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Signs of Welcome, Signs of the Possible: Public Practice in Rural California
Unlike much of what has heretofore been called public art, new genre public art — visual art that uses both traditional and nontraditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues directly relevant to their lives— is based on engagement … Attacking boundaries, new genre public artists draw on ideas from vanguard forms, but they add a … sensibility about audience, social strategy, and effectiveness. The Main Streets of rural towns are not typical canvases for public art. Students from the new MFA in Public Practice program at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Calif., under the leadership of Suzanne Lacy, have traveled far and wide to produce their collaborative projects. This year, in order to see the fruits of their labor, I traveled to Laton, a small town in California’s Central Valley, for an event called Laton Live! REUNION / REUNIÓN, March 21, 2009. Over the past year, Otis students have been working with residents of the rural town in the San Joaquin Valley on a series of art projects that aim to engender a greater sense of civic pride in the community, particularly among young people. The event on March 21 was a celebration of the year’s activities and projects, culminating in an evening of performances and installations set up along a few blocks of Laton’s “main street,” De Woody. The evening brought together the Laton community, the students from Otis, and the friends and families of both groups, representing the surrounding area as well as Los Angeles. I traveled to the event from Oakland with Moira Roth, instructor of my History of Performance Art class at Mills College, along with a fellow student. As a graduate student myself, I wanted to see what my peers were doing to positively affect the life of a small town. As a girl from a rural town in eastern Nebraska, I wanted to see if a project like REUNION / REUNIÓN could be a viable option for the rural spaces of my own upbringing, and how the collaboration between residents and students operated to each group’s benefit. Riding with my traveling companions from the East Bay over the hills into the Central Valley, I didn’t know what to expect from the reunion that awaited us. The dry fields rolled out in front of us, the landscape infrequently dotted with palm trees and the monstrous signage that accompanies suburban shopping centers. We arrived in Laton in the sun-washed, lazy afternoon. The streets were nearly deserted, except for Otis students flitting sporadically between buildings and installation sites wearing headset walkie-talkies. We followed a small, hand-painted sign to parking on a side street a few blocks from the project’s center of operations, the Methodist church. People were mowing their lawns; a scruffy mop of a dog chased us for half a block before retreating and leaving us to our inspection of the town’s main thoroughfare, the “stage” for the night’s performances.
Signs of the Laton project had been popping up long before we drove into town on that bright March afternoon. Students from Otis had been living there off and on for eight months, meeting with community members, documenting their lives on film and video, and beginning the projects that would be celebrated in the evening’s festivities. The buildings on De Woody had been transformed from the color of the dusty landscape to bright yellow, green, red, silver and blue. The labor for this project was largely donated by members of the community working with Roberto Del Hoyo and other Otis MFA students. MFA student Faith Purvey had been meeting weekly with Laton high-school students, imagining and materializing their vision for the future of Laton in the sculpture installations on display in the Youth Sculpture Encampment on De Woody that would open that night. Aside from the painted facades and sculpture, however, there was little to view that afternoon except the darting figures of MFA students and the commanding presence of Suzanne Lacy. For the rest, we would have to wait for sundown. In the hours leading up to the main event, I was lucky enough to steal a few moments with both Nathalie Sanchez, MFA student and media contact, and Consuelo Velasco, the MFA Public Practice’s program manager and Laton native. As the afternoon waned, I stood in the kitchen of the yellow Victorian house that served as home base to the multiple Otis students who visited repeatedly during the months leading up to the event. and talked to Nathalie about the press coverage they had received and the questions people tended to ask. Chief among them were “How is this art?” and “How will this help?” Nathalie spoke passionately about the possibilities of public practice, about the way projects like the one in Laton had effects far exceeding the individual artist’s grasp. Consuelo, whose parents owned the house and who had wanted to see an event like this come to Laton long before Otis accepted her proposal to locate their Ford Foundation-funded project in her hometown, spoke about her master’s thesis and her serendipitous meeting with Lacy in Ireland, at a conference entitled “Shifting Ground: New Perspectives on Art in Rural Contexts.” We also spoke of the possibilities for art making in Laton in the future. But our time was short — before long, both women were required back on De Woody to perform their various tasks and I was left to my wandering and rumination.
At 6 p.m., the bell of the old Methodist church interrupted the multiple reunions already taking place on De Woody, and hundreds of people from Laton, alongside the throng of Otis students and their visitors from Los Angeles and beyond, filed into the church. A video installation by visiting artist Andrea Bowers was playing in the small sanctuary (named, appropriately, “Sanctuary”) and featured the image of an immigrant woman who had taken up sanctuary in another Methodist church, this one in Chicago, to avoid deportation and stay in the United States with her son. (Professionals in various arts-related fields were invited to join the students as teachers, mentors and presenting artists during the many months of collaboration.) The incoming crowd noisily milled around in the fellowship hall, looking at winners of the elementary-school mural contest conducted by MFA students Andrea Dominguez and Michelle Glass, and greeting friends and discussing the night’s events as people found their seats and began to take note of the silent video. It is possible to assume that the image was lost in the shuffle, but I found it to be a poignant reminder that, despite the noise of society, we cannot ignore the immigrant experience, or our reactions to it. The first order of business in the evening’s program was a series of speeches kicked off by Suzanne Lacy with Consuelo Velasco and including local business owner Manuel Lopez, Superintendent of Schools Ralph Vandro, and Otis president Samuel Hoi, after which we were directed outside. There we encountered another enthusiastic speech by visiting playwright Richard Montoya of Culture Clash and local business owner Raul Cortez. Director of the Neighborhood Activities Center Angie Moshier led a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the temporarily located new town sign, designed by Otis student Boseul Kim and constructed by students in the metal shop at Laton High under the supervision of shop teacher Dale Costa.
Another ribbon cutting took place inside the church, marking the inception of a venture intended to provide ongoing economic support for this small town. The Free Store, a project organized by Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers with the help of Otis students Andy Manoushagian, Paige Tighe and Otis alum Marissa Mercado, opened that evening in the Methodist church, and each of the night’s attendees were given a voucher for one free item. The store is an endeavor to set up a barter economy in this economically strapped town, where work in the community will be exchanged for necessary items from the Free Store. The items were collected during the course of an art exhibition, “Your Donations Do Our Work” (Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers), at the UC Riverside Sweeny Art Gallery. Throughout the run of this exhibition, bags of donations were accepted as gallery admission and Riverside resident teams cleaned and mended the donations in preparation for their debut in Laton. The intersection of the work of artists and community members was especially apparent in this aspect of the event — the labor to prepare the items had been done more than four hours away by people the new owners of these items would probably never meet. The work that will be done in the community to “purchase” each item is a continuation of the work begun in Riverside, an expression of solidarity that seems particularly timely in this gloomy economic climate. Once the second ribbon was cut at the Laton town sign, the crowd began to move down De Woody toward the fire department, stopping along the way to observe musicians Bobbie Joe Neely and Patrick Contreras playing on porches; large video installations on the sides of the once blank buildings made by students working with visiting artists Kate Johnson and Dana Duff; photo installations by visiting artist Raul Vega, Otis student Shatto Light, and Kim in the Neighborhood Activities Center, and a six-channel video installation by Manoushagian in the post office. De Woody Street terminates at the fire station, where the Patrick Contreras band played against the backdrop of a flashing fire truck as the light of day gave way to night. This year the Laton all-volunteer Fire Department celebrates its 100-year anniversary, making their engagement an important feature of this event celebrating community spirit. Inside and outside the stores along De Woody, television monitors played interviews with store owners revealing stories of survival in this small town: the Gong family in their market, Lopez in his restaurant, Albert Vera in front of his barber shop, and Helen Weathers and Lucy Bettencourt in their beauty shop. Outside the abandoned doctor’s office and hardware store, the former owners were also captured in video interviews. Fifty Laton High School students sporting REUNION / REUNIÓN t-shirts, organized by Otis student Hataya Tubtim, worked as ushers and safety monitors. Families visited the town’s market to buy snacks. I bought a very large bottle of water and made a circuit of the vendors, my favorite part of any public event, who were in this case selling their products to support local causes.
In many ways, REUNION / REUNIÓN was like any other street fair. It had its food sellers, its local flair and, most importantly, its flow — the movement of the crowd was haphazard, only loosely guided by the music that first began by the church and drew people to the fire station at the end of the street. There was no direction after the ribbon cutting, at which time people were free to wander down De Woody and view the video installations and visit the Free Store. What sets this performance apart, what defines it as a “performance” for me, was the content of the video and photo installations and the striking aesthetic of the “stages” used for the musicians. The videos and photos featured members of the community, their lives celebrated on the scale of wall-sized projections — dancing, cooking, farming and so on. Each offered a new vision of the daily, and each became the focus of a celebration turned inward. Laton was celebrating itself. The three music sites, the fire station and two front porches along De Woody, lit by washes of color and spots, provided the most arresting images of the evening and also stood as shrines to the place and its people. By literally “making the town a stage,” assisted by professional light and sound crews under the direction of Laton High teacher and music promoter Matt Schwarz and Los Angeles media producer Peter Kirby, the students of Otis and the residents of Laton re-envisioned their own place in the world and offered a glimpse into the beauty of their daily lives to visitors like myself and to each other. The experience was communal, festive and affirming. If this is a sign of the promise of Public Practice programs in the arts academy, the future for students like those attending the MFA program at Otis, as well as the communities they will partner with, is bright. What remains to be seen is the lasting effect a singular event such as this one (or even a series of such events over the course of a year) can have on a community like Laton. How are these effects measured and evaluated? Is there a qualitative scale for “civic pride”? Although the evening of March 21 and the events of Laton Live! REUNION / REUNIÓN represent a time apart, a time to step away from the daily and reflect upon it, more reflection is needed to gauge the long-term effects of a public project such as this. Maria Rosario Jackson and Florence Kabwasa-Green of the Urban Institute, as well as Elisheva Gross Woo of UCLA, are doing just that. All three are conducting follow-up research on the impact of REUNION / REUNIÓN, and a number of Otis students plan to return to Laton to continue projects and start new ones. The work that Otis MFA students, visiting artists, and the Laton community began last summer did not end on March 21. Both the art making and the reflection process continue. It is hoped, and I agree, that the ability of a community to visualize and construct signs of change can be translated into social and economic change, though the road from image conception to concrete realization may be long and winding. Even if signs of progress and solidarity are few and far between, REUNION / REUNIÓN is a sign of the possible and is motivation for the students of Otis and all artists working in public practice. Emily Roehl is a graduate student at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., studying English literature and performance theory. Originally from rural Nebraska, Roehl has directed and written for stages large and small from Minneapolis, Minn., to Nagoya, Japan. Links Original CAN/API publication: June 2009 CommentsPost a comment Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
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