Making Art/Making Home: An Introduction

Artists Rick Lowe and Suzanne Lacy with Rob Miller, director of the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston. Photo by Alicia Kozikowski

Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the most deeply conflicted historical communities in the U.S. Over the past decade, Charleston has recreated itself as a global tourist destination. In a process something like the reverse of a beetle shedding its skin, Charleston has grown a new set of economic and cultural guts and muscles while preserving almost intact the skin of its historic fabric. To the area's existing stew of issues concerning race and the control of public monuments and symbols, this economic change has added the incipient removal of nearly all low-income communities from historical districts, creating a flood of displacement, housing and cultural-rights issues. Like everything else on the peninsula of Charleston, these are in fact among the most "historical" low-income communities in the country; families at every point on the economic spectrum trace their lineage here back for centuries.

Since the summer of 2000, I've been part of "Evoking History," a project at Spoleto Festival USA to bring contemporary global art and dialogue strategies to bear on the Charleston environment. Since 1983, I've worked with a Southeastern network of artists called Alternate ROOTS; and since about 1996 have worked with ROOTS' Resources for Social Change, which promotes strategies for community transformation and development through the arts.

I often make artwork about people's perception of the past, and especially about how that connects to their emotional relationship to place. I used to do this through site-specific performances and theater pieces. Today I do it through public visual art and an interdisciplinary public process combining that with elements of writing, rehearsal, debate and design. For the past decade, I've worked with this method to empower communities through creating new self-expressions of their own histories. Along the way I became convinced that long-term relationships rather than short-term residencies were best way to work.

I give my own little history to explain how I came to be introducing the material that follows. It arises from a unique set of events that took place in June 2003 in which Resources for Social Change and "Evoking History" brought their related but very different processes alongside one another in Charleston for a long weekend.

The weekend had two centers: an ambitious outdoor dialogue/performance event by artists Suzanne Lacy and Rick Lowe called "Latitude 32° — Navigating Home," and a three-day workshop by Resources for Social Change called "Making Art/Making Home."

What made this weekend fascinating for me (aside from the raw issues of cultural politics at play in the city) was a series of people and ideas coming together across boundaries – boundaries that exist even within what would seem to be the small, homogenous field of arts concerned with community. Boundaries between regions, between disciplines, between grassroots and mainstream organizations, across any number of versions of the insider/outsider line.

All these boundaries were blurred and penetrated thoroughly, and yet there they still stand—some in ghostly outline, and some in stark relief.

The Spoleto Festival USA was built on the European model of the global arts festival in a charming location. "Evoking History" represents a serious impulse to create and work with change that is arising in the dominant institutions of Charleston, from city hall to the museums. Of course, a related impulse is to manage change. But "Evoking History," now an ongoing program, has gone hand-in-hand with real change at Spoleto, including the recent rewriting of the festival's mission statement to redefine its existence within the local community. "Evoking History" has created a real space for community voices in a town where silence is still a chief operating principle. It has not solved the issues at hand; but my take is that a program like this creates forward momentum by the very frustration it creates. "Evoking History" works with the mystique of the artist and curator that is the coin of the contemporary art world, and the collision of local artists with this force is one of its chief sources of creative frustration.

Alternate ROOTS has helped to define the community arts field, through group work, an insistence on equitable power relationships and direct attention to racism, and a kind of dogged, step-by-step respect for the nuances of its member communities. Within ROOTS, really, the group carries the mystique, and this contrast with "Evoking History" reflects the surviving traditions of the theater companies from which ROOTS was born, versus those of visual art.

An opportunity for the two efforts to connect came up rather suddenly in April, and over the next ten weeks there arose a new set of collusions and collisions among the charged entities involved. The production of the weekend featured all of the energy and creative challenge of low-cost community work, combined with those of elaborate outdoor events. A rain squall that forced the "Navigating Home" event indoors did not really seem untoward for a program that has at times taken on the themes the survival of the working port (as economic right) and access to the sea (as cultural right). The issues raised that weekend, about the city, about the collaboration itself, and about the processes of doing community art work, will hopefully be continued in the online discussion about to ensue here on CAN.

That a widening network of people—residents, citizens, animators, onlookers and others—has found new spaces for thought, speech and action through these processes over the past years is due to the tenacity if not downright stubbornness of a number of people including Nayo Watkins, and Bob Leonard of Resources for Social Change and Mary Jane Jacob and Tumelo Mosaka of Evoking History. The Charleston artist team of Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet have staked out especially tenacious insider/outsider status within both the ROOTS and Spoleto efforts and within their own adopted city. Their energetic coordination of the Charleston ROOTS rhizome (a fluid effort to create local affiliates for the regional group) was a key to the ROOTS portion of the collaboration.

[Making Art/Making Home Main Page]

Neill Bogan is a writer and artist from Georgia. During the 1990s he was a leader in the influential REPOhistory collaborative that staged interdisciplinary public art and education projects around the U.S. With partner Tom Klem of Klem/Bogan Art and Communication, he is currently a finalist in the Marking Places That Matter competition in New York.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2003