Training and Partnerships in Rutgers’ Transcultural New Jersey Public Service Arts Program

Rutgers University’s Transcultural N.J. Public Service Arts Program (TNJ-PSAP) incorporates arts with civic engagement. It builds community relations while also training graduates from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, as well as nonaffiliated creative thinkers, to be effective community artists. This paper will explore how, through artists’ residencies, we build community partnerships among diverse stakeholders and foster understanding of civic engagement, both on and off campus. We’ve learned that the potential for cultivating special relationships among students and faculty, community artists and vulnerable populations, is stronger when service goals are developed in collaboration with all stakeholders and driven by community rather than campus interests. We’ll also discuss the evolution of the university’s role in the program.

TNJ-PSAP enlists the talents of artists from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds to provide civically engaged community arts residencies in partnership with neighborhood organizations statewide. The mission of TNJ-PSAP is to engage communities in the creative process, empowering the voices of disenfranchised populations and the resident artists while illuminating the shared experiences of each community site. To accomplish this mission the program strives to:

• Reconnect individuals to their own creativity as a resource for personal exploration, civic dialogue, cultural expression and problem-solving
• Provide a safe forum for participants to discuss and express social concerns
• Increase visibility for these concerns through the arts, especially empowering the voices of vulnerable communities.

TNJ-PSAP, supported by funding from the university, the Geraldine R Dodge Foundation and the Society for Arts in Healthcare in collaboration with Johnson and Johnson, is under the auspices of the Office of the Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities at Rutgers University. This office supports the development of relationships between the university and the broader community in three disparate regions of the state where Rutgers campuses are located: central, northern, and southern N.J. New Brunswick, Newark and Camden are among N.J.’s most poverty-stricken communities, often alienated from mainstream institutions and lacking in opportunities.

Training Artists to Partner with Communities: Core Ideas

CARTS, the program’s artist-training component, brings artists, community sites and Rutgers staff/students together to participate in and develop curricula and residencies. It draws on a guild model (developed in collaboration with the Institute for Arts and Humanities Education) where community artists are assigned experienced mentors who guide them through their residencies. The goal is to develop a statewide network of trained artists who plan and design residencies, as well as facilitate, assess, mentor and communicate across cultures effectively. This paper focuses on the artist-training component of the program, summarizing key structural components of the training as well as its core ideas about community and the arts.

As we discuss components of the artist training, we will draw on experiences from our partnership with four sites of the New Jersey Hyacinth AIDS Foundation’s/ Wellness Groups for community examples.

Artist Training Structure

Integral Role of the Artist: Central to our training model is a core of experienced community artists, working to create an ever-expanding circle of artists committed to, competent at and comfortable with the idea of collective expression that is informed by understanding grassroots forms of knowledge and cultural vocabularies often different from their own. In the literary spirit of “show, don’t tell,” the training provides hands-on experiences for artists to engage together in model community arts practices. They then reflect on the process and discuss techniques used and choices made by the facilitating mentor artists. These experiences and reflections help to inform the design and implementation of their own residencies.

A team-building activity at the CARTS artist training: creating body sculptures inspired by photographs of famous buildings and structures. Pictured: the Golden Gate Bridge, created by Ritu Pandya, Jerry Gant, Zach Green and Jaymie Stein. (Photo by Yilis del C. Suriel) Click here to enlarge

Mentorship Structure: Our TNJ-PSAP is based on a multilayered mentorship structure. Each two-artist team works with a mentor artist who helps develop the residency, and visits the program in action. As we bring new artists into the training program, they are paired with an experienced CARTS artist so that the residency doubles as a training lab. We are currently expanding the mentoring structure to include group mentoring and bringing artists together by discipline or medium (i.e., artists working on mural projects) and around types of communities (i.e., with chronic health problems or in urban afterschool programs).

Lesson Planning/Backward Planning for Residencies: Each training day, a different artist team facilitates a hands-on experience for its colleagues, constructed to profile central workshop components: ice-breakers, community-building activities, artwork that draws on community-based ideas and experiences, and collaborative activities that rely on group dynamics to help craft partnerships. Building the components of an artist residency challenges the artist to think carefully about his or her objectives for each phase of the residency whether they be:

• Partnering with the community site to plan the residency
• Providing personally meaningful artistic experiences for each individual participant
• Integrating community experiences and concerns as inspiration and source of ideas
• Inviting community participants to be part of the artists’ creative process and artwork
• Honoring the process and the conversations along the way as valuable products of community arts collaborations
• Empowering community cultural expression by cultivating a sense of agency.

Reflection and Assessment Strategies: Artists keep journals and write residency workshop reports. Other forums for feedback and reflection provide invaluable information for the program staff and artist advisory group. Some of these venues include: written evaluation after each artist training; artistic and cultural reflections such as visual maps, circles of reflection and photo documentation; and written and oral feedback from the community partners and residency participants. A post-residency meeting of the project staff and community sites coordinators completes the reflection and evaluation.

Getting to Know the Community: Before theory can be put into practice, the artists must get to know the community they will be working with, including the site director, project coordinator and residency participants. Artists visit the community partners and participate in an introductory orientation at the community site; they meet with the site director and project coordinator who must attend an all-day training with the artists, playing an active role in the early formation of a residency. Three questions guide our thinking in the training: Who are we? Where are we going? How will we prepare for the journey, in collaboration with our community partners? Some of the ideas we have found to be of central importance in the training include:

1. Building Community Partnerships
2. Entering a Community as an Outside
3. Creating a Sense of Community
4. Empowering Cross-Cultural Community Voices
   
   

Training Artists to Work in Community Settings: Core Ideas

Building Community Partnerships: There are several levels of partnerships that always include the artists: 1) the cluster of community organizations statewide that are in the program are brought together to participate in discussions, feedback and planning; 2) the full network of participating artists come together with mentoring artists; 3) art students participate as assistants to the artists (challenges with this part of the program are currently being reconfigured). On a practical level, the program builds time for artists to meet with community staff, to participate in a pre-residency gathering with the workshop participants and to plan for a culminating social and educational event. The community site must have an active role in designing the residency goals, provide an on-site coordinator and provide a realistic assessment of the residency.

Example from the field: For the first two years of the program, the New Brunswick Wellness Group of the Hyacinth AIDS Foundation was one of our community residency sites. Clients and staff began to understand the unique opportunity these arts workshops provided for clients to tell their stories, share their hopes and pain, and celebrate the healthy parts of themselves that had nothing to do with their illness. A dynamic site coordinator spread the word to other N.J. Hyacinth sites and together we applied for funding from Johnson & Johnson in conjunction with the Society for the Arts in Healthcare. In fall 2007 we worked with Hyacinth wellness groups in four New Jersey cities, strengthening our collaboration with the statewide Hyacinth organization and providing the opportunity for artists to better understand both shared concerns and unique characteristics of each Hyacinth site.

Entering a Community as an Outsider: We are looking to collect model practices in this area, and to document cross-cultural challenges. At a recent artist-training day we compiled a list of strategies artists have found effective when they enter a pre-existing community group.

• Learn about the community and its shared issues, beliefs and concerns before you go.
• Challenge your own suppositions about this community’s issues, even while knowing that your understandings will continue to change as you get to know the community.
• Attend an introductory get-together with staff and potential participants, providing a chance to
• meet participants as fellow human beings before you start in as a resident artist, and
• open up to them before you ask them to open up to you (share experiences and artwork).
• Include participants in the conversation about the structure and plans for the program.
• Speak in a language familiar to the group.

Example from the field: At the Hyacinth sites during the fall of 2007, we implemented a pilot process, a more in-depth preliminary relationship with community-site staff and participants before the hands-on residency began. These meetings of Rutgers CARTS project staff, site directors, site coordinators, community artists and potential participants were intended to help alleviate some of the recurrent problems we had faced at community sites where initial workshop time was lost as artists got up to speed in their understanding of community issues, clients grappled with developing a sense of trust of the outsider artists, and the various levels of site administrators gained a clear enough shared understanding of the project to provide necessary internal support. This process proved so beneficial, it has now been adopted for all of our community sites this spring.

A Sense of Community Among Participants: Participants in our community arts residencies are usually part of a pre-existing community, whether it be a cancer-survivors group, children in an urban afterschool program, a G.E.D. program at an adult learning center, or members of an HIV/AIDS wellness group. At each new site, the community artist is challenged to honor the on-going community while seeking to build a new sense of community among the residency participants. The opportunity to talk about their ideas, concerns, artwork and their creative process and to listen carefully to the ideas and discoveries of others is empowering and opens a means for expression and imagining.

Example from the field: Learning to develop a sense of community among workshop participants is an important focus of our artist-training sessions. Again, looking to the four Hyacinth sites, the impact of this objective is reflected in feedback from participants. Things they liked best about the workshop were “the bonding and sharing,” that “their art revealed so much of themselves” and “listening to other people’s experiences.” They learned that art is a good way to “express oneself and share ideas” and to “get in touch with others.” The workshop experiences gave them new insights into their community: “how to work together as a group,” that they “have much more in common than (our) HIV” and that “when we all work together we get to share our talents, learn new things and get a new sense of closeness.”

Empowering Cross-Cultural Community Voices: Each residency finds its own balance in the continuum from personal exploration to public civic engagement. By listening to the needs and hopes of individual participants as well as the expectations of the community site, the artist charts a unique integration for each residency.

Example from the field: Clients from Hyacinth Wellness Groups have told their stories through photography, video, spoken word and painted collaged murals. At the end of the residencies, participants from the four Hyacinth communities came together at Rutgers for a luncheon, exhibit and celebration. They exhibited photography including portraits of the participants, personal shrines and photos of outdoor sites that had personal, emotional meaning. A series of murals inspired by the ideas – life, living, healing and the Greek archetype Chiron, the wounded healer -- were also exhibited. Participants shared their poetry accompanied by drumming. One of the resident artists made a video of participants telling their stories, sharing the pain and wisdom they have gained through their battle with HIV and, for some, reflecting on their role as navigator in the wellness groups supporting others struggling with the virus.

Overview of Other Selected CARTS Community Arts Residencies

• Students from the Trenton After-School Program wrote poems about the sights and sounds of peace and created a mural with the thematic focus “Peace on the Streets.” The project was profiled on New Jersey Network’s State of the Arts TV show.
• Children from Boat People SOS in Pennsauken made rice mandalas and spoken-word poetry inspired by a theme of “Unity in Diversity.” The mandalas were such a good fit for the community aesthetic that parents, when they came to pick their children up, began to stay and work on the mandala project with them, extending the community to another generation.
• The Get SET mentorship program, an afterschool program at Westminster Church in Trenton, reclaimed an abandoned lot and made a large stone garden sculpture, inspired by the structures of cairns. Individual students make small stone sculptures and welcome banners to further enhance the space. The residency worked with a wide age-range of children — from academically at-risk elementary-school students to the high-school students who served as their mentors. The older students were integrated into the program by teaching them to document the process through digital photography and video documentation.
• Through the Robert Wood Johnson Hospital Community Health Promotion Program artists worked with cancer survivors and their children. They painted self-portraits where they were invited to portray inner characteristics as well as outward appearances, made collages of personally important physical locales, and created plaster gauze “warrior masks,” the face they wear when facing adversity. Equally important, it provided an opportunity for the recovering adults and their children to spend meaningful time together and for the children to share stories about school and family in a situation where they did not have to explain to others the strain they had just lived through.
• In the spring of 2008 we will be adding sites facing additional community challenges — a residence for women ages 18-21 who have aged out of foster care but are not really old enough to set out on their own; a residential program for HIV-positive or medically fragile youth; and a Bomba and Plena troop to help mentor against the lure of drugs and gangs among New Brunswick youth.

Obstacles and Solutions

We learned early-on how important it is to develop a good relationship with the community site, meeting with the site director and site coordinator, and clarifying roles and expectations, even before the resident artist is brought into the process. Entering into a partnership together, a truly reciprocal relationship goes beyond paperwork and an agreement to work together. The university project staff, the resident artists, site directors and coordinators have to listen carefully to one another; artists must suspend preconceived notions of the community, its needs, wishes and unheard voices; community staff members must come to understand what the arts can provide them, and how residencies can be part of the life of their community programs. Each community site coordinator is the communications link and attends (ideally, participates in) the residency workshops. Artists and site managers should share clear, consistent expectations about the product of the residency, whether it is an eight-foot mural or a lasting impact on clients from the process-oriented work they engage in together. The project’s staff at Rutgers plays an important role in brokering this relationship between artists and community, matching artists and sites to accommodate locales, schedules and arts-discipline preferences. As we enter our third year of CARTS and have gotten a better handle on the curriculum for the artist training and the core requirements for successful artist-community collaborations, we are ready to revisit an expanded role for students and faculty at the university.

The Role of the University

The service-learning and civic-engagement movement in higher education is increasingly challenging conventional academic culture and is the catalyst for raising awareness and standards of what it means to be an engaged university. As reflected in the analyses by Saltmarsh and Gelmon (Kecskes 30) there is also a “parallel movement” over the last decade to revitalize in higher education reflective modes of teaching and learning that addresses social challenges. These trends are providing opportunities for faculty and students to be more responsive to community needs. The guiding principles of service learning, such as critical reflection, mediated experiential learning and a commitment to the greater good, are concepts that lend themselves well to community arts development efforts at the university.

At Rutgers, faculty and administrators are currently involved in restructuring undergraduate education, including reframing the purpose and goals of service learning as a strategy of critical pedagogy. The university’s mission is composed of three tiers: research, teaching and service, with the third part of the mission being redefined along with the curriculum. Our students have opportunities to participate in service-learning courses, and a growing number of faculty have forged partnerships with a wide variety of community organizations, schools and agencies. The Transcultural New Jersey: Public Service Arts Program is one of several service programs at Rutgers exploring the most effective ways to establish and maintain meaningful working relations with the broader community. The program is situated in the Office of Academic and Public Partnerships, a relatively new office led by an associate vice president committed to developing programs that help connect the university in a meaningful way to the broader community.
            
What is unique about the program is that in our effort to fully involve community organizations in the design and implementation of the program and not just relegate them to placement sites, the university purposely structured the program off campus without direct involvement of faculty until its third year. This was made possible with strong support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Initially, the university partnered with the Institute for Arts and Humanities Education, a community organization not affiliated with our university that had a history of trustworthy relations with nonprofit organizations and state artists. The first year of the program, we had Rutgers B.F.A. students as interns who were matched with Rutgers graduates and artists new to community arts, all working together in a residency. Based on the feedback from the students and artists we decided the second year to temporarily drop the students from the program until we redesigned the residencies to include a more productive and meaningful role for the students. We found that the interns needed to be mentored and better oriented to enter the community. They needed clearer boundaries and expectations. Through feedback we learned that students’ roles had been reduced to “assisting grunts” who were giving out supplies and cleaning up. Participating students realized that it is hard to transition from a student to a person instructing and communicating with individuals whose life experiences are not familiar. In a series of in-depth discussions, we all recognized that reciprocity means being able to learn from others, including from those that have no formal education, and that a successful residency requires that we understand and respect these values.

We plan to reintroduce M.F.A. and B.F.A. interns into the program in the coming academic year and require them to participate in selected training and reflective-mediated-learning sessions. This year we hired more permanent staff allowing us to strengthen logistics and the overall framework of the program. Hence, both M.F.A. and B.F.A. interns will be provided ongoing mentoring and feedback mechanisms allowing for a better experience. A good vehicle for facilitating participation of undergraduate students is a one-credit practice requirement for all B.F.A. students at Mason Gross School of the Arts. Currently, this one-credit requirement is not focused on community service. In addition, we plan to include student interns from other disciplines, including the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, the School of Social Work and the Graduate School of Education.

In our third year, we are exploring the most effective internal partnerships to include faculty and students at Mason Gross School of the Arts, and the art departments at our additional regional campuses, Newark and Camden. At Rutgers, as is the case in many higher-learning institutions, the students are trained in studio art, with a focus on the “Fine Arts,” not in critical pedagogy that emphasizes the importance of relating what you learn to the social conditions in society and to social-justice issues. It’s been a challenge to solicit support for community-service efforts when the arts curriculum is conceptualized as a conservatory. However, throughout the university we find faculty committed to public scholarship and community service who are working across disciplines in selected departments, but all too often they are working alone. We’ve been identifying individual faculty that are doing innovative course work where students are working collaboratively with vulnerable and diverse populations. As part of our efforts to support their work, we’ve provided, through the Vice President’s Office, grants for research and community projects. This has enabled us to identify a pool of faculty that need our support and are committed to participating in the further development of our program. We are exploring the possibility of adding a course on community arts in the art school, so that students studying studio will be able to study theory, as well as participate in community-based service. Finally, over the years we have been working with Rutgers’ cultural centers, institutes, art galleries and the University museum. This year as part of our planning process we have invited these groups to formally partner with us and become involved in the planning and implementation of the residencies.

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 Stephanie Woodson, Arizona State University.

Isabel Nazario is an associate vice president at Rutgers University responsible for developing and supporting arts and humanities co-curricular projects, community-service learning and community-based arts programming, and public scholarship programs that lead to innovative partnerships between Rutgers and local, state, national and international organizations.

Linda Melamed is an artist and arts educator responsible for designing and facilitating artist/teacher professional-development workshops, proposal development and program assessment.

Works Cited/Bibliography

Kecskes, K. Engaging Departments: Moving Faculty Culture from Private to Public, Individual to Collective Focus for the Common Good. Boston: Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 2006.

Korza, P., B. Schaffer Bacon and A. Assaf. Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, 2005.

Oates, K.K. and L.H. Leavitt. Service-Learning and Learning Communities: Tools for Integration & Assessment. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2003.

Campus Compact. Introduction to Service-Learning Toolkit: Readings & Resources for Faculty. 2nd ed. Providence: Campus Compact, 2003.

OCSL Press. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning. 9.3 (2003)

Original CAN/API publication: July 2008