The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?

Zoom! Another message swoops across my desktop. A whole flock of bright ideas for public-service employment of artists is careening through the Zeitgeist, attracted by that irresistible combination of ingredients: high unemployment, a boundless supply of artistic and social imagination and the intoxicating prospect of a progressive government in Washington. Whenever this idea takes flight — in the Depression-era New Deal of the 1930s, in mid-1970s responses to urban unrest, and today — it draws our collective imagination aloft.

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

The appeal of public-service employment for artists isn’t hard to understand. In our market economy, many more people would like their creativity and livelihood to be conjoined than there are paying jobs for artists; when the public sector steps in, that can change. The forms of public service at which artists excel are almost universally appreciated; it’s just that in a market-driven (and now deeply troubled) economy, finding the money to pay for them is nearly impossible.

Artists dedicated to public service can

• teach
• co-create plays and murals with people young and old
• run community darkrooms and workshops
• beautify the built environment
• carve out space for people to dream, invent and communicate about things that matter to themselves and their communities
• assist communities in creating archives of digital stories
• create public art that commemorates generative moments in the history of a community
• devise choral works and pageants, installations and exhibitions, dances and poetry journals that express and embody community identity and aspiration
• create workplace programs that engage workers in participatory management
• facilitate processes that help people dream their way into new approaches to community and economic development….

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

And that’s just the beginning. With public-sector support, all of the things that preserve, explore, connect and extend community cultural life become possible.

When public-service employment opportunities for artists have arisen in the past, interest and demand have far outstripped supply, as I wrote in 1993 in ”Postscript to The Past,” a piece on community arts history for High Performance magazine, CAN’s precursor. (Web links for this and many other references throughout this article appear at the end.)When the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) first emerged,

San Francisco was a pioneer in using CETA to aid cultural development. When the first 75 CETA arts jobs were created in 1973 (the brainstorm of an inventive NAP [Neighborhood Arts Program] staffer who happened to have interned in Washington), 3,000 unemployed artists showed up to apply for them. After that, the phenomenon of CETA arts spread across the country like wildfire. Department of Labor officials estimated that over $200 million had been allocated to the arts through CETA in fiscal year 1979 alone.

These two prior national experiments were quite distinct. As we consider what might be done today, it is worth exploring them for useful lessons (those that seem clearest to me appear at the end of this article). On my Web site, I’ve posted excerpts from my book “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development” that offer brief summaries. Here are some other highlights on a short tour:

The 1930s

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal encompassed an alphabet soup of programs to aid various sectors of the economy and repair infrastructure as a way to recover from the Great Depression. At first, the driving force was unemployment. By 1932, it was estimated that over 10 percent of the total U.S. population was out of work (and official unemployment statistics generally underestimate the real situation). Artists of various types were hit hard both by general economic decline and by technological changes in the structure of arts-related industries. For instance, the Depression coincided with the rise of the movies and decline of live theater: The Loew's chain had three dozen theaters offering live entertainment up to 1930; by 1934, only three remained in operation.

A whole series of programs were put in place to employ artists in the 1930s, but the best known and longest-lived were grouped under the heading “WPA” for Works Progress Administration, a huge employment relief program started in 1935 at the beginning of FDR's "Second New Deal.” Collectively these arts projects made up Federal Project Number One. Generally known as "Federal One," the project comprised five divisions: the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers Project and the Historical Records Survey, together employing more than 40,000 artists by the end of its first year (and remember, this was when the total population was about a third of today’s).

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

What most stands out for me about these New Deal programs is the way they were started with one purpose in mind — to address epidemic unemployment — and then acquired some far-reaching, original and impressive cultural development aims as they went along. For an overview, I recommend checking out Webster’s World of Cultural Democracy, Don Adams’ text-only archive for cultural development resources. The National Archive has a nice collection of online resources; and there’s a good page of links to source materials at the New Deal Cultures site.

The 1970s

The next time public-service arts employment surfaced, in the 1970s, it mostly happened under the label “CETA,” the name of a single piece of legislation that in general usage came to apply to a whole group of public-service employment programs created by the Nixon and Ford administrations to address high unemployment and urban unrest. (Yes, Virginia, once upon a time there were Republicans who believed in spending public funds for social programs.) Some of the earliest initiatives of the period focused on summer jobs for youth, conceived as giving young people something to do during the long break from school besides tear up their neighborhoods in protest. Later programs made funds available to local governments and nonprofit organizations.

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

For a few years (until Reagan abolished them as soon as he was elected), these programs were a mainstay of the community arts field; almost everyone in my generation who was active in those days either had a CETA job or was close with someone who did. CETA never morphed into a formal program dedicated to the arts, such as Federal One. But resourceful artists demonstrated to those in charge of the funds that their community work was popular and effective, with the result that CETA arts programs existed in every part of the country. (I can’t link you to Web sites about CETA: it was a fairly short-lived initiative that would have been better documented if it had taken place a couple of decades later in the digital age. But if you want to talk about it, feel free to get in touch, as I do have some files and a fair amount of remaining memory.)

Both here and abroad, the fortunes of such programs wax and wane with political winds. In the pre-Margaret Thatcher era, Britain had its own CETA counterpart in MSC (Manpower Services Commission) job creation programs that employed many community artists. Recently, I learned from someone who visited there that the publicly funded Korea Culture and Arts Education Service (KACES) has trained and placed 3,000 teaching artists in schools, senior centers, prisons and other social institutions. If you go to the UNESCO portal education and art or the one on culture and development, you’ll find resources of the more conventional kind, but also many projects describing ways that artists work in public-service institutions and communities today. These ideas are always circling high above the clouds; it’s only once in a blue moon they fly down to earth, and now is one of those times.

Current Initiatives

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

In the last couple of weeks, at least three separate initiatives to employ artists in public service jobs have crossed my desk. There will surely be more by the time this article is published. Each is an elaboration of a single line in Obama’s arts policy: “Create an Artist Corps: Barack Obama and Joe Biden support the creation of an ‘Artists Corps’ of young artists trained to work in low-income schools and their communities.” Each proposal has strong points and arguable ones, but full disclosure: I support them all. Now is not the time to split hairs. As my favorite of Voltaire’s aphorisms says, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Right now, showing as much support as possible for any type of artists’ public-service employment increases the likelihood that it will become a reality in some form.

Here are the three main initiatives of which I’m aware:

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  The National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools (N-CHAWS) is the brainchild of two veterans of the 1970s pioneering CETA arts projects of the San Francisco Bay Area: John Kreidler (who created the first CETA arts proposal under the auspices of the San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program and helped conceive the Campaign) and Michael Nolan (who had one of the jobs, working for the Pickle Family Circus, and is spearheading the Campaign). They (and many of their proposal’s initial endorsers, including myself) have on-the-ground experience with this type of program, fueling their enthusiasm. The Campaign is positioned as a response to the need for economic stimulus by investing in artists and cultural development: “As the President-Elect seeks a potent formula to give the economy a serious jolt in the current recession, artists of all stripes represent a cost-effective investment to bring their performing, visual, and technical talents to a variety of school, neighborhood, housing, health, corrections and community development settings.” Their brief concept paper describes public-service employment for artists as a way to improve education, create green jobs and invest in communities. Thus far, specific program details haven’t been proposed, but N-CHAWS is conceived as a national initiative: “A public service employment program for artists can reach into the major urban centers and rural areas in all 50 states, promote local cultural activities and craft industries, invigorate educational reform, and pass the wisdom and talents of an older generation of artists to a new one, eager to learn and participate in the economic revival of their home communities. The CETA Arts Program demonstrated success in transitioning many of these artists into full-time private-sector employment in the theater, fashion, graphic design, film, animation and entertainment industries. N-CHAWS launched very recently and is rapidly acquiring a Facebook following and a presence with the Obama team. Go Change.org to help N-CHAWS get the 500-plus votes it needs to raise it into transition-team visibility.
  
  

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  The National Green Arts Corps (NGAC) was conceived by community muralist Michael Schwartz and community-based performing artist Jodi Netzer, who live in Tucson. This proposal, too, endorses a concept without focusing a great deal on implementation detail: “The major goal of the NGAC will be to create a program that employs artists to work with community centers, businesses, and Green Job Training Centers’ projects. In this way, artists can contribute, along with other sectors of the society, to developing long-range solutions to our nation’s aesthetic, environmental and economic development.” Its main point is that as the new administration puts “America back to work, rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, artists have a great deal to contribute to the design, building and animation of community projects. For example, artists can help to design and animate elements of community infrastructure such as parks, plazas and public buildings; offer classes and workshops; collaboratively create works of public art; and assist in the development of green businesses where the products to be marketed are those of their own creativity.” It calls for a block-grant process that would “enable communities to adapt the program to local needs and resources. In each community, the methods employed to develop these projects would be participatory and transparent, providing employment for numerous artists. Each community could create opportunities for funding and training individual artists, members of small ensembles and organizations, as well as working through larger public and private cultural agencies. As artists partner with Green Job Training Centers, each participating community would create an industry that is unique to its bioregion, employing local potters, painters, dancers, musicians and others who are part of the creative economy.” This approach aims to start with a local pilot project in Tucson to demonstrate what is possible; a “central Community Green Arts Lab will be established to operate as a hiring agency, resource and administrative center. The programs and classes will take place at satellite sites including Job Training Centers, Community Colleges, public and private schools, Community Centers, and places of work and industry.”
  
  

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  The Music National Service Initiative has gotten the most publicity so far, with a feature on NPR and lots of other press for a “MusicianCorps” (a trademarked label) they’re characterizing as a “musical Peace Corps.” The San Francisco-based project has obtained half a million dollars from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a pilot program in August 2009: “The Initiative will recruit six performing musicians, train them at a two-week workshop, and place them for ten months as instructors working alongside regular teachers in at least five public schools in disadvantaged communities in Alameda County and San Francisco.” Kiff Gallagher, a musician with a lot of entrepreneurial and political experience, is at the helm, and he has proposed extending the program to national scale using the AmeriCorps model whereby volunteers receive a modest stipend, health coverage and education funds in exchange for serving a year in a school or community organization. According to the Web site, “MusicianCorps’ main program components include a summer training institute for MusicianCorps Fellows; a 10-month, direct service experience; ongoing site-based training and development; evaluation, and a year-end National Summit. During 1-2 years of service, Fellows receive a living stipend and modest benefits. Youth who work with MusicianCorps Fellows will demonstrate measurable progress as students, leaders and artists.”
  
  

Rumors Abound

It’s impossible to say whether — let alone precisely how or when — such ideas will be considered by the Obama administration, but rumors abound. Some say that proposals are being vetted by Obama’s arts and humanities transition team, headed by former Clinton NEA Chair Bill Ivey; Anne Luzzatto, also a former Clinton appointee who seems to have little experience with the field; and Clement Price, an academic historian. In a joint arts policy proposal endorsed by 21 mostly mainstream national organizations (from Opera America to the American Association of Museums), a leading recommendation was to “name a senior-level administration official in the Executive Office to coordinate arts and cultural policy, guiding initiatives from federal agencies responsible for tourism, education, economic development, cultural exchange, intellectual property policy, broadband access, and other arts-related areas.” Perhaps that’s why the one rumor that seems to have legs is that Obama will appoint a sort of “arts czar,” to oversee and coordinate all the cultural agencies, and that Bill Ivey is in line for the appointment (shades of Dick Cheney, who was asked by Bush to vet vice presidential candidates and nominated himself).

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

Others are sure all the relevant action will be in Congress, which will ultimately shape and approve the block-grant–driven public works and job programs everyone expects from Obama. One scenario is that artists and arts organizations will have the opportunity to apply for grants and lobby for inclusion in these general-purpose programs, some of which are likely to be expansions of existing initiatives (such as Community Development Block Grants) and some of which may be new. This always involves stretching: How to convince bureaucrats who have little or no community arts experience that funding artists’ jobs is as important as any other form of work? It would be wise to consult some of the people who were successful in making this stretch during the CETA period. Americans for the Arts staffers are saying they will have information on where and how to apply for grants that become available, so check their Web site.

What is known for certain is that, as with his foreign policy team, Obama has drawn his arts and humanities advisors primarily from the usual suspects — people who’ve served previous administrations — and those people are conferring with the usual suspects — primarily heads of the largest public and private agencies and nonprofits, who naturally are focusing on what their own organizations and constituencies want. The argument for this is that such people “know how to get things done in this town (i.e., Washington, D.C.).” The argument against it is that deep allegiance to and integration with the system as it has existed means the things such people know how to get done aren’t likely to be earth-shakingly new, progressive or effective. I’d like to be able to say that someone who has deep experience with and commitment to community arts values has the candidate’s (or his closest advisors’) ear, but although there were a couple of people like that who took part in writing Obama’s arts platform, there is no evidence this is the case.

WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

That seems to be why, even as they try to work the Obama team and potential allies in Congress, the advocates of these new public-service employment initiatives for artists are focusing heavily on generating public support. If you aren’t at the table, at least you can make a lot of noise and get the attention of those who are.

Now is the time for intelligent optimism, so in the hope that those able to influence Obama’s policy toward public-service employment for artists want to do the right thing, I’d like to offer a few observations and a little advice.

Four Key Lessons from the Past

What can we learn from prior public-service arts employment that will be useful today? I see four key lessons:

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  Programs succeed when broad public needs and goals converge with artists’ abilities and creative public servants are given permission and support to bring them together. That’s good news for our current prospects, because as in the New Deal and the 1970s, the U.S. today needs more jobs, more public spending to stimulate the economy and a good deal of help strengthening the physical and cultural infrastructures supporting our communities; and artists need socially useful jobs that deploy their greatest strengths. The best WPA programs empowered visionary leaders, like Hallie Flanagan of the Federal Theatre Project, to experiment, giving birth to new ideas, and allowing them to incubate and hatch over time. Today there is much talk of green jobs, but often they are defined too narrowly as industrial-sector jobs that stress recycling and reuse, safe materials and manufacturing processes, or high-tech jobs in the relatively clean information economy. But social imagination needs to stretch further. As the economy changes, we need to value new types of work: It should be a public priority to provide creative interaction and support for elders restricted to residential facilities; to promote storytelling in many forms as a component of healing for those suffering from serious illness; to assist new immigrants to understand their own heritages in the context of a new country and make their way in the common culture; to assist long-time residents in welcoming and connecting with newcomers, expanding their ideas of home to include far more diversity than in the past; to make arts education an integral part of all education; and to carry out the countless other important jobs that can transform 21st-century life from merely bearable to well worth living.
  
  

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  The best programs respond to local needs and resources, rather than using a one-size-fits-all template. There are rich cultural resources and dedicated artists in every part of this country, but the way a community center in the Bronx could make best use of resources might be very different from a quilt co-op in Appalachia or a local tribal association in Arizona. Where local groups were allowed to devise their own CETA arts programs, some remarkable work flourished; where large bureaucracies treated the projects like just another category of civil service, their impact was negligible. This suggests that a participatory planning approach will be key, where local artists and other members of the community having a say in what’s needed, rather than imposing a preset program from the top down. Federal block-grant programs tend to be baroque in their application requirements, an air of arcane mystery surrounding the decision-making process. Here, there needs to be real accessibility and real transparency in how funds are allocated and controlled, as a precondition of accountability to local communities.
  
  

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  The full range of artists and cultural development practitioners have essential roles to play in public service. In the establishment arts world, the discourse around public-service employment tends to be framed in terms of national service, of providing opportunities for people who can afford to live temporarily on small stipends — young people and retirees being the obvious categories. In the joint arts policy proposal I referenced earlier, the notion of employing artists in public service is put forward in just such terms: “The Corporation for National and Community Service oversees three large programs: AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve America, and SeniorCorps. Arts organizations and art-related projects have a proven record of filling unmet community needs through AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve America, and SeniorCorps. … it is recommended that CNS give specific reference to community arts projects and not-for-profit cultural organizations in the list of eligible national service programs as detailed in the National and Community Service Trust Act.” Several other adjustments are also recommended to increase inclusion of artists and arts programs. It’s great to offer community arts training to newbies and to support what is essentially volunteer activity, but as in every sector, experienced practitioners who already have the skills and training are also needed, people who require livable salaries, a continuity of employment and decent working conditions to invest in local cultural development in the substantial way the Obama administration finally has the chance to actualize.
  
  

• WPA Poster courtesy the Library of Congress Click here to enlarge

  For necessary longevity, programs must be conceived with awareness of their pitfalls and ways to avoid them. The need for public-service employment for artists never goes away, but in every prior case, the programs have disappeared when they have become controversial. During the New Deal, opposition grew when murals depicted controversial subjects and works of theater touched on ideas that frightened the powers-that-be. WPA head Harry Hopkins made this statement in 1935: “I am asked whether a theater subsidized by the government can be kept free of censorship, and I say, yes, it is going to be kept free from censorship. What we want is a free, adult, uncensored theater.” But within six months, a Living Newspaper theatrical production that featured Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie led to a White House ban on depictions of foreign rulers. In 1938, the House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (HUAC) launched an investigation, charging that Federal One was a “hotbed of communists.” In the end, World War II geared up, creating an excuse to end the programs, but they’d already been decimated by censors and witch-hunters.
  
  

During the heyday of CETA, murals, plays and publications also excited controversy, but the ultimate and successful opponent was right-wing opposition to the whole concept of public service through the arts, which was ridiculed as using taxpayer funds to give people jobs playing with paints. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the extreme-right Heritage Foundation emerged as a stalking horse for his policies. This was before downloadable documents became commonplace: Don Adams and I were permitted to peruse a copy of Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership” policy compendium and take notes by hand. In the January, 1981 issue of NAPNOC notes, we reported Heritage’s view that “[U]nder its current leadership, the NEA is more concerned with politically calculated goals of social policy than with the arts it was created to support. … The arts are asked to be everything for everybody, at one and the same time to remedy the perceived ills of society, employ all who want to be artists, and fill up the leisure hours of an entire population.” As for CETA, Heritage called for “a firing of all top-level personnel.”

Over the 28 years since, we’ve seen what happens when public cultural agencies cower in fear of such criticism: a hidebound and conservative NEA, the concept of public-service employment so discredited that even liberals dared not speak its name until very recently. So let’s stipulate it out front: any community cultural program that succeeds in involving people in a meaningful way is likely to generate controversial material. The Obama administration needs to speak out forthrightly for freedom of expression, preparing to stand firm when the next round of censors tries to do away with the next public-service employment initiative, or in two or three decades, someone like me will gaze at a new flock of bright ideas for artists’ public-service employment soaring across her desktop and sit down to write about three historical examples of what could have been.

To obviate that prospect, I urge us all to stand for publicly supported, socially useful work for artists in schools, communities and social institutions, doing everything we can to ensure that a program is approved and funded, and that it incorporates to the fullest extent the lessons learned from past initiatives. Just imagining a new idea hatching and spreading its wings fills me with excitement. I just wish the Obama team had stretched beyond the usual suspects to ask advice on cultural development from those who understand the subject from the ground up.

Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker and consultant on culture, politics and spirituality, based in Kansas City, Mo. She is a long-time veteran of the community cultural development field who began writing about cultural policy (including public service employment for artists) more than 30 years ago. She worked at the San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program in 1973, when the first CETA arts jobs were created. Her most recent book is “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development” (New Village Press, November 2006). Subscribe to her blog and download her writings at her Web site.

Web Links
”Postscript to The Past,” a 1993 piece on community arts history for High Performance magazine, CAN’s precursor.

Excerpts from my book “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development” that offer brief summaries of the WPA and CETA arts.

The New Deal section of Webster’s World of Cultural Democracy, Don Adams’ text-only archive for cultural development resources.

The National Archive collection of online WPA resources

Links to WPA source materials at the New Deal Cultures site.

Korea Culture and Arts Education Service (KACES), which has trained and placed 3,000 teaching artists in schools, senior centers, prisons and other social institutions.

UNESCO’s portal on education and art

UNESCO’s portal on culture and development

The National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools (N-CHAWS)

N-CHAWS Facebook page

Go to Change.org to help N-CHAWS get the 500-plus votes it needs to raise the proposal into transition-team visibility.

The National Green Arts Corps (NGAC)

The Music National Service Initiative

AmeriCorps

Obama’s arts and humanities transition team

Joint arts policy proposal endorsed by 21 mostly mainstream national organizations

Americans for the Arts’ legislative updates.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2008