Introducing Community Arts Perspectives, Volume II

The first gathering of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), in spring 2008, demonstrated how critical the ongoing dialog is to building the field and promoting long-term relationships. Community Arts Perspectives, the online journal that is documenting the work in the field, is now established and increasingly recognized as the academic journal of and resource to the field. The Community Research and Convening Project has moved into its second year and the model of writing and community convening has undergone some changes based on feedback from the first convening.

The first year of journal essays focused on four themes including Critical Pedagogy in the Academy; Partnerships: Campus and Community; Community Practices: Values, Beliefs and Aesthetic Forms; and Community Arts and Artist. The overall goal of all the groups was the production of material that would include principles, practices and actions steps related to each area or theme. The first convening in Baltimore brought together over 130 participants, most of whom had been involved in a writing process. In surveys reviewing the first convening, several improvements were indicated, including better connecting the writing process and the group activities at the convening. Some participants felt the tasks were too demanding for such a short time frame and relied too much on a performative model; they wanted less presenting and more story building. Many participants also expressed a desire to strengthen the link between community and scholarship

The advisory committee, editorial board and staff of the Community Arts Convening and Project sought to address some of these suggestions at the second convening with a collaborative group model that was more self-determining. Improvements included:

• engaging writers in the early, online formation of discussion groups
• supporting those groups in identifying self-determined themes
• soliciting more community grassroots participation through mini-grants for regional dialogues and writing
• working with community/regional dialogues to develop keynote presentations
• using a flexible time with an Open Space model for large group interactions
• linking participants to regional community arts groups and leaders.

In the second year of the project the Community Arts Convening and Research Project continued to emphasize the value of shared learning through an inclusive process of writing, reflection and research. In moving forward with preparation for the convening, the writing process model was revised to build online writing clusters. The second convening writing process followed the same order as the first: call for proposals, submissions, editorial review process (with specific efforts made to include a diverse group of community arts theorists and practitioners) and initiating publications of the best thinking from groups or individuals currently shaping this field. First proposals were vetted, then 2-5-page papers were coached and the final papers became a platform for organizing the actual convening. Writers were encouraged to link with other essayists in related topics. These groups became self-defining communities that resulted in a new collective direction of the convening workshops.

National and Regional/Community Dialogues

In another expansion of the convening model, funding provided support to a number of regional dialogues as well as the development of California-based community groups including California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) community arts around Latino issues, a Latino Dialogue and an East Bay group from the Iron Triangle of Richmond.

Six national dialogues were funded to develop work for the online journal and to promote substantive dialogues on topics of national importance: dialogues at the Pratt Center for Community Development, the Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diaspora Institute and Alternate ROOTS, Resources for Social Change, as well as The Latino Dialogue, The Iron Triangle Legacy Project and The Curriculum Project Dialogues. Four of these dialogues are addressed below. Each group will publish a text for the January 2010 issue of Community Arts Perspectives, to be published on CAN.

The Pratt Center for Community Development

The Pratt Center received support from the Community Arts Convening and Research Project in Fall 2008 for collaboration with the Hip Hop Theater Festival and its partners. The project organized and documented a series of dialogues about gentrification in New York City in conjunction with the tour of Danny Hoch’s play “Taking Over” in four of New York City’s boroughs. In March 2009, the Pratt Center convened the day-long cross-sector roundtable “Creative Stimulus and Community Recovery,” which brought together a group of creative activists to expand and reframe the conversation about economic stimulus and national service . Their goal was to place the arts, culture and media within a greater vision for equitable, democratic and culturally vital communities. Recognizing that some of the most creative strategies happen at the intersections between sectors, disciplines, cultures and generations, we invited a diverse group of participants from community development, labor, education, civic participation, media and the arts and asked them to stretch beyond the conventions of their practice to reconsider assumptions, barriers and opportunities.

The dialogues as a whole accomplished our intention that they:

• be collaborative, involving a range of arts, activist and education participants and build on pre-existing, sustained processes
• have an explicit focus on equity, social justice and progressive change, connecting community-based experience with policymaking, and having a cross-sector approach
• create opportunities for cross-generation dialogue and engaging higher education and the arts as part of sustained movements for social change
• explore multiple art forms and approaches to documentation.

A final report on this on-going project will be forthcoming.

Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diaspora Institute

A second regional project sponsored by the Community Arts Convening and Research Project in Fall 2008 was the Caribbean Cultural Center’s University Without Walls project. The project examined community arts and service-learning initiatives being developed at institutions of higher education. CCADI reflected that while these initiatives are well-intended, they have the potential to undermine the field they have been created to serve. CCADI identified programs in academia as placing the expertise in institutions of higher learning rather than in the community-based institutions that created the field, organizations that have expert staff and possess the methodology and the historical knowledge around art as a vehicle to address concerns about social justice, cultural equity and marginalization. They wanted to focus on the co-production of knowledge through a partnership of the community arts field and institutions of higher learning. Ideally, this partnership would develop a course of study founded in the community arts organizations and community arts movement that emerged out of the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s that transformed this nation.

In this cultural-equity model, community-based organizations and communities define the content and curriculum that will best train future cultural workers in the field. In this dialogue process, through advocacy meetings and round tables the participants examine the assumptions, perspective, aesthetic criteria, knowledge base, theory and practice that will prepare students to understand the transformative principles inherent in community arts work.

Central to this comprehension is the displacement of “art for art’s sake” that is generally the anthem for institutions of higher learning and “mainstream” art institutions. In the cultural-equity model, art strives to honor the legacies of the diverse cultural communities that form the nation and seeks to correct all forms of injustice with the vision of creating a civil society that honors its citizenry.

Integral to the learning process for students in this model is the history of how struggle around cultural diversity — pre-Civil Rights, during the Civil Rights Movement and post-Civil Rights Movement — transformed arts institutions in the U.S.

The gathering hosted by the CCCADI brought together community arts workers, educators involved in community arts and community artists with a recognized history of accomplishments within the field to discuss the topics outlined above. The gatherings allowed the opportunity to discuss the participant’s writings around the themes outlined above with the intent of establishing community arts educational and service practice that places the expertise within community.

Curriculum Project

The Curriculum Project: Culture and Community Development in Higher Education, currently managed by Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA), was established in the fall of 2007, independent of IA, to research how higher education across the United States teaches the theory and practice of community cultural development (CCD), often called community-based art. In contrast to models of service, CCD attempts to understand root causes of the challenges facing our world and respond in meaningful ways, engaging with off-campus partners toward aesthetically meaningful and socially useful ends. Thanks to funding from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, cultural consultant Arlene Goldbard, Appalachia-based theater director Dudley Cocke and Jan Cohen Cruz (at the time a professor at New York University) conducted 28 interviews, analyzed 231 survey responses and examined several dozen syllabi and descriptions of university and community-based programs. The team was strengthened by three advisors: Ludovic Blain II, director of Project Spotlight at the Center for Social Inclusion; Jamie Haft, recent graduate of a community cultural development program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, vice-president for diversity and strategic partnerships at Wesleyan University.

The Curriculum Project report (downloadable at imaginingamerica.org), which Goldbard wrote based on collaborative research, addresses pedagogical components, underlying values, opportunities and challenges of campus-community cultural partnerships, and ends with a list of recommendations. The project was begun with a hypothesis: that an excellent community-based art education encompasses craft (e.g., training in art and community organizing skills), scholarship (encompassing reading, writing and thinking about underlying ideas, history, theory and issues), and hands-on community engagement, each of which must be well developed and all of which must be supported by a set of democratic values and principles. A majority of interviewees and survey respondents agreed, though most saw community engagement as the foundation, training in craft as the second most important component and scholarship as third.

Alternate ROOTS/Resources for Social Change

Alternate ROOTS, a southeast regional arts service organization, is developing a yearlong dialogue around five principles of community engagement: shared power, open dialogue, equal partnership, multiple aesthetics and individual/community transformation. The project leaders will capture the work in a text that will serve as a bridge between the academic, the artist and the community practitioner. The audience, the readers of the text, may be mainly students, teachers, Resources for Social Change (RSC) participants and leaders of community arts. The RSC Learning Exchanges that present and teach these principles attempt to involve cultural workers of various walks of life and develop partnerships between artists and communities.

“State of the Nation — Tipping Point New Orleans” is an annual art and performance festival that brings together artists from across the United States who are committed to addressing social, political and economic issues facing the Gulf South and the country-at-large. RSC will present two workshops there and lead evaluation in roles as viewers, questioners and documenters. ROOTS artists Ebony Golden and Trey Hartt, as part of the process of the Yearlong Dialogue, will be part of creating the questions for this first engagement with community.

The dialogues will examine whether it is necessary to separate the three roles of “academic,” “community member” and “artist.” Part of the process of using the RSC principles is to make attempts to name who we are and what our power is in community partnership, and through this process get closer to what we want to be in a community. The RSC learning Exchange attempts to be a creative process as well as a process of critical analysis where creator, learner, teacher and inquirer are one. Beginning the Yearlong Dialogue, the RSC Learning Exchange led the workshop “Bridging the Gap Between the Community and University” at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, April 17-18, 2009. The dialogues continue.

The Convening Event

The second Community Arts Convening, April 19-21, 2009, was hosted at CSUMB and supported by both the Visual and Public Art department and the Music and Performing Arts department. A former military base converted to a university in 1995, the university’s unique landscape on the Monterey Bay coast and its visionary commitment to community partnerships made it a good site for the convening. As a university created to provide learning to diverse communities through interdisciplinary models of applied learning and community service, CSUMB was perfectly poised to host this important gathering. More than 100 community-based artists and participants from art schools and universities across the country joined together for three days of pre-meetings, community keynotes, workshops, convenings, community events and collegial networking in the beautiful pastoral setting of sand dunes, rolling agricultural fields and scenic ocean views.

Keynote Speakers

The keynotes were delivered by two community dialogue groups comprising representatives from The Latino Dialogue: A Regional Community Partnership; National Steinbeck Center; El Alisal Fine Arts Center; Salinas Valley and Monterey County, California; and The Iron Triangle Legacy Project Committee, East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, Richmond, California. The focus of the keynotes was to enhance the community stories that are at the center of community arts work. The community narrative was illuminated by the keynotes from two California community groups and set the stage for an engaged model of sharing narratives at the convening.

The Latino Dialogue

The Latino Dialogue keynote included the participating members giving insight into their own values as community practitioners and the presentation of the Latino Dialogue model. The keynote opened with a visual presentation and a musical performance by the mariachi youth orchestra from Alisal Center for the Fine Arts. The partner presenters from Alisal and the National Steinbeck Center provided personal insight to community small gatherings including a preliminary tertulia at a local coffee house with community practitioners. The following goals were designed to guide the community discussions and to provide results that could serve to focus the Latino Dialogue in building a cultural sustainability model.

• to learn more about the Latino community practices in the arts and culture
• to identify what arts needs can be served through regional organizations
• to identify the role of the arts in health, education, juvenile justice and other aspects of community sustainability
• to open more communication in the region and provide a forum for documenting shared cultural arts and community practices

Keynote presenters shared the dialogue model, based on the afternoon community conversation known as the resolana. In the discussions of the definitions of cultura and arte, participantsincluded references to family life, to personal art, to folk traditions and folk forms in early childhood. The discussions also revealed philosophic values about the role of art and culture in being a well-educated or well-rounded person. The growth of indigenous communities was discussed and references to their traditional crafts such as weaving and pottery were seen as reflections of culture and art.

The keynote presenters reflected on the development of the dialogues, where there was a desire on the part of the participants to start a network and to determine some future steps. The partners saw the need to invite more participants from the juvenile-justice system, the farmworker community and some of the other established arts organizations in the region. This brief model of discussion indicates the need for more assessment of community need and of community participation in the determination of arts programming in local institutions.

Iron Triangle Project

Over the next two years, East Bay Center is on schedule to consolidate all of the work of the past few years and commence a formal Iron Triangle Legacy Project (ITLP). The goal of this initiative is to build civic unity in the Iron Triangle neighborhood of Richmond, California, by engaging residents of the Triangle in exploring their own culture and history – sharing it with each other and the wider community. Through the production of annual events, the telling of stories, the building of long-term relationships and the archiving of materials in digital format, the ITLP fosters neighborhood leadership and participation, celebrating the legacy of the neighborhood as well as building capacity to address shared challenges.

The first full inaugural event will take place in the opening month of East Bay Center’s new facility – currently scheduled for mid year 2010 – and annually thereafter. The committee will ultimately determine the first year’s specific theme, though many local residents and leaders have strongly suggested that it should feature local youth perspectives and family history from the neighborhood. In subsequent years, with new committee members will choose additional themes to research and illuminate. For the first two years, the project will draw upon its capital project momentum and seed funding from the San Francisco Foundation to enable it to reach all 15,000 Iron Triangle residents with invitations to the events and to become involved in the process.

The Legacy Project worked with Community Arts Convening and Research resources to develop a series of documented dinner dialogues/events on the intersection of artists/art institutions/and the Iron Triangle community’s vision for itself. As a result of the initial dinner events the Iron Triangle Legacy group was able to model an intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue with its members on the stage including the premiere of a community video and performance.

Convening Work Sessions

Seven work sessions addressed compelling issues and questions pertinent to the field of community arts and the health and well-being of communities, including:

• empowering the voice of communities by tapping community resources and history
• developing models for training, reciprocal learning and participatory research,
• arts-based community building and advocacy
• documenting the evolution of the field and best practices in community arts
• building new partnerships and leveraging resources
• documenting community-based cultural and aesthetic traditions and forms.

Convening Work Session Design Process

Every effort was made to convey ownership of this year’s convening structure and process to the participants prior to and during the actual convening — a scenario (hopefully) assuring long-term sustainable success of the Project.

Attendees were invited to review the following plan and proposed work-session descriptions and sign up as active participants. The sooner participants joined a session, the greater their voice in its design and the more fruitful the convening experience. The process guidelines were:

• Text authors and general attendees were invited to scan the accepted texts on the MICA Project Web site and look for authors and attendees with whom they would like to form a convening work session group. The structure of each session was designed by consensus by its own members.
• The Project provided for a coordinator, facilitator and a documenter culled from each of the seven work session groups having at least five authors and five non-authors.
• Work session groups were considered their own living texts, documenting participant experiences while pointing toward ongoing post-convening dialogues and partnerships.
• Each author selected to participate in the Project will have his/her individual text published online on the Community Arts Network (CAN).
• Work session group members were to mentor each other as writing coaches.

Work Session Descriptions

Authors, other practitioners and advocates of the field of community arts developed six work sessions. Each session resulted from an equitable, inclusive process open to public dialogue, debate and consensus by participants. The sessions spanned all or part of Monday, April 20, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Tuesday, April 21, 9 a.m. to as late as 5 p.m. The sessions organized by the text essayists included the following groups and topics.

Session #1: Democratization of Art and Culture
This session investigated the state of knowledge production and critical discourse in the art-and-social-justice field after 28 years of right-wing policy that opposed the democratization of art and culture. Action-oriented strategies were discussed, including how colleges and universities can become more effective centers for the democratization of art and culture. (Haft, coordinator)

Session #2: International Community Arts Engagement and Multiculturalism
This session addressed international community arts engagement and multi-culturalism within the current context/issues of globalism. The participants investigated international community arts models dealing with the pragmatic and theoretical concerns while having the capacity to take the Convening across the “borders.” (Hillman, coordinator)

Session #3: “Failure” in Community Cultural Development
This session looked at failures in community cultural development work, including the inherent vulnerabilities of programs, centers or organizations. A structure of inherent safety was co-designed by participants to create more determined strategies addressing the varied territory of “failure.” (Garneau & Sethi, coordinators)

Session #4: Community Arts Activism: Cultural Policy, Equity and Social Justice
In this session, artists, community practitioners and interested persons explored critical questions surrounding the field of community arts activism including cultural policy, equity, rights and social justice. Questions such as, whose voice and experiences are valued; who defines the landscape of the field; and what methods and strategies are in place and/or need to be developed were addressed. (Johnson, coordinator)

Session #5: Iron Triangle: “Tell The Story”
This session extended the Iron Triangle group’s "keynote" presentation by providing personal perspectives and stories by community members as part of a dialogue with authors about their texts. A real-time, in-motion project to "tell the story" of our neighborhood — so often told by others — was discussed. (Moss & Simmons, coordinators)

Session #6: Self-Empowerment, Community Cohesion and Strategic Policy
This session investigated the concern that practitioners often address only the symptoms of structural inequities but do little or nothing to address the underlying root causes and do not always fully maximize community assets. While self-empowerment, personal expression or community cohesion and development are important elements of positive social change, these elements gain momentum and strength when linked to strategic policy development. Cross-sector partnerships and the role of the arts as partners, allies and, at times, leaders in policy and systems change work were examined. (deNobriga, Atlas, Takeshita & Mack, coordinators)

While sessions aimed at the areas described, there were some last-minute adaptations in leadership, slight changes in the discussion model and some end products.

Open Space Session
Preplanned work sessions were not scheduled during Tuesday afternoon. In the pursuit of an organic participant-driven agenda, this time period was given over to an informal, unfacilitated Open Space process. Convening attendees wishing to converge around certain topics in small or large discussion groups were asked to post their interests on a community bulletin board or announce their wishes during Tuesday's breakfast and/or lunch.

Community Visits and Youth Presentations

In addition to the keynotes and work sessions the convening attendees were invited to participate in two evening community events and were treated to youth presentations during the lunch breaks. As a result of the Latino Dialogue, funded by the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, participants were hosted to a visit at the Alisal Center for the Fine Arts in nearby Salinas. A grassroots organization aimed at developing the arts in local youth, the taller of painting was a site for attendees to meet and learn about youth in the community. In addition, participants were hosted at a community dinner at the National Steinbeck Center. Here the convening attendees met the local leader in CSUMB’s African American Legacy Project as well as other artists and community practitioners in the region. During the day the youth from the Oakland-based Attitudinal Healing Connection Inc. project presented skits and creative activities following the themes of the gathering. This community interaction was a key element of he Convening as a three-day unfolding of collective thought and narrative aimed at bringing together academics and practitioners to further a critical discourse on community arts. Through the organizing and presenting of the workshops, the informal conversations over meals and the connecting with local community artists, the Convening manifested the next step in a national dialogue on the community arts field.

The Journal

The essays were the foundation for the building of collective groups that produced workshops that, in turn, stimulated the building of new networks. In many respects, the writing process, group self-determination and national and regional dialogues inspired the greatest result of the convening — the desire to share the collective knowledge, story or issues. Each group kept its own documentation and will share on the journal Web site its summary reports and insights as well as its link to the original essays. Through a combination of surveys and dialogue reports, the Community Arts Convening and Research Project will continue to develop a model of this collaborative endeavor.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2009-10, 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: Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ph.D., is director of the Department of Visual and Public Art at California State University Monterey Bay. She is an independent artist and cultural critic. As an author of scholarly articles and a nationally known lecturer on Latino art, she has contributed to the understanding of multiculturalism and the major cultural and demographic shifts in the United States. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Mesa-Bains served as a member of the Editorial Review Board of the 2008 Community Convening and Research Project, and as editor of its publication, Community Arts Perspectives.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2009