Conference Notes, Toronto – Community Arts: What's in a Name?

Ankaret Dean of MERA making her presentation in front of a slide of a community mural in McDonalds Corners, Ontario

CAN was lucky to be invited to be part of "Community Arts: What's in a Name," a fascinating symposium at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, Ont., Canada, November 14, 2006. Supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, it was billed as "a one-day symposium and networking event featuring various established and emerging community arts practitioners in critical conversations about the academic and practical field of community arts in Canada and around the world."

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá

The symposium included a keynote by Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, author of "Dwellers of Memory: Youth and Violence in Medellin"; a panel on "CommUnity and Youth" featuring practitioners from various youth-led organizations in Ontario; and a presentation by Steve Durland and yours truly (Linda Burnham) from the Community Arts Network, followed by a conversation with us and Ron Berti from De-ba-jeh-ma-jig Theatre Group, Laurie McGauley of Myths and Mirrors and Ankaret Dean of MERA – McDonalds Corners-Elphin Recreation & Arts. You can read the program here.

We learned some surprising things at this event. Among them:

• Toronto has one of the most diverse populations of any city in the world. This diversity was amply visible in the full-house audience at the symposium, including people from three or four generations.
• Community arts are alive and well in Ontario. Projects of every stripe were heard from at the symposium, from an inner-city group of hip-hop feminists of color (the Medina Collective) to a small but vibrant arts center in a tiny town of 80 people north of Ottawa (MERA).
• Ontario may be well ahead of the U.S. when it comes to youth leadership in community arts. The youth panel was lit up with energy emanating from young people (predominately of color) who have started projects and organizations that thrive all over the province. In fact, several older artists told us privately that they are getting frustrated with the amount of funding limited to "youth-led" initiatives.

The symposium was organized by the prolific Melanie Fernandez, director of community and educational programs at Harbourfront Centre, where she has a staff of 35, plus 50 volunteers. From 1995 through 2001, Fernandez was community arts officer at the Ontario Arts Council, where she did provincial cultural evaluation and mapping, and, based on her findings, designed community arts programs for Ontario that became visible throughout North America. With a degree in anthropology, Fernandez is deeply informed about current issues in community cultural development.

Harbourfront Centre is a large, mainstream contemporary arts center on Lake Ontario with topflight local, national and international exhibition and presenting programs. With a strong sense of place, it boasts of its 26-person community-based volunteer governing board, its ten-acre site, its partnerships with 450 community groups, its services to more than 35,000 children a year and its 12 million visitors and 4,000 events annually. One of its unique features is the hallway of its main building, which takes the public from the theaters to the dining room on a catwalk overlooking busy open studios where artists teach affordable classes in textiles, glasswork, metalwork and ceramics. 

You can make a tentative judgment about the community dedication of any organization by looking at the quality of its staff and the expression of its values. Besides its dedication to the creative spirit, Harbourfront's stated values include diversity in all its programs and promotion of multiculturalism and racial harmony, especially in its work with community groups. It's satisfying to find such an example in the mainstream.

Laurie McGauley

One of the brilliant strokes of this symposium was Fernandez's engagement of scholar-practitioner Laurie McGauley as facilitator of our panel. McGauley had just completed "IMAGINE - An External Review of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Artists and Community Collaboration Fund," a detailed quantitative/qualitative analysis of the impact of the ACCF and recommendations about its artistic trends and funding patterns, with a particular focus on the nature of process-based and community-collaborative work. Her 73-page report was so thorough and convincing that, as of April 1, 2007, the ACCF will be renamed the Artist and Community Collaboration Program and permanently integrated into the Canada Council’s regular funding programs in all artistic disciplines.

With her deep research into community arts at the front of her mind, McGauley presented the panel and audience with some challenging questions:

• Will professionalization, institutionalization and standardization of community arts result in a narrowing of the possibilities of the work?
• Can artist-community collaboration truly address injustice and tap into "democracy's unfulfilled promise" (a quote from The CAN Report)?
• Do community practices tend to be less controversial, less confrontational and less critical than other engaged art practices, and if so, does it matter?

Her questions provoked answers so voluminous they can't even be summarized here. Suffice to say, practitioners defended their practice well with examples from their own work all over the province, and Durland and I presented examples from our knowledge of U.S. and other experiences.

I was interested in two responses to the "professionalization" question. Ron Berti, from a northern Native group on Manatoulin Island that has a remarkable community arts training program, said the term "professional" is considered pejorative among his colleagues, and they prefer to use the term "honorable." And an audience member worried about the current calls for an academic professional association and a peer-reviewed journal. She feared standardization of methods and practices would cause the field to be carved up into territories "owned" by individual programs or scholars, which would then circumscribe the work, limit innovation and affect funding guidelines.

Tonika Morgan

But I have to admit, my favorite Q&A occurred earlier during the panel discussion between audience members and youth leaders:

Q: What advice do you have for those training the next generation of community arts administrators?

A: (From Tonika Morgan, director of Toronto's radical feminist hip-hop Medina Collective) Teach them how to prepare artists for people like me. Teach them how to prepare funders for people like me.

And here are a few other quotes from my notes, reflecting the issues and extremes many of these practitioners are facing:

Tanya Ball

"We put the show on a bus and made it a moving exhibition because there was no space in the city [Medellin, Colombia] where everybody could safely go."
"For a brief period of time 'the new' is neutral."

— Pilar Riaño-Alcalá

"We've been operating for 12 years and involved hundreds of thousands of residents. Otherwise there is nothing for kids out there, no programs, nothing at all to do. Every summer kids from all over flock to Sudbury because of Myths and Mirrors."

– Tanya Ball, Myths and Mirrors

Adonis Huggins

"The media represent Regent Park as a crime-ridden, drug-infested, low-income, racialized community. We established our own media campaign because we don't think it's so important for kids to know about crime in their community. We want them to know who their leaders are and what activities are taking place. The hope is that your participants will grow up to dismantle the power structure, but they have to know who they are first."

– Adonis Huggins, Regent Park Focus Media Arts Centre

"I'm glad to hear there are people from the bottom who are trying to make change. We are the ones who know what's going on. We have to take responsibility."

–Young audience member

Ron Berti

"We turned our chairs around and instead of facing South, we faced the North and saw ourselves for the first time."
"We're a bridge, a conduit. We want to keep our artists there and become more relevant to our own communities. It's about employability."
"How do I know when we've experienced success in a community? While we were there nobody died."

— Ron Berti, De-ba-jeh-ma-jig Theatre Group,
Manatoulin Island (in "the Far North")

We left Toronto convinced that between the U.S. and Canada there is not enough cross-border discourse going on. We have a great deal to learn from our colleagues to the north, and their voices should be included on U.S. panels and at U.S. conferences as soon as possible.

Linda Frye Burnham is codirector of The Community Arts Network.

NETWORKING: Here's an annotated, linked list of some organizations we encountered in Ontario that we think CAN users will be interested in:

Harbourfront Centre

De-ba-jeh-ma-jig Theatre Group
Professional, community based theater in Northern Ontario dedicated to the vitalization of the Anishnaabeg culture, language and heritage. National Aboriginal Arts Animator Program offers theater training, with special resources to help those who wish to return to their own communities to work. Directed by Ron Berti.

MERA
McDonalds Corners-Elphin Recreation & Arts: volunteer-run community arts organization in rural eastern Ontario. Library; programs in children's activities, fibre arts, labyrinth, exhibitions, music, pottery, Tai Chi/Qigong, weaving, writing. Located in historic one-room schoolhouse renovated by the community. Directed by Ankaret Dean.

Myths and Mirrors Community Arts
Community arts organization in Sudbury, a northern mining town. Based in two of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, the Flour Mill and the Donovan. "Under the shadow of the world’s highest smoke stack, we are committed to planting seeds of creativity and hope in slagheaps of burnt rock, and to joining with others in the creation of our common future." Theater, performance art, murals, mosaics, music and drumming, gardens, celebrations, rituals, stilting, face painting, costuming, visual arts, installations, video, film, games and popular education. Founded by Laurie McGauley.

Regent Park Focus Media Arts Centre
Youth program in Toronto's Regent Park, Canada’s largest public housing community, developing prevention programs and activities exploring radio and print journalism, and audio, video, photography arts. Catch da Flava News, Catch da Flava Radio, E.Y.E. Video Library, Focus Music Studio, Zapparoli Photo Studio. Directed by Adonis Huggins.

7th Generation Image Makers
Native youth and art program based at Native Child & Family Services of Toronto. Works with at-risk Native youth creating murals and art projects such as regalia making, painting, mixed media and photography. Founded by Maria Hupfield.

Medina Collective
Hip-hop/urban culture/journalism/mentorship program for young women of color ages 16-24. Magazine with contributions from program participants. Founded by Tonika Morgan, based in Toronto.

Community Arts Practice Certificate, York University
Students take courses offered through the Faculties of Environmental Studies and Fine Arts to develop artistic skills while working collaboratively on a community-based cultural production in their final year of study.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2006