Art Work, Social Work: An Interview with Kara McDonagh

A Landmark Year: Introduction    Jumping In With Courage: An Interview with Ken Krafchek (Part 1)    Learning to Translate Art into the Language of Community by Christy Zuccarini (Part 2)    Art Work, Social Work: An Interview with Kara McDonagh (Part 3)    Grassroots Arts Education on the Cutting Edge: An Interview with Sonia BasSheva Mañjon (Part 4)    The Athena Project: Refining the Practice of Mentorship in Community Art by Minette Lee Mangahas (Part 5)    Valuing Public Scholarship: An Interview with Doug Blandy (Part 6)    Third Space: Youth, Arts and Community Development by Lori Hager (Part 7)

Part 3 of "A Landmark Year: Community Arts and U.S. Higher Education 2006," a CANuniversity series of timely articles, interviews, photographs and syllabi from the field. Kara McDonagh is an artist with a master's degree in social work who is a faculty member of the Master of Arts in Community Art program (MACA) at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. This interview, which looks at teaching across sectors, took place by e-mail on August 2, 2006.

Linda Frye Burnham: Describe your backgrounds as an artist and as a social worker.

Kara McDonagh: My background as an artist stems from growing up in a family of artists; my father bought us art supplies and poetry books as presents and I was always encouraged to draw and paint and write. Later, my art classes were among the only things that stood between me and dropping out of high school. When I got to college, though, the conversations I found compelling were not happening in the art department – they were happening in women’s studies classes, Quaker meetings, political rallies, sociology classes. This led me very early on to pursue my artwork on my own and in workshops and continuing studies courses while pursuing degrees in social work and community organizing.

Kara McDonagh

Making art, attending to people's basic needs, addressing political issues and learning to be an effective collaborator are not separate ideas.

I joined an intentional community in Washington, D.C.: the Community for Creative Non-Violence, as an undergraduate student and got involved in activism and service work. Many of the community's most effective actions were creative in nature, actions like releasing roaches in the White House to dramatize conditions of poverty in D.C., and preparing Thanksgiving dinners from food thrown into trash cans to serve to the homeless on the grounds of the Capitol building were metaphoric, symbolic, collaborative actions that were part theater and performance art as well as powerful acts of resistance, advocacy and activism.

The experience of living and working with homeless people in community at CCNV helped me form my conviction that making art, attending to people's basic needs, addressing political issues and learning to be an effective collaborator are not separate ideas. I’ve been working to find ways to work at the intersection of those ideas ever since.

What is your position in MACA and what do you think it contributes to the degree program?

My work in the Master of Arts in Community Arts (MACA) program is to coordinate the residency component of the program. At MICA, we’ve been fortunate to have an AmeriCorps-supported program, the Community Art Corps (CAC), since 2003 – two years prior to the MACA program's inception. The CAC program works with organizations around the city who are able to articulate a vision for and commitment to incorporating or expanding the reach of art into the life of their communities, and also with artists who are interested in learning to work with and for communities. We then match those artists and organizations in an interactive process according to their needs, resources, interests and abilities.

The program also trains, supervises, supports and oversees the work of the students in these partnerships, in conjunction with representatives from the organizations. The MA program works with the CAC program in that the MACA graduate students are able to apply for the opportunity to serve this year of Americorps concurrent with their year of graduate school. As you can imagine, this makes for both an extremely rigorous term of service and also an extremely rigorous graduate-school education, but it also leverages resources from both programs to use in developing relevant, meaningful work.

I am also a faculty member in the MACA program and I teach mostly from my years of experience with nonprofit youth-serving organizations. Because part of my position is to oversee the students' work in their residencies, I’m in a good position to help incorporate coursework that bridges the gap between what they are studying in classes and what they are experiencing in their residencies.

I’m convinced that the residency component of the program contributes an enormous amount to the student’s education. Ken Krafchek, the director of the MACA program, is always quick to point out that artists learn by doing. The residencies help these aspiring community artists to negotiate complex situations that have real-world consequences, and they do so in the context of a supportive learning community. This takes their graduate-school experience from the realm of the theoretical into reality, a reality in which they have a chance to have a potentially powerful effect.

At CAN, we have been talking a lot about "hybridity," meaning pathways to innovative thinking about community arts by cross-training in fields outside the arts. Does this idea have any resonance for you? What changes have occurred in your personal approach to the work as a result of your own cross-training?

What resonates with me is the potential for artists to gain a variety of skills in a variety of disciplines that help them use their work in ways that have meaning for them and for their communities. What also resonates is a desire to save people some of the time and hassles expended in missteps and miscalculations. I know I’ve learned a lot about things like budgets and grants and volunteer management the hard way – by making a lot of mistakes along the way. Being an artist in the studio, bumping into things and groping along to discover something authentic, is different from being a community artist stumbling around while people and organizations and programs wait for something of substance.

Certainly artists who work in collaboration with groups of people have something to learn from arts managers as well as from fields that teach about facilitation skills, group dynamics and the specifics of working effectively with different populations and in different settings. The exciting thing for me is that I also think these fields have something to learn from artists. I know one of the things I loved about studying social work was the holistic approach, the emphasis on person in situation, and the fact that the health and well-being of the community is seen as an indispensable component of the individual's health and well-being. What I found missing over time, though, was what I find in abundance among communities of artists – an understanding of the role of creativity, imagination, and passion, the willingness to take risks and explore innovative ways of approaching problems, and the emphasis on a genuinely reflective process of finding an authentic voice with which to speak.

My own approach has changed with the quest to “marry” these different ways of thinking and working – to find ways of using both the right and left brain when necessary, and to approach things in pragmatic and imaginative ways. I find it immeasurably important work to help reconcile society’s caricatures of the artist as completely self-focused and the community worker as completely externally focused. To me, they are not two separate distinct irreconcilable archetypes; but two missing pieces to the other’s puzzle.

A number of community-arts training programs are starting up at visual-arts institutions. Do you have any stories about visual artists encountering communities in their internships?

One of the most heartening aspects of the work I do involves my proximity to the truly reciprocal relationships that can form between artists and communities. The students in the program generally approach their relationships with great respect and humility and with a real desire to learn. I’ve had the sense that for the best of these collaborations, the artists find not only a way to contribute to their partners' goals but they also find a place for themselves and their art in the complex realms in which they’ve chosen to work.

The stories that have moved me most this year, our first full year as a program, are those in which the encounter between artist and community left both changed. One of the students in the program brought her Nicaraguan background and commitment to cross-cultural dialogue into her internship and her internship helped her understand teenagers, job-training programs and the public school system. What has emerged from that encounter is a new international service-learning trip with youth and adults to paint murals and build houses in Nicaragua. Another of our students brought his metal-working skills into a youth-arts program, where they made a formidable metal fence for a community garden, along with many long-standing meaningful relationships that allowed the fence to be created collaboratively.

For another of our students, her residency helped her understand the role of organizing in this country – its roots, its vision, mission and goals. And she was able to begin to demonstrate how art could be used as a potent tool to help organize people. The relationships our students formed this year with youth, community leaders and elders were clearly a huge motivating force for most of the students. It was evident they considered themselves honored to be welcomed into communities and felt strongly about offering their best efforts in return.

What do you think the next generation of community arts leaders will contribute?

I’m quite sure that the next generation will come not only from degree-granting programs, but from many places and many backgrounds, as they have in the past. My hope is that they will bring what the people before them brought, a hunger for relevant, meaningful work, the heart of an innovator, the capacity to take risks, originality, passion and insight. I think they will also be in a position to take advantage of a broad range of information that can impact their work. Many will contribute technological savvy, interdisciplinary thinking and important relationship-building skills. I’ve read with great interest the cross-generational dialogue between Arlene Goldbard and Lee Ann Norman on the CAN Web site, and it occurs to me one of the great contributions any leader can make is to question the prevailing ideas, to poke at the generally accepted assumptions and to be willing to learn from those who have acquired wisdom over time.

My deepest hope for what the next generation of community arts leaders will contribute is a capacity to advocate for the arts. I believe they not only need an ability have a vision but also an ability to articulate that vision in a series of languages that are recognizable to the many communities they must come to belong to in order for this work to continue; the community of artists, of youth and community workers, activists, citizens, humans.

Kara McDonagh is an educator, social worker, community organizer, nonprofit leader and artist who has worked with youth and communities for 19 years. She holds an MSW with a concentration in social and community development from the University of Maryland at Baltimore and has worked in a variety of settings, including homeless shelters, jails, residential treatment centers, community programs and youth centers. McDonagh was instrumental in designing and implementing the Community Art Corps, a program that works in conjunction with the new Masters in Community Arts (MACA) degree program at the Maryland Institute College of Art.  She is also a faculty member in the MACA program.

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

Original CAN/API publication: September 2006