It Was a Time of Hope – A Time of Challenge

The roots of community arts in the Southeast include vigorous action initiated in Atlanta by artists of color. Here writer Alice Lovelace looks back on some of that work. —Eds.

Public funding for the arts is a fairly recent phenomenon in the United States. There was a time when the words “community arts” were used by funders, public and private, as a shorthand for “other”…black folk, that African stuff, Asians and Latinos. The secondary definition stretched to include anyone doing art that was directed at the “nontraditional” arts consumer. When we were lucky we were the last to be funded the least. When we were unlucky we were the first to be cut. We existed outside of their definition of “classical arts.”

Being a writer I have an interest in the root meaning of words, so I looked up “common” (“belonging equally to all”) and “community” (society as a whole, the public). Of course there were other connotations, such as average, everyday, unrefined and coarse. Here lies the root that divides us from each other.

While ancient Western European folk art forms like ballet and symphony are funded in spite of huge deficits carried over from one year to the next and a dwindling base of subscribers and audiences, the general observation was that funding community-based artists and the art they created was like “watering the weeds at the expense of the roses.”

I was sorting through old papers, still smarting from yet another letter to the editor of my hometown paper that supported Cobb County’s decision to cut all funding for the arts from their budget, when I ran across a photo from the Art for the People’s Sake Festival (AFTPS).

The year was 1982 and we were a common collective of poets, dancers, actors and clowns representing a variety of ethnic arts and traditions who considered our work community-based and who shared a common goal…to educate by example our passion for arts as a means for social change.

The three-week festival employed more than 300 musicians, poets and performing artists, and delivered more than 50 performances in housing projects, churches, school and cafes, anywhere they would have us.

AFTPS was organic: it was multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-disciplinary. It was a partnership between community-based artists, many who were trained at the Neighborhood Arts Center, and progressive white artists, including some members of Alternate ROOTS.

It represented the best cross-section of the arts in Atlanta and included individuals like Monty Ross, who went on to be filmmaker Spike Lee’s production manager, and Maliaka Adero, who became an editor at Random House before moving on to a career in modeling. Most of the artists still work and produce in Atlanta today, training a new generation.

Imagine our surprise when the Atlanta Constitution carried an editorial by arch-conservative Dick Williams, labeling us as “ungodly and anti-family.” The editorial went on to accuse us and the staff of the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs of wasting “taxpayers’ money.” In the same year the symphony and the ballet, both carrying million-dollar deficits, were listed as line items in the city budget at $100,000 each.

This bit of nostalgic thinking led me back to the ’70s and my early association with the Neighborhood Arts Center, or NAC as we called it, and my friendship with Ebon Dooley. I gave him a call and spent half an hour laughing and remembering.

Ebon reminded me that the Neighborhood Arts Center was a pioneer project for artists’ rights to fair employment because it was among the very first organizations in the country to use Department of Labor CETA funds to hire artists.

It was also unique in that the collective of artists desired to be based in and to serve a particular type of community—working-class and African Americans. They were invited to locate in the in-town community of Mechanicsville. This move was initiated by indigenous community residents and activists Rosa Burney and Charles Ezzard. They lobbied the community for support and negotiated a space for the artists to work and create.

Located in a former school building, the Neighborhood Arts Center consisted of a theater, gallery, music and painting studios, a dance studio, classrooms and a full-service kitchen. Six days a week you could find on duty 28 mostly African-American artists together at one place at one time to be about one thing. We were required to practice our art each day, to interact with anyone in the community who wanted to learn, and to contribute to the common goals of the center.

Jomandi Theatre Company, actor Bill Nunn, filmmaker Spike Lee and Just Us Theatre Company are just an example of those who owe credit for their formative years to the Neighborhood Arts Center.

Founded in 1974, NAC was made possible by the newly created National Endowment for the Arts Expansion Arts Program, directed by a youngish A.B. Spelman.

“Expansion Arts,” Ebon remembered, “was an infusion of funds that was critical to support artists and institutions who had teetered on the brink of collapse since the Harlem Renaissance.

“Expansion Arts helped us to break down some walls that had made us invisible to the general public and to each other. Suddenly we were in Washington sitting on a panel or policy committee, and across the table is a guy from Hawaii, a Chicano dancer, a Japanese-American silk-screen artist, a Hopi Indian. The discussion nourished and sustained us; personally it made me a better artist and administrator.”

Today Ebon is a writer/organizer, and his early involvement with NAC and Expansion Arts can be seen in his work as a founding board member of several important organizations like: Atlanta’s only independent community radio station, Radio Free Georgia (WRFG); the Neighborhood Arts Center and its forerunner, the Center for Black Arts, as well as The Arts Exchange, and the Little Five Points Community Center.

The founding of Expansion Arts, the creation of the Neighborhood Arts Center concept, and winning the right to Department of Labor funds to hire artists were hard-won fruits in those early struggles.

It felt good to relive a moment when it seemed possible the country was getting it—this Art for the People’s Sake thing. When it seemed that instead of being “them,” our work might be accepted as a part of the national “we.”

Today heroes of the “they are not us movement” believe that “some” citizens may do business with and for the government, yet they argue not “all” citizens share this right. They believe any “hyphenated American is an un-American,” not seeing in their own arguments the hypocrisy in their hearts.

I care little whether you call bidding to provide goods and services a “privilege” or a “right,” because in truth it is a contract. Free enterprise. And we work hard for our money.

The big “We,” citizen artists and the rest of the nation, survived Eisenhower, the ’60s and Nixon. Today Reagan and Bush have been relegated to our political past, yet we continue to debate who can be a rightful recipient of their own federal tax funds.

In his book Culture, Inc., Herbert Schiller, a professor of communications at the University of California, warns us that, “…when corporate executives discovered that communication and culture were profitable as well as politically expedient, the new era of cultural absorption began. This quest for accumulation has led not only to vast cultural destruction, but, more important, to the erasure of organic roots.” (In “Master of All We Know” by Saul Laundau, The Progressive, Nov. 1989.)

A movement for “Multiculturalism” won’t do it because, quiet as it’s kept, the United States was multicultural even before it was the United States. It is not something we have to become, we are. Acknowledging and respecting the difference is part of the solution.

As “ethnics” in a “white” society we are forced to watch as our traditions and symbols are marginalized and marketed to sell everything from tennis shoes to beer.

One of the things we would like to get back to is a discussion and movement grounded in Cultural Democracy: A time in this nation when artists received fair pay for fair labor. We would like to move forward to a time when our creation stories, saints and gods, heroes and accomplishments are known and respected by those with whom we share this nation. A sort of live and let live society.

So make room on your block for us, because us is the big “WE”—Community. Or as the dictionary would define it: An assemblage of interacting populations; holding this nation as a joint possession; together and part seeking expression and enjoyment; and assuming together the liability for our actions.

Alice Lovelace is an Atlanta writer/performer whose works include published nonfiction and poetry and produced plays and television scripts. A past executive director of Atlanta’s Arts Exchange and Alternate ROOTS, she is the recipient of numerous arts and community awards including the Bronze Jubilee Award and the Sisterhood of Higher Education Award. Lovelace is currently (2003) executive director of Atlanta Partnership in Arts Learning. This story was first published in High Performance #64, Winter 1993.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2003