Book Review: New Creative Community

Arlene Goldbard’s "New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development" is in almost every way a new book even though it’s billed as an updated and expanded version of a 2001 book by Goldbard and Don Adams titled "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development." In it she shares lessons from her unprecedented breadth of experience in community arts over the past 30 years.

The book serves an ambitious agenda. It’s a much needed document of history, a theoretical proposition for a field called community cultural development, a global comparison of similar practices, a set of recommendations for codifying the practice, a blueprint for supporting and building the infrastructure of the field, and a never-give-up argument for public funding of the arts. Goldbard’s excellent and insightful prose captures the essence and applications of these community cultural practices. It’s a wonderfully rich book, full of ideas and recommendations worth serious consideration and debate.

The 2001 Adams and Goldbard book, as well as their "Community, Culture and Globalization" – a 2002 collection of essays on cultural and globalization – were monumental in their time. They brought together and put language to a generation of important work and thinking by community-based artists, arts administrators and cultural workers in the U.S. and gave us context in a global arena. Goldbard and Adams, as organizers, consultants and writers, served the field as prolific chroniclers and analysts of this work for most of those years. Commissioned and published by the Rockefeller Foundation, these books also brought the weight of this venerable foundation to such a cogent compilation of ideas and practices.

Yet, these books came at a time of great challenge for that field – a field that even Rockefeller has now turned away from supporting as it seeks to maximize return for its investments in community change. The Culture Wars of the '90s and new Republican realities of the 2000s had already forced many artists and nonprofits to find other routes, to re-create themselves once again – or to fade away.

Part of Goldbard’s motivation for writing this book would appear to be based in her desire to influence coming generations of artists and cultural workers. “I am concerned,” she writes, “that there be adequate opportunities – and receptiveness on both sides – to transmit prior learning to a new generation.” She poses an interesting question: can she and her contemporaries – myself included – be open to new ideas and approaches, and will young practitioners discovering (or re-discovering) on their own listen to voices of experience? Embedded in her question is one about the book itself. Does it provide the field tools with which to move into new times, or is it a document of a field of practice now part of history?

In seeking to define the field, Goldbard frequently cites UNESCO and the World Commission on Arts and Culture Development. The kind of role for artists she is trying to describe, she says, boils down to UNESCO’s concept of “self-determination.” She also refers to “emancipatory aims.” Goldbard offers many gems in describing community cultural development work. I enjoy repeating her words:

Goldbard’s effort to create unifying principles or models is a worthy yet tricky undertaking – one deserving of discussion and debate across the field. Ultimately, I find her definitions more limiting than expansive and her recommendations too laden with doubts to help propel the field into a new generation and new times.

Before further discussing the juicier ideas in the book, I must offer minor critique under the category of "I didn’t get enough."

Intellectually I was left unsatisfied, wanting more depth. The chapter on Historical and Theoretical Underpinnings, for instance, moves from the cave painters of Lascaux to Liz Lerman in six paragraphs. While illuminating and weaving these threads is important to give historical continuity, Goldbard provides little analysis of the meaning and legacies of these forerunners. Settlement Houses are touched on and discounted as flawed and not relevant. University-based Arts Extension programs are mentioned but without their significance. In another section she devotes about one page to CETA, a government employment program that had no small part in bringing about what Goldbard describes as the movement’s late-'70s golden age.

Likewise, a number of fascinating contradictions arise but aren’t explored. Goldbard grapples with finding herself marginalized as a white consultant in a diversifying field for which she served as midwife, and she expresses mixed feelings about efforts to institutionalize the field of practice she herself advocates applying strict standards to. These – and other – contradictions, we all face regularly. However, she doesn’t openly wrestle with them on the page in a way that might be more informative and engaging – revealing her struggles and how she resolves them. There is some awkwardness in the flow of the narrative as it attempts to bridge historic context and timely recommendations; some sections read as a first-person reflections, others a policy paper for a foundation.

Goldbard’s proclamation, cited earlier, describes artists in service of the emancipation and development of communities. However, this principle doesn’t seem to follow through in how community cultural development is applied and evaluated.

In Unifying Principles and Matrix of Practice/Program Models, I worry that her typologies may be too difficult for natural innovators to conform to. “To achieve its full social impact,” she writes, “community cultural development must also be recognized and strengthened as a distinct, value-driven practice, which sometimes requires drawing the line, saying that a project departs too much from those core values to be called community cultural development.” There are other similar demarcating statements, as well.

While her wonderful observations draw out commonalities among a variety of artist-driven projects, I have to question the creation of a code that excludes. Is it for purposes of branding? Creating funding categories into which people might wiggle? To provide a prototype which young artists strive to replicate? Does creating such a code serve the field – or, more important – how is it of value for communities?

In her model artists are almost always visitors to the communities in which they work and they bring formal training in Western art disciplines. Goldbard writes,

I can’t help but think here about Starfleet’s “Prime Directive,” a principle of noninterference in other cultures invoked and violated weekly by various generations of Enterprise captains in the fictional TV series. There’s always influence or transference of cultural values – even in observation.

Perhaps the most revealing part of the book is her attempt to describe a hypothetical community arts project, an “exemplary tale.” The project described doesn’t include an internal critique or open-ended set of questions. The overriding interest appears to be protecting the goals and funding of the lead artists who rally community members into their cultural contrivance. We don’t know how they recruited participants or what, besides free time, would motivate community members to take part. At the front end, there is no assessment of community needs, desires, issues or assets, nor is there identification or engagement of indigenous cultural practices and practitioners that might be employed. A group of artists, who have a sketchy relationship to this place, bring their cultural backgrounds and artistic training as a gift. No one invited them. They meet together in an “us versus them” setting to decide the course of the project. Their arch nemesis is the Chamber of Commerce. They didn’t seek to join existing organizing efforts around issues already identified as concerns to this community. They’re essentially going it alone. While moving transformations take place among and between individual participants in the end, they are basically random, unintended consequences. There’s no basis on which to measure community progress or change.

Goldbard and Adams' 2001 book described culture as akin to the operating system of a computer, as the underlying code that enables (or prevents) everything in the social, political, economic world to function. This strongly influenced my work. I adopted a wider definition of culture that includes everything from food, farming, and relationships to the land, to games, sports, religious and ritual practices, fashion, and virtually every form of social interaction. It opened my thinking to learn more about how economics and politics are driven by culture, as are architecture and urban design. It’s then easy to see how artists can be effective inventors and repair technicians for the workings of culture and, by extension, for all these other fields and social functions. I began to see so many levels on which artists’ work has power. I’m also convinced that to truly embrace a multi-cultural reality, this wider definition is essential.

In this book, Goldbard positions community-based artists and community cultural development within and firmly attached to the traditional industry and professional field of the arts. Given the goals she has articulated for community cultural development and the successes she cites in ‘New Hybridity,’ one has to question whether this is the best place for it. Can the field really progress if it remains on the fringe of an industry essentially hostile to its premises and values? Besides I think artists are capable of being effective in a much wider arena than Goldbard has roped off for them.

Community cultural development finds itself apart and somehow in competition with major Eurocentric arts institutions on the one hand, and in a similar relationship with informal and participatory cultural practices on the other.

In contrasting establishment arts institutions that “focus primarily on bringing new populations into contact with received culture, busing groups to museums…,” Goldbard describes them in opposition to community cultural development, which she says focuses “much more on multidirectional cultural dialogue, working with immigrants to devise drama or photography projects depicting their own struggles with assimilation and difference in relation to mainstream culture…” How big is the difference between busing immigrant kids to museums and leading them through western forms of drama production or the process of interpreting images through the technology of photography? Undocumented immigrants and refugees along with others who are uncomfortable with their images being captured and displayed, or for whom theater is profoundly unfamiliar, may decline this exercise. What about exploring, learning about, and facilitating their indigenous cultural practices – at least those not in conflict with emancipatory aims or self-determination?

At the same time Goldbard expresses very limited interest in informal and traditional participatory practices – those that are indigenous, or that have been propagated outside formal arts institutions such as those described by anthropologist Maribel Alvarez. Alvarez sees informal and participatory practices as the true mainstream versus the symphonies, operas and ballets that are passed off as “mainstream” by the economic elite. Whether new or centuries old, these indigenous practices empower people to define themselves and build social bonds. Have community cultural development practices helped unleash these informal arts, as Goldbard suggests, or are they both part of the same human drive to engage in creative activities together?

Goldbard writes, “What makes community cultural development different from clever advertising, do-it-yourself crafts kits, advanced or inspiring protest songs is that its means and ends are one.” I think she’s discounting valuable cultural practices. Is there a purpose to drawing lines that separate us from and diminish the pursuits of do-it-yourselfers, gamers, "wiki" participants and others?

Today’s younger generation has different horizons, different hopes, different visions. Their idealism is real. To infer their expectations are less than ours once were is a sign of resignation and serves to diminish theirs.

Ironically, and in just one paragraph, she acknowledges and dismisses asset-based organizing practices. Such approaches, she writes, “fall into the…trap of minimizing obstacles.” Asset-based organizing and community development strategies are just that: strategies used to resolve problems and overcome obstacles. They’re centered on assessing the strengths and assets people and communities have and can build on in efforts to solve problems. While denial affects people of all persuasions, assuming practitioners of asset-based community development regularly flirt with it, doesn’t provide sufficient evidence to dismiss a well-honed philosophy and practice that has proved successful in other progressive community-building fields.

Instead of assets, Goldbard suggests grounding community cultural development work in spirituality because, she writes, it “has just as much inspiriting potential and fewer discouraging pitfalls.” The historic and contemporary application of spirituality in community building, however, has quite a list of pitfalls.

“The answer must lie,” she continues, “in the little foretastes of a perfected world we glimpse in our connections with loved ones, in our experiences of the ineffable in the natural world, and in the alternate universe we are able to create in art.” While vision and hope are powerful tools, such approaches have too often turned community organizers and social-change advocates against the arts, dismissing us as people with our heads in the clouds. Besides it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Vision and hope, when coupled with a grasp on assets and strengths, provides a powerful formula.

An important message throughout the book is Goldbard’s case to rebuild a more progressive agenda and larger pool of funding at the National Endowment for the Arts. “Without policy – without explicit commitment to certain values and aims – citizens have little basis to hold government accountable for its practice,” Goldbard writes. Federal policy, expressed through the NEA, is significant in both symbolic and real ways, which is why the Right focused its attacks there. However, as she and others including Caron Atlas and Bill Ivey point out, cultural policy does exist in the U.S., it’s just spread across the landscape of government. And, it’s not called cultural policy. It’s built into regulatory and funding practices and It's both public and private. Goldbard’s right not to concede the Culture Wars or abandon the NEA, but we have to build broader alliances to take on other battle fronts.

Native American colleagues remind us how they’ve long considered land-use policy as cultural policy, economic-development policy as cultural policy, education and health policy as cultural policy, and so on. In reflecting on the systematic attempts to erase Native culture and way of life, this is easy to see. Goldbard makes a similar reference to a river dam project in India with a quote that describes people torn from their land and spirits of their ancestors. However, she doesn’t carry this broader orientation throughout her arguments. Policy that concerns community cultural development workers, must extend beyond what is typically defined as “arts policy."

Goldbard makes a great point that funders have evaluated community-based arts as an extension of mainstream arts, using many of the same criteria and wanting to see similar results in the form of larger audiences, institutional stability, and so on. To move the field forward, we need to get it on dockets managed by nonarts program officers. To do so we need, among other things, different evaluation criteria.

I agree that process, and its impacts, are often the ground we want to measure and I’m all in favor of action-research methods. However, building a case requires more, and quantitative measures have more meaning to policy makers, especially those outside the arts. Goldbard complains that funders have not been willing to make the sustained investment to adequately assess community-based arts practices. If we truly believe community-based cultural work creates change, we have to put it to the test ourselves.

“When it comes to quantitative assessment, evaluator’s aims are often irrelevant or in contradiction to community cultural development practice,” she writes. If community cultural development practice is in tune with the desires of communities, then relevant change criteria can be ascertained. Communities want safe and healthy environments, they want economic opportunity and the benefits it brings, they want good education, they want to solve addictions, they want affordable housing, they even want aesthetically pleasing streets and public spaces. These can be measured and artists and community-based groups can begin to position themselves as addressing them and use their own simple, in unscientific tools to do so. If community-based artists aren’t addressing those – or other issues of importance to communities – then they’re not being of service.

The most upbeat and most interesting part of the book is the section on what Goldbard calls New Hybridity. Here she explores and describes crossover work. She cites “the speed with which community cultural development approaches have spread within the arts community and beyond…”

She cites new support coming from “non-arts” sources and goes on to describe artist-led projects such as Project Row Houses in Houston and Holler to the Hood, a cross-disciplinary initiative at Appalshop, among others.

Goldbard then posits, “Whether this foreshadows the end of organizations exclusively dedicated to community cultural development practice – whether it signals that the field’s success will be more of the type that influences the mainstream than stands apart from it – it is too early to say.”

It’s unclear if she advocates one or the other. The projects she cites are solid successes and I’m not sure why they fall outside her strict definition of community cultural development. I’m also not sure that these projects are influencing the mainstream, as she suggests, as much as they’re influencing the progressive wings of the various other fields they touch and collaborate with.

Goldbard summarizes from a 2003 gathering of cultural workers, “a common complaint among community-based artists is that their work is not seen as art, but as social work.” In another section she says that without the ingredient of artistic skills, “projects cannot rise beyond the level of well-intended social therapy or agitprop.” I was disappointed she didn’t dig more deeply into these ideas. I’ve often felt put off by artists or cultural workers who pronounce with indignation, “this is not social work!” as if it were a less worthy activity. Isn’t this instead a compliment? Having art elevated to social work seems like a good thing. As a field social work has a wonderful progressive history and tradition. Besides, it’s not an either/or option. Artists’ work can and should have integrity in multiple spheres. Why, after all, is recognition by the conservative art establishment so much more important if we strive to put ourselves in “service of the emancipation and development” of communities?

In discussing the field’s development needs, Goldbard surveys failed and expired philanthropic initiatives – without gleaning what was of value and what was learned. Her pages are riddled with “grantmakers should….” Many of the suggestions have been implemented at one time or another by funders and service organizations. An examination of why they have not garnered continued or larger degrees of support would be of more help to the field.

In her chapter State of the Field, and in setting the stage for recommendations to improve it, Goldbard focuses on its deficiencies. In positing her suggestions she says, “The proliferation of academic programs could be a wonderful gateway to needed research, and it could focus more attention and resources on community cultural development practice training by conferring mainstream legitimation.” However, she provides many caveats and expresses discomfort with academic institutions.

An important question she asks is “…whether what is essentially an activating and liberating enterprise can be institutionalized without a loss of integrity and connection to community.” She also writes,

She asserts another potential danger, “that resources and attention will flow to academic institutions which appear to funders as safer repositories for their grants than more marginal, controversial community-based groups.” These may be valid, but there are trade-offs as part of the price of moving forward.

This important and provocative book chronicles a significant field of practice. It maybe more effective at looking back than it is helpful at looking forward. I couldn’t help thinking Goldbard was prescribing community-based art for the sake of community-based art. Meaningful connections with communities and with social action and social justice allies were not well formed in her prescriptions or her “exemplary tale.” Those she does describe who formed such partnerships were placed just outside the door of her definition of community cultural development.

Goldbard spends a considerable part of the book describing how desperate things have been in the field since a high point she suggests was during the late 1970s. In the final pages she writes, “The forces of globalization have virtually unlimited capital and influence on their side. Yet on the other side we have the relentless resilience of spirit that characterizes human cultures. I am betting on the underdog.” Had only she begun the book on this hopeful note, describing the ways this resilient spirit has manifested in counter-force to the darker side of globalization and big capital, the book would better do what I think she wanted: to create forward momentum if we learn form and build on the profound work of the artists and cultural workers of the boomer generation while recognizing and adapting to new realities.

Tom Borrup is a consultant, writer and educator based in Minneapolis. He has written many articles for publications in the arts, city planning and philanthropy. He was executive director of Intermedia Arts from 1980 to 2002, a multidisciplinary urban arts center. He consults with nonprofits, foundations and public agencies nationally and specializes in strategic planning and program evaluation with organizations that bring creativity and the arts together with community and economic development. His most recent book, "The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook," was published in 2006 by Fieldstone Alliance.

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I hope readers will be encouraged to check out this new book for themselves. It can be ordered at http://www.newvillagepress.net/pub_newCreativeComm.html

Posted by: Don Adams at November 8, 2006 09:20 PM

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Book Review: New Creative Community

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