Conference Report: Engaging Through Place at Imagining America

Artist Sekou Sundiata's "51st (dream) state" residency project with the University of Michigan and local artists. The collaboration culminated with "Checkpoint: A Concert of Poets" at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn.

“I’m not interested in art rituals for art audiences. I’m interested in people talking and creating across the closely guarded territories of Art, Academia and Activism”  — Sekou Sundiata

The Imagining America 2006 conference was two days of presentations on engaged public art and public scholarship, but one in particular exemplified what happens when an artist crosses the territories of academia and scholarship to enliven his questions about a challenging and controversial subject matter. Sekou Sundiata’s “51st (dream) state” is his “quest to find a vision of what it means to be both a citizen and an individual in a deeply complex, hyper-kinetic society,” and it was the subject of a panel discussion at the annual conference of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

Imagining America is a consortium of colleges and universities whose mission is to strengthen the public role and democratic purposes of the humanities, arts, and design. The October 7-8, 2006, conference was at The Ohio State University in Columbus, and its theme was “Engaging Through Place.” I attended as part of a Columbia College Chicago panel entitled “Practice in Changing Places: Training Master’s Students in Community-based Youth Arts” and we all found many other presentations and workshops to satisfy us as artists, scholars and administrators. Since civic engagement at universities requires ongoing collaboration with partners in the public and nonprofit arenas, the conference offered tools for developing and refining higher education’s role in community partnerships.

Sekou Sundiata (courtesy of MultiArts Projects and Productions)

The “51st (dream) state: Creativity, Collaboration and Student Learning” panel was particularly useful as a case study, highlighting many points of intersection among a performing artist, university partners, students and community organizations. The session focused on Sekou Sundiata’s “51st (dream) state” performance residencies that have been collaborations among cultural institutions, community groups and Imagining America campuses.

“51st (dream) state” is a multimedia theater work inspired by nationally acclaimed poet Sekou Sundiata’s personal struggle to understand what it means to claim citizenship while exploring issues of national identity and security in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The work, which Sundiata imagines as his poetic and personal “state of the American Soul Address,” explores how America defines itself in a new era characterized by unprecedented global influence and power.[1] The piece premiered at Stanford Lively Arts in April 2006 and is touring internationally. Public engagements associated with the performance are organized under the heading “The America Project.”

Sundiata talked about the process of making the piece in solitude and in conversation with other artists/intellectuals. But more important for Imagining America, university and community partners were invited to share stories and lessons learned about the public activities and workshops surrounding the project. Sundiata said making the piece helped him feel “alive in movements for struggle,” and that he was engaging “ideas of how to live in motion.”

“Creativity, Collaboration and Student Learning” panelists included:

• Ismael Ahmed, executive director, ACCESS: Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services
• Kim D. Hunter, poet, educator and community activist
• Julie Ellison, professor of American culture, English and art and design, University of Michigan
• Sekou Sundiata, poet, creator of “51st (dream) state”
• Michelle Lee, residency program manager, Stanford Lively Arts
• Gladstone Hutchinson, associate professor of economics and business, Lafayette College
• Reggie Prim, community programs coordinator, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minn.

Dean of Studies Gladstone Hutchinson brought Sundiata’s “America Project” in 2004 to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania as part of his efforts to “publicly imagine experimental, inclusive pedagogy” and explore Sundiata's concept of "critical patriotism." Immediately Hutchinson found himself fielding questions from college authorities such as: “What is critical patriotism? Do you know Sekou was associated with the black power movement of the 1960s? Will [presenting a project that examines what it means to be American] cause harm to the college among alumni and supporters?” (Hutchinson noted that, in fact, it had the opposite effect.) In addressing questions, Hutchinson remained committed to encouraging institutional progress — and kept a playful attitude. As a professor of economics and law, he also learned that art is an extremely efficient way to quickly get students involved in critical dialogue.

At work at the Arab American National Museum with poets and staff

Julie Ellison, professor of English at University of Michigan and founding director of Imagining America, invited Sundiata to work with her senior seminar class as part of “The America Project.” Her class, together with 12 poets in the Detroit metro area, produced an evening of performance poetry. Sundiata visited her class four times as they explored the life cycles of anecdotes as hidden treasures. The class developed what Ellison called an “explicit model of citizenship potlucks,” during which students engaged in meta-level analysis of critical patriotism. According to Sundiata, “the idea of the Citizenship Dinners is to have a guest speaker or a panel to introduce a selected topic, i.e., Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The goal is to create a strong sense of community and common purpose, and to model this format as something that can be duplicated in small settings at home, as well as larger settings.”[2]

Ismael Ahmed of ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services) helped place the “51st (dream) state project” in a geopolitical context for the assembled conference audience. Ellison’s class held its poetry evening at the Arab-American National Museum outside Detroit, Michigan. Detroit had restricted covenants until 1949, but is now the center of the largest Arab community in the U.S. Ahmed reflected on the way in which this Arab community seemed to become an “enemy community” after September 11, 2001, as a result of the huge FBI deployment of agents to investigate Arabs and Arab-Americans under the guise of probing for terrorists. The history and politics of this place certainly charged an evening of poetry examining patriotism.

Stanford's Lively Arts Residency Program Manager Michelle Nicole Lee hosted Sundiata in a one-week residency. For her, one incident crystallized the power of the project. Sundiata had been talking about the idea of challenging people with the task of creating new public rituals—rituals of community building and rituals that express a vision for the kind of world in which we want to live. He asked the Stanford artists, scholars and students expecting him if they would work on creating a public ritual that would re-evaluate creative and democratic processes. This is an excerpt from Sundiata’s message to the Stanford community:

One of the overall questions of this work has to do with American mythologies and public rituals… whether or not they still have the power to inspire awe and mystery and wonder, whether or not they still have the power to re-connect and realign people with what Jacob Needleman would call the “transcendent” meanings of America.

For example, do the many Fourth of July celebrations and observances compel us into an encounter with the deep meanings of Independence? I recognize that the so-called progressive or liberal communities have very few (if any) public rituals that express, celebrate and display its vision and values. These communities have been so focused on the rituals and propaganda of protest that it has avoided the challenge of uncovering a “transcendent” vision of society that lifts our visions to the highest possibilities of human conduct. What might such a vision be? What would it take to imagine, to create, and to ritualize such a vision? How can artists and activists and scholars and others take up this challenge?

The day Sundiata arrived at Stanford, the college had a surprise visitor: President Bush, and students joined in a large anti-Bush demonstration. As a veteran activist, Sundiata values political protest, but the work he's currently doing is concerned with reconnecting to shared humanity through a sense of celebration, anticipation and community. The next day, Sundiata held an induction ceremony for students in the project. There was a musical invocation with poetry readings held outdoors in sculpture gardens. Sundiata spoke of his vision for the “51st (dream) state,” and then the assembled crowd processed through campus with a percussion accompaniment. Lee said that she and the students immediately understood that this event was not a ritual of protest, but a “ritual of possibility” as a way to articulate a vision for a more humane world.

What was abundantly clear is that Sundiata and the university and community partners assembled around the “51st (dream) state/America Project” entered the work with ambitious and earnest goals like transforming their colleges by engaging their communities through dialogue. They reflected back that the process and content of the project proved transformative for themselves, their communities, and their institutions. Julie Ellison stated, “the ‘51st (dream) state’ is a moving rehearsal…when it leaves town, it leaves behind collaborations that are still working together.” Michelle Lee said the seven days of Sundiata’s residency “keep reverberating.” She described what happened as “culturally radioactive,” and noted increasing demand for more of this kind of project.

And since good cultural workers can always be counted upon to model the behavior they are trying to promote, Reggie Prim gave us a taste of the “Community Sing” event Sundiata led at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis by directing the Imagining America participants in singing “Wade in the Water.” Breathing and singing together, we shared an experience Sundiata and the other presenters had told us about in stories. The song’s call to wade in the water is a call to enter into the river of change. God “troubles the water” in order for change to manifest, and we were all invited in.

Nicole Garneau is assistant director of Community Partnerships in the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago, where she coordinates the Arts in Youth and Community Development concentration of the Master's in Arts Management. For ten years, Garneau has been an active member of Insight Arts, an arts organization dedicated to social justice and human rights. She is also a practicing performance artist based in Chicago.

NOTES

Original CAN/API publication: March 2007