Bridging Art and Research: An Interview with Susan Monagan

A "concept map" by scholar Susan Monagan, accompanying her portrait of artist Barnaby Evans, a method she devised "to connect with the subject beyond their written words, as a way of somehow reconstituting them." (Click image to enlarge)

Susan Monagan is a community arts professional who wrote "The Artmaker As Active Agent: Six Portraits" as a thesis for her Masters degree in Professional Studies at Cornell University. She calls it her "first foray into the theories and practices of social science." For the thesis she engaged six community-based artists in dialogue about their own experiences of working with communities and addressing and defining the new problems presented by a changing public life. Monagan also created "concept maps" based on each artist's interview and work, and came up with some conclusions about the field and about project evaluation. She's now working on a book-length manuscript.

I interviewed Monagan by e-mail during the last week in January 2006. Of particular interest is what she has to say about cross-sector collaboration between artists and social scientists. —LB

Linda Burnham: Why did you decide to focus on the experiences of the artists themselves instead of focusing on the outcomes and impacts of specific initiatives?

Susan Monagan: I have been a student of leadership for a long time and have taught communications skills as part of leadership programs since the early '90s. I noticed early on that with the undergraduate programs I worked with, there were never any visual- or performing-arts majors among the self-identified leaders. I wondered why artists rarely consider themselves leaders even though they often fill leadership roles and flex leadership skills. This inquiry was really brought to a head when I first met George Trakas.

N.Y.C. is arranged into political entities called community boards. Several years ago I was living in Brooklyn and was at my local community board meeting. Many items were on the agenda, among them George's presentation of his design for a waterfront park as part of our neighborhood's water treatment plant's reconstruction. As George began to present, he was being heckled by a few notorious local figures I knew and had run up against in my travels as well. George handled them with such incredible skill. He respectfully (artfully?) moved through his presentation despite the interruptions until the hundred or so people in the room were completely on his side and the hecklers were left stranded. This was quite an achievement in a very tight community that always privileges local over outside interests.

So here George has this masterful command of a leader's communication skills and I'm watching him and marvelling at that and then I realize, "Wait a second – this guy is an internationally renowned environmental artist, too!" It was just overwhelming to me that he had developed such a range of skills and practices and that the type of work he made incorporated the use of all his talents and interests. I knew I had to get to know him better and he became one of the central questions of my thesis. More generally, I wanted to know about the types of people who became and continue to become artists who work with communities. What are they seeking? What are they getting out of this type of practice that a more traditional and perhaps market-based practice denies them?

LB: What was the most intriguing thing you learned while doing this research?

SM: Frankly, the most surprising thing I learned was my own very idiosyncratic way of working through an intellectual problem. My work, as it turns out, is a blend of both artistic and research-based practices. I have formal training in theater and this graduate degree was my first foray into the theories and practices of social science. I really loved the chance to learn and practice qualitative and quantitative modes of research but I was always interpreting them through an artistic lens. As I researched and wrote, I was always struggling with my own personal meaning and whether or not my values and beliefs were being engaged. Did the research design, its implementation and my writing feel honest? I struggled with trying to represent the subjects and realized I had to acknowledge the relationship I had with them. I ended up creating concept maps of each portrait subject as a way to connect with the subject beyond their written words, as a way of somehow reconstituting them. Ultimately, I came to realize that while studying these other practitioners I was working through my own issues of trying to bridge a life in both research and the arts.

LB: You say in your thesis that one of the things these six artists hold in common is a broad and fluid definition of art that helps them "work closely and effectively across disciplines in order to bridge language and paradigms and facilitate collaboration, particularly when their values are engaged." That observation nicely links vision, theory and practice. Can you give us some examples of how that approach worked in action?

SM: I would say that all of the six portrait subjects would name "giving voice to unheard voices" as a central tenet of their personal artistic vision and would see themselves as a conduit to this process. This is a personal value that has political and social ramifications. It is also a simple concept that is unbelievably difficult to achieve.

I think Marty Pottenger was successful in doing this in "City Water Tunnel #3," and so much of that success had to do with her tenacity and the sheer force of her personality. Marty came to the CWT #3 project with a background in theater, feminism and building construction. Bridging different worlds, as difficult as that can be, is as natural to her as breathing and, really, the act of bridging is as much her "art" as is her practice within the medium of theater or performance art. CWT #3 was about Marty privileging the life and work of nonartists: construction workers, engineers, etc. She insisted that they made art in their everyday lives and that their lives would be fascinating subjects with which to build a theatrical piece. She really had a job to do in convincing the workers to participate in the project and in developing the techniques that would draw them toward it and enable them to reimagine themselves as being engaged in making or being the subject of art. It helped that she knew the construction culture from having worked construction herself but it was the hugeness of her vision that kept her at it and able to stand up to the rejection and ridicule she experienced along the way. By the end of the project she knew that she had not only created a work of artistic merit but had made change and had transformed lives with the piece.

LB: What new ideas about project evaluation did you come up with in the process of your research?

SM: Evaluation needs to be built into the artistic process almost at the beginning. Along with the preliminary artistic questions about form, design and subject matter, the practitioner needs to ask, "How will I know if it's good? How will I know if it worked? How will I be able to tell other people about whether and how it worked and how good it is? How will I keep this project honest and check myself against snowing myself or others?" I think Lincoln and Guba* give us a framework for checking the progress of these questions throughout the life of a project. Their "Inquiry Audit" design partners a lead artistic practitioner with a trusted colleague (not involved in the project) who helps her formulate these questions and then asks and checks them at intervals along the way, recording the responses. The evaluation can be a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods, depending upon the project and its goals; the important thing is that there is a stated plan of evaluation, that it is detailed and that the plan is verifiable and has been verified by a practitioner who is willing to tie her reputation to that validity. We need to build money for rigorous project evaluation of this type into funding proposals.

LB: You say you found these artists using social-science data collection and analysis methods in work. How do you think artists and social scientists can collaborate across disciplines to share techniques?

SM: Social scientists seem to be desperate to learn from artists. Almost as soon as I arrived in Ithaca, I learned of a growing movement in social science, Participatory Action Research (PAR), and got to know many of its lead practitioners. As I understand it, PAR suggests that the practitioner enter the research plane as a receptive body with a stated desire to help. Research is designed and created with and by the research "subjects." Ideally, the research – both process and product – has meaning and value to the whole team. My observation is that community-based artists engage in a very similar practice. So it seems that we are arriving at the same place from different starting points. As in many gaps, this one is very fertile and a very exciting place to be!

I went to a conference hosted by the University of Georgia in early '05 entitled "Art as Research & Research as Art." We were all flushed with excitement to finally be in the same room together! Much of the work (including my own) was not pretty but it was very fresh and full of the pioneering spirit of moving into new territory. Because of this the atmosphere was far more supportive and far less critical of one another's efforts than would have been typically observed in either an artistic or an academic setting. I saw presentations about delivering a research paper as a poem, teaching environmental awareness through performance art, and doing enthnographic research by building an interactive website with a music-based youth subculture. So this type of sharing is happening, collaborations are happening, too, but perhaps even more startling is that people are allowing themselves to be hybrids and are embracing all these methods to help them pursue their questions.

LB: How was this thesis received by the Graduate School? Does this thesis project inform your own future path as a professional? How?

SM: My committee comprised two professors engaged actively in Participatory Action Research (one from Education and the other from Landscape Architecture!) and they embraced my work fully. This work is by nature interdisciplinary, so bridging is built into conversations right from the beginning. Other professors I deeply connected with and got loads of support from were from City and Regional Planning, Development Sociology and Anthropology. Strangely, I found no connections with performing- or visual-arts faculty. My access to these professors was aided by the fact that I am middle-aged and so are they. Like them, I have many years and a large variety of experiences I'm drawing from. Also, I was extremely focused as a student in completing the project and had a very clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish and how to go about it.

I plan to expand this piece into book length by fleshing out the portraits by including responses to the artists‚ work from their funders and some of the community folks they've worked with. Reading and learning and talking about community-based work is a great source of vitality for me. I will be helping host an artists retreat here in upstate N.Y. this summer with Art Culture Nature, a group of practitioners and academics (sometimes both in one person!) who are looking at the confluence of ideas presented by art and the environment.

My career path is taking me toward a great deal of consulting with upstate New York communities that want to get started on the "creative economy" approach to community and economic development. Much of our work is on the Web site www.nycreativeeconomy.cornell.edu. Having written and researched the motivations of artists who work with communities, I feel that I am in a much better position to suggest projects and designs that will use the arts to begin to gather and unify communities. I continue to come across and recognize the "artist-entrepreneur" type while doing this work and I urge community leaders and stakeholders to seek out the artist leaders in their communities, bridge to them and support them.

Susan Monagan

Susan Monagan is manager of audience development and special projects in the Department of Theatre Arts at Ithaca College. She is also a project team member of Cornell's New York Creative Economy research project, and is engaged in several projects initiated by Cornell's CARDI (Community and Rural Development Institute) from which she recently received an M.P.S. degree focusing on art and community development.

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

* Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, authors of "Naturalistic Inquiry," a book about research and evaluation in education and the social sciences.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2006