The New New Deal, Part 2 - A New WPA for Artists: How and Why

When CAN published my essay “The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?” in mid-December, the idea of a “New WPA for Artists” had begun to take flight for the first time in a generation. The prospect of public service jobs for artists has continued to generate unprecedented interest and energy, as well as a flood of questions about how and why a new WPA might come into being. Aside from reporting on recent developments, this second essay focuses on two new additional aspects of the topic: what a new WPA might look like, and a summary of strong public policy arguments for its creation.

I hope that in the Obama administration we will finally be able to write the democratic national cultural policy that has been needed for decades: not just jobs and community development, but how to embody the values of creativity, pluralism, participation and equity that animate a culture of democracy. When that happens, we will have a national conversation about what advocates of cultural democracy cherish most: social inclusion for immigrants, low-income people and others excluded from a full measure of social goods; diversity as a positive asset; social institutions (such as schools, social welfare agencies and public cultural agencies) that are truly responsive to humane concerns; protected public space for cultural expression. A full-scale cultural policy will consider how to support cultural preservation for communities and training for artists, how to assert the public interest in public broadcasting, how to support arts in education, how to stimulate creativity and knowledge exchange in the burgeoning online universe and much, much more.

But first things first. Right now, one issue tops the list: most of the recent outpouring of energy has attached to the economic stimulus package Congress is due to pass soon. People are hoping that opportunities for artists and arts organizations working in the community interest will be woven through the community-development block grants and public service jobs they anticipate. Here are some examples:

The only explicit mention of art in the 250-plus page American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan bill released on January 15 is $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts “in direct grants to fund arts projects and activities which preserve jobs in the non-profit arts sector threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn.” Much of this is to be regranted to state arts agencies. Bill Cleveland of the Center for the Study of Art and Community did a quick compilation the day the bill came out (it’s posted in the CAN blog), listing several sections where artists and organizations may be able to secure resources. In addition to the NEA’s $50 million, relevant provisions total approximately $5 billion, mostly for employment and training, but also in community-development block grants and national service programs. "There are actually a lot of potential opportunities in this bill for arts folks,” Bill wrote me. “The key will be to get the arts sector up to speed about how to take full advantage of what eventually manifests. This bill is going to morph like crazy." On the other hand, even if the entire $5 billion were spent on cultural development (an impossibility), it would amount to less than one percent of the $550 billion the bill allocates.

The bill’s primary modality is adding funds to existing programs, not creating new ones. All of its new elements are administrative and oversight provisions. That means that the question of whether artists and organizations will benefit from this new spending will be left up to officials and administrators at regional, state and local levels. Judging from past experience, they will administer these programs according to rules and procedures grounded in legislative language: Without the magic words, it is nearly impossible to persuade bureaucrats to innovate at the local level within a federal program. So, culture needs to be mentioned as an aspect of stimulus and development to give administrators some way to connect the dots when local artists and community organizations come knocking.

If members of the House of Representatives hear enough from community artists and their allies, it could create real opportunities. But it’s important to remember that this legislation, introduced even before the inauguration, will not be President Obama’s sole opportunity to focus on culture and community development. We need to find and use every opportunity, opening any relevant legislation to the contributions of artists and their community partners. It’s also time to use the prodigious social and cultural imagination we’ve developed over decades of propositional thinking, and dream big, recognizing that more is possible than wedging our priorities into pre-existing programs. Let’s put forward ideas for a “new WPA” at least as substantial and relevant as its predecessor in the 1930s New Deal, understanding that the Obama administration is just beginning. With energy and persistence, we have some time to make it happen.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the federal arts programs of the New Deal, starting with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1934. When the WPA was created in 1935, its arts-related elements spoke to the real economic and social conditions of its time: for instance, the Federal Theatre Project employed performers who had been displaced when movie palaces began to replace live theater; and the Federal Writers Project used the American Guide series to document community cultural resources threatened by the Depression. (See my previous essay for links to examples.) Back in the 30s, it made sense to divide Federal One, the WPA’s major arts-related initiative, into discipline-based programs (Theatre, Music, Art, Writers and Historical Records).

Today, circumstances and opportunities are different. Art forms and genres interact and blend; the Internet has changed our whole idea of infrastructure; and defining communities by geography is only one of many possible ways to understand commonality and connection. So, I’ve chosen to define programs by modalities rather than arts disciplines.

A sum equal to two weeks’ worth of Iraq War costs (the National Priorities Project estimates that at $341 million a day) would yield roughly $5 billion to work with. If I had the privilege of helping to design a new WPA, I would advocate for the range of initiatives described below. The most democratic way to manage them would be to allocate federal funds on a proportional basis to regional authorities and/or the states, who would in turn allocate them to counties, cities and nonprofit organizations, with real local participation and transparency required in decision-making. Because these new programs would be authorized as part of economic recovery (though I’d like to see them continue as ongoing public provision, like public libraries and schools), economic need would be an important criterion. Artists would have to qualify for inclusion by demonstrating low income or long-term underemployment.

To clarify my ideas, I’ve packaged them as program elements. But I’m not attached to the particular names or most other details, so don’t get hung up there. Just invent your own!

Communities Creating Culture (CCC): This initiative would be driven by partnerships between communities and experienced cultural development practitioners. Jointly, they would apply for stipends for community artists to plan and co-create works in music, theater, dance, visual art or other forms that would have a specific public purpose: for example, to commemorate an individual, community or history of special importance, creating what Judy Baca has called “sites of public memory”; or to build engagement and interaction in a particular neighborhood by creating a public space infused with cultural meaning, such as a sculpture park or community memorial garden; or to mark a community’s centennial with the creation of dance, drama and music embodying the cultures that have contributed to its resilience. Federal funds would go to long-term stipends (at least a year) for artists or groups who would reside in the community, allowing sufficient time for the slow building of trust and the process of mutual education and social imagination that the best community cultural development work requires. The stipend should be sufficient to cover living expenses; and communities should be able to provide or seek other support sources for associated costs such as facilities and materials. Ballparking this at $50,000 per artist per year for stipend and associated costs, $125 million would support 2,500 artists.

Enlivening Public Institutions (EPI): I see this initiative as supporting teaching artists and others working in social institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons, community centers and social service organizations. Depending on existing local provision, funds might be allocated to excellent teaching-artist programs already in existence, or where there is no local program, through a new entity. Qualifying artists would make themselves available, either as they emerge from a training program (see the ArtistsCorps description below) or by demonstrating appropriate knowledge and experience, just as they would today when applying to Chicago Arts Partners in Education (CAPE), WritersCorps, Empire State Partnerships or any of the other good programs operating. Here, too, an annual wage is essential for security and continuity. At $50,000 per artist per year for stipend and associated costs, $250 million would support 5,000 artists.

ArtistsCorps: This is the framework that has been most widely adopted and advocated already, through the Music National Service Initiative of MusicianCorps that I described in my previous essay, NAMAC’s Digital Arts Service Corps, referenced above, and others. They all roughly follow the AmeriCorps model, with a period of service in return for a stipend, insurance and sometimes student loan forgiveness. They all incorporate significant training elements, which makes them most appropriate for newbies. Participants who find their calling in one of these service corps could apply to transition into the CCC or EPI programs described above, which require strongly skilled and experienced artists. ArtistsCorps-type programs, with their emphasis on training, tend to be heavily staffed, which is expensive. But participants’ stipends are small, generally around $10,000 a year (with another $5,000 or so available toward educational costs). Let’s ballpark it this way: At costs of $25,000 per participant per year, $125 million could support 5,000 artists.

National Story Archive (NSA): Back in the WPA, quite a few programs were aimed at straightforward cultural preservation: the Index of American Design, the Index of American Music, the collection of slave narratives and so on. But in our digital age, private initiative drives an amazing volume of recording, scanning and digitizing of cultural material; although participation needs to be extended across the digital divide between haves and have-nots, there is no need for the public sector to step in and simply document. But there is much need to support and facilitate use of cultural material in a way that serves community development.

I envision this program as having several dimensions: the organization and archiving of materials; the creation of digital stories and other projects responding to local needs; and the broadcast and online publication of programming emerging from the NSA.

Hardware and software would be situated in local communities — at libraries, cultural centers or other accessible venues — where training and support could be provided by media artists, enabling community members to collect, contribute and store information about local culture. Oral histories, scanned documents, still and moving-image media, discussions of issues — a repository of such material could be used in countless ways to tell each participating community’s stories. I’ve written in the past about several projects that could be models. For instance, the early-1990s Mendocino People’s Portrait Project included a massive community photographic self-portrait and a storefront community center equipped with computers, scanners and printers to serve as a digital archive; the PlaceStories project created by the Australian community arts group Feral Arts is a custom-built online environment for archiving and digital stories; and much of the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling in California fits this model.

NSA centers would take part in special projects to lift local resources into national visibility. Two types of initiative are especially appealing to me. First, after a year of so of collecting material and carrying out small-scale projects, the NSA could roll out public radio and/or TV series featuring community self-portraits, with production funds awarded from a supplemental pool, and distribution and promotion carried out by participating broadcasters. Second would be a 21st-century adaptation of the American Guide Series. (Pantheon reissued a bunch of these guides in paperback in the mid-‘80s, each focusing on a different city or state; go to a used-book site and search for “WPA Guide to” and dozens will come up for a few dollars apiece.) I’m looking at the San Francisco guide right now: A lively survey of trade-union history appears in one place, and in another, a section treating migrations into the Western Addition as a kind of cultural geology, layer upon layer. Imagine local sites where visitors could access the same kinds of stories and pictures with a mouse click, sites created with the public interest in culture and community in mind rather than simply to maximize profit.

NSA would be a capital-intensive initiative. In some communities, the necessary facilities and equipment are already in place, but subsidy is needed for skilled organizers, writers and media artists to staff the centers; in others, buying computers and other equipment would be part of the program. I’m going to ballpark this at an average annual operating cost of $400,000 per site, estimating that $80 million would support at least four centers in every state of the union.

Digital initiatives can also provide work for unemployed high-tech professionals who want to make the shift to public service, thus assisting another stressed economic sector.

Community Cultural Development Centers (CCCD): This is the most bricks-and-mortar-oriented element in my dream of a new WPA for artists. If you have ever spent time abroad, where community cultural centers are an expected part of every neighborhood’s public provision, you will know what I’m talking about. (I’ve listed a link below to a brief account of one I visited in Spain in the summer of 2007.) There are some great centers in the U.S., functioning as bases for artistic production, training, meeting-spaces for all kinds of community action and celebration. Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, is the one I know best; Chicago’s Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Humboldt Park is another example of a group soundly rooted in its community, seamlessly integrating arts, politics and community development. In my vision of cultural democracy, every community and neighborhood has a center like this, just as every community and neighborhood ought to have excellent public libraries and schools. This would be less a building program — even $5 billion would go quickly if it were spent to construct brand-new facilities — than one that helps to support low-cost, green renovation, maintenance, staffing and programming, in essence making up for resource shortfalls exacerbated by the economic downturn. There are already disused storefronts and decommissioned schools in the communities that most need these centers. Let’s ballpark the average annual grant at $400,000 per community center: $100 million would support an average of five sites in each state. In places with a great many existing centers, that could stretch to provide program or facilities support for a larger number of sites; and where existing provision is scarce, it would seed a goodly number of reuse and renovation projects.

In sum, my personal assessment of priority elements for a new WPA for artists would cost $680 million a year; bump that up to $800 million to include administrative costs and overhead, and two weeks’ worth of spending on the War in Iraq would give us more than six years of sustained investment in cultural development and social imagination. Do I have to ask which way of using our tax revenues is likely to return more social benefit?

In my last essay, I briefly described some of the things artists could do with public-service jobs. Those who understand community cultural development have only to read that list to be reminded of all the good reasons to support a new WPA for artists. But we’re still a pretty small group. If we succeed in getting a real dialogue started about public cultural policy, it will be because we’ve enlarged the conversation beyond special-interest pleading, one among many weaknesses that have limited the effectiveness of mainstream arts advocacy. Indeed, mainstream pro-arts campaigns have tended to stress the weakest arguments, such as the “economic multiplier effect.” (Yes, if you buy theater tickets you probably also pay for parking and food, and that does support jobs and get money flowing; but if you went to a boxing-match or an auction, the multiplier effect would be identical, so how is this an argument for arts support?) For a complete account of this phenomenon, read my article “Bromides and Sugar-Pills: Cleaning Out the Artworld Medicine Chest,” which appeared in Teaching Artist Journal.

We need to make a strong argument for cultural democracy and community cultural development, using multiple realms of knowledge to show how this work advances essential public policy goals. Our task is to bring community arts and cultural activism into the public policy arena as potent ways to embody full, multidimensional citizenship and stimulate the participation needed not just for economic recovery, but to recover democracy from the near-fatal wounds inflicted by generations of corporate rule and commercialization of the public sector. In that spirit, I’ve summarized nine brief arguments that can be powerful tools in that campaign.

1. Things are changing in a way that elevates culture’s role. We are on the cusp between two cultural eras. The old system treats everything like so much material that can be weighed, measured, assigned a number and dismissed. The new system is grounded in human stories, recognizing abundant diversity and the power of relationship. In the old system, art and culture are dismissible as nice, but not necessary; in the emergent system, culture is the crucible for all positive development. At this transitional moment, many of us see the shift happening, but the news hasn’t yet broken through to people who operate many of our social institutions, which is why it is often so easy to describe the new paradigm to ordinary people and so hard to get bureaucrats and officials to see it. I gave a talk on this in November at the International Centre of Art for Social Change in Vancouver: see the link below to download it.

2. Community arts contribute powerfully to community development; they are essential to success in remaking damaged communities. One bit of proof that things are changing is the impact of new thinkers within established institutions. Consider Jeremy Nowack, president and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund and a board member of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank. About a year ago, he authored a report on culture’s intrinsic and powerful role in community development, based on a review of the findings of Mark Stern’s and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania. Nowack wrote:

His report isn’t just the usual stuff about how arts make places nicer: In terms any investor or public policymaker can understand, it explains how they are necessary for the best development to take place.

3. For our brains to serve the future, we must develop our creative imagination and empathic capacities through arts participation. Antonio and Hanna Damasio of the Brain and Creativity Institute and Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center at the
University of Southern California are leading brain scientists who have also become advocates for arts education. “[M]ath and science alone do not make citizens,” they write. “And, given that the development of citizenship is already under siege, math and science alone are not sufficient.” Rapid and intense changes in the way we spend our time, the way we communicate and process information, have created

The Damasios point out that cognitive processing is constantly speeding up as we exercise it through interaction with machines, but that emotional processing cannot keep pace, with the result that young minds are emotionally underdeveloped, leading to a loss of moral compass, of the emotional sense and imagination that guide a well-rounded human being.

These quotations are from a speech at the 2006 UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education, linked below.

4. Culture is the balm that can begin to heal social injury, allowing us to face each other across every barrier that creates distance and objectification. Barack Obama’s election suggests a time of openness to racial healing, for example. I have often written of the lessons scientists are learning about how our brains process trauma, and what that can teach us about the healing role of culture. It can be healing for a traumatized person to tell his or her story in fullness and in detail, so long as the telling is received with respect, presence and caring. The same is true in healing social trauma. There are many sore spots in the global cultural matrix, old bruises where people have been told they are less than full citizens of the world, even less than fully human. One of the tasks and unique strengths of cultural development in this time is to help heal those injuries through the telling and receiving of stories. In my book “New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development,” I wrote about the Documentary Project for Refugee Youth, for instance, a collaboration among young refugees, the Global Action Project, the International Rescue Committee and other community organizations and artists in New York City. Around the world, the work of community artists has addressed social trauma with remarkable results. This is an intrinsic public good, and ought to be supported.

5. Cultural action promotes social inclusion, an essential public aim in a period of vast migrations. Moving across the face of this small planet are more refugees and migrants than at any time in human history. In 2007, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees estimated the number of refugees and internally displaced persons at 67 million. In the U.S. and around the world, enormous numbers of migrants (who may not have formal refugee status but have been forced by economic conditions or religious or political persecution from their homelands) are being brought into contact, and often conflict, with the residents of existing communities that may already be hard-pressed. The attendant challenges are a core public policy concern that has been shamefully neglected. Cultural action offers effective, humane means of promoting social inclusion and the fullness of cultural citizenship, bringing newcomers into the social sphere. Take an example like Houston’s El Teatro Lucha de Salud del Barrio, in which a mothers’ group focused on Latino immigrants’ uses of Theater of the Oppressed techniques to bring people into dialogue and action around their own families’ health. What could be a better expenditure of public funds?

6. Cultural action creates the container that enables people to face each other and enter into dialogue even about the most polarized, heated issues. In the body politic as portrayed by the commercial media, most issues are reduced to a simple pro and con. But in reality, issues are complex, and for civil society to flourish, we must create genuine meeting-places and promote genuine dialogue in the place of the angry tennis match that has become the favorite model for issue discussions.

Artists are doing this better than anyone else. Check out Thousand Kites, a national dialogue project addressing criminal justice. The project, a collaboration between two Appalshop projects, Roadside Theater and Holler to the Hood, has created a film, a dialogue-driven play, an interactive Web site and other initiatives that are being widely used to involve everyone, from guards to prisoner families to policy makers, in considering a major public issue that hasn’t been able to get a full hearing any other way.

7. Marketplace culture, dominated by the commercial cultural industries, is skewed in ways that counter democratic cultural values; the public interest can bring balance. The commercial cultural industries — broadcasting, movies, commercial music, advertising and so on — exist to make money. Along the way, they can support those who make meaning, with nooks and crannies for passionate advocates to find footholds, to get important works out to their authenticating audiences. But still, the much-mentioned 18-25 male demographic generates the big bucks these days: How many films can be made based on video games? We have yet to learn the limit.

Many other countries have a much larger public presence in the cultural marketplace, with more money for public broadcasting, often mandating a percentage of domestic content on their airwaves and in their movie theaters, ensuring that Hollywood doesn’t dominate everything. In the U.S., independent media play the primary mediating role, with everything from YouTube to Michael Moore working together to turn a unidirectional system — broadcasting outward from Hollywood into every home — into a diversity of voices.

Unless we want to become Grand Theft Auto Nation, we have to recognize and stress the need for public subvention to counter marketplace dominance of culture. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting does a little here, as by setting aside modest support several decades ago for what were termed the “Minority Public Broadcasting Consortia,” groups that fund media by, for and about people of color, of which the Center for Asian American Media (formerly National Asian American Telecommunications Association) is best-known. But compared to the revenues and infrastructure of the commercial cultural industries, much more investment is needed.

8. Cultural participation is intrinsically pleasurable and inviting, creating a low threshold for civic involvement. Community cultural development projects bring people into dialogue about the assets and problems they hold in common. One of the most frequent outcomes of community arts work is that the participants display a markedly heightened disposition to get up off the couch and into dialogue with their fellow citizens. Consider Marty Pottenger’s Arts and Equity Project in Portland, Maine, a creative collaboration between artists and workers in that city’s Public Works, Health & Human Services and Police Departments. The goal is “to make the arts and artmaking everyday tools for municipal governments to come up with better solutions in challenging times.” Click around the project’s Web site as you consider whether this type of public-interest dialogue and participation would have been possible through any means other than art-making. Community cultural development projects are laboratories for engaged citizenship.

9. Arts participation develops our capacity to envision, dream and shape the future we desire. The January 19 issue of Newsweek carried an article that has been making the rounds at light-speed: Jeremy McCarter’s piece, “Will Act for Food,” argues that the very election of Barack Obama — let alone the hope our new president urges us to cultivate — was made possible by the work of artists. He writes that

I can’t agree with everything in McCarter’s piece, but much of it is wonderful (and thrilling to see in a mainstream newsmagazine). He harks back to the WPA, concluding with a point I find stirring:

Whether you focus on the immediate opportunities latent in the recovery bill or on the longer-term project of articulating democratic cultural policy, now is the time to make yourself heard. To an unprecedented extent, people are moving forward on these issues, energy is going in a dozen different directions. As one arts activist wrote to me this week, “My challenge has been to try and figure out how to CONNECT with all the other initiatives (that means finding out about them, etc.) and seeing where commonalities exist so we can organize a concerted package.”

Given very real differences in values and approach, full consensus may not be possible. For example, a group of artists and organizations working with a member of the New York City Council launched its policy proposals this week under the heading “Arts Policy Now.” But despite the broad claims that accompany the group’s proposal, it is almost entirely oriented to grants for new work and to the arts’ role in commerce, only a small part of the policy picture. Working a different corner of the policy universe, the steering committee of the International Network for Cultural Diversity has called on President Obama to ratify the UNESCO Convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions, an essential plank of any policy platform.

But I doubt that consensus is required. Ultimately, policy makers will adopt the language and concepts they deem best: a less-than-harmonious but vigorous chorus will make a strong impression, even if everyone is not singing from the same page. I applaud it all, but in the deepest way, I am with those who sing the praises of a new WPA for artists and a democratic cultural policy.

I don’t think artists are in any essential sense different from or better than other human beings. But our work — plunging our hearts and minds into the stuff of culture, attempting to see without filters or blinders, sharing the news with anyone who is ready to receive it — has special value in confusing times. John Kennedy said this in his speech in honor of Robert Frost, delivered a month before he was assassinated:

Make use of my arguments or use your own. Just be sure that whatever you do, it is worthy of the task at hand. In a long-awaited moment of possibility, the important thing is to seize the time.

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.

National Priorities Project Cost of War page. At this writing, the total cost is approaching $600 billion, most of it incurred since President Bush said “Mission accomplished.” Mention that to the next person who says we can’t afford cultural initiatives.

Banlieues d'Europe, founded by Jean Hurstel, a key writer on cultural democracy in the formative period of the 1970s. This site will give you access to an interesting list of projects.

Comments

Is there any update on what level of this sort of support was included in the stimulus package that just got passed? And who would be implementing it?

Posted by: Danielle Martin at February 24, 2009 12:30 PM

Aside from $50M for the NEA, Danielle, there's no money set aside for the arts per se. But there are many job training, education, community development and infrastructure programs, each of which will be administered by the agency receiving the funds. Some have regional offices, some statewide or local, so guidelines and application processes will differ a lot from program to program. There should be something soon on the Facebook group National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools (NCHAWS) that summarizes some of the opportunities that will be available.

Posted by: Arlene Goldbard at February 24, 2009 03:23 PM

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The New New Deal, Part 2 - A New WPA for Artists: How and Why

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