The Choices We Have and Our Privilege To Move On

The ability to choose to enter a community, to make art and to leave once a project or session is complete or things get “too hard” is a privilege of the outsider community artist. When working in a community that is different from our own, it is essential to reflect, address and confront our own privilege in order to become conscious and committed to the work and to the community.

This is a personal account of my experiences as a community artist new to the field, working with Baltimore City youth, and how, through reflection on my past decisions and privilege, I came to see that an artist working in a community that is not her own can become more than a temporary helper.

Through an AmeriCorps contract, I co-taught and facilitated an afterschool arts program at Carver Vocational Technical High School with Whitney Frazier, community arts coordinator for Child First Authority, and Desiree Duell, then a Master of Arts in Community Arts candidate from the Maryland Institute College of Art. The young people in the afterschool program, Kids With A Statement, were a group of vivacious and determined adolescents from Baltimore City ranging in age from 13 to 18. Through our program, the youth, the instructors and their audiences collectively investigated themes of social justice, community and the arts to create interactive performances surrounding power and community problem solving.

Students in the afterschool arts program at Baltimore’s Carver Vocational Technical High School make a collaborative painting representing their group: Kids With A Statement. Photo by Laura D. Cohen Click here to enlarge

We all have different reasons for working with community. We want to make change, connect with people, react, inspire, create, empower, learn, understand, teach, grow and make an impact. These hopes revolve around making and following through on choices that affect everyone involved. The ability to enter a community, to make art and to leave once we are finished is something to contend with. An artist coming in from outside has the choice to move on, and that is a choice of privilege and power that can separate artist from community, no matter how compassionate the artist’s intentions or actions.

When I came to Baltimore in September 2007, I found myself in partnership with the public school system through a nonprofit organization. I had taught in rural and suburban settings in the United States as well as in Mexico and within city-based community art centers, but had not had the opportunity to teach youth in an urban environment for any substantial period of time. My mentality at the beginning was one of green altruism. I anticipated that the main challenges would be creating student rapport, building relationships and overcoming cultural, age, gender or racial barriers in order to create an ideal situation for expression and art making. Instead, the personal and professional challenges that arose revolved the basic human health environment of the facility we were working in, and around recognizing my own position of privilege as one working with community.

We knew the Kids With A Statement had certain things to accomplish, despite the conditions of the facility. Our youth deserved and received the opportunities to perform and create networks at museums and at colleges. They deserved to get a foot in the door. Whitney, Desiree, the Carver students and I pushed through the challenges. When it was cold because there was no heating in the auditorium, we wore coats. When rats and mice shredded and ate our materials and food, we bought more. When cockroaches disrupted our class sessions, forcing students to stand on chairs, we removed them and continued the best as we could. When students didn't have change for the bus, we lent them money or drove them home (against policy) because our students didn't feel the buses were safe after dark. Through these obstacles, the Kids With A Statement created astounding artwork and we continued to have sessions, pushing through it. But when one of my participants found human feces in our session space, that's when I stopped pushing through it and started thinking past it.

It was one of those days. Anything that could go wrong did go wrong. Whitney and I arrived for our afterschool KWAS session to find that there had been a shooting in the hallway as well as several trashcan fires. Our students told stories of being barricaded in their classrooms for two hours at the end of the day. No one was hurt, they explained, but they heard the shots and smelled burning trash. Right before arriving at the school that afternoon, a teenage girl was attacked by a group of female gang members in front of the school building. This happened around the same time that my student, Ashley, found human waste (for the second time that school year) in our program space. When we asked the KWAS students how these things were impacting them, the general response was, "Eh, that's the way it is."

As I was driving home that day, I took a closer look at the neighborhood surrounding the school. Adults from the neighborhood were huddled around the school entrance waiting for reporters that would not show up; multiple houses were boarded up or burnt-out on each tree-less city block. It was overwhelming. Everything I had experienced that year came to a head that day. For 45 minutes, I sat in my car in front of my house -- which is located three miles from Carver but may as well be in a different town -- crying and not knowing what to do. It became too much for me at that moment. I felt like I couldn't push through it anymore. I wanted to look past it. The temptation to not return the following year presented itself, along with a flood of guilt for considering leaving my kids. My students experienced terrible things on a daily basis and accepted them as normal because it was normal for them.

At that moment in my professional life I was 22 and in the position of privilege, as an outsider, not to return. I loved and believed in the youth I worked with but at moments of stress, when things got hard, there was the temptation to move on. I knew that upon completing my AmeriCorps term, I could leave the situation. I could work somewhere else, where the facility and atmosphere weren’t so toxic and where my students were not faced with such daily stress and violence; where the environment would support the youth and help them to flourish. I could -- and was privileged to -- make that choice. I did not have to go back to the unheated facility, to the leaking and exposed bathrooms, to mice-eaten supplies or cockroach-covered floors. But my students would still be there. They could not make that choice to leave.

With the end of the school year, I ended my work with the nonprofit organization. I accepted the opportunity to attend graduate school at Maryland Institute College of Art for my Master of Arts in Community Arts degree. I was distracted, guilty and felt I had abandoned my kids. I had started something else, began working with another community through my graduate-school residency. I started working for an organization where I didn’t have to contend with such toxicity, violence or unhealthy temperatures every day. My co-teachers also went on to new things.

Carver eventually renovated the building, transforming the toxic environment into a place where, hopefully, students have their basic needs met and can learn and grow.

With the passing of time, I have had the chance to reflect on this experience and gauge my reactions and coping abilities. I am determined to configure ways to encourage those who are working in communities foreign to their own to stay on and keep going, rather than pushing past it. But the questions are pressing.

How many of us who work with community choose to leave groups of participants, programs and communities when things get tough or when the contract is up? How many of us recognize the privilege we possess to choose to leave or to stay? Will we forever be seen as outsiders who have the privilege to leave and are therefore guaranteed to leave? How can community artists become a consistent and continuing part of creating sustainable programming in communities?

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.

Laura D. Cohen is a community artist, educator and co-director of community arts at Baltimore Clayworks. She has her Master of Art in Community Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a B.S in art education from the University of Vermont. She is a licensed art teacher and has been teaching social-justice-based arts programming in Baltimore City for the past two years through AmeriCorps, Child First Authority and Baltimore Clayworks.

Original CAN/API publication: November 2009