Viewpoint: Community Collaborative Arts

This article sets several scenarios of actual hands-on learning in the Visual and Public Art (VPA) department at California State University, Monterey Bay, which provides students with the opportunity to work with community partners from the local region in Monterey County, California. The scenarios are followed by a critique and reflection from my own work as a public artist.

Practice

Scenario 1: Young people from a gang-prevention group met in the computer lab with students from the VPA Digital Public Art Class. Everyone was a bit uncomfortable, not knowing what to expect. It was a nice-sized group of about 12 people, enabling a real exchange to take place. The core issues that came up through a process of questions, discussion, creative writing and spoken word were violence, loss and education. The tool was the computer. The youth and students teamed up, huddled around the monitors, and the design process began. As a professor and longtime community-based artist I, along with my colleague Gilbert Neri, led the group toward a common goal. The project had funding and support, so we had the resources to design and print large-scale posters for advertising Kiosks and a large exterior billboard. The local bus company that normally posts our work on its busses did not agree to support this project, as they found the subject matter of violence prevention controversial. By the end of the semester the group had developed its own identity and name “ACT (Artists Collaborating Together) to prevent violence.” The final works are powerful images and touching statements that reflect the experience, talents and hard work of the participants. Gilbert and I, as teachers and artist-professionals, worked with the community organization, provided the framework, the tasks, negotiated for the sites, taught the skills, guided the critique process and administered the production and installation. The youth offered their stories, hopes, failures, words, images and dreams. The students shaped the images, learned how to plan, lead, collaborate, improve skills and help with the production.

Scenario 2: The VPA Digital Public Art class expected the young girls they met with as part of the Planned Parenthood project to be much less candid. Young, pregnant or considering an abortion they talked about their education, their boyfriends, their families, their babies, their bodies and what they wanted from life. The students discussed their own reactions to Planned Parenthood as an organization and how it is perceived. Sometimes the discussions were quite sensitive, as the work Planned Parenthood does touches on so many personal and political issues. The Planned Parenthood staff that we met enlightened all of us with the incredible services and healthcare that Planned Parenthood provides to women and families throughout the country. They were very excited that we had chosen them as community partners as it was obviously not something that happened often. As a community/public artist, I have often found that projects around women’s bodies, health and issues are more difficult to get funded. Because we had no financial support for this project we chose to do experimental videos that Planned Parenthood could use in their community outreach. The students teamed up and created small productions around themes that were generated in the exchange with our partners. The final collection of short videos is used by Planned Parenthood to do education in the community.

“Doing a complex large-scale collaborative piece with students with a range of skills is challenging. It requires creating a plan and design that can involve everyone but not compromise the piece. The pedagogical process and artistic intent must work together. It is the hardest thing to do as a professor,” says Cal State Monterey Bay Professor Johnna Poethig. Above, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for "Seasons Of Wildfowers/Poetry of Ideas," acryllic on wood relief for the Alumni Visitors Center, CSUMB. Shown, the Visual and Public Art Mural Class of Fall 2006, with Poethig (center, blonde hair);  Dean Marsha Moroh, College of Science, Media Arts and Technology; Director Amalia Mesa-Bains, VPA; and Advancement Services Manager Richard Westing. Click here to enlarge

Scenario 3: One of the most difficult parts of collaborative public-art production is finding a site. Public space is contested territory. When the staff at the CSUMB Alumni Visitor’s Center expressed interest in having artwork in the new building I responded quickly. A process was set up through the Alumni Visitor’s Center art committee. I worked with my VPA Painting and Mural Class to design a work of art for the centerpiece wall of the reception room. It was approved and the work began in the next semester. Doing a complex large-scale collaborative piece with students with a range of skills is challenging. It requires creating a plan and design that can involve everyone but not compromise the piece. The pedagogical process and artistic intent must work together. It is the hardest thing to do as a professor. In nonacademic public projects, I am not at the same time training the participants to be able to lead a project of their own. There are many levels of professional knowledge that are delivered in a public art program, including the historical, conceptual, contextual, relational, technical, practical and even physical requirements. In the end, we created a beautifully crafted installation out of painted and layered wood, everyone was involved, no one got hurt and the ribbon was cut. The artwork, titled “Seasons of Wildflowers, Poetry of Ideas,” uses native California wildflowers composed within an offset diamond shape to compliment the architecture of the room. Within the flowers, seed packets float across the diamond shape, each one designed and painted by a student/artist as a metaphor for growth, knowledge, cycles of life and continuing education.

Critique

I am compelled at times in my teaching to reflect on my own work as a public artist and on the experience I have gained from doing this work over three decades. The commercial image-makers of our society are the most powerful in the world. The forces of advertising, media, capitalist consumerism, corporate propaganda, industrialized pop culture and the “high art” institutions exert a nearly complete control on the imaging of our everyday lives. The images that idealize and standardize who and what we should be are set against unsettling views of the disenfranchised people of our society. This instills fear, depression and a disconnection from who we really are and how we can grow as human beings individually and collectively. To teach a socially engaged visual-arts practice in this context requires a layering of self-reflection, critical discourse, research, training in technique and materials, collaborative exchange, improvisation and professional practices. To do this effectively, the teacher-practitioner draws from the “in the trenches” experience of community and public art processes and projects. The institution in which this art making takes place must provide real support in the form of resources, space and access to sites in order for it to be successful. Through these efforts the next generation of image makers, visual artists and members of our society will learn the concepts and tools necessary to intervene in our shared spaces and collaborate on images that authentically reflect the complexity of the world we live in.

• The Burning Question
The burning question in collaborative, socially engaged art making is: Is this more a public service or an artistic practice? When it is thought of as a public service first, it does not serve its public. How then do artists bridge art in the service of the public, politics and social values, and art primarily centered in artistic concepts and aesthetic ideals? Can artists reach across boundaries of space, language, history, culture and time to rethink the world we share and ways that we might be able to influence its future? How does contemporary art respond to the idea of social engagement and shared public space? What makes an arts activist? What takes an artist out of the studio and onto the streets? How is our cultural life affected by the way art is integrated into our society? Certainly, because of the economic disparity in our society, the money, time and support it takes to do art should reach many more people in a significant way. But this type of funding comes with so many bureaucratic constraints that the art can be stifled. The expectations and hierarchical form of an institution are often at odds with what it takes to do successful creative projects. How does the artist deal with sensitive and critical social issues and not be restricted by academic committees, nervous administrators and corporate style conformity? How does the artist make work that is not compromised by these sponsorship realities so that it can really reflect, communicate and be taken seriously as art? In contrast to this, what happens when the artist creates subtle, obscure, layered, abstract, “non-message” yet collaborative works of art that don’t easily meet the expectations of what socially engaged art should look like? How do you teach and navigate these issues with students and prepare them to enter this exciting yet tremendously difficult practice and profession?

• Working Conditions and Resources
Community artists – and teaching artists as well — are often given unrealistic circumstances to work in. The conditions should support the artists as they undertake these demanding projects. Art teachers in schools are expected to handle so many children at one time it becomes a feat in “art waitressing,” the chaotic distribution of materials and constant clean-up. I speak from experience as an artist who taught in the schools with varying degrees of support. I eventually set up my own afterschool youth arts program (Inner City Public Art Projects for Youth) where the youth-to-visual artist/poet/dancer/musician adult ratio was four to one. We were able to create great interdisciplinary public art works in this setting because I had the freedom and support to shape the program from the artist’s goals, vision, needs, perspective and experience.

In the university academic environment, service learning supports a socially engaged art curriculum best when it is taught as an artistic practice. This type of class, because it includes a community partner, additional resources, a sense of purpose and a specific project, operates on a professional level. Consequently, the students are engaged in a process that exposes them to a real-world work environment that carries with it more responsibility. An artistically unproductive scenario for a service-learning class is a numbers-based, report-focused, predetermined art-education model, mainly concerned with public service. The most fulfilling and exciting service-learning model involves students in a creative collaborative practice based on the best examples of public and community arts in the field. This means small classes, access to the right materials, tools and equipment, and budgets that fit the desired project. Administrative support is there to develop public art sites and exhibition venues, and to work with the logistics and needs of the community partner. The creative process is directed but open and the students and partners are guided by the professors/arts professionals toward the best artwork possible.

• Concepts and Experiments
The artist who leads and/or teaches in the community arts setting must have a strong overall concept, willingness to experiment and the skill to guide the improvisation, critique and editing. Artwork that rises out of a real exchange, taking risks, overcoming challenges and examining the personal and social issues together, takes it own unique form. This process is rooted in the development of skills, the use of materials and basics of planning and producing site-specific public art or experimental projects. There is a rhythm that the artist and group listen to as they work. The collective perception engages and moves the work forward through honest critique and away from possessiveness and sentimentality. I am consistently surprised and inspired by this cohesion. It is far more difficult to do this collaborative work than a standard exhibit of individual works, with no conceptual focus, just to show how many people were involved. Whether the art is created individually or collaboratively within the group process, by keeping the conceptual and aesthetic intent at the center, as the foundation of the collaborative community art form there is the greatest possibility for growth, an authentic experience and art that satisfies. The art created in this community improvisation reflects our historical moment and contributes to the current cultural discourse. The student/artist must be trained in collaborative art-making methods but also learn how to be free to guide the creative process with true inspiration.

• Motivation
When a visual artist decides to work in community she or he does so for any number of reasons. Most likely the artist is a woman and has worked with children in art education or with other groups that need caregiving. The low pay, handling of large groups, working with messy materials, organizing, planning, set-up, clean-up, disciplining and paperwork are par for the course. Another reason artists work in community is out of political conviction. Our society is so compartmentalized that we don’t easily get the opportunity to know and work with people of other cultures, generations, economic backgrounds and life experiences. The desire to exchange ideas and create together is a way to cross boundaries with the immediacy of visual language. Intervention in our contested public spaces is one of the greatest motivations for visual artists in this field. The direct application of marks to a surface or wall is the oldest and most accessible form of visual public expression. Mural art, with its more recent history in the Mexican Mural Movement and the WPA program of the New Deal engaged with the feminist, multicultural, community based arts of the ‘60s and grew into one of the principal forms of community collaborative visual art. The effect of building-sized images in our environment and as part of architectural design cannot be underestimated. Gaining access to these sites for community expression has become increasingly difficult as advertising has become even more pervasive and cheaper through digital processes. Digitally designed and produced community public arts works, as we have created through the VPA classes, has become an effective way of introducing alternative images into advertising venues. The scale has been limited, however, to bus-shelter posters and small billboards, since both the printing and space rental gets more expensive as the scale increases. Adequate funding and support enables artists to experiment with new materials and technologies, making it possible for community artists and muralists to develop innovative projects for these key sites in our urban, suburban and rural areas. The opportunity to place meaningful works of large-scale art in our communities and civic spaces will always be one of the most powerful tools we have to reach new audiences and transform daily life.

• Methods of Engagement
Community art is a situational art form. The first trick in doing collaborative visual arts is to get over the fear. Everyone brings some fear to the spacious studio or dingy room where this arts alchemy will take place. There are normally three parts to this equation. There is the institution, the artist and the participants. The best way to overcome fear is through a healthy practice. A healthy community arts practice needs adequate funding, resources and space. It needs artists that are properly trained in this very specific art form. The participants or “community” need to be engaged within the process. Most important, it needs a specific creative purpose. The community arts are not the same as art education, though that is certainly a component. It is an artistic collaboration with participants from a specific physical and/or social site or an event in time.

Many of the methods of collaborating with community were developed by professional muralists and currently inform the fields of community arts, art education and public art today. The accessibility of the medium makes it possible for involving participants at various stages of the process. The first stage is site assessment and development. Get to know the social and physical characteristics of the place. Set realistic parameters with regard to the age and skills of the participants, time, funding and scale. Know what materials, tools and space there are to work with. The next stage is the research of context and content. What is the history of a site, who are the participants, what is the present use of the site, who is involved and what can be imagined?

The design always starts with a compositional focus based on the specificity of the actual site or venue. Creating through collaborative methods in the visual arts consists of a series of back-and-forth individual and group drawing. painting, collaging, building, making and ongoing discussions as the work takes shape. Lead artists recognize and honor individual skills, use intuition in the assignment of tasks and teams and find ways for the group to work together.

Community arts processes are by necessity and nature collaborative and improvised. This often makes students, participants, sponsors and administrators uneasy. An experienced community artist knows how to be structured and free at the same time. As a longtime community, public artist and arts professor, I have never found the institutional focus on formulaic reports and assessments to be a helpful method of evaluation. I believe the most important way to study the success of a project is by looking at the artwork itself. Good visual documentation and creative written or taped verbal reflections of projects preserve and distribute the work through printed and virtual technologies. The bodies of work that lead artists build over time deserve respect. Yet no matter how much good work has been created by artists, we are often suspect, constantly having to prove the worth of our work through pointless paperwork and review. We live in a culture that requires standardized tests and guarantees, without any trust of intangibles and what real learning is. Methods don’t always work, things will go wrong, there will be failure, mistakes will be made, and that’s how things grow. That is one of the best lessons that a disciplined artistic practice can teach us.

• Communication/Aesthetics/Language
 An artist makes things with an aesthetic intention; to get attention, to look good, sound good, to make people think, to transcend a moment, to last through time, to bring them to tears or to action. No matter how noble the cause may be, as a community artist what is the point if the greatest concern is the number of participants and not the art itself? Community art is unpredictable and unquantifiable. It is not an easily commodified form of art and that is one of its greatest strengths. It is an amazing form of communication and collective experience. It is the edgy experience of the live performance inherent in the process, the project structure in the artist’s mind, the suspension of the structure by the improvisation, the listening, the genuine surprises, the making together, the lessons in collaborative editing, the authenticity of the relationships, the well-funded, supported and respected project and the final work of art that becomes a landmark in our collective imagination of what is possible for us to do together. It has its own artistic qualities that need to be recognized and studied by practitioners, scholars, critics and writers in the field.
The definitions of community and the way participants are engaged must be flexible. The community artist is a person who is excited by the work of others and the hybrids and blends that come out of the mix.

• Celebration
Finally there is the unveiling, the celebration, the launching of the creative work into the world. It must not be underestimated how important this is. We are social beings and we make art to share and enjoy. The sad side of this is that art has been used to establish class and social status over the centuries, excluding so many people. In many parts of society, however, it is also the fabric of the whole group, the punctuation of life’s passages and the enhancement or even survival of the everyday. We all need to be witnessed, to be acknowledged for our talents, our work and who we are in the world. At the heart of the community arts practice is the desire to be known and know each other, to cross boundaries, offer our best interpretation of our experience, entertain each other, ponder our humanity, transcend our differences and have a good time together.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Johanna Poethig is a visual, public and performance artist who has exhibited internationally and has been actively creating public art works, paintings and multi-media installations for over 25 years. She was raised in the Philippines and lives in the Bay Area. She received her B.F.A. at University of California, Santa Cruz, and her M.F.A. at Mills College in Oakland. She is a professor in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University, Monterey Bay. As an arts educator, she deconstructs traditional "art world" boundaries in a collaborative artistic process grounded in research, production, critique, improvisation and reciprocal learning.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2008