The New Hybridity: HOME, New Orleans and Emerging Forms of Community/ University/Arts Collaboration

HOME, New Orleans is a community-based, arts-focused network of organizations, universities and artists bringing communities together to create positive change in New Orleans, La. As a hybrid university/community/arts project with a shared leadership structure and resources from multiple sources, it represents an innovative model for integrating education, arts and community development. HOME, New Orleans includes four neighborhood-based projects supported by a collaborative service-learning course taught across Xavier, Dillard and Tulane Universities. This course, “Rebuilding Community through the Arts,” places enrolled university students in cross-institutional teams assigned to each of the HOME, New Orleans projects as a core course component. Although the history of this project replicates many of the debates concerning the proper relationship between art and community, its current structure attempts to balance artist’s priorities with those of the university and the community through pedagogically sound and evidence-based strategies for engaging community through the arts.

The original scenario for HOME, New Orleans, created by the well-known theater director and NYU professor Richard Schechner, called for a commemoration of individual houses devastated by Katrina’s aftermath, followed by a culminating procession or parade through the city to the Superdome. His idea focused on the role of art and performance to memorialize, cleanse and celebrate so that the city could move on. The concept was presented and discussed at a meeting in New Orleans in August of 2006 organized by the Vestiges Project. Schechner was there, along with a variety of local artists, including painter Willie Birch and theater artist John O’Neal. There were also representatives from out of town: Trinidadian artist Peter Minshall, Dudley Cocke of Roadside Theater, and Jan Cohen-Cruz, then a theater professor at NYU. Readers who know something about these participants will realize already that there were conflicting aesthetic ideologies in the room. A tradition of aesthetic autonomy and creative expression powered by the unique vision of a gifted individual artist was represented by Schechner and Minshall. The tradition of community-based art, driven by a reciprocal relationship between artists and community was represented by Cocke and Cohen-Cruz. By the end of this meeting it was clear that these two orientations were incompatible, and that, while the advocates of a more purely art-centered approach were not going to cede ground, neither were they going to commit the time and effort to make their vision a reality. The community-oriented artists, meanwhile, were not interested in expending their energy in the service of work that they did not feel would be responsive to community needs or provide long-term benefit to the people of New Orleans.

As HOME, New Orleans evolved, the legacy of this philosophical rift continued to plague the project. While some participants felt that presenting art in public on themes that resonated with “home” was fully adequate to the mission of the project, others sought a more active integration of art-making with community. It was this latter approach that gave rise to youth-development and education projects in the 7th Ward and 9th Ward, each of which attempted to make community members active participants in art making while also engaging artists in nonart community development activities. These projects are most closely aligned with what Arlene Goldbard calls Community Cultural Development, a movement spearheaded by artists using art to benefit often marginalized communities and populations. These artists — such as the dancer Liz Lerman, the muralist Judy Baca, and the many theater artists working in the tradition of Augusto Boal — seek, though art, to give voice and agency to those often silenced or “done to” in our society.

Related to this movement is the more research and policy-oriented work of groups like the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania and the Urban Institute’s studies of culture and community. These researchers seek to understand the actual impact of art and culture in communities, doing surveys, measuring indicators of community health and vitality, assessing the effectiveness of agencies and policies aimed at supporting arts activities. Their findings suggest that focusing resources on smaller cultural organizations and indigenous or vernacular genres within neighborhoods can be an effective mechanism for strengthening poor and disadvantaged communities (Stern and Seifert). If, according to this research, the arts community is serious about having a real impact on such communities, it should focus on these kinds of organizations and art forms. Further, it should focus not on art as a stand-alone sphere of human endeavor, but as integral to reaching the goals of other sectors — healthcare, family services, the environment, workforce development, etc. This was one of the recommendations of the Urban Institute in its policy brief on rebuilding the arts and culture in New Orleans (Rosenstein). This approach is likewise reflected in the mission of Transforma, an umbrella organization begun by Rick Lowe, Jessica Cusick and Sam Durant to assist projects in New Orleans that link the arts with civic regeneration. HOME, New Orleans was one of three projects adopted by Transforma (Cohen-Cruz). Finally, in concert with these findings and initiatives, HOME, New Orleans is evolving in direction where artists are neither passive enactors of community desires nor completely autonomous aesthetic actors but partners in a reciprocal relationship in which art making becomes a shared project.

This reciprocity, or what Goldbard has called hybridity, in the relationship between art and nonart components of community development (172), has become increasingly central to HOME, New Orleans. In addition, however, and unlike most of the projects described by Goldbard, HOME, New Orleans is deeply integrated with university-based coursework and relies heavily on student participation to further its projects. By taking college students out of the classroom and studio, the project has introduced them to models for art-making not ordinarily found in either fine arts or arts-related humanities curricula. In addition, the structure of the course itself — a collaborative cross-institutional effort in which students and faculty from three universities, one a predominately white, private, research university, the others HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), work together both inside and beyond the classroom — introduces them to modes of interracial collaboration still less common than they should be in New Orleans. The hope, and challenge, of HOME, New Orleans, will be to maintain a balance among its components and stakeholders that all find fair and productive, one that enables us to deepen and expand the interconnections of art, education and community.

Here is a description written collaboratively toward the end of HOME, New Orleans’ first year:

Achieving this paragraph took many months of often fractious work. In fact, we have yet to fully resolve how the disparate needs and priorities of this multifaceted partnership will work together.

Among the challenges we face is a lack of time to work through differences and to establish relationships with nonarts community organizations that would help us integrate the arts into the work of other sectors. If we take seriously the power of art making to impact community, it is important to start from a broader analysis of community needs and assets that can direct the power of creative expression toward addressing the insights of this analysis. Meanwhile, though, everyone competent in New Orleans is doing at least two jobs. None of us have the time for the kind of regular meetings that would enable us to develop a common language and understanding of the specific challenges and aspirations that characterize our own sphere of action. These are very different for, say, the director of a community center, the director of a small performance group, an independent visual artist, a professor at a small liberal-arts college, a professor at a research university, and so on. Further, even given the time, there are probably differences in goals and priorities that rest on deeper values and beliefs, for example, about the role of art in the world, the responsibilities of the artist, or the purposes of education in the arts. So, in practice we’ve cobbled together what seems to be a mutually beneficial alliance that participants feel meets enough of their goals to justify its continued existence.

The four neighborhood-based projects (in the New Orleans neighborhoods of Central City, Lakeview, the 7th Ward and the Lower 9th Ward) supported by the multi-institutional service-learning course form the heart of HOME, New Orleans. The project also has a fifth team, focused on documentation and led by a local independent documentary filmmaker. This team has as an additional goal of facilitating communication and cooperation among the neighborhoods. Finally, the administrative and fiscal center of the project resides in the National Performance Network, a national organization focused on the performing arts with headquarters in New Orleans. This structure attempts to balance artists’ priorities with those of the university and the community through integrating concrete community-based projects with the work of professional artists and university educators. Ideally, we create for our students pedagogically sound and practice-based strategies for engaging community through the arts, while also redefining the semester-long experience as one that is embedded in a larger collaborative partnership.

The actual content focus of each neighborhood project emerged from and is controlled by the leadership of that team. So far this has consisted mainly of artists with some connection to that neighborhood, though each group works as well with other local organizations and residents. In the 7th Ward, our first conversation, in the summer of 2006, took place with members of the Porch Cultural Organization, a group started by Willie Birch, Helen Regis, Ed Buckner, Ron Bechet, Dan Etheridge and a few others following the storm. We spoke with Ed Buckner, a community activist with particular interest in youth development, and Dan Etheridge, an environmentalist with interests in housing issues. Both expressed a desire to increase youth literacy, and wanted to draw on the community-theater talents of Jan Cohen-Cruz to create a youth theater program. While the original thought was that middle- and high-school students would participate, once recruiting began it turned out that much younger children showed up. With the help of Stephanie McKee, a dancer who later became the director of the 7th Ward community center run by Neighborhood Housing Services and replaced Jan Cohen-Cruz on the project’s steering committee, the program was redesigned for this younger population. They developed two public performances, one focused on “local heroes” and the other on the environment. The Heroes Project was designed to bring awareness of the contributions and positive accomplishments of New Orleanians of African descent to the 7th Ward community. Several have connections to the neighborhood. Ten people each year are highlighted to assist in displacing less positive contributions in the neighborhood. This idea is based on John Scott’s ideas in response to Black History Month. The medium is silkscreen prints on paper. The images were produced with simple text stating the names of the individuals and placed on the 300 light poles in the community. The theater piece was written and performed by the students and gave context to the images. The students produced the environmental performance after a visit to the Bayou Signet swamp with Dan Etheridge, who works with the Center for Bioenvironmental Research. In its second year, Ed Buckner and Stephanie McKee continue to lead HOME, New Orleans work in the 7th Ward, though Ron Bechet, through his relationship with the Porch, remains an active presence there.

Ron Bechet (co-author of this paper) is also integral to the work in the Lower 9th Ward. Along with ceramic artist Rashida Ferdinand, he is working with the Martin Luther King Charter School to establish an after-school ceramics program for elementary- and middle-school children that will integrate awareness of environmental issues into art making. This project has begun to develop a rich array of relationships that could underwrite its expansion in several directions. A group of Tulane students worked with a wetlands educator in the fall of 2007 developing curricula that infused wetlands education into the state standards for 7th and 8th grades. This group is in contact with Rashida and her group, and we are hoping that the information and ideas gathered in the fall will inform the structure and content of the after-school program. In addition, we (Bechet and Koritz) have been working with the president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research to explore the potential of expanding art making to address economic development and environmental remediation issues facing the community.

In Central City, a neighborhood plagued with youth violence and blighted housing, HOME, New Orleans has partnered with the Ashe Cultural Arts Center and the Economic Opportunity Center’s program for senior citizens in a project led by Dillard professor John Barnes and artist Jeffery Cook. Its focus was suggested in 2007 by Carol Bebelle, the director of Ashe, who was interested in recovering and celebrating the heritage and legacies of the elders of this community in ways that might strengthen connections between the generations. Using a combination of story circles with college students and senor citizens and found-object art making, this group seeks to create a multimedia “quilt” to commemorate the lives and experiences of people through the material objects that make up their worlds. This project has struggled with the relative inexperience of the leadership in creating this kind of art project, as well as with their inability to devote sufficient time to relationship-building in the community. Nevertheless, in its second year, it is seeing a higher level of organization and focus.

In Lakeview, a predominately white and fairly affluent neighborhood that was severely flooded by the breaches in the 17th Street Canal on its border, the HOME, New Orleans team consists of highly skilled professional artists, including Jan Gilbert of the Vestiges Project and Kathy Randels of ArtSpot Productions, with the ability to organize and execute large projects. In the project’s first year, this group put together a bus tour with stops at various community sites. Performances and visual art displays took place in gutted houses, a church and a cemetery. The tour closed with a performance and meal at the former site of a popular restaurant. It was well attended and received substantial press coverage. This year the group is focusing on race relations in the community, particularly as these are manifest by the history of black domestic labor in the white households of this community. While by some commonly accepted criteria this was the most successful project in HOME, New Orleans’ first year, for a few of us it raised questions about use of resources, long-term impact, and the relationship between professional artists and community members. Because of the history of racism and segregation in New Orleans, we felt it particularly important to include a predominantly white neighborhood among the HOME, New Orleans sites. This, we felt, might enable us to use art making as a tool for healing some of these historic wounds in the city and for making connections between neighborhoods. At the same time, since it already had many residents with significant assets at their disposal, devoting disproportionate resources to a large and complex event in this neighborhood was perhaps not the best use of the small amount of funding we had available.

Finally, perhaps the most problematic component of the project’s first year was one we called the “Bridging group.” This group was assigned the (in retrospect) impossible task of managing documentation, establishing connections among neighborhoods, pursuing grant opportunities and working on project publicity. To make matters worse, the original documenter was not selected via any process that matched this person’s approach with those of other steering committee members — he was the spouse of one of the project’s founding participants. In fact, the failures of this group reflected the weaknesses of the project as a whole in its first year. We were trying to put together something very quickly, with inadequate time or money, and without resolving philosophical differences that were present at the inception of the project. As a result, we made all the mistakes those who are experienced in collaborative projects warn against. Expectations were not clear. What we placed in writing was a start, but not adequate. We did not have a good conflict-resolution process in place. And so on. We have, however, learned from our mistakes. Our new documenter has significant experience in community-based work and a commitment to facilitating the agency of those being documented in their own representation. She has established a process that uses participatory media tools such as blogs to create an electronic commons for the project. She has also been proactive in trying to get the steering committee to address intellectual property questions. The negative aspects of the first year’s work revolved in part around this issue.

Unlike many of the best-known efforts of community-focused artists like Suzanne Lacy and Liz Lerman, who are often commissioned to work on time-limited projects with specific communities, HOME, New Orleans has made sustainability and continuity its ideals. Our hope is to work more deeply with our existing partners, perhaps continuing the program now in place, perhaps initiating new projects. We hope to increase interaction and communication among neighborhood-based projects, and if resources allow, bring in new neighborhoods. We also hope to increase interaction among the universities. While Xavier already has a program in community arts, neither Dillard nor Tulane does. There is interest, at least at Tulane, in developing one, and were this to occur, the possibility of expanding the scope and depth of HOME, New Orleans would become more realistic. This is so not because universities are necessary to community-based art, but because they bring a range of resources to the table that provide some stability in the face of the uncertainty of soft-money funding that such programs often rely on. ForHOME, New Orleans, the existence of a supporting class has provided continuity to the project that does not rely on constant access to cash resources.

The goals of HOME, New Orleans are both principled and strategic, geared not only toward strengthening community assets and students’ education, but also toward creating recognizable products and pathways for artists, communities and universities that demonstrate the importance of the arts to vibrant and healthy neighborhoods. Among the university participants, these goals include establishing ways of teaching, creating and writing about the arts that serve public life. The importance of arts and culture to community rebuilding is often dismissed or relegated to the realm of economics (via tourism), and this was painfully evident following the city’s devastation in 2005. In part, the arts are easily dismissed because we have educated artists and their audiences to consider this realm of human endeavor isolated from ordinary life. In contrast, the deep integration of coursework and community engagement provided by the HOME, New Orleans model enabled a practical and intellectual orientation toward the arts that challenged this separation. This course, “Building Community through the Arts,” places enrolled university students in cross-institutional teams assigned to each of the HOME, New Orleans projects as a core course component.

This class was designed and taught in the first year by four professors: Jan Cohen Cruz, then a theater professor at New York University and now the director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life; John Barnes, a sculptor and chair of the Art Department at Dillard University’ Ron Bechet, a painter and art professor at Xavier University; and Amy Koritz, an English professor at Tulane. Working across multiple universities and disciplines while simultaneously setting up and supporting community projects was challenging. That semester we moved the entire class three times, so that each local university could serve as host, and each faculty member coordinated a team of students working with a community partner. It was as if we had each doubled our teaching load. While from the point of view of the nonuniversity participants it felt as though we were spending an inordinate amount of time on the class component of the project, those of us teaching the class felt like we were winging it every week because we lacked time to plan properly. This year we addressed the class-location issue with the students, and they agreed that we should hold the entire class at Xavier, as both the most centrally located campus and the venue with the most available parking.

The syllabus is structured to address issues we anticipate students will face in their community work. We screen “Stranger with a Camera” as a cautionary tale about entering unfamiliar communities. We read case studies of community arts projects gathered in “Art/Vision/Voice.” We spend time learning about New Orleans cultural practices and traditions. In each of our weekly class meetings we also set aside time for the project teams to meet with each other to discuss issues that may have arisen and plan upcoming tasks. Integrating this planning time into the class is crucial for two reasons. First, because we have students from multiple universities on each team, they may find it impossible to coordinate out-of-class time for planning. Second, this strategy allows the faculty to stay on top of the progress of each group, clear up any misunderstandings, and troubleshoot problems. When a group is not making progress, these meetings can seem pointless and repetitive, but they can also shift part of the supervisory burden off of the community partners and give us the opportunity to coach students who are having trouble figuring out how to strike the right balance between taking responsibility for the success of their projects and respecting community priorities.

In the first year of the project we expected too much from both the course and community partners. Students complained frequently that everything seemed disorganized — the class, the projects — the whole deal. In an anonymous course evaluation, one student wrote that “the unexpected part of the class was the lack of organization.” This observation was repeated in many variations by most students completing these evaluations. They also, however, consistently expressed respect for what we were trying to do and felt they had benefited from the class. The same student quoted above noted, “I think the course was theoretically a good idea, but in practice it was less organized and communication with teachers was sometimes difficult. That being said, the class was a great experience.” Another student wrote that the class “has good, noble intentions, which is respectable.” This student also commented, “My understanding of community definitely has changed. I realized how proud people are of their communities and how two neighboring communities can seem like different countries. Integration is also harder than it seems.” This kind of insight into how communities see themselves and others was found in other student comments as well. Based on these responses, we believe that the course is effectively achieving some of the goals of HOME, New Orleans. Even if we did not succeed in building bridges between communities, we did make important connections for our students between themselves and the communities of New Orleans.

It is important, though, that students raised issues that we did not expect about their relationships with each other. We discovered that the Tulane students felt that they were being stereotyped by the Xavier students as “rich, spoiled white kids.” Meanwhile, they expressed the opinion that the Xavier and Dillard students were held to lower standards and didn’t work as hard as they did. Issues of race and class were raised and discussed in ways that may not have been possible without the experiences of the course. One student noted that she felt very uncomfortable in her placement as an African-American woman, and learned how important it was to continue to help others see how narrowly they see African Americans. We have attempted to address this issue by adding material on intercultural communication to the class syllabus and being self-conscious about including the project teams, not just the community partners, in conversations about how we work with those different than ourselves. As one student wrote, “…as far as our goal is to build community we need to focus on building more community in the classroom.” We hope to have addressed this concern for our current group of students.

Although HOME, New Orleans has made progress from the days of its inception, it remains in some ways still a conflicted and fragile undertaking. The size and complexity of its scope, in combination with the speed of its implementation at the outset, magnified the fragmentation of the many communities that must be coordinated for its success. Effective and consistent communication does not always occur. Expectations and outcomes are not always well defined. We are still struggling with the legacy of the philosophical split that characterized the project’s birth. Some of the neighborhood projects and their leadership groups are more stable than others. Nevertheless we are more than hopeful about the future. Speaking only from the point of view of two university-based participants in this project, we see the following as the crucial steps to be taken to ensure the project’s continued vitality:

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.

Amy Koritz is professor of English at Tulane University and associate director for Culture and Community at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research. She is the author of the forthcoming “Culture Makers: Urban Performance and Literature in the 1920s” and co-editor of “Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina.”

Ron Bechet is a painter and professor of art at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Goldbard, Arlene. New Creative Community: The Art of Community Development. Oakland, CA: New Village P, 2006.

Rosenstein, Carole. “New Orleans Arts and Culture.” After Katrina: Shared Challenges for Rebuilding Communities. Ed. Carol J. De Vita. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2007 13-16.

Stern, Mark J. and Susan C. Seifert. “Re-presenting the City: Arts, Culture, and Diversity in Philadelphia” The Politics of Culture: Policy Perspectives for Individuals, Institutions, and Communities. Eds. GiGi Bradford et al. New York: New Press and Washington, D.C.: Center for Arts and Culture, 2000. 286-300.

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The New Hybridity: HOME, New Orleans and Emerging Forms of Community/ University/Arts Collaboration

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