Relationship, Reciprocity, Reclamation: The Arts at Cal State Monterey Bay

Billboard on Market Street in Salinas, California, by Edward Chavez and Aaron Saucedo, students in the Digital Public Art course at California State University at Monterey Bay, in collaboration with 2nd Chance, a gang-and-violence-prevention organization in Salinas. (All photos are courtesy of Cal State Monterey Bay, except where indicated.)

“We view art as a social activity.” This is what staff member Todd Kruper tells interested students when they visit the Visual and Public Art Department (VPA) at California State University at Monterey Bay. They are usually just out of high school, he says, and think public art might be their thing. “I tell them to read over our vision statement — things like service learning and ideas of real-time learning are very important to us — so that the student doesn’t think right off, OK, I’m going to be doing all of these studio art things.” He reassures them that they will acquire skills they will use the rest of their lives, but says, “This department is about more than that.” The VPA complex is one of the centers that make up a university founded on the principles of service learning and community participation. It serves its students as well as the surrounding community in a relationship of reciprocity. Those principles make it the most innovative campus in the California State University system.

Ghosts of War, California Dreaming

Top: Abandoned barracks at Fort Ord. Bottom: Portraits of long-departed soldiers by painting students in the Visual and Public Arts Program grace the old barracks. Photo by Jan Freya

California State University at Monterey Bay (CSUMB) is located on a decommissioned army base, Fort Ord, on the central California coast. You approach the campus by turning off Highway 1, away from the coastal dunes. As you drive east on Lightfighter Drive, the vestiges of militarism are striking but strangely benign. Along General Jim Moore Boulevard, the rows of old wooden barracks that remain abandoned in fields among the grid of streets are evocative and inspiring to any artist and coveted as studio space, but deemed unsafe for university purposes. On one side of a grey, weathered building, like a recently landed flock of parrots, colorful portraits of long-departed young soldiers are mounted in the window frames—an early project by students in VPA’s painting class.

The VPA compound sits at the northern end of the developed area of the base, and a few shiny, modern structures including the Music and Performing Arts (MPA) building can be spotted south of it. Students come and go in small numbers through the doors, and a lone, flannel-shirted boy throws a frisbee to a dog in the dry brush that has yet to be landscaped. It is quiet, and there’s time to absorb the transitional nature of the place with the ghosts and dreams of one culture slowly ceding space to the new.

The location of the 13-year-old university is significant in terms of the vision and mission of each of its programs. Monterey County extends from the southern end of the Salinas Valley, north along the path of the mostly underground Salinas River, and broadens out into a coastal plain where the river emerges in the estuarial Elkhorn Slough. This prime California coastline encompasses the rugged, forested wilderness and ocean cliffs of Big Sur, the posh resort communities of Carmel and Monterey and a cluster of smaller communities that once housed families of army base personnel. The rich marine environment includes the largest submarine canyon in U.S. coastal waters and miles of protected shore with dunes, bays and lagoons. More important, in terms of the regional population served by the university, the area’s major industry is agriculture, which has been supported by the labor of immigrant Mexican farmworkers in the Salinas Valley since farmlands began to outnumber the cattle ranges of the old Mexican-era ranchos.

Fort Ord occupied 45,000 acres along the coastline on this plain from 1917 to its closure in 1993. As the largest American military post outside the South, the base attracted scores of minority and interracial families of servicemen. Of the hundreds of U.S. military bases targeted for closure in the past few of decades, Fort Ord was one of four selected by the Federal Government to be a model for conversion to peacetime use. This decision rocked the surrounding communities economically, taking 15,000 soldiers and their 20,000 dependents out of the Monterey area and eliminating 2,500 civilian jobs. The public-works director of Monterey at the time said that the county lost 10 percent of its people:

The population of Monterey County was 350,000 then, and there were 35,000 people at Fort Ord. … I think there was a lot of, you could say, clinical depression during that time. Folks who had spent a lifetime building businesses that supported the troops—it was like losing a part of their soul.

California State University at Monterey Bay

Concerned citizens and Congressmen wanted a say in what would occupy the vacated space. Community involvement managed to subvert developers’ proposals for corporate-owned condo communities and theme parks and instead opt for maximizing the region’s potential for creating a scientific and technological education and research center that could become Monterey County’s third largest industry, after agriculture and tourism. A report at the time proposed areas of focus such as environmental remediation, agriculture/aquaculture, scientific instrumentation, global climate prediction and marine sciences and biotechnology. This sounded a lot like a university.

Imagining Education for the 21st Century

The official agreement of all parties was a commitment to establishing an entirely new state university campus uniquely suited to the needs of the region and taking advantage of the challenges and opportunities it afforded for a center of education in the 21st century. Aside from some basic requirements for the creation of facilities, a budget, programs, curriculum, staff, faculty and enrollment, the founding body of CSUMB had astounding freedom.

Multiple focus groups consisting of California State University (CSU) faculty from campuses throughout the state and leaders from the Monterey Bay community gathered in 1994 to create a vision statement. The university was to be “futuristic” and “pluralistic,” make “smart use of technology” and serve the surrounding three counties, but with a “statewide mission.” Most significantly, it was to be based on “collaboration.”

The Visual and Public Art complex at CSUMB

Among the original 13 founding faculty members who participated in this process were public artists Judy Baca and Suzanne Lacy. Both had experience in projects that involved extensive community organization, collaboration and participation. Each of them had taught at other CSU campuses and were recruited to bring their expertise and knowledge to founding the Visual and Public Art Department at CSUMB.

This founding group established a model for American education in the coming century based on core values:

• service through education
• commitment to a multicultural community
• a culture of innovation
• accessible and enriched quality learning using new technology resources
• an outcome-driven curriculum based on serving both students and society
• cultivation of the creative talents of students, faculty and staff
• integration of the university community across staff and faculty lines and
• maintenance of a pluralistic academic environment.

This model was the template on which the original faculty and students of the Visual and Public Art Department based their first community art projects.

Learning through Service and Reciprocity

During the early stages of forming the University’s vision statement, among the consultants were several leaders in the service-learning movement within the CSU system who arranged a conference to speak with and facilitate small-group discussions among the founding faculty. Service learning developed in the 1960s as a response to demand on universities to respond to social issues. In the 1980s, the CSU system adopted service learning as a core educational strategy. Service learning is a form of experiential education that involves students in community service directly correlated to the academic subject being learned. Counter to a theoretical, traditionally academic perspective, students are taught and supported to be respectful participants in community and are asked to reflect on the confluence of academic and community learning. They are given a unique perspective on the "outside world" and the opportunity to understand diversity and reciprocity. As they give service, the students also receive, through their learning about the world. Instead of promoting an ethic of service to the community through extra-curricular student programs and work-study options, CSUMB made its commitment to community service an educational goal, placing service learning at the core of its academic programs and establishing the Service Learning Institute as a central resource and overseer of the policies and practices of service-learning campus-wide. VPA’s unique model of art as service is developed in the service-learning components of classes overseen by Professor Stephanie Johnson, the coordinator of Service Learning for VPA.

Another significant feature of this model is that it is "outcome-driven.” Curriculum for the arts departments and each of the university’s current 11 degree programs is based on certain desired outcomes and is designed by working backwards from these expected results. Rather than fulfilling a rigid set of class requirements to graduate from programs designed around specialty clusters—marine, atmospheric and environmental sciences; visual and performing arts; and languages, cultures and international studies—students must demonstrate certain outcomes during and after their education. This approach leaves room for flexibility and creativity and honors the experiences and input that both students and faculty bring to the process of education.

Artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, director of Visual and Public Art

Artist Amalia Mesa-Bains and musician and musicologist Richard Bains came to CSUMB in 1995 to head the departments of Visual and Public Art (VPA) and Music and Performing Arts (MPA), respectively. Mesa-Bains said that they “found the university struggling with how best to serve the surrounding region.” She added:

At that point in the new university’s history, the notion of service was defined by the idea that we had something we should give to people. As educators with long careers in community arts, we knew that it was more likely the opposite — that there were values, strategies and practices in those communities that could help the university to realize its own lofty goals and vision.

Breaking from the Missionary “Outreach” Model

In 1999, CSUMB was one of only six sites selected nationally by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund to receive a grant to fund an arts partnership with the surrounding communities. With this funding, the arts departments established the Reciprocal University for the Arts Project (RUAP) in an attempt “to break from the traditional model of arts-education outreach, efforts that are typically missionary at their core,” said Mesa-Bains. “We prefer the model of reciprocity.”

RUAP functions as a conduit for gathering knowledge and making connections between the University and four local communities: Watsonville, Salinas, Seaside and Monterey. In terms of reciprocity, RUAP facilitates students, faculty and guest artists in producing performances, projects and classes in the communities and brings community artists, youth supporters and youth onto campus to teach the college students about their experiences. RUAP supports the development of partnerships between the arts departments and selected groups within the surrounding communities and funds the output of their collaboration. VPA’s Digital Public Art class is mainly dedicated to RUAP projects and the VPA Service Learning class; Community Research also participates as does the VPA Museum Studies class. Other classes — photography, mural painting, the 3D studio, music classes — get involved depending on the project. The digital lab has ongoing commitment to doing community-based work, so that class faces more consistently the issues of how to create partnership.

RUAP staff member Arthur Simons, as Web site and publications designer and overall digital wizard, maintains a Web site[1] with in-depth documentation of RUAP-supported wide-ranging projects including MPA’s “Reclaiming a Musical Heritage” project, a collaboration with the school district and local musicians to create classes, events and venues for learning and preserving the indigenous music from the African and Latin diasporas. Projects also include VPA’s “A.C.T. To Prevent Violence,” a partnership with Second Chance for Youth. Second Chance is a prevention, intervention and antigang educational resource for at-risk youth and their families in the Salinas area. Students collaborated with young people to create dynamic, large-scale digital images for billboards, mall kiosks and busses.

Anyone with experience in administering the arts in academia knows the limits imposed by the trickle of funding from state universities for such projects. In order, therefore, to expand the capacity of the arts departments to meet the visions of student and community partners, funding was granted by the Nathan Cummings Foundation to develop the Reclamation Project as an off-shoot of RUAP to employ prominent visual and performing artists-in-residence to work reciprocally in RUAP-established community-university partnerships. The Reclamation Project emphasizes responsiveness to issues articulated by the community concerning the “reclamation” and revitalization of blighted aspects of their environments and the multicultural narratives and history embedded in these environments.

The Reclamation Project is based on the Cultural Citizenship model co-authored by Amalia Mesa-Bains and Rina Benmayor, a professor in CSUMB’s humanities program. Mesa-Bains, who co-directs the project with her husband, Richard Bains, said that they found this model

really helpful because you can look at what you’re doing as having a basis both within the academic world and in the community world. Cultural citizenship is basically what people are already doing in their lives. I liked it because even before the most current debate on immigration there has always been a question about undocumented people.

With the majority of potential partnering organizations in the surrounding communities serving the immigrant Latino/a population, this model is appropriate because, she said, “it stands outside the legal definitions of citizenship and looks at the deeper meaning of what it is to be a citizen, and how people gain the agency to struggle for their rights and issues.” Guided by this model, reciprocity occurs in the students’ exposure the culture, history, experience and issues of their community partners in the act of reclamation; in the exchange between VPA students and teachers with established, socially concerned visiting and resident artists; and in the connection their collaboration makes between the university and the community.

Working in Watsonville: Looking In and Looking Out

The title of the project VPA produced in collaboration with Watsonville Community School in 2003, “Windows: Looking In/Looking Out,”[2] describes not only the project itself but the process that Professor Gilbert Neri said “takes the ivory tower bit out of the university” in a reciprocal relationship of learning with community partners from historically underserved populations. Students beginning Neri’s Digital Public Art class each fall initiate a yearlong collaboration with a community organization with which RUAP has made a connection over the preceding summer. The curriculum in the first semester includes site visits and interviews with leaders of the organization and those it serves.

Gilbert Neri and his Public Art class each fall initiate a yearlong collaboration with a community organization, which, says Neri, “takes the ivory tower bit out of the university.”

“In the fall we do the footwork” said Neri. “We sink our teeth into who these people are, what they care about and what the resonances are between what we do as artists in this class and the concerns and missions of the organization.” Students also research the Web and other media for issues related to the focus of the organization and measure their findings against the reality of the organization. “We try to flesh out within the class a big understanding of where that organization fits in the historical context but also in the community context. We don’t know what the project will be yet,” said Neri.

Watsonville is an agriculturally based community in Santa Cruz County with a population that is 75 percent Hispanic/Latino comprising mainly farmworker families. The Watsonville Community School is an alternative high school for students who have had problems attending the mainstream high school and for teen mothers. Before meeting the Watsonville students, the VPA students had experience in the service-learning curriculum that emphasized systems of oppression, and therefore had notions about juvenile justice and ethical issues they thought affected the high-school youth. Mesa-Bains explained that students approaching such a population may have preconceptions: “Some of them come from what they learn here because we have this framework around issues of justice, but you learn that it translates in different ways, different places.”

Top: At Watsonville Community School, students install artworks from “Windows,” a collaboration with CSUMB students in the VPA Digital Public Art Class. Bottom: A “Windows” artwork by Watsonville Community School student Carrie Hoechlin. (Click image to enlarge.)

An aspect of the learning outcomes for the program is for students to understand that an initial step in working in community is building a relationship. In this case, Neri said, “the VPA students focused on this one way of looking at the Watsonville students, but those students had a different idea altogether—their issue was that they were trapped in a building without windows.” Although the Community School program is considered positive and has a dedicated and caring staff, the building, with its long, dark hallways, felt oppressive and prison like. The kids said, “We hate this building—we want you guys to build some windows.”

“You may have all the most wonderful ideas in the world, but all the things you think matter to people are not in the terms you think,” says Mesa-Bains. The VPA students had to drop their notions of what might represent the identities and needs of these kids and instead recognize and serve the vision the teens had for themselves.

In conversation, the VPA students did a loosening-up exercise with the Community School students in which weather became the metaphor for what the students were feeling: like a cloudy day, or like tornadoes or tidal waves. Many of the VPA students were from the same background as the Watsonville students and were only four or five years older. Once they dropped their preconceptions and merely interacted and listened, they could relate to the richness of the material that emerged and see their mission not as portraying the struggle of an oppressed population, but instead serving to giving expression to the true identity, voice and vision of an under-represented group of individuals. Mesa-Bains commented, “I’m finding more and more that a lot of the work we do is really about being understood — narratives and visibility.” This collaborative aspect of programming in the arts not only educates the participants and validates their experience but also produces art that serves to change the regional perception of local communities.

“Every challenge is packed with learning. It’s right on the table — we are negotiating it with the student,” says Johanna Poethig, VPA faculty member.

In the second semester of the Digital Public Art class, the images and ideas that evolve from the students’ “footwork” of the first semester coalesce into a digital art project. Building actual windows into the building was beyond the limits of the budget for this project, so the Watsonville students came to the digital lab and collaborated with the VPA students in creating large-scale images — metaphorical windows. This project was led by Professor Johanna Poethig prior to Neri’s taking over the lab.

“The Watsonville students had the ideas and not necessarily the computer skills, while our student might have some computer skills,” said Neri, and that’s where they all jumped in together, “furthering the metaphor, using images of weather and weather systems to portray the reality of the students as well as their future desires and dreams.” Neri described the students’ collaboration in projects such as this: “‘What’s your idea?’ ‘I want to put myself there. How do I do that?’ Then we just start playing around and the images come out.” With the help of Poethig and Neri, a multimedia artist specializing in digital imagery, and technical aides, the VPA students and their partners learn the technology on the spot in response to what each project demands.

The digital art “windows” that were hung along the hallways of the Community School are about 4’ by 3’ and incorporate images of the Watsonville students in a fantastical way with a variety of environmental aspects and settings, some reflecting their Hispanic/Latino/a heritage.[3] The technology mastered by the students in the digital lab does justice to the power and clarity of the individuals’ sense of their own reality, identity and vision for themselves. Instructor Todd Kruper saw that a sense of “spiritualism started coming through the students that we had not anticipated. The instructors said, ‘OK, let it flow if that’s what they want to talk about.’” He also noticed that when the teens came to work in the digital lab, “they got to see, ‘Oh, man! I can go to college. This is what college could be like for me.’” Looking in, looking out … for everyone involved.

Digital Storytelling: Latina Life Stories

The strong bond forged between the groups of students created in this partnership spun a second project with the teen moms at the Community School. Mesa-Bains said that there was a concern that “many of these girls were in an alternative school not because they had bad grades or acted up but because they’d become pregnant. They were being lumped in with truant kids and those with behavior problems.” Although the school had parenting classes and day care, these girls were aware of what they weren’t getting — no proms, no sports teams — and felt the system had given up on them.

The project that evolved in a VPA special-projects class in Spring 2004 reflects CSUMB’s embrace of its mission in terms of service learning that incorporates university interdepartmental collaboration and participation of professionals, programs and partners in the community. CSUMB Professor Rina Benmayor, who had brought the techniques and pedagogy of digital storytelling to the CSUMB’s Humanities and Communications department through her “Latina Life Stories” classes, guided the VPA students in mentoring the teen mothers through telling their stories and designing scripts for a digital format that is described as an updated version of scrapbooking that combines still and moving imagery with an audio score. Early in the course, a staff member from the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley augmented Benmayor’s instruction, and the collaboration with the community increased with the participation of two artists with histories of working on issues of social justice: Jenny Angelacos, who specializes in photography and graphic design, and Lourdes Portillo, an award-winning documentary filmmaker. They advised the teen mothers and their VPA student-mentors on the formal aspects of creating three-to-five-minute digital movies in VPA’s digital lab.

Artist Jenny Angelacos, a photographer and graphic designer, leads a digital-storytelling session at Watsonville Community School.

RUAP’s Web site’s comprehensive presentation of documentation of this project includes the class’s retrospective assessment of stages of the process that shows how these endeavors take their own unpredictable course. It seems that none of the student mentors and, possibly, the professors had calculated the emotional complications of telling and hearing the stories of these girls. One VPA student recalled the initial sessions of storytelling she had experienced among her fellow students and then with the girls: “We came together as strangers, but at the first class we realized that the stories we told each other had the power to move us to tears. We saw that again the day we heard the teen moms' stories — there wasn't a dry eye in the room.”

The path to the establishment of rapport and trust between the young mothers, their student mentors and the artists facilitating the project was rocky as they visited each other’s schools in the initial stages of the project. Ultimately, the five young mothers who became involved were able to see the benefits of facing the pain of delving into their intergenerational and interpersonal relationships and revealing their memories, thoughts and feelings. For some, the project became a personal journey toward understanding their background; others made a story to share with their children. Beyond the more immediate goals, the process and the product of the project provided a model for other teen programs and to affect changes in policy at the level of the school district.

Counting on the Certainty of Change

“Change” is a key concept woven into the university’s inception, growth and mandate. Within each project VPA initiates is the certainty of change in the consciousness of students and community partners. Many of the students are what Mesa-Bains describes as “first-to-college” from families in the surrounding communities. The curriculum provides the nurturance, space, facilities and guidance to develop unique skills and talents that may have languished without this opportunity. More significant, rather than isolating them from their communities, the service-learning aspect allows a broadening of their vision and a deeper understanding of the issues particular to their communities while they collaborate with and mentor younger community members. They join with other students and faculty from different backgrounds to go beyond mere deconstruction of negative stereotypes in their acts of reclamation of the spirit and humanity of the groups of individuals their projects serve. The aim of VPAs production of art, as Mesa-Bains explains, is to create representations of people that empower them.

Change is also a significant factor in the process of VPA’s projects in terms of the flexibility they demand from all concerned during the process of researching, building a relationship with partners, collecting words and images, and producing art. RUAP and faculty from the Digital Art Class, Mural Painting and Photography support and help to guide the projects, but students are involved in all aspects of the process. One of VPA’s early public art projects was a partnership with an umbrella organization, the Rural Alternatives Project, to create a mural that dealt with conditions under which the local strawberry farmworkers labored. Mesa-Bains had historically been involved with earlier farmworker movements stemming from the work of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers in the Central Valley region of California, but organizing the strawberry workers came much later to the coastal valley. The strawberry workers began organizing in the late ’90s, just when VPA was becoming more deeply involved in community outreach. In the process of researching and gathering images for a mural, the students attempted to go into the fields to take photographs of the workers on the job. “In this case,” said Mesa-Bains, “three-fourths of the class were farmworker students, first-to-college, so they were very aware of what went on in the fields. But even so, it was scary — they were practically run over by the growers in a truck. We knew we were bucking the boss. We didn’t think it would be that big a deal, but it was. When you begin to examine issues of social justice in this area, you will bump into labor and the multibillion-dollar agribusiness.”

The students mounted their mural in the community and, said Mesa-Bains,

All hell broke loose. The growers called the president of the university, they had Congressmen calling in, they had people faxing in from the Western growers association. All over this dinky little portable mural. I thought, if I were in San Francisco, I wouldn’t even notice this, but here the issue of agribusiness and farmworkers is an Achilles heel. It’s something we have a real interest in because we’ve heavily recruited youth from farm worker families, and we’ve tried our best to maintain our commitment to diversity and first-to-college students in the region, and that puts us right in the middle of where the farmworkers live.

One True Thing: Technology Breaks the Ice

Students got another taste of reality visiting incarcerated youth to generate ideas for what was to become the poster and billboard art meant to bring awareness to the need to prevent gang violence.[4] On trips to interview young men at the correctional facility, several times they encountered “lock-downs” due to the possible repercussions of gang murders in Salinas. The few young men who had been allowed to visit the digital art lab to collaborate with the students sometimes didn’t show up because they had been restricted for behavior violations in the facility.

Students working around these inconsistencies and other obstacles found that the process also elicited some powerful material. Faculty member Neri said that the VPA students were initially nervous working at the computers with former gang members, but that both groups “in the end, loved it.” He added, “One thing is true about this group and many we’ve worked with: the computer is actually a great third collaborator. You don’t know each other very well, but you sit in front of the screen and focus on it — it breaks the ice.”

Brian Contreras, director of the community group, Second Chance, provided his expertise as a former gang member who now dedicates his efforts to incarcerated youth and to trouble-shooting incidents of gang violence. He helps to provide access to youth in the correctional facility and advised the students on the intricacies of gang politics and symbolism as they interacted with the youth to develop words and imagery concerning issues of violence. The choice of images presented a problem in the case of a photograph of an incarcerated youth that the students wanted to include in a digitally designed image. Brian warned them that them about the tangled web of gang politics involving the boy and his family: They couldn’t “put his face out there” because it could bring him negative attention — “he might have people out for him.” The decision was made to substitute the image of one of the art students, but the artists still had to be mindful of the gang and prison associations of the smallest details of clothing, colors and posture because of the messages they might send.

After resolving these issues and creating art for the posters, the students and their young collaborators developed the logo, ACT (Artists Collaborating Together to Prevent Gang Violence), and presented a proposal to the local bus company, Monterey/Salinas Transit. They were met with resistance from the transit authorities, who found the posters “too edgy.” The students did not miss the irony in the fact that the buses advertised movies with violent imagery, but in an effort to stop violence, the imagery and words of former gang members, their community’s own incarcerated youth, weren’t acceptable. Faculty member Johanna Poethig, who joins Neri as an instructor in digital-art class projects, said, “Whatever job you get as an artist, you’re going to have to learn to go out there and develop a thick skin. In the projects we’ve done, the students get more real world experience than almost any other class they’re going to take.”

Through other connections among the community participants, the students eventually secured the use of a 24’ by 20’ billboard in the community and the cooperation of private, corporate owners of a local mall to display the posters on their kiosks. This required students’ involvement in meetings with corporate officials as well as changes in format that had to be compatible with the finite amount of ink and paper that had been budgeted for printing. Neri says, “Students are privy to the budget, production constraints, and are part of the ideation process.” RUAP helped smooth the way by providing help with financial operations and consistency in community connections, but the students were ultimately responsible for the production schedule and for the presentation and installation of the final product.

Developing Responsibility as Community Artists

The development of responsibility as community artists is, according to painting instructor Poethig, a desired result of the learning outcomes designated for creative and artistic expression in the department’s program. Poethig, a visual, public and performance artist, began her career in community art around 1980 when women became more involved in the longstanding tradition of political mural art. Community art was beginning to develop as a practice and, through their work, Poethig, Lacy, Baca and other artists began to define principles, ethics and values for public art work that have become integrated into VPA’s learning environment. The first requirement in Poethig’s painting and mural class is to research the community. The students do individual paintings, learning basic techniques, and they simultaneously collaborate on public mural projects, many of which enhance the buildings of the campus. Researching the community, she says, “is more emphasized in theory classes, but you couldn’t do a public project, or, to be honest, your own project if you didn’t.” Students may originally sign up for art classes because they think research isn’t required, but Poethig tells them they have to find references, read book and newspapers, get on the Web—get ideas. “It becomes even more specific when working on a public process,” she says, because they need to learn about the particular community with whom they are partnering.

Understanding the scope and the cultural context of the audience for the work is imperative, whether that is the community with which the class is partnering, or a larger audience that will view the work. Poethig connects audience with practice in terms of how the art is manifested visually and she stresses learning the skills to present it in an effective way. In the case of mural projects on the campus, such as the one that students recently completed and installed in the Visitor’s Center, the work represents the history, cultural and environmental aspects and diversity of the campus to its students, faculty and visitors. Poethig describes this as “affecting our environment to be more reflective of who and what is there.”

In the digital art that is mounted in the surrounding communities, often, says Neri, “we’re messing around with expectations of an advertising space and adding content that is unexpected.” The art may be attempting to convey a message or image from one population in the community to a larger audience in a way that will reach them. Neri says this can require “balancing hard-hitting messages with a sensitivity to the realities of people’s lives.” In partnership with the Monterey County AIDS Project, an AIDS awareness and support organization, a digital art class led by Johanna Poethig planned a project that would disseminate direct info about AIDS prevention. They created a series of bus-kiosk panels with themes linked to the social environment of the local communities of Monterey and Salinas.

Digital mural created in 2000 by student artist Duane Shima during a collaboration with the African American Outreach Program of the Monterey County AIDS Project for display in Monterey-Salinas Transit's bus shelters

In assessing the audience, the class chose to target young people in an effort to demythologize AIDS, especially for those who believe “This won’t happen to me.” The audience that would actually view the art, however, included the whole population of Salinas and Monterey. Reviewing the images created in Poethig's class for this project, Neri said, “A majority of the Mexican population in Salinas are devout, spiritual people,” said Neri, “and given the issue of condoms and the Church, the students had to be aware of subtleties in how to get the message out.” One poster features a image of a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a pious pose against the backdrop of a starry sky, with the words, “Faith Alone Cannot Prevent AIDS.” Another is less subtle, with a banner headline that states “Masturbation for the prevention of AIDS.” Below it, the open palm of a hand is overwritten with the words Cancer, Acne, Going Blind, Hairy Palms, and Balding. Beneath the image, the text reads, “These are myths. AIDS is real.” This one, by Duane Shima, did not make it to large-scale printing or public display.

Museum Studies and Complex Issue of Representation

The particular use of imagery also became a challenge in partnering with the Monterey Museum of Art’s education-and-outreach division to produce pieces that were displayed in the community and documented in a museum exhibit as well. VPA’s liaison with the museum had been established as a means of fulfilling the University’s service-learning requirement for multicultural community building. VPA students can choose the concentration of Museum Studies, led by faculty member Lila Staples and described as giving students “the opportunity to learn how to manage and curate exhibits through internships and grapple with the complex issues of representation and interpretation in historic and contemporary museum settings.” Along with theoretical and ethical approaches to Museum Studies, the students in this concentration work on-site at local museums where they participate in exhibition design and acquire basic knowledge of operations, conservation application, exhibit content and interpretation, design, installation, collections management and oral-history interviewing.

A roundtable discussion in 2004, cosponsored by the university, VPA and RUAP, included Mesa-Bains and Lila Staples, VPA’s Museum Studies instructor, along with other invited directors or former curators of important art museums. They discussed the role of the museum, its mission focus and audience, asking questions about the extent to which a museum can exist beyond its walls and have an impact on the social dynamics of the community it inhabits. These questions are part of the process of inquiry in Museum Studies classes. “We’re trying to apply the notion of museums as a site of community life so that’s our emphasis, not so much the more traditional notions of museum conservation and registry,” said Mesa-Bains. “I think of museums as new cultural spaces, people do things in museums that they didn’t do before.”

In 2002, the Digital Public Art class, led by Neri and Poethig, gained access to the Monterey Museum of Art’s substantial collection of folk art and painting from the turn of the 20th century. The students took photographs of the art and artifacts and brainstormed ways of digitally working the images. They came up with a plan to link the art to the diverse history and culture of Monterey County, but the museum took issue with manipulating the paintings. Neri pointed out the issue of boundaries in using other artists’ art imagery and music. “Art has always been historically interpreting what was done before,” he said, “but now with the Internet and digital, we can do it like wild. When someone puts some limits on that, it sends you off into another way of dealing with it.”

Every Challenge Packed with Learning

Poethig and Neri are accustomed to such turns of events. “Every challenge is packed with learning,” says Poethig. “It’s right on the table — we are negotiating it with the student.” The first thing the class had to deal with was devising a way to work with the original paintings. Students came up with alternative images that would create the concept they wanted by using the structure of diptychs or triptychs by which they could keep the original pure and “unPhoto-shopped” and juxtapose it with their own imagery. Because digital work is adaptable to all sizes of public spaces, the students’ work was displayed in a variety of locations around Monterey that were in some way linked to the content of the imagery. The posters carried the title of the project, “Inside/Outside Museum.”[5] One of the student artists stretched the form slightly, but within acceptable bounds, using photos of paintings by Armin Hansen, a noted early California artist who painted fishing scenes. She placed the images on the lids of sardine cans and the poster was installed on Cannery Row, the site of the town’s historical canning industry and now a tourist attraction, graphically calling attention to the social and economic history of the place.

Poethig said that the students’ concept worked, “but it threw into our faces the different notions of what’s precious and not precious in terms of artifacts. It was a great lesson for the class, because we had to put the brakes on and put a screeching halt to a direction we were going. We had to think about how we were going to deal with the museum’s issues about image and artwork and propriety. How do you place it into the public space in an educative, interesting way? In the end they loved our solution, and gave us a show in the lower part of the museum. It turned out perfectly, but it was tough.”

Student Laurel Leonetti at Monterey Museum of Art with her piece from “Insight/Outside Museum,” an exhibition of maquettes of much larger pieces located throughout Monterey County linking the museum’s archives with local culture

The museum show displayed maquettes of the pieces in their locations around the county, which included a bank, a grocery outlet, a bookstore, a café and the advertising space above the windows inside buses, spaces where one normally sees advertising. In an article written on the project for CSUMB’s newsletter, “Faculty Focus,”[6] Poethig stated,

This work involved a complex improvisation played out between students and their community partners that layers social, historical, theoretical, technical and artistic considerations. The challenge was to interpret the interests and issues relevant to the people involved while learning digital imaging and production in order to design public art works that work socially and aesthetically. … Media literacy and the deconstruction of commercial images is central to the tactic of making public art that contradicts the relentless messages of our consumer-culture advertising. By using the same medium and imitating some of its forms we, as part of diverse society whose members are misrepresented or not represented at all, are able to redefine ourselves in the public arena. The use of advertising and alternative venues for public artworks is a necessary step in reclaiming our landscapes and social spaces.

Reclaiming Air Space as Art Space

The directors, faculty, students and community partners of both VPA and the Music and Public Arts departments are alert to the synchronous and serendipitous opportunities that arise for reclamation as connections continue to be established within the surrounding communities. VPA’s project on the prevention of gang violence, described above, yielded material that spun off into a guerilla radio event that “reclaimed” air space circulating around the parking lot of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.

When VPA students had initially visited the correctional facility, they had asked the prisoners they met with to complete a questionnaire that included questions about their feelings about gang violence and what they dreamed for their futures. One of the young men had written and performed his answers in hip-hop rhyme that voiced the pain and anger of these youth: “Tired of seeing innocent caskets drop. Let’s get together, make it all stop,” and “Violence in the streets got us losing loved ones. But who’s gonna help us get rid of the guns?”

The faculty of both arts departments is a tight and interconnected group. There is a palpable sense that they share interest and excitement about what goes on in both arenas and are ready to contribute, participate in or build on what’s going on. As news of the hip-hop poet’s responses spread, MPA director Richard Bains took the opportunity, through the Reclamation Project, to hire Chris Brown, head of the music department at Mills College in Oakland, and Guillermo Galindo, a classically trained Mexican composer and performer, as visiting artists to work with MPA’s students to develop the material into a public art project titled “Transmissions: Main Street.”

MPA students collaborated with at-risk high-school students from Second Chance Youth Project to rehearse, work up their own beats and record CDs in the department’s recording studio under the tutelage of Brown and Galindo. They gathered freestyle in the studio, learning the technology and bouncing off each other’s lyrics while laying down tracks.

Permission was negotiated through the city to use the parking lot across from the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas as a location for four guerrilla radio stations set up to “pirate” FM radio-station frequencies to broadcast music in the surrounding area. Signs were posted along the adjacent road directing drivers to a number on their radio dials. Spectators were invited to bring boom boxes and, along with drivers who cruised around the block, they blasted the music, which fed back into receivers that amplified the live radio tracks, creating a wall of sound. The blend of recording and broadcasting technology that created this interaction infused with the culture of the community in this outdoor public space was thrilling for the artists and participants.

A writer for the local Monterey County Weekly[7] covered the event and interviewed some of the participants. A 17-year-old rap artist calling himself “Young Bubb,” in the Second Chance program for six months, said "Recording is fun, and I’m helping the community out at the same time. It’s something I love doing. It relaxes me. It’s like a natural high.” He felt that it helps make up for the actions of his “illicit past” and keeps him out of trouble. His poetry comes from the heart: “I pray for peace but it won’t be/ because money rules everything." MPA’s project coordinator, Alison Clifford, was quoted in the article as saying, "We’re not necessarily trying to make squeaky-clean, Evangelistic music. … We want it to be realistic, but not negative. They can talk about their lives, but there has to be a positive message to it as well.”

The use of music and words in this venue paralleled VPA’s practice of using image and text to represent and validate the identity, culture and concerns of a community. Bains spoke about the impact of hip-hop and rap:

I find, outside of the misogynistic and gangster-type stuff, that there are people who write to certain socially relevant concerns. We show, even in our program for new students, that this is an opportunity to change the world. It may be optimistic, but I think it can. Music can address issues of social justice — not in the standard form of people marching and demonstrating, but by creating an anthem. Catch their ear — there’s a message in the music. A valid song cuts through time — it may be talking about Vietnam but the same issue applies to Iraq. Music has a place in that context. Some students even now don’t like hip-hop, and I myself don’t understand all of it, but I feel it has a place. Years ago, parents hated rock and roll — and it’s still here. We have to understand how each generation’s music talks to them.

Major Pro Seminar: Going for Deep

Awareness of the students’ backgrounds, abilities and their own sense of agency is emphasized by Professor Stephanie Johnson, who now co-chairs VPA with Director Mesa-Bains in alternate semesters. Johnson teaches VPA’s Major Pro Seminar, a class required in all majors across the university to introduce students to the learning outcomes expected for the major and to interdisciplinary thinking. In an interview on RUAP’s Web site, Johnson explained, “I try to format it such that it's an introduction both on a textual level, reading, researching, and also in a hands-on way — individual projects, research assignments and so on and so forth.” She ushers students through an experience of service learning, beginning with making a relationship with members of a chosen community group. This is one of the settings in which the pedagogy of service learning as applied to community-based public art is growing and evolving in relation to consecutive new generations of college students. Johnson says,

Between telling them exactly what to do and allowing them the freedom to formulate their own working strategies, their own methodologies, figuring out their own needs, it’s always a delicate, delicate balance, because certainly I could lay it all out for them but then there's no exploration. I mean, that's kindergarten, these are adults.

Professor Stephanie Johnson, who teaches VPA’s Major Pro Seminar, wants students to “formulate their own working strategies, their own methodologies. … certainly I could lay it all out for them but then there's no exploration. I mean, that's kindergarten, these are adults.”

Johnson, whose own work as a mixed-media sculpture and installation artist honors the history of African-Americans, works closely with RUAP to involve the students in art projects with community partners that will immerse them in the experience in a way that expands their knowledge and vision but is not overwhelming. “What I like about our program,” she says, “is that we do things in small steps, we don't overcommit, we don't say we can do something we can't. We go for deep rather than big. You can get into all kinds of trouble when you want to make a big show of something, instead of a deep, authentic connection.”

The Major Pro Seminar gives students a basis for larger, more comprehensive projects such as those completed with the Center for Community Advocacy (CCA) in a community partnership that is in its second year. CCA, founded as a nonprofit organization in 1988, provides outreach, health and educational programs for farmworkers and other low-income families in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. The distinctive feature of the Center’s work is that it trains the farmworkers themselves to advocate for improved housing and health conditions. Sabino Lopez, CCA’s deputy director, said that CCA’s initial connection to the VPA department came through Amalia Mesa-Bains’ invitation to farmworkers to participate in the elaborate Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration VPA hosts annually. Mesa-Bains brings to the event her skills as an artist who creates interpretations of traditional Chicano altars that incorporate specific cultural and historical aspects. Her deep understanding of multiculturalism as well as the historical struggles of farmworkers in the region informs the department’s involvement with groups such as CCA.

It seems that once a community organization becomes involved with CSUMB’s arts departments, the fun never ends. In 2005, the Reclamation Project facilitated a collaboration between CCA and both the music and art departments. With a focus on researching and creating a relationship with the farmworker communities CCA serves, students in the digital art class met with CCA’s Lopez to further the research they had already done on immigrant labor and the issues and struggles CCA had dealt with in their work. Neri, who taught the class, said, “I tried to put it into a larger context of the United Farmworkers development under Dolores Huerta and Caesar Chavez. Sabino Lopez provided some materials we could review to get an idea of what CCA does. It was quite complex.”

With the Farmworkers: Eyes Wide Open

Lopez then conducted the students on a tour of the migrant farmworkers’ camps, which was, in Mesa-Bains’ words, “eye-opening. They just didn’t know that people really lived under those conditions, not in America.” Some of the camps had existed since the bracero program during the 1940s and ’50s and were barely holding together. Living conditions in many camps are baseline, partly because the transitory nature of migrant farm work creates a disconnection that hampers efforts of the workers to improve the environment. By contrast, some camps have become co-ops or have become organized via the CCA model of empowering the farmworkers to act as their own advocates in improving conditions.

Lopez said that he wanted to “share with students the other side of the coin. Parts of Monterey County are very beautiful and it’s hard for the farmworkers to live in transit work, low paying jobs. The camp housing is cheaper than apartments in the city.”

Lopez also wanted to correct a false perception. Neri, who taught the class, said,

One thing Sabino wanted was to change the media’s and the public’s objectification of the farmworker as the drag on society or the idea that these are the pobrecitos of our society, so we have to help them — that because they are farmworkers they are naturally in need of help and unable to help themselves.

Lopez wanted the students to be cognizant of the fact that the philosophy of CCA is to give the farmworkers the choice. CCA doesn’t help them as a matter of course, but presents options for them to help themselves. “Responding to these concerns,” Neri said,

we wanted to do a project that showed what kinds of successes individuals with proper information and advocacy can accomplish for themselves. This isn’t about CCA’s success. This is the success of these people helping themselves and we were just there to give them some help from the university.

The initial stages of connecting with the workers was assisted by the participation of Judy Baca who helped the class formulate interview questions about “home,” such as “What home did you leave behind? What home do you see for your future?” that would be asked in interviews to elicit personal stories from the residents at one camp CCA was supporting in its renovation. Visiting artist Roberto Salas, suggested a birdhouse-building project he had conducted with other groups as a way to bring families and students together. Salas coordinated the project and brought children and parents on campus to VPA’s facilities to construct the birdhouses, which were then taken back to the camp where the children painted them.

Meanwhile, the students had begun formulating the idea of creating banners using quotes from the residents and images of their lives in the camps. The class presented its proposal late one evening when the residents had come home from work. They projected images of the birdhouses on the side of a house and talked about them as metaphors for migrant’s homes, then videotaped interviews with the farmworkers. “We had some amazing birdhouses and got some amazing interviews,” said Gilbert Neri. “We went door-to-door with one of the main advocates whose brother had been murdered in the bathroom of that camp before they redeveloped it, and we got photographs. A lot of photos in the banners were from our trips.”

Listening to the stories of the struggles of the workers, their fears of deportation, the heartaches of separation from their families in Mexico and the lack of finances to contact or visit them was intense for the students. They wanted to make these stories visible to the community and put a more human and personal face on the work that CCA does. They also wanted the project to celebrate the farmworkers’ sweat-equity project of building their own homes in a new housing division called Moro Cojo.

Banner (both sides) on North Main Street in Salinas by student artist Fletcher Buccowich from “Journeys Home,” a Digital Art class collaboration with migrant farmworkers and their families through the Reclamation Project

The Digital Art class’ project, titled “Journeys Home,” produced 20 double-sided, bilingual banners that were hung on light poles along main thoroughfares in Salinas and will be moved to different venues in the surrounding communities. The artwork was based on the notions of home collected in the interviews: What does home provide? What do people need? Juxtaposed with each image is a narrative directly drawn from the interviews reflecting the sentiments of individuals, children, parents, family and community: “Every person needs a place they can call home.” “My first priority was to own a house in order to protect my family.” The images were made up of photos and parts of drawings the farmworkers had made during the interviews. One farmworker donated a photo disc of himself building his own house and getting “sweat equity” credit for his labor toward buying it.

In the fall of 2006, while a new class of students met for the digital art class and began discussing ideas for the second year of VPA’s partnership with CCA, a corrido, a Mexican narrative folk ballad, played in the gallery next door. Lyrics scrolled over images on a TV monitor, and a voice sang an oral history of Mexican immigrants and the struggles and triumphs of the farmworkers in California, a composition by musician and Music Professor Juan Sanchez recorded in MPA’s studio. The gallery was hung with photos of the students with Lopez and the farmworkers, pictures of the banners in their sites in Salinas, and documentation of students’ individual art projects that the collaboration had inspired.

This school year, 2006-2007, students are focusing on CCA’s current mission to train farmworkers to form and lead their own committees that research, educate and advocate for improved health conditions for farmworkers and other low-income families in Monterey County and Santa Cruz County. As the second semester begins, VPA’s plans are coalescing around projects to assist in CCA’s emphasis on prevention of health problems common among farmworkers. Students and faculty are discussing a multimedia approach that creates a continuum of presence in a variety of venues they consider both public and private. The expanding network of VPA’s and MPA’s collaboration with community organizations and media venues along with the expertise the departments have developed in community-based art facilitates a broader, sustainable realization of their vision. Discussion has begun with visiting multidisciplinary artist and “digital cultural worker,” John Jota Leaños[8], about creating an audio-visual narrative adaptable for radio, television and the Internet. Other ideas include designs for printed material for distribution to workers in the fields, with visuals and text that can be adapted to a Web site as a resource for advocates and workers, and large-scale billboard art focusing on the idea that good health in the individual is good health in the family and in the community. Modeled on their collaboration with CCA regarding farmworkers’ housing, VPA’s efforts will be to support the farmworkers’ power to help themselves.

For many of the students, the experience of collaborating in making art with community partners is life-changing, says Mesa-Bains.

It doesn’t mean that they’re going to do community art work the rest of their lives, but it’s life-changing in the sense of understanding the world they live in and the benefits they have as a result of other people’s absence of those same benefits.

The Service Learning Prism: Justice, Compassion, Diversity, Social Responsibility

Before seniors graduate from the arts programs, they are required to complete a Capstone Project that demonstrates their skills in relation to the major’s learning outcomes. The Capstone Projects for VPA majors in 2006 included individual works of art, community-based art projects and collaborations on public art projects by pairs of students.[9] Most of the projects involve social awareness or issues of identity. A capstone project is evaluated for the student’s skills in individual expression, research and analysis, community collaboration, production, evaluation and distribution. The framework for developing learning outcomes in all of CSUMB’s majors is the Service Learning Prism with its four facets: justice, compassion, diversity and social responsibility. The service-learning model, says Mesa-Bains,

probably goes back to tenement housing social work, but what makes it different than just providing service is the part of it in which you analyze the larger social conditions that predate the means for service, whether it’s poverty or health or whatever. So you’re looking at it as a systemic issue not just an individual who is poor or sick. Your service goes into not only the immediate need of communities but also to the larger goal of creating a healthier environment for people to live in. The part of the service-learning prism that I really like is the combo of compassion and social justice.

In terms of the reciprocity that she sees as essential to the experience of service learning in the arts, Mesa-Bains believes in “asking young people who have provided service to reflect on what happened to them in the process and asking them how their views of people have changed as a result of working in that way with them.”

In terms of students beginning the program, Mesa-Bains said that the department created a “self-and-society model,” starting with students’ reflections on themselves, their own issues of gender or other life crises of young people trying to sort out their identities. “Then,” she said,

we try to engage them past that into identifying what communities they connect with—sometimes its on campus, or sometimes it has to do with their own heritage or an interest in an environmental issue and that’s their community. We move them from self to society through several stages.

The beginning classes give them a chance to learn tools while creating representations of themselves, but the later classes such as the digital lab or the museum classes start to move them into working in community. “In the senior capstone projects,” said Mesa-Bains,

students may be working through important issues but through an individual source of expression, which I think is extremely valuable. We’re not opposed to that. I think sometimes people think when they read “visual” and “public,” it means they’re not going to have a chance to make their own art. The whole gallery of capstone projects has that range, but presenting it is still art in community.

A Different Approach to Studio and Gallery

VPA students create art in three of the old army base’s converted motor pool buildings. With arched wood and metal sunshades added above the windows and between the buildings as the characteristic architectural feature, the VPA complex is referred to as the one with the “eyebrows.” The original founders and faculty who designed the facilities planned them with the idea of supporting a curriculum and classes unlike those of a traditional art department within a university. Because public art requires community and collaboration, the interior of these structures was built with the flexibility to accommodate individual as well as group involvement in making art.

Instructor Todd Kruper was able to design a state-of-the-art, OSHA-regulated shop with all the equipment and safeguards necessary for students to learn to fabricate the pieces they need for projects in any classes in the program.

Kruper, the department instructional technician who oversees students in the 3-D sculpture studio that fills one of the buildings, said, “When I first came here eight years ago there was absolutely nothing. It was wonderful to be able to go shopping after 12 years of being at other colleges in the UC system where I never thought they had the right equipment for what they expected.” With an entire empty building allotted to him, he was able to work with faculty to design a state-of-the-art, OSHA-regulated shop with all of the equipment and safeguards necessary for students to learn to fabricate the pieces they need for projects in any classes in the program. “I was able to set up centers,” said Kruper.

We’ve got a metal shop where everything can be moved away, so if students want to work on large scale pieces, they can. That was the exciting part of the start-up of the facility, instead of one band saw, we have four band saws. The students can check things out for use here, but we are geared up as a pubic art facility to go on-site to create the works. So the students not only get to work with a custom built table saw, but they also learn to work with a contractor’s saw—one you would work out in the field with and one you would use in the shop. Those types of things make a big difference with the way we can work.

In his own training in traditional sculpture, Kruper was taught, “You go in and stay in the studio and create these pieces of art that you bring into the public. The public grows, you grow, you grow rich and die, or die and then get rich.” The VPA buildings were originally redesigned with smaller, separate studios for the students, but they were soon converted into more fluid spaces as the curriculum for training in collaborative community and public art demanded. The building next to the 3-D shop houses a mural studio with hanging panels that slide on tracks designed by VPA founder, Baca. Students can work on individual panels and then put them all together and step back to see a whole piece as it comes together. “Compared to big long walls,” said Kruper, “it’s a versatile way of approaching space.” The third building contains the digital art lab and a bank of computers capable of advanced technology along with a new, large scale, color printer. The digital lab shares the building with a photography studio, administrative offices, and a small gallery that displays multimedia documentation of the public art projects VPA has installed in the community.

“We’re probably one of the few CSUs that offers students real-world application,” says Mesa-Bains. “They can drive around here and see their artwork on the back of buses, on bus kiosks, on billboard, on kiosks in the shopping malls.”

Mesa-Bains said that “it’s interesting watching when they start out to do a project with a partner, and the partner says, ‘I was thinking more that we needed this…’ and they have to make this negotiation that has to do with reciprocity.” When both are part of the equation how do they collaborate and still find their own creative, aesthetic satisfaction in the work? “What we see happening is the sense of purpose and worth that comes from being able to do work that provides expression for others,” she explained. “It doesn’t happen to every student but I say that three-fourths of the students that go through community public projects go away with a tremendous sense of well-being, and maybe about a third to a half of them develop a sense of purpose about that and they find, this is what I want to do.”

For students who intend to make a career in art, says Mesa-Bains,

we want them to make a living. We want them to leave here with the beginning of a sense of purpose about how they might live as artists, what they might do and how they might affect the world around them. We really aim to give them the tools and the strategies that go across both the process of making things and the capacity to think critically and conceptualize.

Mesa-Bains said that she and the VPA faculty looked at the general trends in art schools historically and saw the years of skill-based training followed by “years that spawned pendulum to the other side, which was conceptual, and you never learned to make a thing, and no one cared if you made a thing. Before, you had to learn how to make everything.” Regarding her own experience in this evolution of art education, Mesa-Bains said, “I threw that all away because I wanted to make things that weren’t in the realm of that kind of fine arts.”

Poethig pointed out that “there’s always been a tension between the art world high-stakes game and a philosophy of making art that is outside the marketplace.” In her career, she found public art becoming more high-stakes in terms of big civic or corporate projects that present the opportunity to infuse large architectural spaces with “social-scape, history and memory.” She attempts to educate students about this aspect of the art world. Working in this type of public arena, she says, is “hard, competitive like anything else. Then there’s community arts, which is about developing a cultural life so that we have a healthier society on every level.” She sees community art as involving people of all ages and physical or mental ability, and says, “being creative is good for you in every way, like exercise or nutrition.” She said, however, that because of the misconception that public and community arts are only about process, “they have been neglected in the critical dialogue about art creation in our culture. I think it’s because people don’t know enough about it, they don’t understand enough about that segue between the process and the product.” Poethig describes the VPA program as expanding the dialogue about art in the culture and educating students about all of the options available to an artist going into the field. “We want to prepare them for the reality of whatever way they want to go in their career, or for bridging them all.”

Mesa-Bains states that the VPA curriculum asks students to incorporate skills and concepts, but also asks a third thing: “to have consciousness about the role of the artist in society and the purpose of art as a form of social meaning. We emphasize issues like justice and social service which are not often associated with the making of art.” In taking the emphasis off the ego of the artist, “it’s not like we’re trying to make an army of little do-gooders,” said Mesa-Bains. The faculty’s perspective is informed by their own histories as artists that span decades of significant changes in the field. Each of them has personally dealt with choices involving their work in community art versus individual, personal expression. “I’m in my 60s,” said Mesa-Bains,

and I’ve been making art since I was in my 20s—a good 40 years. It doesn’t last as a self-expression model, that only lasts so long, and then what? How many stories do you want to tell about yourself and how many times are you going to contemplate your gender or your this or your that. There’s has to be a bigger way of looking at the world.

The funding CSUMB received from the Wallace Foundation for supporting community partnerships through RUAP was also awarded nationwide to five other colleges with public and community arts-based programs. Rather than competing for students, these colleges networked to form a consortium and collaborated on “Art / Vision / Voice: Cultural Conversations in Community, A Book of Cases from Community Arts Partnerships.” Published by Columbia College Chicago and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and funded by the Nathan Cummings Foundation in 2006, this book is a guide for practitioners and as a text for students in community-arts degree programs. Concerned with developing a pedagogy for education in community arts, they assisted in planning master’s programs that are now in place at Columbia and MICA. The opportunity these master’s programs offer is crucial for students from undergraduate arts programs who want to continue developing strength as public and community artists.

Although the establishment of graduate programs may be a goal of the arts departments at CSUMB, the directors and faculty see the value in providing training in community and public art to students on the undergraduate level. Mesa-Bains appreciates the scale of a program that affords the opportunity for administration, faculty, visiting artists and students all to have input in projects and be involved in the excitement of partnering with the community. This milieu provides the opportunity for nurturing a unique artistic vision in students from the inception of their university education. The founding of the university was based on a revolutionary approach, and, says Mesa-Bains, “there’s an ongoing vigilance about the vision. That’s the defining characteristic of the entire campus. I think the arts and humanities are the souls of that vision. We are the ones that keep ourselves committed to that — interdisciplinary work, working in community, addressing issues of justice and diversity and service. … I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

Jan Freya is an arts journalist and academic editor living in California. She once managed High Performance magazine and, to the never-ending delight of those to whom she reveals her past credits, she co-wrote the screenplay for the '80s breakdance classic, "Breakin' 2 IS Electric Boogaloo."

NOTES: This essay is based upon face-to-face and e-mail interviews conducted by the author in the fall of 2006 with faculty, staff, students and community partners of the arts programs at California State University at Monterey Bay. Additional research was conducted through the university’s publications and Web sites.

[1] http://ruap.csumb.edu/welcome.html

[2] http://ruap.csumb.edu/projects_class_menu.html and
  http://home.csumb.edu/CLASSES/VPA/VPA306-01/world/VPA306/windows.htm

[3] See http://home.csumb.edu/CLASSES/VPA/VPA306-01/world/VPA306/index.htm for historical documentation of the digital public art class projects.

[4] See this art at http://home.csumb.edu/CLASSES/VPA/VPA306-01/world/VPA306/2ndChance.htm

[5] See posters at http://home.csumb.edu/CLASSES/VPA/VPA306-01/world/VPA306/MMA.htm

[6] http://tla.csumb.edu/site/Images/tla/FFSeptember2002.pdf

[7] Kate Folsom, April 10, 2003 http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/articles/8955

[8] See http://leanos.net/bio.htm

[9] See students’ 2006 Capstone Projects at http://vpa.csumb.edu/capstone/index.htm

Original CAN/API publication: April 2007