Power and Mastery — Negotiations in Community-based Visual Art

The reputation of community-based visual art remains resolutely modest. This has happened for two related reasons: the lack of material resources available and the fact that the realities of our society dictate that resources continue to flow to work that can be presented and marketed under the tradition of the monumental or masterwork. The latter has to be created by a "master" artist. But when community groups or individuals attain mastery — of resources, their own ideas and materials, and of the social situation around them — their work can move beyond modesty.

This article looks at community-based visual art in light of these effects, and through the framework of negotiation with power by which any project seeks resources to thrive and be seen. It emphasizes projects in areas most familiar to me, in the southeastern U.S. and around New York City.

The redistribution of power and decision-making that defines community-based processes is contradicted by the master-artist role. Add to this dynamic the fact that the it is almost impossible to adopt the social role of visual artist shaped in modern and postmodern times without absorbing a self-aware stance of opposition, criticism or at least apartness from both local and mass communities. (Almost impossible due to the fact that society has eagerly continued to cast the artist in this outsider role, after a certain number of artists adopted it. It is difficult to find a written, taught or filmed depiction of the role that is free of this assumption.) Therefore the role of community-based visual artist represents a nuanced balancing act. This, combined with the scarcity of resources, often leads to modest choices by those who have entered the field.

Modesty of resources is the origin of what are now becoming traditional forms in community-based visual art: murals, mosaics, posters, signs. They all are based on available materials (paint, broken glass, a friendly merchant's wall or window), and can provide work for many hands circled around a motivating individual or committee. We may also find similar origins when we look closely at more cutting-edge forms, like Web sites and gardens or other planting projects, and even dialog-based and conceptual/social works.

Vital community interactions are moving onto the Web today, with projects like the Flux Art Space's "Me and My Money," created with kids at a Children's Aid Society center in New York City. On a larger scale are efforts like the Digital Arts Network, linking ten Los Angeles community youth-arts organizations in a linkage brokered by California Institute for the Arts. (On the other hand, there is a growing body of rather mundane Web-based work, and my own view is that artists and youth being encouraged to go onto the Web has often had the flavor of their being allowed to go to their rooms, rather than remaining at the table. I guess it all depends on how we use our time there.)

New Web-based community art intersects with a host of developments in digital activist and critical art (start with ®™ark and the Radical Software Group and move on to discover hundreds of such efforts), but it continues to be crucial to differentiate between these ways of working. Most definitions of "community-based" call for inclusion of members of the potential audience for a work in its planning and execution; some go on to demand that the impetus for the project itself arise within some community-of-interest not connected to the art or "content" system, and that power throughout the process remain invested there rather than in consultants like artists and curators who might seize on community needs as the means to their own ends.

Likewise, there is a host of new work by collaboratives and collectives, some of which will lend itself to community-based projects but most of which remains tied to activist, critical, or even "art for art's sake" traditions. Some people always like to work in groups, but more visual artists turn to collectives during hard economic times that feature fewer local opportunities and fewer new art stars to serve as global models of success. (Perhaps just as important, the press turns its attention to artists' collectives. See the New York Times, "Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together" by Holland Cotter, January 2003, on groups like Temporary Services of Chicago.) The significance for community-based work is that collectives and cooperatives dictate a group process; if this can be turned outward rather than inward, it can become a space for community interactions.

My own experience during the '90s in the REPOhistory group tied together several of the strands I've just mentioned. The group came together, first around shared curiosity on history as a power construct, but secondly, I think, due to a slump in arts funding that made solo projects more difficult. Gathered around visual artists it also included teachers, historians, writers and activists. Its projects started out as resolutely critical/activist, but as the group began to concentrate on a low-cost, flexible street-sign format that initially allowed for individual expression for artists within a group framework, it discovered that the format was also ideal for giving voice to unheard "community narratives." A portion of the group's work became "community-based." However, this portion was still often competing with activist/critical elements and projects. Over time, the difficulty in sorting these elements out along lines of interest led to the group's decision to split up, allowing its members to go in a number of different directions.

Because the form of most projects is still determined by material resources, the initiating force in community-based art still often arises "outside" the community, since (by unspoken definition of the way the term is used in the field) such a community is seeking to augment resources it lacks. Wealthy areas don't often turn to community-based artists to address their problems; they are more likely to contract with a consultant whose work they can closely direct, including, for instance, an artist solving a problem in civic design or creating a new community "face." The very fact that a visiting artist is without the obligations and ties of local life, has always given her/him power and freedom to act; the visiting community-based artist tries to use this freedom with a new respect, in closer collaboration with local people. However, even local artists, especially visual artists, who come forward to address community issues like housing, transportation and planning are seldom seen clearly by other community stakeholders, leaders or officials. They may be seen as meddlers, naïfs, do-gooders or chumps, but strangely empowered ones, empowered to say and do things that most people won't do. They may even be seen as vibrant leaders, but I suspect that some unclearness or mystery over their role continues then, and in it lies some of what power artists do have to create change.

When a real community impetus does locate resources, or a low-resource solution, the results can be moving, living art. And the complex community-artist role, almost always crossing multiple insider/outsider boundaries no matter what the geographic relation of the artist to the project (in other words, even if the artist is "from here"), does in fact give movement and life to the process. The differences, gaps and distances are part of life and the impetus for all communication; so projects that make room for them have a head start.

Consider a standard in the field, the mosaics of the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia. Gathered around one dynamic individual, Lily Yeh, originally a complete "outsider" to the neighborhood, this project has gathered members, resources and public spaces to present striking permanent art works to such a degree that it has become a dominant force in both the landscape and the development of the area. The Village's murals are striking if not breathtakingly original in vision and execution, carried out by many hands working under the guidance of Yeh and a few other lead artists working in a role that we might call for the sake of argument "community masters." The murals take on force by their multiplication across a whole neighborhood, becoming a determining visual factor in the landscape. The Village has coupled this force with broad pedagogic (youth leadership and performing-arts projects) and development (property renovation, job creation) activities that are crucial for stability and growth in this work. The fact is that the visual object itself can become a stopping place, unable to create a constituency broad enough to ensure even its own preservation, let alone community change. It is the web of social actions that take place around the art work that lead further.

The dynamic of the "community master" can be found in many locations, as in the vernacular Southern art called yard show. This work has usually started with one complex individual who feels called to deliver a message to her or his neighbors through elaborate outdoor visual creation. This artist figure, certainly in a complex relation of belonging and not-belonging to the community, often recruits others — family members, children and admirers — to complete the work in way that mirrors the process most "professional" or visiting community-based artists use. I regard this work as "community-based" because it involves the marshalling of local resources around an image of power and interest to local people. It is remarkable work because it takes low-cost materials and transforms them. The "outsider" label often attached to these works, is a product of modernist marketing myth, useful largely for breaking them up and moving the bits into galleries to be sold.

The life of Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens in Summerville, Ga., has shared many elements with Yeh's Village on a smaller scale, providing an economic boost to the town and especially to Finster's large extended family, and deriving support locally and nationally as a pedagogic tool for teaching both the Gospel and the power of art. (The project' future, however, raises all the questions of permanence and sustainability that affect most community-based visual arts, because the Garden remained deeply dependent on Finster's personal magnetism and authority, and few formal structures or connections exist to preserve this treasure now that the master himself has passed. His family has, understandably, moved many of the assets derived through his work into standard local businesses like a flower shop, and are renting the Garden to another artist, who is working in one of its buildings. This relationship, I assume, provides some income for maintenance but, despite the efforts of a "Save the Garden" group, the two-acre construction is deteriorating rapidly.)

Finally, the mastery within the community setting need not come from a charismatic leader; though this is often how things go. It can arise from a group that has tapped into a source of energy and a way to focus it. Both these things can happen by bringing together people with different skills and resources.

Mastery can also arise from persistence. The fact is that the creative life of most American communities is determined to a great extent by those individuals and small groups who never give up, and who are always there, showing, teaching, serving and thinking. (I believe I belong to this group and so I'm bound to speak up for it.) I'm aware that such figures can create their own problems, and that the idea is at risk of being sentimentalized. When an amazing community project happens, though, whether around a charismatic leader or through some group effort, it is usually a penumbra of such figures that carries the project forward in its details. I think it is around these artists that the debate over quality vs. value in art work becomes most pointed. Hence I propose a mastery of care and continuity, to match the grander sort.

In this area, from among thousands, I would point up the work of James Hiram Malone of Atlanta, an artist and writer whose work in painting, books, cartoons, murals and community organizing is now going into its sixth decade. Check out Malone's bio and artist's statement on the Web for a portrait of gentle determination.

This bringing together points to another affinity between yard show and professional community-based art: the readiness to cross boundaries of subject and method that may lead quickly away from rigid definitions of art. In fact, yard-show creators were seldom the first to use the term "art," and usually called their activity something else. Finster, we must stop to notice, was witnessing for Christ. Lonnie Holley, creator of an even earthier outdoor environment (now destroyed) says he was trying to do "the archeology of our black community in Birmingham," and connect "our little children to the thrones of the Kings and Queens of Africa." For both these figures, the yard-show environment became platform and stage set for pedagogic and performative actions that complete the visual work and in fact may on close examination seem to overshadow it. This links Holley and Finster to postmodernists like Alan Kaprow, Adrian Piper and Joseph Beuys. Kaprow, inventor of the Happening and unsung parent of a lot of what has come to be called "performance," has been most active the last 20 years as a teacher of philosophy. So has Piper, who took Kaprow's abstraction of action into the realm of race and arguably created our contemporary notion of identity-based performance; today she is most active as one of the few female African-American full professors of philosophy. Beuys abandoned visual work for teaching in a slightly louder format, creating the interlocking series of seminars that he called "social sculpture" and that led to both our current notions of dialogue-based art work and to the founding of the Green Party.

I mention this dynamic at such length because for me its emphasis on ideas and beliefs, on the interdisciplinary and on movement into areas that may not be strictly viewed as art by all observers is the most fruitful way to guide a search for truly innovative and vital community-based visual work. I find this way of looking at Holley and Finster to also be the most useful way to consider some of the most notable current community-based work. Such projects often involve the investigation by a coalition of interested local parties into an idea or goal, and the way it is worked out across the social, physical and emotional landscape of a particular place. Visual art-making is the core of these projects, but their elaboration may involve dozens of other types of activities, with the artwork either catalyzing those or, perhaps, accumulating as a product of them over time. Maybe we should just call this work culture; its power comes from an insistence on stepping beyond the fussy object and cost-obsessed practices that fence most visual art off from mass audiences. It echoes the practices in premodern cultures in which visual objects have importance largely within the context of directed activity like worship or rulership.

Community investigations can be initially grouped according to the type of phenomena that become their subjects. Many have been environmental, as with the Nine Mile Run project in Pittsburgh, in which a coalition of groups focused over a multi-year period on the environmental and cultural reclamation of a stretch of urban river. More modest was Yutaka Kobayashi's Chicken Ecology Project with students in a school in the Bay Area, which designed urban chicken houses and manure recycling methods, to investigate food production issues. This was one of the art-and education-partnerships clustered together by the Center for Art and Public Life of California College of Arts and Crafts. A related cluster was the production garden created at a youth center by the Art-Health-Nutrition Collaborative, whose name crystallizes the interdisciplinary effect.

Making such clusters and chains of partnerships to has become a standard producing format to leverage scarce resources. More important, it creates a multivocal dynamic, and allows a breadth of reach across the social and physical landscape that become dominant aesthetic elements and create much of the work's impact. Multivocality and accumulating sense of scope also help linked, Web-based projects escape the narrowness of the page. Efforts like CalArts' Digital Art Network may find their impetus, once again, in the search for resources, with a wealthy institution brokering services and linkages out to poorer partners. This in reality may not always lead to dead ends. As the community-arts field searches for an ideal of community-originated and controlled projects, benefits accrue through spreading the principle of equity and power sharing in a way that dominant institutions are forced to respect through the ongoing processes of negotiation. When the negotiation with power reaches a fruitful level of tension and involvement, the aesthetic of multivocality often becomes even more fully developed. For this reason, misunderstanding and the subsequent reworking that it forces should be looked at for signs of substance, rather than viewed immediately as failure.

A point that cannot be fully explored here: Grassroots projects, from the tentative to the most resolute, cannot be said to take place outside this negotiation with power. If only because few projects become known or seen without the mediation of power through foundations or academic institutions, I find it useful to think of a continuum rather than an end-point in the effects of power negotiations across the whole field.

Another common subject area is the built environment. Project Row Houses stands as the national model, growing from deep community roots to engage questions of art-making, identity creation and preservation, social service and economic empowerment through serious community development work. Many well-known artists have made work through residencies in one of the Row Houses, but for me the standard was set by Houston artist Vandorn Hinnant's 1997 creation of a geometry workshop for middle-school kids. The installation that accumulated around their work, a pale blue interior covered with chalked and golden descriptions of cubes, spheres, and angles made during teaching sessions, raised a true sense of "the reenchantment of the world" through mindful action.

In New York, an interesting effort of the past five years has come out of the Place Matters project, a partnership of City Lore (a folklore organization) and the wealthy Municipal Arts Society (historic preservation.) Place Matters is doing a leading-edge job of "cultural preservation" by drawing attention to built urban spaces with deep cultural significance (like the roller discos and playgrounds where hip-hop was born), and has begun linking visual artists with community stakeholders to create projects around these crucial places.

Another very evocative but perhaps problematic set of work in this regard is that of the Rural Studio founded in Hale County, Alabama by Samuel Mockbee as an outpost of the Auburn University School of Architecture. The visionary, beautiful and low-cost houses, churches and community buildings built across western Alabama by the students in the project stand as some of the most affecting visual art work created in the U.S. in years, as is witnessed by their inclusion in the last Whitney Biennial just before Mockbee's untimely death. The community-power differential in this continuing effort however, is something I would like to learn more about. There is a note of very familiar, almost Faulknerian paternalism in the Studio's materials regarding, for instance, the selection of clients to receive new homes. As more such local visionaries as Mockbee begin efforts to transform their environment, to what extent do their own local traditions provide tools and fuel, and to what extent do they become traps?

This question has arisen a number of times in my own experience over the past ten years with projects investigating concepts of history, memory and "the problem of the past." These included the REPOhistory collaborations described above, and a lengthy involvement with the "Evoking History" project developed by curators Mary Jane Jacob and Tumelo Mosaka for the Spoleto Festival USA of Charleston, described at length elsewhere on this Web site. An effort started by a dominant institution, "Evoking History" has continued to negotiate these questions, allowing itself to change shape in response to community feedback or lack thereof, and creating, despite some failures, dynamic arts and civic experiences in Charleston neighborhoods. The project also shares with other projects mentioned here a concern with an encompassing geographic area, economic development and a liquid willingness to cross disciplinary lines — even the emphasis on housing and the involvement of a special lab set up by the Clemson School of Architecture.

Finally, the situation in New York following 9/11 produced interesting phenomenon of community-based work, though for once there was no real lack of resources, but rather an outpouring of them, due to the fact that all strata and divisions of community were forced to deal with a single issue at one time — the emotional response to the attack and the need to provide symbolic responses. The outpouring of projects has ranged from the most immediately improvised through dozens of grassroots and populist efforts, to the most grandly planned and funded, capped of course by the efforts to memorialize Ground Zero itself. The result has been an encyclopedic set of negotiations and interactions between empowered and disempowered community segments. That the official monument-making process has taken on all the subtlety of a cudgel is only a sign of the return to normalcy of New York City politics, and a diagram of how plentiful resources are engineered into seeming scarcity.

During the initial, shocked and liquid phase of response (see artist Marty Pottenger's account on CAN), the most memorable visual project for me was the open-source photo exhibition "Here Is New York." Beginning as a spontaneous open call to the thousands of people who recorded the day's events and aftermath on film, "Here Is New York" managed for a period to elevate the store-front art show into a new model for global interaction. Taking an empty gallery space not far from Ground Zero and equipping it with rows of inexpensive digital scanners, the project collected and redistributing visceral civic responses. For weeks after the event, the storefront stayed open onto the street to accommodate a crowd that at times spilled to the opposite sidewalk, bringing their own images to scan and taking away those of others and creating a souk for a frantic trade in the seeable and knowable details of trauma. Starting with hanging rows of prints clothes-pinned to ropes (from snapshots to images by the same photojournalists supplying the world press) the project proceeded to selling low-cost digital prints, then to an exhaustive Web site posting every one of the tens of thousands of images collected at the storefront and electronically from around the world. By the time its expensive coffee table book appeared last year, HINY had taken on a different sort of life, but its beginning was an electrifying moment with broad implications, and the book itself is an example of the way that digital culture will collide with the sweating body politic.

By mentioning the artwork "Tribute in Light," by a team of architects, and lighting designers, I want to perhaps stretch the definition of community-based work. This piece transmits the ephemeral echo of the shape of the World Trade Center towers from the beams of 100 searchlights into the night sky. The work, despite its scale, stands for me as a community-based art work in that it was the one response that rose to global visibility from the immediate community, heavily populated with artists and creators, of Manhattan itself. According to the Web site of Creative Time, one of the current producing partners, "The initial 'Tribute in Light' was conceived shortly after the September 11 attacks, when several creative individuals independently envisioned two beams of light rising from downtown New York. …The original creative team of 'Tribute in Light' consisted of architects John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi of PROUN Space Studio, artists Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, architect Richard Nash Gould and lighting designer Paul Marantz."

The work began as a temporary, improvised response slipped literally through the official barriers (aided by a coalition of wealthy institutions and individuals), escaped the bounds of modesty to reach a scale capable of actually addressing the event, was visible to so many millions and elicited such a response that it has become a recurring marker, and I suspect will remain so for some years to come. That the governor and mayor of New York have now attached their names to it, I suppose, also stands as a fitting symbol for one argument of this article: that community arts will take place in negotiation with power in U.S. communities, and through such negotiation. That the supporters of community-based visual art now include ConEd as well as the Rockefeller Foundation may be a good thing, may be problematic, but it is the ongoing reality.

Neill Bogan is an artist and writer from Georgia who currently lives outside New York City. He has staged projects dealing with place, power and memory in performance, visual art, and interdisciplinary public art venues since 1983, and is currently a partner with artist Tom Klem in Klem/Bogan Art and Communication.

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Power and Mastery — Negotiations in Community-based Visual Art

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