasonable people from both sides reached a stalemate.

"All the black faces turned to the two whites. What are you going to do? they asked." Graves writes with a sense of irony, "The ethnics were petitioning the white power structure for redress of grievances, and now it was up to us. The fact that we do hold significant power within our (admittedly limited) spheres of influence is testimony to how far down the economic food chain our artists and communities really are," he concludes. (The controversy apparently got down to an argument over an invited speaker for the conference they were planning, and the center decided to cancel the person, which disappointed some people but took a lot of heat off.)

Not every curator or cultural programmer wants to engage in such processes, to act in the stead of the United Nations. But this community diplomacy is exactly the stuff of cultural democracy.

The role of the growing number of community partners or committees at the center is important, but it wouldn't be possible and wouldn't result in anything without the key role played by Graves and other staff.

"To be a cultural mediator means to place oneself at the center of the cyclone," Graves writes. "The access that we (native-born white Americans) enjoy to our civic institutions, to the pathways of money and power and information, was gained primarily by being born and raised within the dominant social structure."

"The mediative role is necessary, important, and worthy of careful scrutiny precisely because of the power over what people see, hear and experience that it embodies," he says.

"At its heart, cultural facilitation means deep involvement with people who are different from oneself, and a continuous willingness to withhold judgment and let the differences lie in the open. If mediators are not willing to voluntarily step outside their own comfort zone to cede some of their power to constituents, public culture remains paternalistic at best. The test is one's willingness to enable communities to pursue projects that stir misgivings, to lend support for an ethnic approach to an issue that disturbs your own sensibilities," writes Graves.

Struggle for Balance and Inclusion

The center's building, although prominently located and complete with a café area and suite of second-floor offices (third-floor offices are rented out), is not as large as its international stature might suggest. The public event space takes up most of the first floor of the building with a large, mostly glass wall facing Longfellow Square. It accommodates about 225 people with a small balcony in a flexible, open floor space with folding chairs available. There are no dressing or green rooms. What the space does well is to take on the character of the artists and the community, and it provides a respectful and highly visible public location to the work being presented.

"Very few cultures partake of their culture in chairs bolted to the floor in a dark room," Graves likes to repeat. He writes, "Without an infusion of properly responsive ethnic participation at the audience level, the presentation becomes a shell of its authentic incarnation. Performers fail to receive the appropriate feedback; the crowd fails to correctly interpret the artists' presentation; lacking their customary cues, the performers alter the content of the event."

"Often public presenters can't attract insiders, regardless of the presentation, because the institutional and attitudinal frame that they place around the event is a mismatch with the community's," Graves says. "Ethnic artistry that is presented in a format foreign to the ethnicity will feel distorted and devalued to insiders."

Continually seeking balance in the work of the Center, Graves told me. "We want to respect community traditions and for outsiders to learn and have as accurate an experience as they can have. If a community spins to accommodate American sensibilities then they're not giving the audience a sense of their culture."

Audience makeup at the center is, according to Graves, totally dependent on the event. "Somali events were almost all Somali, until the Lewiston controversy," he said, referring to incidents in that nearby city where the mayor made a statement that his community couldn't accommodate additional refugees. The upside of this, said Graves, was that social-justice groups who responded began to realize their strength.

"Irish stuff attracts Irish," Graves continued. "Greek stuff is mostly Greek. There's more general interest in stuff from Latin America and Africa," he said.

Nearly a decade ago, Graves resumed his academic pursuits while still directing the center, traveling to Tufts University to complete a masters degree in ethnomusicology. In his manuscript, which is only in part a result of that work, he wrestles with different perspectives on "authenticity," with the role of cultural exchange in innovation, and with the impact of the "mediator" in making cultural "interventions" – concepts that all require finding balance if one is to "do the right thing."

Keeping the center afloat in this small Maine city, and in a country that doesn't exactly endorse cultural democracy, while maintaining the incredibly rich mix of offerings its international audiences and artists have come to expect, may be the greatest balancing act of all.

"Community-based work is long-term – difficult work to do with short-term philanthropic dollars," Graves complained. In his book, he writes, "Some of the corporations that support our work … are indifferent to our rhetoric about diversity; they fund our programs because bankers love dancing to a great salsa band as much as anybody else."

Go to part 2: Intermedia Arts: Bringing Many Voices to the Table

Tom Borrup is a community activist, writer and consultant based in Minneapolis. He was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2003, and now works as a consultant to arts organizations, foundations and public agencies in several cities around the U.S.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2003