Help Wanted! Communities Reach Out

Today's question: If, as we keep saying, art really is a community asset, an essential part of community life, then why aren't communities initiating more community-based arts projects?

Most “community-based arts projects” are arts-based community projects. They are artist-initiated, usually administered primarily by an arts organization, prompted by a grants program initiated by an arts funder. And the artist at the heart of the project may have several motives: a compulsion to make art, a commitment to make positive social change, and, let’s face it, a need for employment.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s been the start of some inspiring work. If artists didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have so many ground-breaking models of intriguing and effective arts collaborations in and with communities. Our culture definitely benefits when artists initiate innovative participatory arts projects with communities of all kinds. And artists should get paid.

But if all that past work has been successful, shouldn’t community groups be taking the lead in proposing to incorporate the arts in their community-building efforts? We recently did a very quick survey of 25 community-arts professionals and there's some good news: It is starting to happen. We learned that, indeed, there is a growing number of projects that are community-based and community-initiated. Communities are hearing about what has been accomplished — and imagining what is possible. They are learning that artists want to help — and are capable of it. They are beginning to include artists and arts organizations on the list of their resources.

There is a space opening in the public imagination where people can visualize reaching out to the arts to help them attain a goal — whether they simply want to participate locally in vigorous artmaking, or they articulate a more pointed social need: to research a community’s past, to brand a community identity, to heal the local river, to find something productive for kids to do after school, to reduce crime in a neighborhood, to transform an empty lot, or to help an economically stressed community inventory its assets and come up with a product or service they can market for themselves.

Want to know more? Here are some results from our hurried survey: a short list of community entities, their needs, the arts resources they turned to and the resulting community projects. In every case, they turned to arts professionals because they had had — or heard about — previous successful interactions between artists and communities. (Use your search engine on CAN or the Web for more info on each citation; for those not yet on the Web, watch CAN. Of course, this is not an exhaustive directory, just a few choice selections.)

Residents of the City of Tamarac, Florida, needed to define the community’s identity. They went to the Broward County Cultural Affairs Division for funding, engaged a design firm and an artist in a public planning process and were off to the races: The Southgate Linear Park Project.

The City of Danville, Vermont, needed to meet federal requirements for the upgrade of U.S. Highway 2 through the center of town — and make the task aesthetically pleasing. They went to the Vermont Arts Council and Vermont Agency of Transportation, hired some artists and voila: The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project.

Miami-Dade County Juvenile Assessment Center needed gender-specific programs for girls in the Department of Juvenile Justice who are committed to residential facilities and after-school diversion programs. They approached Leslie Neal, artistic director of ArtSpring Inc., who submitted an arts-based curriculum design: Special Arts for Girls Empowerment (SAGE).  If the program is approved by the county, an arts-based program for girls will be implemented over a two-year period and will employ a variety of Florida artists

The Cancer Coalition of Galveston County needed a Spanish-language diabetes-management module. They went to the Sealy Center for Environmental Health & Medicine at the University of Texas and met with public forum & toxics assistance co-director (and theater artist) John Sullivan, and are currently collaborating on a theater-and-film module for use in the spring.

Health Care for All Texas, a public-health advocacy group, needed a forum on healthcare access, turned to Sullivan for help, and now they have one called “It’s Broke. Can We Fix It?”

An inmate in San Quentin State Prison needed to address young people in his home community who were beginning to get into trouble. He turned to his prison-arts writing class and his teacher, Judith Tannenbaum. A year later they had published and distributed to 400 juvenile lock-up facilities and continuation high schools a book of their own work: “The Real Rap: A Message to the Youth.”

The principal of a California continuation high school wanted a diversity project for her summer school. She turned to Tannenbaum (a resident of her town) for help and they designed a series of poem-posters, titled "I Am Here, Too," which they placed in store windows along the town's main street. Each poster displayed one young person's poem and that student's photograph; Tannenbaum calls it a community museum.

In Portland, Maine, the city director of Equal Opportunity and Multicultural Affairs, the school district's director of Multicultural Affairs and the principal of the largest high school needed to address longstanding challenges around racism in Portland. Inspired by success of artist Marty Pottenger's community performance with Portland citizens and elected officials, "home land security," after a year of meetings, they produced a web of ideas including performances, residencies and community gatherings, the Arts & Equity Initiative.

Students at Fremont High School in Oakland, California, needed to “clear the air” between students, staff and teachers. One of the students had worked on “Code 33; Emergency Clear the Air,” an earlier performance by Suzanne Lacy, Julio Morales and Unique Holland. They approached these artists to work with them and a team of students at Fremont, and together came up with a series of three facilitated conversations involving over 100 faculty, students and staff, and a public performance for students, teachers and district administrators. Called “Eye 2 Eye at Fremont High” the performance was also documented by a youth-produced videotape and resulted in a series of problems, and solutions, identified by participants and sent to the Superintendent of schools.

Elkhorn City Heritage Council in the Eastern Kentucky mountains was trying to revitalize its town in various ways and wanted to work with artists. They met with The American Festival Project at nearby Appalshop, inviting artists Suzanne Lacy, Susan Steinman and Yutaka Kobayashi for a site visit. The artists used local love of the river and its ecological state as a starting point for an ongoing extensive public artwork, “Beneath Land and Water: A Project for Elkhorn City.”

The ARC in Rockville, Maryland, (formerly the Association of Retarded Citizens) needed a training module for new employees of its group homes and other programs for people with developmental disabilities, so their adult advocacy group "Stand Together" went to drama therapist Sally Bailey with a request to create a series of scenes to dramatize situations in which the rights of a group-home resident might/might not be violated. Result: The ARC Project.

A parent of a child in a performance company for kids with and without disabilities in Washington, D.C., moved to Manhattan, Kansas, and needed a similar troupe in her new community. She went to the local Parks and Recreation Department and lobbied for their help, recommending Bailey, who had created the troupe in D.C. and had just become a faculty member at Kansas State University. The result: K-State students, Parks & Rec and community members created The Barrier-Free Theatre.

PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) in Manhattan, Kansas, needed to raise public awareness about family problems around children coming out to the their parents. They went to Bailey and her playwriting students at K State, and are now presenting and touring two student-written plays: "If Truth Be Told” and “You Belong to Us.”

The Mayor of Portland, Oregon, needed help with visionPDX, the city’s vision initiative about what the city looks like today, and the challenges it faces as it dreams the future it wants. He went to local Sojourn Theatre, who researched in the community, then created and toured the Portland area with a performance and civic-dialogue event about local decision-making called “One Day.”

Portland’s City Executive Committee needed help with how to tell the public about their choices for the city’s 25-year plan. They invited Sojourn’s Michael Rohd to sit in on their retreat and close it by telling them the story of their day through his eyes and synthesizing the story he saw them preparing to tell the city.

A School Healthy Lifestyles Program administrator in Zuni, N.M., needed to combat the rise of diabetes within the community. He requested that tribal member Chris Edaakie use his skills as a dancer, drummer, storyteller and graphic designer to approach the problem, hiring him as a Healthy Lifestyles Assistant.

The principal of Dandelion School in Beijing, China, needed to transform the bland and sterile environment of his middle school for children of low-income families. He heard Chinese-American artist Lily Yeh talk about her work in Philadelphia and Rwanda, and invited her to work with 50 faculty/staff, 400 students and their parents to transform the school into, says Yeh,  “a garden of peace, beauty and safety with painted and mosaic murals, gardens, sculptures and inventive outdoor furniture,” hence The Transformation Through Art Project at Dandelion School.

Charles Tracy of the Rivers, Trails & Conservation Assistance Program of the National Park Service needed a better way to fill community requests for help with river, trail and conservation projects. He went to the National Endowment for the Arts and the New England Foundation for the Arts and together they created a program that has hired artists to work with 11 community-based projects in nine states: Art & Community Landscapes.

The New River Valley Living Wage Campaign in Virginia needed to raise awareness about the struggles of low-paid American workers and the financial challenges they face. They approached director Bob Leonard and the Theatre Department at Virginia Tech, and together they produced Joan Holden’s play adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Nickel and Dimed.”

The Courtland Action Team in one of Seattle’s toughest neighborhoods needed to explore local history, build a greater sense of community identity and improve the neighborhood's physical environment. They turned to the Seattle Arts Commission (SAC) and were linked with local artist Donald Fels who has helped them build a coalition of organizations, professionals and funders who share Courtland's vision. Plans include a community archaeological dig in a city right-of-way, collection of oral and written history, and the design of a one-block hill-climb connecting Courtland to its neighbors to the east.

Friends of the Duwamish in Seattle needed to gain recognition for this community as a tribe by making their culture and history more visible. SAC helped them connect with local Native American filmmakers Sandy and Yasu Osawa, who worked with the community to produce several documentary films.

…And last but certainly not least, Community Performance Inc. is a company of artists who live all over the U.S. Since the historic success of CPI’s first community play “Swamp Gravy” (which in 15 years has transformed the economy of Miller County, Ga.), most of their community performance work has been commissioned. These are some of the groups that have sought out and hired CPI to help mine the histories and concerns of their communities and turn them into plays, casting their fellow citizens by the hundreds:

• Boogaloo Broadcasting Company, Union County, South Carolina
• Citizens of Walton County, Florida
• Citizens of Montgomery County, Mississippi
• Instituto Central do Povo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Imagine Southwark, London, England
• Yampa Valley Legacy Education Initiative, South Routt County, Colorado
• The Mennonite community of Newport News, Virginia
• Glades County Development Corporation, West Palm Beach, Florida
• Citizens of the Uptown Neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois
• Bethel New Life Community Development Corporation, Chicago, Illinois

This question raises many more questions:

• Is our ideal world a place where every community has its own artists? Artists who are part of that community, who know the nuances of its culture? The examples above show many communities working with artists from somewhere else. What are the benefits and ramifications of this model? (For some discussion of this, see the “Presence of a Cultural Organizer” section of “Factors for Success” in the CAN/Irvine “Connecting Californians” project.)

• Most of the students being trained in university programs are white and middle-class, yet they are being prepared to work in “underserved” communities of color, like missionaries. Should we be talking about the wisdom of this model?

• How can arts professionals do more to open that space in the public imagination of their own communities, the ones they live in, where were born and raised? What are some inspiring methods?

• What can funders do to place the choices and the funding in the hands of communities? The ARTS UP program of the Seattle Arts Commission (Artist Residencies Transforming Seattle's Urban Places), now defunct, was a grants initiative where the applicants were communities who needed an artist for a specific project. SAC helped match the grantee communities with qualified artists from around the country. American Composers’ Forum works similarly with communities and composers in its Continental Harmony. Are there other such programs out there? How are they doing?

Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland are co-directors of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network.

Thanks, Tom Borrup, Leslie Neal, John Sullivan, Judith Tannenbaum, Arlene Goldbard, Marty Pottenger, Suzanne Lacy, Sally Bailey, Lily Yeh, Michael Rohd, Mat Schwarzman, Charles Tracy, Bob Leonard and Jules Corriere, for your contributions

NOTE: CAN would sincerely love to hear from you about community-initiated arts projects. Please use the Comments section following this story and your contributions will be archived on CAN. (And while you’re at it, do your part and get those projects up on your own Web site!)

Original CAN/API publication: February 2007