Let's Give Them Something to Talk About: Animating Democracy's Last Gathering

(From left) ADI's Barbara Schaffer Bacon, Raylene Lancaster & Sharon Hayden from Hawaii, ADI's Pam Korza & Andrea Assaf. View slideshow of images from project. All photos courtesy Animating Democracy

Those who attended the October 2003 National Exchange on Art & Civic Dialogue in Flint, Michigan, will be able to say they were at one of the signal arts events of the last decade. This final gathering of the four-year Animating Democracy Initiative was important on so many levels, not the least of which was its timing. It happened at the point where many of us were politically agitated about U.S. government policies and were primed for a motivating event. And we had gathered around 32 "lab" projects in arts-based civic dialogue supported by the initiative, projects focused on some of the burning issues of our lives. Among the 250 people attending were many leaders in art for social justice from all corners of the country, some of whom have decades-long histories in human-rights activism. And they were passionate.

Touching off this tinder box was "These are the times that try our Souls," one of the few keynote speeches I have ever heard that actually struck a spark at an arts conference. It was given by Grace Lee Boggs of Detroit, age 88, an activist in what she called "most of the great humanizing movements of the second half of the last century" — the labor, Civil Rights, black power, women's, Asian American, environmental justice and antiwar movements. She listed many of the desperate challenges facing the U.S. and the world at this time, and urged us to unite across our differences, "stop thinking of ourselves as victims," "put the Neighbor back in the Hood," transform ourselves into "global and planetary citizens" and "create a new paradigm of our selfhood and our nationhood." Addressing a room full of people who fight daily to undo oppression in their various communities, she said,

… the various identity struggles, while remediating to some degree the great wrongs that have been done to workers, African Americans, Native Americans and other people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and while helping to humanize our society overall, have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more as victims of "isms" (racism, sexism, capitalism) than as human beings who have the power of choice and who for our own survival must assume individual and collective responsibility for creating a new nation that is loved rather than feared and that does not have to bribe and bully other nations to win support.

…This gathering provides us with the opportunity to share what each of us has been doing to reach the hearts and souls of Americans so that together we can begin building the movement that is now required to develop our compassion, i.e., our capacity to feel the pain, suffering, fears and hopes of others, and our recognition that each one of us is continually making a difference by what we choose to do or choose not to do.

Grace Lee Boggs brought down the house, and for the next three days we went energetically about the business of sharing what we had all been doing to reach the hearts and souls of Americans. Grace was with us all the way. The sharing was so powerful that by the third day the crowd was organizing for political action. By the end of the conference, plans had been laid for another gathering in New Orleans in January 2004, and a hat was being passed to provide transportation for those who needed help getting there. We left the conference with the words of Gandhi ringing in our ears: "Be the change you hope to see in the world."

What's So Great About Animating Democracy

It was no accident that electricity jumped like ball lightning from one group to the other at this gathering. A combustible combination made it burst into flame: a beautifully structured conference and a group of people who, over four years of serious, constant dialogue, had become a cohesive community.

Animating Democracy is a four-year initiative (1999-2003) designed by Pam Korza and Barbara Schaffer Bacon to explore the intersection of the arts and civic dialogue (sponsored by Americans for the Arts with support from the Ford Foundation). Its deeper purpose is to find the answers to some serious questions about art for social change: How and why does change occur in society and what is art's place in it? ADI's activities, including publications, project support, dialogue training, convenings and a brilliant Web site, are premised on the idea that a healthy democracy needs civic dialogue that brings forth an exchange of many voices around the issues that affect people's daily lives. The designers had detected a growing body of activity in which the arts were consciously incorporating civic dialogue as part of an aesthetic strategy.

Following the 1999 publication of their ground-breaking national field study and report, "Animating Democracy: The Artistic Imagination as a Force in Civic Dialogue," ADI issued a call for proposals, then partially funded 32 projects across the country in which artists partnered with their communities and civic-dialogue experts, provided help and guidance, and followed their progress through periodic gatherings called "learning labs." I was lucky enough to attend three of these labs and get a sense of the evolution of the project. (For more details of ADI's case studies, dialogue methods, theories of change, lessons learned and much more, dive into the voluminous Animating Democracy Web site.)

As San Jose's Maribel Alvarez observed at the Flint convening, the whole initiative became a learning exchange, with the sponsors learning just as much as the participants. At early learning labs I became concerned that ADI was suffering from organizers' disease: Experts were being brought in to teach these artists a certain method of civic dialogue. While this method offered many useful approaches to uncovering assumptions, suspending judgment and listening with empathy, the professional instructors at first appeared to be enforcing a specific form and structure. This was hard for some of the older artists to swallow, especially those who had been doing successful, cutting-edge work in this vein for 20-30 years with a wide variety of populations and in styles that didn't fit the mold. I worried that once again pioneering artists were being treated like students instead of resources.

But that turned out not to be the case. While sticking to their agenda, Schaffer Bacon and Korza — along with associates Andrea Assaf and Michael del Vecchio and a battery of project "liaisons" — kept their eyes, ears and hearts open along the way and learned from their participants and projects, enhancing their style, theory and content to fit the moment and advance the momentum. By the time we got to Flint, they had it down. We spent the whole four days talking and listening in large and small groups, sharing our experience and teaching each other. The conference, advertised as Animating Democracy's last gathering, was so energizing that the attendees didn't want the dialogue to end. It was telling that the impetus to organize as a movement was the result of a commonly voiced need to "go on talking with each other." Perfect: The need for the dialogue lives on after the initiative that birthed it.

The Gathering of the Clan

There was a moment when I thought I was hallucinating the whole thing. During the group sing at the end, I closed my eyes and realized I could hear the voices of many of my closest colleagues, most generous mentors, most powerful role models and dearest friends. If I had designed a coming together of the arts, it would have been this one.

Run your eye across the Reading Room page of this Web site and listen to a short list of the people who were there.

From the writers of CAN's "textbook" on community arts – they wrote the overview essays for the categories by which we organize the field — there were: Jan Cohen-Cruz, Alice Lovelace, Mat Schwarzman, Caron Atlas, Liz Lerman, Maryo Ewell and Assaf, Korza and Schaffer Bacon.

Look at the list of Special Projects on that page. From The ROOTS Reader there were Lisa Mount, Kathie deNobriga, Suzanne Lacy, Mary Jane Jacob, Gwylène Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet, Sonja Kuftinec, Carolyn Morris, John O'Neal and MK Wegmann. From "Performing Communities" there were Michael Fields, Ferdinand Lewis and John Malpede. From Places to Study: Janie Paul, Buzz Alexander, Judy Baca. From "Everybody Say Hallelujah" there were John Borstel, Jane Hirshberg, Sandy Augustin and Wendy Morris. From "Connecting Californians," there were Kate Magruder, Theresa Holden and Isao Fujimoto. From "The Citizen Artist" there was Marty Pottenger.

And from the other pages of CAN: Tom Borrup, Katrina Browne, Michiko Akiba, Jessica Holt, Homer Jackson, Judy Jennings, Michael Keck, Jon Pounds, Graciela Sanchez, Bernardo Solano, Roberta Uno, Tricia Ward, John Zwick and probably many more. (And of course some of these names, like Liz Lerman, echo across many of the pages of CAN.)

Sharing Our Stories

The meeting was a golden opportunity to hear firsthand from artists and their community partners about the inventive ways dialogue is being used in ADI projects all over the nation.

John O'Neal and Curtis Muhammad of Junebug Productions (New Orleans), for instance, talked about their use of the story-circle method in their national Color Line Project and its local, three-year collaboration with the people of Flint. They are collecting stories about the Civil Rights Movement and exploring ways artists, educators and organizers can use them to promote civic dialogue around issues of race and inequality. Judy Baca, Debra Padilla and Pete Galindo from SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center) led a session about their use of dialogue through digital and Internet technology to expand their project, The Great Wall of Los Angeles. The world's longest mural, The Great Wall was created between 1976 and 1984 by Baca and teams of artists and scholars, along with teenagers who had been in trouble with the law. The mural is a reinterpretation of the history of California's minority peoples, built on community stories. Now people from all walks of life are coming together in live and online dialogue forums to consider ideas for expanding the mural.  Images created by Baca and a design team will be taken back to the community and posted on SPARC's Web site for further feedback.  SPARC has carried on 80 community dialogues in the last year alone.

Artists from Out North in Anchorage brought a range of questions raised by their project with the Interfaith Council and Alaska Common Ground about "the legal, moral and cultural place of same-sex couples in our society." Katrina Browne and two dialogue experts conducted small-group discussions around Browne's film-in-progress, "Traces of the Trade," which maps the North's complicity in the American slave trade. Browne's film focuses on an intimate, wrenching dialogue with members of her own family, descendants of slave traders in Rhode Island, as they tour African departure points for slaves bound for the Americas. The workshop speculated about methods and effects of future public dialogues in Rhode Island, where the populace profited from the trade and this history is carefully hidden.

All these dialogues were deep and complex, poring over myriad riches, stand-offs, paradoxes and surprises in every case. So much was on the table at this banquet of art and dialogue that I can only offer the reader a small taste of the feast.

The Motion of the Ocean

The meeting was much more than a chance to witness this work in progress. Every session presented all participants with a chance to speak from their own experience, and all the sessions pointed to the confluence of art and social change.

For example, Jan Cohen-Cruz (N.Y.U.) facilitated a session called "Historical Perspectives: Motion of the Ocean," premised on a quote she heard from John O'Neal and originally uttered by an Atlanta deejay: "It's not the size of the ship that makes the waves, it's the motion of the ocean."

The session was meant to suggest that socially engaged art is not a marginal activity made in a vacuum, but has multiple influences and contexts that give it resonance and relevance. Placing a timeline on the wall, Cohen-Cruz asked us each to call up a defining moment in our lives when a cultural movement intersected with a social movement, and the resulting art we made. We each wrote a year on the timeline.

We would all spend time telling our stories, but six people were designated in advance to get the dialogue rolling. Here's a description by Cohen-Cruz herself, from an unpublished manuscript on community-based art:

The first storyteller, a Latino artist [Michael Marinez of the Esperanza Center], challenges the authority of history by evoking Aztec mythology. He links negative revisionist misconceptions of a particular Aztec goddess to misapprehensions about contemporary women like his grandmother who are poor economically but not culturally. He then describes his beginnings as an artist, painting flowers under the sink of his grandmother's public-housing apartment, where he could secretly make art without her being threatened with eviction.

The next speaker, a Japanese man in his early 80s [Isao Fujimoto of the Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship], chooses his time in a WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans as a point of reflection. He cites works of art made from found objects such as sea shells and sagebrush that littered the bleak grounds of the camps. Such art, he tells us, is akin to the Buddhist symbol of the lotus, which bursts forth in the dankest of surroundings.

The next artist [Suzanne Lacy, Otis Art Institute] juxtaposes Cesar Chavez and the Chicano Farm Workers movement in California in the 1970s with her own work at that time with feminist artists in Los Angeles, making connections between gender, class and race.

Next an arts administrator [Maryo Gard Ewell, late of the Colorado Council on the Arts] evokes the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, which created the Extension Service as the basis for the rural grassroots arts in this country, including Midwest colleges where people including her father, Robert Gard, connected with local people as makers of art often based on love of place.

An African-American writer/educator [Alice Lovelace, Atlanta Partnerships in Arts and Learning] speaks about slaves who wrote spirituals as tools of liberation with secret messages, and her own work as a writer/educator.

The last speaker, in his mid-20s [Uday Joshi, New WORLD Theater], describes the April day in 2002 when his car blinker lights broke and he was stopped by the police. Raised middle-class and ivy-educated, he was sure that once he explained, he would be allowed to proceed. However, given his mid-eastern features, the police did a back-check and hauled him into the station for participating some years earlier in a demonstration in Cambridge, a case that had been closed but was reopened with the Patriot Act. The incident became the starting point of a play.

Art, Dialogue and Activism

At most of the sessions I participated in, and at lunch and performances and quiet times on the grass, people were talking about Grace Lee Boggs' speech and its resonance with the politics of the time. Things finally came to a head during a session called "Art, Dialogue and Activism." This was a very large group discussion with a panel of artists who are considered activists. They spoke with vigor about their work in their own communities and their commitment to make things better for the people around them. (Quotes are from my written notes, not from a transcript.)

Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio talked about the difficulty of participating in a democracy that wants your people to be silent:

We are the survivors of cultural genocide. …We participate fully in the community, but not as the zombies the business community would like us to be. …We believe in the values of being "buenagente," good people. …As lesbians of color, we have nothing but our dignity, so the struggle is about our dignity. …Intellectuals are always thought of as being at the university. I'm an intellectual, but my theory comes from my mother.

Junebug's Curtis Muhammad got serious about using art and dialogue to organize a movement:

Story is the most valuable element oppressed people have. … The story circle is the great equalizer. …We need to rejuvenate the Civil Rights Movement, and story is the vehicle. …In SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, we took people's stories and built a movement. We made Freedom Schools. Artists learned how to make art from those stories, educators made curriculum, activists organized the community with those stories. …We reached for the voices of the voiceless. We had to demand change in the adversarial relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor.

It was Muhammad who, when someone in the audience shouted out that this was our last gathering as ADI, suggested we found a national coordinating council, as he and his collaborators had done with SNCC, to continue the conversation and organize around our political concerns. It was interesting to watch the response to his words fly around the circle. Older people had testimony in their eyes. People in their middle years acknowledged the past. Younger people leaned forward.

Grace Lee Boggs was enthusiastic but guarded about repeating methods that were successful in the '60s: "A movement is built when someone does something, someone else sees it and says, 'We can do that, too.' …[but] let's not go back to the past, let's see how people are applying the lessons of the past to the problems of today."

Roberta Uno of the Ford Foundation spoke up for a movement she has supported in her work at New WORLD Theater in Massachusetts: "We need to learn from what young people are doing in hip-hop activism. …It's a new Civil Rights Movement, or like when culture was so central to the Farm Workers. …They're not creating their models in response to the boxes funders have put us into."

Andrea Assaf of ADI put in: "The best dialogue I have seen is by anarchists involved in anti-globalization."

ADI's Wayne Winborne warned us: "We think a movement is going to look like it did in the '60s, so we don't recognize a movement when we see it."

At the end of this meeting, several individuals took the initiative to carry the conversation forward. At another ad hoc meeting in the afternoon, we talked more about organizing as a "national congress of artists, organizers and educators." A date was set in late January for another meeting, and the artists from New Orleans (Junebug and the National Performance Network – contact them for more information) offered their spaces for that purpose. Grace Lee Boggs kept attempting to sway the group away from political protest and toward something new and creative and compassionate, something only artists could contribute.

That night we adjourned to the theater for some powerful performance by New York's Urban Bush Women and brilliant poetry by young artists from Flint's own Neo Griot collective. When I finally got back to my hotel at 2 a.m., I found Grace Boggs, John O'Neal, Graciela Sanchez and Wayne Winborne in the lobby, arguing (or dialoguing) about revolution. They were still at it when I went to bed at 3.

Get Up, Stand Up

Having listened past the point of exhaustion to this dialogue among experienced artist-activists, I understood why, during the final gathering on Sunday morning, only about 60 people rose to identify themselves as ready to attend the meeting in New Orleans in January. For those who had been through all the human-rights struggles since the 1960s, not to mention the culture wars of the '90s, there was a reluctance to go down that road again without some completely fresh, new approaches and strategies. Many community-based artists were energized to organize within their own regions, but not nationally, or felt they already had their hands full changing the world with their own work at home.

Some were simply pessimistic. As one young woman had put it so eloquently in the previous discussion, for her nothing but discouragement emerged from the massive antiwar demonstrations of early 2003, when many millions of protestors poured into the streets all over the world on the same day. "I was left with an overwhelming feeling of apathy," she said. Not only did the demonstration fail to stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was barely covered by the press.

Additionally, in Flint there was an undercurrent of feeling that this group wanted the next movement to be designed, led and powered by people of color, as if "the struggle" we all thought we were facing was about race, and, what's more, it could be confronted with organizing tools previously successful in civil-rights battles. But Grace Boggs kept trying to push the argument beyond such distinctions, implying that they would distract us from the real emergency. If we are to unite behind a cause, the cause for this group is not yet clearly defined, and in fact seems as diverse as the multiple causes behind the hydra-headed coalition against globalization.

Personally, I feel the real emergency is the present Republican administration's unilateral crusade for U.S. world domination, fueled by a barely concealed evangelical Christian agenda that has been stealing into power across the nation for 30 years. The tools we need to fight against that will have to go beyond civil disobedience and other strategies that have worked in the past. The right has already absorbed the 20th-century tactics of the left and turned them against us.

But it is safe to say motivation for local arts-based civic-dialogue work remained strong within everyone in the room, along with the determination to make positive change in our communities. "This is your moment," educator David O'Fallon told the gathering. "There will never be another like it."

The conference closed with "Answering the Call of the Drums," one of Alice Lovelace's "GroupSpeak" pieces composed of phrases she heard throughout the conference while eavesdropping on its conversations. Its last words:

If you change then the world will change

Educate

Agitate and

Organize

Organize

Organize

What's Next

Whether or not an organized movement emerges from Animating Democracy, the initiative itself is a resounding success. It got us together – in a time when there is little money in the arts for face-to-face national convenings. It got us talking, and talking deeply about workable ideas and urgent issues – together and at sites in all regions of the country.

ADI has made a recommendation to Americans for the Arts for follow-up activities based in ADI's insights, information and best practices, including a cross-disciplinary network that convenes annually, professional-development programs, grants for broader arts-based civic-engagement projects, support for documentation, and a national awards program. There will no doubt be a harvest of publications and DVDs out of many of the projects, including ADI's "Critical Perspectives," an interestingly designed book of critical essays by diverse writers about three of the Lab projects.

ADI will spin out across the nation for years to come as its projects wind down or spring to further life. It is a fortunate landmark in American art history. Whatever happens, many of us will have our eyes on Schaffer Bacon, Korza, Assaf and delVecchio to see what they think it is important to do next.

Linda Frye Burnham is a co-director of the Community Arts Network and Art in the Public Interest.

The National Exchange on Art & Civic Dialogue took place in Flint, Michigan, October 9-12, 2003, on the campus of the Flint Cultural Center, with the support of Americans for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Ruth Mott Foundation and the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. For more information see the Animating Democracy Web site.

Original CAN/API publication: November 2003