Grassroots Arts Education on the Cutting Edge: An Interview with Sonia BasSheva Mañjon

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 4 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. Sonia BasSheva Mañjon is the Executive Director of the Center for Art & Public Life at the California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. This interview looks at a community-arts degree program based in social justice and grounded in the grassroots politics of Northern California. It also touches on the urgently growing need for credentialed teaching artists.

"Social justice, equity and diversity." It's like a mantra at the Center for Art & Public Life at California College of the Arts in the progressive environment of the San Francisco Bay Area. Those values are buried deep in all the lessons CCA students are learning about art's place in the public arena. One of the most ambitious beehives in artist education right now, the Center for Art & Public Life was founded in 1998 by artist Suzanne Lacy and educator Sonia BasSheva Mañjon. The Center manages the only Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Community Arts in the U.S.

Established in fall 2005, the interdisciplinary BFA program backs it focus on community-based arts practice and theory with an emphasis on service learning, civic engagement and diversity issues. The curriculum combines humanities and sciences coursework with Core studios, studio electives, courses in arts administration and cultural diversity, and a required internship. Students may choose the SMART (Subject Matter Art) emphasis, a pre-credential program that meets the basic requirement for state-approved teacher credentialing programs.

California College of the Arts students in CCA's Artists for Community program "Rebuild La Peña" at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. (Click for slide show of other CCA projects )

The Community Arts BFA program prides itself on the knowledge that students graduate with an understanding of how historical, social, economic and political factors of communities relate to community art. Toward this end, Center for Art & Public Life creates community partnerships and provides a number of student-support programs. Students may apply for Center Student Grants to help them collaborate on projects with community partners – local partners like the Arab Culture and Community Center in San Francisco or Advocates for the Arts in Fairfield, or international partners like the School of the Arts/Open Studio in Perquin, El Salvador, or the Escuela deYunguilla project in Quito, Equador. (You can read fascinating essays by the students about their experiences in these projects on the Center's Web site.)

Community Arts majors receive priority when applying for the Center's Community Students Fellows (CSF) program, which offers paid work-study internships in local schools and arts organizations. Partnering sites have included Art Esteem, which places CSFs in middle and high schools, after-school programs throughout West Oakland, the Oakland Museum of California, Museum of Children's Art and more. CSFs also work alongside teachers in public schools and artists in residence at local hospitals.

In another Center program, Artists in Community, freshmen live in a dedicated dorm and learn about working as an artist, architect or designer "at the intersection of art and public life," combining art, community and social activism.

The Center is actively networking with colleagues in community art and higher education across the nation. At this writing, the Center staff and a national advisory committee are hard at work on plans for a national gathering, "Crafting a Vision for Art, Equity, and Civic Engagement: Convening the Community Arts Field in Higher Education," a community arts symposium November 2–4, 2006, on the San Francisco and Oakland campuses. It's designed for artists, students, scholars, and community activists to experience and exchange best practices in the field of community arts. The symposium is hosted at CCA in partnership with the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) and Massachusetts College of Art.

As an indicator of what these leaders feel is important in the field right now, symposium topics include:

• What are best practices that incorporate art and civic engagement?
• Does the democratization of art practices address diversity?
• Is there integration of diversity in identity and representation politics on college campuses?
• How is higher education addressing the issues of changing demographics?
• What are processes for community collaboration and interdisciplinarity as means for social change?
• What are methods for achieving diversity in art colleges through community participation?
• How does one develop reciprocal approaches to curricular and community building through the arts?

When I visited the Oakland campus of CCA and the Center for Art & Public Life, I had a chance to meet with these undergraduates, look at their artwork and sit in on some of their classes. I was impressed with their sophistication and their entrepreneurial spirit.

Sonia BasSheva Mañjon

For example, first-year student Camille Hoffman has created a Web site, "Student-Teacher-Artist-Citizen," about the Community Student Fellows program. It starts off with a ringing manifesto called "Our Stance on Art Education and Community." There are essays by Hoffman and other student fellows about their CSF projects at local organizations and schools like the National Institute for Art and Disabilities, Berkeley Alternative High School and Art Esteem, along with a gallery of artwork produced in those internships. There are also a history of legislation affecting arts education in California over the past three decades and local art-education links.

I was interested to talk Sonia BasSheva Mañjon about her program and its place in the bewilderingly diverse and forward-looking communities of Oakland and San Francisco. This interview with took place May 3, 2006, in Oakland, California.

Linda Frye Burnham: Tell me how you introduce your students to the field of community-based arts.

Sonia BasSheva Mañjon: They all take Introduction to Community Arts, the first class for students taking the major or for students exploring if they want to be in the major or do community arts. This academic year, what I did to start the class was this: Through an event we hosted called "Making the Dream Real," we were encouraging the community to take part in "A Season for Nonviolence" [an annual international grassroots educational campaign launched at the United Nations on in 1998 commemorating the memorial anniversaries of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King]. It's 64 days that start on January 30 and end on May 4. And we wanted the community to recognize these two individuals and their teachings and philosophies around nonviolence and then develop community art projects that focus on nonviolence. I wanted the class to think about community art within that context.

Each student had a community they would work with and a community art project that they would implement in those 64 days. Some of my students are new to community arts and some of the students were veterans. So I paired them up in groups that had a veteran artist and a new artist. The projects they did were amazing. One group went to the Youth Guidance Center in San Francisco and worked with three groups of incarcerated youth around art making, painting. And they started telling their stories without telling it in words.

The second group partnered with Far West, which is the school right next door to us. That project was called "Bridging the Gap"; they wanted to bridge the gap between CCA freshmen and Far West freshman and had them come together to do sessions on what nonviolence means and the philosophies of Dr. King and Gandhi. Then they created peace flags and we had a ceremony where they strung the peace flags across the street between Far West and CCA.

The third group worked at Berkeley Alternative High School and did a ceramic tile project. So, it was interesting that all three groups focused on disenfranchised populations in both Oakland and SF. So it would be great for them to talk about their projects to you because they did presentations, they had reflections in the process. Some of them are coming new into this whole notion of community arts. Today is the last class. They're turning in their papers today.

Are these students all freshmen?

No I only have four freshmen in the major. The others are all transfer students from other departments or other schools.

How does your program relate to the concept of service learning?

I tend to use "civic engagement." Service learning is a pedagogy where you incorporate a community component and a reflection component in the class. So, for example, instead of doing the history of the Arts and Crafts Movement, you'd say: The Arts and Crafts Movement – what would be the modern-day application of that in our contemporary community? And they'd research it by experiencing it with a community partner. Then they'd come back into the classroom and reflect on their learning – the impact on the community, so on and so forth.

How is that different from what you are talking about?

It isn't. It's the same. I think it's just semantics and terminology.

But you emphasize social change.

You mean "social justice, equity and diversity"?

That seems like a little twist on service learning.

Yes. A lot of service learning is done in liberal-arts environments, but not in art. I think what we're bringing to service learning is the arts application of it and what that looks like and how it's done in community. The work we do at the Center is focused on social justice, diversity and equity. When we're rolling out new programs or planning things, we basically ask: How are we responding to social justice? How are we responding to diversity? How are we responding to equity? Who are we working with? What are the issues that we're dealing with? What's our sense of impact or outcome? We're very conscientious about that. Not just doing something because it's a do-gooder thing to do.

A lot of times I think service learning is constructed as missionary work: "We're doing this for them." For us equity means that it really is in partnership with. It's not about us sitting in our offices thinking, Oh, let's go to West Oakland today because of x, y and z. It's really about developing a relationship and having the partners want to work with us just as much as we want to work with them. Or we have some partners say they don't want to work with the college, and we will respect that. There very much has to be a condition of reciprocation or it doesn't work. If not, you're just going in and doing something that makes you look good for a minute and then everything goes back to normal.

We're also looking at issues of sustainability. We've been working with Far West for six years and have made a commitment to working with that school as a partner. Now, there has been a lot of research that was poured into the school -- like professional development of teachers – that we feel has not had the type of impact that we would like to see, because the teachers did not have the capacity or interest to engage at that level. We were initially thinking: Let's work with the teachers. Let's teach them this new methodology, new pedagogies incorporating artists in their work. But these are teachers who don't do art. So, it was sexy for a minute, but then they're being held accountable for certain standards and focuses that divert their attention. A couple of times we thought we should pull out because we were not making a difference, and I said: No, we're committed to the partnership, so we have to figure out other avenues to do the work. We had to reevaluate what the principle was, do we continue – [mimes beating at her chest]? Or do we look at other ways in which we can have a more positive impact – which is what we did with mentorship relationships, teaching artists working with the teachers in the classroom, developing and implementing curriculum. I think this is something that you don't find in some service-learning relationships where it's contingent upon a class and a faculty member that's doing the service-learning work and then if that class is no longer given or that faculty person is no longer there, the relationship is lost. Now, there are exceptions: Cal State Monterey Bay was built on service learning. It was very much integrated into the fabric of the culture.

You're saying the difference between a service-learning pedagogy and civic engagement and is a long-term relationship between the institutions, no matter what? And the BFA's social-justice component comes from the Center's mission, that's what it brings into this?

Not only the Center, but a lot of the communities we are working with have very strong social-justice missions, community activism.

How does arts education – teacher training – fold in?

Arts education is very important because education or lack of education is what creates inequity. A lot of time problems around social-justice issues arise because of a lack of educational awareness. So, we're saying we're at an educational institution and if education isn't at the forefront of what we're doing, then we're missing the boat here.

It's very much integrated into everything that we do at the Center. We have a long-term partnership with the Alameda County Office of Education, and with that come 13 school districts. We'll be looking at professional development, teacher training, credentialing. At the Center, we actually developed the SMART Teaching Concentration in direct relationship to that partnership. [SMART is a cluster of studio and humanities courses satisfies prerequisites for application to postgraduate, single-subject-in-art teacher credential programs].

California high school students are required to fulfill certain course requirements to be admitted into a four-year university, and the State has recently added art. All students must have a year of art. Now schools are going to have to respond to that requirement if they're preparing their students to be college-ready.

However, in California, Proposition 13 [a 1978 ballot initiative that reduced state income from property taxes by 57%] wiped out all the art teachers, and there haven't been any arts in the inner-city schools for decades. Now there's a need to train art teachers, and that led us to actively develop three pre-teaching credential programs.

Lori Hager at the University of Oregon gave a paper while I was there, saying that the Department of Education's 21st Community Learning Centers Program has on its agenda to open up schools as community centers, so after-school activity then is open to the whole community. Only about 30% of that opportunity is being taken – in terms of what support the government is willing to put into it. She said this is another call for teaching-artist training. They need these activities in out-of-school programs and of course the artists need to be trained to be teachers. You wouldn't send a teacher into the classroom without any training.

It's a national agenda, though. In my travels to Chicago, Maryland, New York, everyone is looking at how we make the schools a more integral part of the community. And Parks & Recreation, too: They have facilities that are not being used because these agencies are not funding these activities. You can't just have a facility and no funding. First we had Prop 13 and there went all the art programs. And then you look at the city budget and the line item for arts that used to be there for Parks & Rec is gone.

What do you know about the shakeup in San Francisco about arts funding?

That's an age-old debate. When the hotel-tax fund was established in the late '60s-early '70s, the money was going to the major art institutions and it really got the community protesting. The main art institutions have all this money already, they have board money, etc., and tax funds should be equitably distributed to all citizens. There was this huge community forum in protest to that, which created the Call for Equity Endowment that's being run through the San Francisco Arts Commission. It would take up to I don't know how many millions of dollars and focus it on organizations that have a budget of less than $100,000, with a priority for organizations that are serving communities of color, disenfranchised communities, inner-city areas of San Francisco. It's interesting when you look at major art organizations and who's on their boards and how they're connected to politicians and businesses and foundations, and you have people making phone calls and cutting deals for these organizations. We don't have that, grassroots and smaller organizations don't have board members who can do that. Nor do we have executive program managers that have that type of savvy. When you talk about equity issues, how do you level the playing field? There's a disparity out there.

What's your relationship with the City of Oakland?

I have a good relationship. I was the director of the cultural arts department for the City of Oakland under Jerry Brown. So, I came from that position into this one, and I have a very good relationship with the City. And again, I think when Jerry Brown ran for mayor of Oakland, he ran on three platforms: business, housing and the arts. So, the first two: He has brought businesses into Oakland. He started as a commissioner for the Port of Oakland, so he came in the right way. But if you look at downtown, you see all the high-rise condominiums that are being built in that area right now, which are not affordable to me or you. He really is targeting the population that has moved out into the suburbs and trying to bring them back into Oakland. Now, his arts program, what he did do was create the Department of Cultural Affairs for the City of Oakland. What he didn't do was empower the commission. So, going in, to create a city arts agenda was nearly impossible.

When you say empower, do you mean budgetwise, or…?

Budgetwise he did, but his right-hand man when he was in Sacramento was his chief of staff, so he brought him down and gave him the purview of the arts, do with it what you may. And it's my opinion that it wasn't about arts education, it wasn't about the schools, it was about how do you bring more fine artists and public artists into Oakland to build more monuments. It wasn't about community…

He probably wasn't even aware of what you're talking about.

He was. I brought it to his attention a number of times. But he came in with an agenda. And when you're in a position where an agenda has already been established, and then the commission is selected by the agenda-setter, there's not much you can do. And I think it was unfortunate because a lot of artists really put their trust into that administration, they said this is good for Oakland, the arts are finally going to get the visibility they deserve. And we had artists moving here from San Francisco because it was right after the dot-com debacle and a lot of artists were being displaced. They said, Let's go to Oakland, Jerry Brown, his whole platform was about the arts. And it just wasn't the case. So, it really was too bad and that was one of my reasons for leaving the City. Do I stay here and fight for an agenda that was already established before my getting here? Or go someplace else where I can really do something. And at that point the opportunity arose for me to come here to work with Suzanne Lacy in starting the Center. And I'm an ignition lighter as well, so give me something needs to be created and leave me alone, get out of my way. Give me the resources I need and I will put something together for you.

Sonia BasSheva Mañjon is director of the Center for Art & Public Life, chairs the Community Arts Program and Diversity Studies, and is vice chair of a campus diversity initiative. She also holds the endowed position of Barclay Simpson professor of Community Arts. Mañjon's professional background in arts administration and arts education spans 18 years at Bay Area colleges, universities, arts commissions and municipal offices. She has completed numerous projects and video documentaries and is a dancer/choreographer. She earned a PhD in humanities, transformative learning and change in human systems and a Master of Arts in cultural anthropology and social transformation from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She received a Bachelor of Arts in world arts and cultures with a dance emphasis from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the mother of two small boys.

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

NOTE: California College of the Arts was formerly known as California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC).

Original CAN/API publication: September 2006