Common Memory: The Community Visual Art Challenge of Gwylène Gallimard

The vigorous work of Gwylène Gallimard is exciting for anyone interested in the significance of visual art in community cultural development. Gallimard is a native French artist living and working in Charleston, South Carolina. Her creation of large community-engaged works based in rigorous 21st-century art principles is riveting from any angle. Currently she is making massive canvas murals drenched in images, objects and language that document and interpret her collaborative community projects with hundreds of people of all ages and backgrounds in the American South.

Book documenting "The Charleston / Atlanta / Alaska Challenge: an art program: contemporary, environmental, participatory," created to "build a common memory between all the participants." Click here to download PDF [5.5 mb]

Gallimard's expertise as an artist goes far beyond visual representation. Her community engagement – and her reflection on it — is deeply personal, political, philosophical, inclusive and holistic. Like the best community artists, she can step back from a large collaborative project and see all of its components as part of a whole artwork, including the conceptualization, the planning, the research, the workshops, the politics, all the human relationships, the environment, the installation and the aftermath.

The best way to discuss Gallimard's approach to community visual art is to examine her recent book, written with South Carolina writer Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, documenting her years-long project, "The Charleston / Atlanta / Alaska Challenge: an art program: contemporary, environmental, participatory" (referred to here as "The Challenge") The project begins, breathtakingly, with a three-month-long canoe trip on the Yukon River from Canada to the Bering Sea. It ends, poignantly, with a massive art installation in Charleston's Old City Jail including the work of 400 people.

This little 58-page book is the best job of community art documentation I have ever encountered. It does what great art does: holds humanity up to the light in a way not done before, in a way to jar the soul.* Gallimard created the book with Wellington "to build a common memory between all the participants." In the text, she speaks deeply and clearly about the process of paddling across the wild north country, encountering and learning about the aesthetics and philosophy of the Native population along the river, capturing it all on video, then eventually creating another "river" of art and memory, a community collaboration to connect the children of Atlanta and Charleston with the Alaska experience in complex, touching and glitteringly beautiful ways.

In this Web package, we present:

• An interview between Gallimard and Wellington, excerpted from the book to give a flavor of Gallimard's sweeping views on aesthetics and communication.
• The entire "Challenge" book, downloadable as a .pdf file, printable and readable with Adobe Acrobat. We urge you to download and read this wonderful piece of work, rich with precise descriptions of the process and the art work, and balanced with accessible commentary on social exploration, collaboration, diversity, feminism and criticism of the mainstream art world. [Click to download. 5.5 mb]

An Impossible Dream

As both an artist and a professional restaurateur (she is part owner of Fast & French, Inc.), she is alert to the politics of commerce and efficient marketing. In her travel through the Alaska indigenous world, Gallimard was struck with the Native Americans' absence of separation between what is beautiful and what is functional. She came away from the Yukon experience determined to "emulate a practice of visual art which our modern culture, based on buying and selling, has neglected." She struggled to find an artistic medium that would bring the Yukon to Atlanta and Charleston, a proposal she saw as "a vision, an impossible dream." It became a confrontation with memory, which is one step removed from experience — as is art.

Gallimard worked with schoolchildren in the process of the piece because she was overwhelmed with the experience of discovery. Herself a U.S. immigrant who has worked often with immigrant populations, she perceived herself as a child encountering something new. She wanted to "celebrate the child in us." "There is a parallel," she said, "between discovering the Last Frontiers and discovering the adventure of contemporary art."

Working with 16 school classes and community centers, and with 30 other artists and school mentors, Gallimard spent two years in various workshop situations, introducing contemporary art and producing sections of the final installation. On the team were teachers in math, science, art and biology; a Native American kudzu weaver and paper maker; several sculptors; a Gullah indigo artist; a drum-maker/storyteller; and a writer. Collaborators included organizations as diverse as Camp Kiwanis in Georgia, the Children's Museum of the Low Country, the American Indian Scouting Association, the School of the Building Arts, the Sewee Environmental Education Center and the New Charleston Mosquito Fleet (seamanship training for kids 12-14, commemorating a 19th-century cooperative of African-American fishermen).

"The heart of the installation is the river, a stream of consciousness flowing ceaselessly, the fictional link between Alaska and the Low Country." — Gwylène Gallimard [Click image for larger version]

Together they worked with the children to create the elements that made up the "Challenge" installation in both Atlanta and Charleston. "The heart of the installation is the river," say the authors about the final installation in Charleston's Old City Jail. The 300-foot "river" was "a stream of consciousness … flowing ceaselessly … the fictional link between Alaska and the Low Country." Partly woven, partly laid out on site, it incorporated school projects, found objects, shells, blue bottles, indigo-dyed kudzu, laminated prints of fish and pastel colored fields, color copies of photographs and still videos, handmade rocks, found stones and slabs of glass. The river had a number of tributaries across the geography of the installation, named by and for the participants: the Salmon Slough, the Silken Stream, the Blue Magnet Rapids, Garrett High Plains, Clay Pike Bend, the Discipline Stream and the Midland Channel, leading to the Oyster Blue Ocean, Capers Island and the Recycling Blue Creek. Passing through the installation, visitors encountered a video of the Yukon canoe trip, a children's video letter to Alaskan teens, a children's art workshop, a slide projection of artworks Gallimard presented to all the participants (works by Smithson, Hammons, Dubuffet), a sidewalk-chalk map of North America, a dangling installation of multi-colored paper boats, a stepping-stone path, the Alaskan Summer Spring, the Kudzu Waterfall, silhouettes of African-Americans working along the Carolina coast, a Native American shelter, a moss skirt, an evolutionary bridge, giant dreamcatcher webs, an arch of blue ropes connecting the sky and the earth, and a suite of spectacular canvas murals collecting and synthesizing the whole experience. On the third floor of the jail was an exhibition of artworks by the participating professional artists and a room covered with more than 300 names of participants in the project.

The book offers texts of all kinds: essays by different participants on the artistic process, the child's vision, the school residencies, the Native American reality in the South and its relation to art, artists as teachers and teachers as artists, artists as visitors. There are interviews with the children about what they thought of the project, as well as an evaluative statement and a review from the local newspaper. And the book is filled with evocative color photographs documenting the trip, the workshops, the art making, the installation and the people who took part.

Of particular interest are Gallimard's comments on how she solved the aesthetic problem of representing memory as static visual art in the documentary canvas murals. Wellington describes them and quotes Gallimard (italics) in their book:

Most aspects of the aesthetic behind "The Charleston / Atlanta / Alaska Challenge" are epitomized in the murals. These canvases of transferred video stills are images of an experience past (the Yukon) reinterpreted for the present, yet temporally unfixed, imprecise, and possibly exist in the future. “I tried to introduce a kind of ‘reportage’ — a story about what happened within the work itself. The way it is represented and what is represented are combined. What is represented links it to the time it was made. The way it is represented is the time that flows. The reference point is important as an anchor. Like the roots of a tree. The tree is still growing, but it has roots.”

The murals depict and link us to the initial journey to the Yukon. …[They] were created through a process of freezing a picture on a video monitor, then taking a picture, enlarging it in color copy, and manually transferring the copy to canvas using matte medium and wash. The technique is both multi-layered and “hands on.” Gwylène found that the process enabled her to work with the images, controlling their juxtaposition and composition, in a way that was less removed than cold computer manipulation. The resulting images are sophisticated; they appeal to our sense of the visual chaos of the 20th century; but raw, as opposed to slick, memories, as opposed to hyper-realistic advertisements, dreams, as opposed to possessions.

“I wanted the murals to achieve a distance from reality that was still reality. I wanted to incorporate movement and a little of the sense of the way our eyes work." —Gwylène Gallimard

“I wanted the murals to achieve a distance from reality that was still reality. I wanted to incorporate movement and a little of the sense of the way our eyes work. I wanted to transfer that quality of movement that results when something is never fixed, never totally still. You pass by the murals but the picture is never fixed. You can’t pinpoint exactly what it is. It is not out of focus. Or it’s a special type of focus that is always changing due to the speed of the object, the nature of the motion, the closer you are. When you take a still photograph, that’s when you are obeying artificial laws. That’s not how our eyes perceive. It may become the way our minds remember. But not how our eyes naturally work. And when you are paddling the Yukon it’s even worse. You cannot stop and look. The current moves you. You are never fixed when you are looking at something. The murals capture the movement of paddling. It’s also the way our minds and eyes work, going back and forth all the time, processing information. The murals don’t have frames. Because they aren’t paintings. Or meant to be looked at like paintings. A painting is fixed where it is — boom! More like films, the murals blur in, out. They’re closer to films than to photography. The magic of a film is that it’s three dimensional, with the third dimension of time. I tried to introduce the dimension of time by size, texture, contrast and the accumulation of various types of details.”

The murals are cinematically shifting surfaces replete with the poetics of time and place. They were made to “answer” the drawings made by children at the Charleston Day School. Prior to the Yukon adventure the children visualized for Gwylène and Louise [Graff, her trip partner] what they thought she would see. With an accuracy beholden to the way our eyes work, she gives them back “what she saw.” Blurred though they are, leading us to spaces that memory has emptied of precision, identifiable subjects are locatable within each mural. The murals are each about 20 to 24 feet long, and between eight and ten feet high, divided into subjects.

Social Tangles as Art (Problems)

As an artist and a documenter, Gallimard's brilliance is her ability to look through all the layers of the experience, see each exactly for what it is, and then blend and blur their features together for a commentary on geographical and artistic exploration. Her rigorous process was incredibly difficult at times, but she confronted social tangles like an artist, fully and judiciously, teasing them apart like art problems. The team worked in some of the most challenging school situations available, including the Charleston Discipline School, for children who have been expelled from regular schools, and the 21st Century Learning Center at McClellanville Middle School. When the artists were faced with tough attention-deficit and hostility problems — and sometimes near chaos — at these two schools, Gallimard did not sweep the controversies under the rug, but emphasized conflict resolution, encouraging her team to find solutions toward change, or at least to reflect seriously on the power struggles. For an artist as inclusive as Gallimard, these are simply additional aspects of the same artwork, and they need polishing like everything else. In the book, there are six pages of statements from the artists about how difficult it sometimes was to do their work, and in one case, a letter of openly angry complaint to the children and staff of the McClellanville School by co-author Darryl Wellington. There is no question this was hard work, and all of it was of equal interest and importance to Gallimard as she looked for the heart of the project, which she saw as "bigger than the installation."

Collective Dreams: An interview with Gwylène Gallimard by Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

We turn your attention to the interview with Gallimard from the "Challenge" book, in which she comments on individual and collective dreaming and the "fight against authoritarian values, homogeneity, badly situated ideas of freedom, and a lack of personal and communal means of expression," as well as collaboration with students and teachers, presenting visual art, why she chose community art, the "Alaskan model," diversity, learning about Charleston and "radicalizing the classroom with art." We begin with parts of their bios from the book.

Gwylène Gallimard, the "mapper" of "The Challenge," was born in 1948 in Paris, France. She holds a master's degree in visual communication from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and an MFA in multimedia from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She was a professor of arts at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Nancy and a working partner in the Ustazad graphic design firm. Gallimard was influenced by the cultural revolution of the 1960s. She says new theories of art and politics — minimalism, conceptualism, structuralism, situationism, feminism and the entire media revolution — "fermented in the air and left a permanent impression" upon her artistic consciousness. A co-founder of Cairn, an artists' cooperative dedicated to researching and experimenting with collaborative ways of producing art, she favors installation and public art as forms that actively engage an audience. Her ideal as a creator would be "to go beyond the engagement of surprise and achieve a form of interactive/participatory/community art." Gallimard frequently works in collaboration with French sculptor Jean-Marie Mauclet. The couple are founders and part-owners in a pair of French cafés, providing them "an income outside of the art marketplace, a service relationship with the community, and means of producing art that hopefully reflects the functional beauty of a restaurant."

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet, playwright and critic living in Charleston, S.C. His literary criticism appears frequently in Crisis, The Washington Post Book World and The Christian Science Monitor. His poetry has appeared in The Boston Review and The Chiron Review, among other places. He has received a variety of grants and awards and was the recipient of a 2004 South Carolina Individual Artist fellowship in Playwriting.

(Gwylène Gallimard speaks heavily accented English, with the typical “z” “th” confusion associated with French-born English speakers. She began our conversation with a statement about the corruption of dreams. –DLW)

Gwylène Gallimard: The dreams we are proposed through the media are all richness, glamour, show-off, superstars. Those are the dreams of our culture. And they are not very probable. But we can have many other dreams. I hoped to show in this project that the arts can develop and express a different kind of dream.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington: What kinds of dreams?

GG: Just to take a personal example, when I was young, I wanted to know the world. I wanted to know what was behind the walls of my street. At that time quick answers were not available from TV and anyway an adventure was not just an adventure with people. It was to discover everything that was not around me. So, it was an adventure to discover countries that had nothing to do with France. It was a dream to go to Africa. It was a dream to go to Alaska. To go to China was — and still is, for me — a dream. I still haven’t been there.

As a child I looked at geography books. All those books had pictures that were representations by others and colored my dreams. And they had also stories. So, you start to develop those dreams as a possibility. Some 40 years later, thanks to Louise, there was the opportunity of paddling the Yukon. If I had never dreamt about a possible adventure in Alaska, I would have just let the opportunity pass by.

I think many kids have dreams like mine, too — of traveling and getting out of the house. And those individual dreams are also collective dreams. I am interested in opening minds to creative concepts, both as a healing process and as a way of developing our culture to come. We must fight against authoritarian values, homogeneity, badly situated ideas of freedom and a lack of personal and communal means of expression.

"The child's vision, which is the vision of the unfettered imagination, refuses to fear the Unknown in any guise, whether it be art or place or people." —Darryl Lorenzo Washington

DLW: How did you go about working with the kids? Had you done this before? How did you and the students collaborate? There’s an inherent intellectual imbalance, isn’t there?

GG: I have taught kids, but not the younger ages. This project also involved elementary school children. But first, this project is not only collaboration with the kids. It’s a collaboration with the teachers. And with the mentoring artists. Collaboration for me doesn’t mean that everybody’s equal. The project involved some 350 kids, and the sheer quantitative count of kids influenced the project. This project could not have existed if we had started by trying to have everybody agree.

In our case, there was a leader. Someone who decided that this project was going to happen. That’s me. But even as the leader, I didn’t fully know beforehand the outcome of the project. This was the first time I had worked outdoors with other people. I was trying to not enforce a particular aesthetic development. That was very important. I did not control what went on in the different classes and workshops. The control I kept was more in the mapping of everything. It was very important that there was something in common for everybody in the beginning. That was the reason for the slide presentation and the lecture. Everyone involved in the project saw a slide presentation of contemporary arts.

There was something in common for everybody at the end. Everybody had to come to the installation site, bring their work, decide what, where and how, and participate in the making of the installation. But in the middle it was hands off. There was a lot of improvisation and freedom. The mentoring artists were free to connect with my proposal in original ways. The process worked the best when the teacher connected with my proposal — even without understanding everything which was in my mind. Actually I did not either. And to some extent, as the project developed, my attention was absorbed by administrative duties. I was fighting to try to keep in touch with those duties and not lose the big picture of this endeavor.

Remember. The teachers themselves have a dream of being good teachers. They are there to bring out the best of their students. And sometimes, as in the case of the Discipline school, they urgently desire to get a response out of their students whatever it is, by whatever means. The mentoring artists were often outsiders. But they worked with a regular classroom teacher who was very important as a liaison and interpreter to the students. I couldn’t have always done that. I am not a youth specialist.

DLW: Why do you choose to do community collaborative work?

GG: For years, women were left out of the art world. But when I came to be interested in art in the late sixties, that was over — we weren’t going to be left out anymore. It was a time for woman’s liberation movements. We were going to invade all the professions and the arts. In art school there was something I could not grasp... there was something very formal about it. It was the spirit of the times to introduce new things into the arts. It started by introducing new subjects. Then new materials. Or making posters. New media. Then it developed into questioning our relationship with the audience. I suppose you start by thinking of the audience you have in mind for your art. Then this is not enough. You begin to want to incorporate the audience into the production of the work. That finally, truly transforms the way it is made. Then — in turn — that involvement can enlarge the audience. From my concerns about the audience the idea of working with communities was a logical development.

The Alaskan Indians have no word for art and religion. There is no word, but clear evidence that they admired the arts. The “art” they were making was placed differently within the psychological and sociological framework. That model was interesting and inspiring for me to look at as a model for community art.

DLW: That’s a beautiful model.

GG: A potential model. Then there’s what we have, an art market. Our art market is actually made up of quite a few different art markets. The primary thing that I would like to see changed is the feeling that selling is the ultimate goal. You are a successful artist if you make money. I don’t see anything specific to the arts there. You are a successful restaurateur if you make money. You are a successful paper maker if you are paid well. The statement says nothing about the uniqueness of the arts. It only places art in a capitalist equation.

"There is a parallel between discovering the Last Frontiers and discovering the adventure of contemporary art." — Gwylène Gallimard [Click for larger image]

We could see art and art making as important as other educational subjects. Oftentimes it is not something that’s given enough importance. The arts can be a way for anyone to be able to develop their consciousness of the world we have to survive in. There is freedom in making art. Art can accept experiences that are classifiable nowhere else. But I don’t believe anyone really involved in the arts can only be a viewer. You must participate. In the same way that if you enter the virgin forest, you cannot just sit down. You must work, build and labor in order to learn and survive. The sense of the art world as a wilderness is compromised by the so-called art market. A better art world wouldn’t be so curious — and presently it’s rapaciously curious — about which individuals can be promoted.

DLW: Were you happy with the social and ethnic diversity of the participants?

GG: I was happy that I was able to involve Native Americans from this area. Thanks to an elementary school teacher named Cathy Nelson. There was variety. I don’t know how well it was balanced or imbalanced. We had the Academic Magnet School and the Discipline school, 99% white schools and 99% black schools, elementary, middle and high schools, schools from the countryside and schools from downtown. Those people would never have met but for the project. I had thought the team of Americorps members coming to work on the installation site would act as a link between all students and teachers/artists. But the team was neither ethnically nor sexually diverse. Nevertheless everybody worked with the same goal at the end. The schools that contributed the most had nothing to do with the hierarchy of the best school or the worst school. It was according to the involvement of the teacher. And how open the teacher was to visiting artists. The involvement of the teachers with the kids was the most important thing. Whether they pushed them to be curious, go on field trips, make things. And here I take the opportunity to honor twenty teenagers from the Atlanta-based Youth Art Connection, the American Indian Scouting Association and the 10th grade honor biology class of Garrett Academy for surviving a windy, rainy encounter with a wild, protected environment during their first experience camping on Capers island.

DLW: What did you learn about Charleston from all of this?

GG: The Charleston school system, you mean? And the kids? I was shocked by the fact that most high school kids seem to reach a state of depression and hopelessness. They feel the world is not made for them, and that it cannot be improved. I think you shouldn’t be a teacher in the Charleston school system and feel you can’t expect very much from the kids. No one should participate in reinforcing those feelings. I went to all these different schools and presented slides. I encountered different attitudes. The teacher could be doing something else. The teacher could be after every kid making sure they were listening, not falling asleep, not talking too loud. The teacher could be asking questions and, just by doing that, directing the kids’ focus. There were teachers who felt the slides were a little too difficult for the class, either for the younger or the older kids. They weren’t. The images were new for everybody — including most teachers.

In the social experiment I was making it was good that I had a foreign accent. That helps the students to experience something totally foreign. I sound foreign. I present slides of works that are totally foreign to them and to the teachers. I talk about Alaska — a foreign place. Then I give them smoked salmon to eat — that was foreign to a lot of the kids. They had never eaten that. It’s a gourmet item in Charleston restaurants. It’s the staple food in the Yukon.

I asked every student just to remember two slides. They all did. I asked them to ask themselves why did that artist do that over and over again, sometimes for years and years? I showed works as different as Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty — it’s just a spiral but it’s big enough for a road to go over it. Jean Dubuffet. I am sure that as a kid Jean Dubuffet did a lot of doodles. Every kid who does doodles can relate to Dubuffet. I showed David Hammons’ depiction of Rev. Jesse Jackson as a blonde-haired white man. Everybody laughed. When you show something like that, you immediately make it easier to talk about racial issues.

DLW: And did you?

GG: It opens the possibility. Even if you don’t engage in a serious, lengthy discussion, it becomes a possibility. Those art works have that effect — of radicalizing the classroom. Otherwise it’s always the same classroom, always the same walls. Many art works can potentially transform a dream into a possibility. They have that magic. Especially if you understand where that piece comes from, the process by which someone made it, you can “go” with it, and ”go for it.”

On the Table: Unknown Challenges

After the publication of the "Challenge" book, Gallimard continued to work with the content and technique of the documentary canvas murals. In summer of 2004, she installed a large canvas at Lutheridge Conference Center in North Carolina during the Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting. She discusses it this way (from an e-mail to me in December 2004):

The work I showed at ROOTS ("A mandala. Or is it?") is the last one of the series, "The Charleston/Atlanta/Alaska Challenge." This is the only piece that was not done to act as a background for the project. It was created as a final period: the ultimate documentation of the project and yet a traditional work of art meant to live by itself, framed as a dreamcatcher. It grew out of the "Challenge" as much as older concerns about art history, temporary artworks and the transmission of knowledge. It is a marker of an art-&-community project. However, it works well with the five other canvases of the series and I hope to be able to exhibit them all together at one point and watch them as something from the past. The challenge was not over with the last cleaning of the jail grounds, nor with the book. I needed to say it "in one word," which needed to englobe process, community, Native American culture, video panoramics, the Yukon and the visual arts.

"A mandala. Or is it?" by Gwylène Gallimard 2004 (installation at Lutheridge Conference Center, Arden, N.C., August 2004) [Click image for larger image]

The central image of "A mandala. Or is it?" is an "igloo of trees." The fringe pictures come from two 30' wide dreamcatchers built at the jail. The long blue line is from the Yukon first videos. All images, except the bubbles, are stills from videos taken at various steps of the challenge or even before. The composition of the piece was influenced by a hurricane, an igloo, an Athapascan mask, an Appalachian cove, the Yukon river, a dreamcatcher, a mandala, a rosace, a memorial. The artwork, like an Athapascan mask has holes to let other creatures of the world to come our way. I like to see it as an open work.

In the same manner I am now doing in my studio a large artwork about "My Journey Yours," an art program Jean-Marie and I created and directed in partnership with Refugee Family Services. The presentation this summer at Youth Art Connection in Atlanta was a creative art installation & documentary show. It explored the spirit in which the program — as well as each object, sound or performance — was developed, as a step in that journey.

And in the past I have done what I used to call "documentary drawings." As an example the one I did after "Holy City" (part of "Places with the Past," curated by Mary Jane Jacob for the Spoleto Festival in 1991) was 4.5' x 14.5' and placed on a curved horizontal structure, to be walked around. Other series include "33 Gorenflo Gap" and "Portraits of a Community."

Gallimard has moved on to other projects, including "The Future Is On the Table." Here's what she says about its current phase and about her overall plans for the future:

"The Future Is On the Table #3" is like a bottle in the ocean. We (Jean-Marie Mauclet and I) have made 56 three-legged stools, shipped throughout the world and to be reassembled two years later. The seat of each stool is one of the 56 pieces of a large "Map of the World" puzzle (a North Pole projection, not ethnocentric). We then printed an invitation: "A stock of stools is ready to be sent in bundles of 5, 6 or 7, wherever there are artists and communities willing to use the arts to highlight WATER and SHELTER…" because so many millions of people, today, are displaced by war and the search for water. We invite participants to imagine, propose, plan, map, build, perform... that is, "put water and shelter on, in, above, within the table…" and then we will piece back together the puzzle of stools and works, maybe as an installation, a video, a virtual open space or as a book… It will depend on the type of works generated, the locus, the budget and, for sure, our perception/understanding, from here, of form and substance. Four groups have started working in France, India, South Africa, England.

I guess I do not seek answers. One of my first works was a series of books of questions. I place my art in the process, the making and the aftermath. With social justice as a backdrop. I design my projects around such questions as the socioeconomic factors influencing the production and perception of art. I look into the difference between creating to prevent and creating to mend. I attempt to generate parts that keep a presence as artifacts, like series of large-scale video panoramas on canvas; multi-dimensional documentation; performative elements. Not all of them are finalized, because of lack of money and time, but also because as long as I am selling food I feel I should experiment with the arts outside of commercial constraints, although I am aware it keeps me out of the loop more than I want to be. I am trying to bring the artifacts or documentation or "final periods" as far as necessary, to be strong enough to be meaningful, community- and art-wise. To be honest with you I hope to show all of them as one journey, but I do not yet want to do the groundwork necessary to reach that possibility. I am still looking forward to unknown challenges.

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

*A definition of "great art" I wrote in 1978; I hold it up to the light every year or so to see if it still works.

Click here to download the 58-page pdf book "The Charleston / Atlanta / Alaska Challenge: an art program: contemporary, environmental, participatory" by Gwylène Gallimard [5.5mb].

Original CAN/API publication: December 2004