Book Review: Works of Heart

“Works of Heart: Building Village through the Arts,” edited by Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young (Oakland, Calif.: New Village Press, 2006, hardcover, 160 pp., 75 color illus.)

“Go home. Work with the mentalities you fled in your development. Wrestle your neighbors. Call out your ancestors,” wrote artist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto in “Works of Heart: Building Village through the Arts.”

This new anthology presents a remarkable spectrum of artists who, like Lanzillotto, immersed themselves in their communities and emerged with projects, connections and experiences that transcend traditional notions of community art and move into realms that seem more like community development.

Each featured project arose from the artists’ commitment to their communities and from the circumstances they share with their neighbors. Social change followed as the result of their participating within their communities rather than from their trying to do something in or even to their communities.

The editors, Lynne Elizabeth and Suzanne Young, chose nine North American artists and organizations to represent this emerging realm of community art. Lanzillotto, for instance, returned to the Bronx market where her grandmother shopped for provolone and peppers, and where the sights, sounds and stories pulled at the artist’s psyche long into adulthood. She befriended the butchers and merchants. She studied the market’s history and observed the behavior of the crowds.

Before long, she hung a bar above the deli counter and hired a trapeze artist to work above the routine drama unfolding below. She rigged a gondola on wheels to transport beloved elderly musicians down the aisles. She took oral histories, drafted plays and penned text on eggs, garlic and wooden signs meant for prices only.

“My method was to load the environment in ways that provoked drama. … I could load the environment with events that would naturally cause reactions in the organism. The Market was alive,” she wrote.

In Minneapolis, an arts organization bought a sprawling 19th Century soap factory and reflected on how to renovate it into a worthy arts space. At the same time, a bankrupt luxury shopping mall was slated for demolition. What if, the No Name Gallery organizers asked themselves, we salvaged parts of the shopping mall to help renovate our soap factory?

The question yielded an answer in the form of a far-reaching community reuse project. The gallery salvaged materials valued at more than $85,000 from the doomed mall, including Italian marble tile, cast-iron benches and mop sinks. But they also engaged architects, trades people, politicians, citizens and local businesses in the project and in a broader conversation about reuse and waste.

By the project’s end, the No Name Gallery organizers had inserted themselves irrevocably into the community’s fabric. “We’re now part of an ongoing, multidirectional conversation between neighbors, developers and the city to build a new urban community from the remnants of other eras,” wrote No Name board president Heather Beal.

In Boston, artist Clara Wainwright enticed communities of women into explorations of their faith through the Faith Quilts Project. The act of creating a quilt among women who shared the same faith allowed the participants to extend their conversations with one another beyond customary realms. The process enhanced their personal and collective identities. Their resulting quilts, more than 50, gave them a means to share these identities with people outside their faith.

“[The Faith Quilts Project] invites people to talk about how faith shows up in their hearts and lives, and to speak about the value of faith, rather than focusing on what a faith institution does right or wrong,” observed Maggie Herzig, a project staff member.

Thomas Borrup, who wrote the introduction for the text, termed this kind of engaged community artistry “asset-based practice.” He said most nonprofit and civic leaders have been trained to begin with a community’s shortcomings as a starting point for change. “The artists and art projects in this book are among the many who challenge deficit-based models,” he wrote. “They see themselves existing in a world where everyone is rich – at least in culture, traditions and talents.”

The editors, writing in the preface, simplified the motivating force even further than Borrup. They stated, quite unapologetically, that the artists were working out of passion, out of love. In fact, they dedicated the book to the memory of urban observer Jane Jacobs, who once said that if you want to improve your city, you have to love it. “Such zeal, such neighborhood caring, is the stuff this book is made of,” the editors wrote.

And, they are, for the most part, right. Even though the text provides Web sites and contact information at the end of each chapter and an appendix of community-based arts resources, “Works of Heart” is less a resource book than a transmitter of energy, a channel for the zeal of nine vibrant projects, tenderly grown in disparate communities, compiled and captured on paper — with all the joys and shortcomings that implies. 

Jennifer Roche is an independent writer based in Chicago and a contributor to Community Arts Network. [JenniferRoche (at) yahoo.com]

Original CAN/API publication: April 2007