Getting It Wrong: How We Fail and What We Learn

The project is up and running. Things are going beautifully: You’ve conducted research and planned community engagement and considered multiple points of view. You’ve analyzed racial, cultural, economic, religious and gender structures. You’ve included the voices of important constituencies.

And then it all comes crashing down: You’ve been called out. Someone finds a heterosexist assumption in the paper. A major community partner drops out. Someone sees racist imagery in the performance. The lead faculty member drops the ball. Someone calls the project leader a colonizer. No one shows up to the event.

Anonymously Reported Case #1

One element that’s made community-based arts projects I’ve been involved with consistently go awry is setting the end goal of art/performance at the beginning of the project. In one (terrible) case, working with a vulnerable population from the community, the pressure of performing with the limited time for adequate preparation actually caused harm to one individual. In another instance, the goal of creating a performance drove the entire process, driving out any opportunity for innovation and entrepreneurship.

This paper will shine a light on failures in community cultural development work. The authors wish to examine what we see as a great reluctance to expose the inherent vulnerabilities of a program, center or organization. Community arts is a broad and varied field, and those that work within its framework are significantly less likely to address where their projects failed than where their projects succeeded.[1] While this can be said of numerous professions, the risks of exposing and discussing failure are greater within the community arts arena because of the varied constituencies to whom the practitioner is accountable, including community participants, fellow professionals, funders, governmental/institutional officials and the larger community. Furthermore, acknowledging and openly discussing the ways in which a project did not succeed and being able to identify the particular qualities of that failure allows us to reflect on what practices to avoid and how to contend more ably with a certain set of circumstances.

Anonymously Reported Case #2

Two years after my city was nearly destroyed by a natural disaster, I was hired to run a community arts program for an organization that was trying to rebuild a devastated neighborhood through the arts. The project was the brainchild of two nationally prominent local artists, but they essentially outsourced their project to my employer. Somehow their vision for the project was never fully communicated to me or to my employer, so in the absence of direction we created a program.

Midway through, a lot of dissatisfaction emerged because we were not running the program the way it had been envisioned. So there were midstream revisions, and at the time this interference felt like a violation. I have never been able to talk about this project because in the aftermath of terrible disaster there were so many issues around community voice and representation—who gets to speak for traumatized communities? This tension was also inside the project: Who gets to evaluate it as a success or a failure? The folks who initiated the project were representing a very specific community, but the people who were implementing the ideas had a different experience. There were so many unmet needs in that neighborhood that it was really difficult for us to only address the ones that the artists identified at the beginning.

Image from a “Getting It Wrong” workshop with community art practitioners. Photo by Nicole Garneau Click here to enlarge

In examining the concept of failure with the context of community arts there lies a series of essential questions to be addressed. What is the function of this dread of exposing weakness to community partners? What are the pressures and problems of being continually self-congratulatory? How can we learn from the projects that were “mostly successful” yet contained some element of failure that may be known only to a select few? How might exposing these weaknesses and failures affect reputations and funding? In what ways can we accurately and explicitly address our failures without fear of recrimination or associations that come with that type of disclosure? If we are to look at community cultural development projects in a corporeal manner, is there a more expansive yet explicit manner in which failure can be addressed?

Anonymously Reported Case #3

I'm a puppeteer and have been working for the past year for a grassroots organizing group. The original idea was to help them integrate arts into their organizing work. Shortly into my term at the organization, I pointed out that I was not comfortable making unilateral decisions about where art should be and how it should be integrated (particularly because their constituency is low-income African Americans and I am middle-class and white) and I wanted to develop a group of their constituents to serve as a committee that would help integrate arts and culture into the organization.

The organization agreed that was a good idea and developed a vision for what they wanted this committee to do. I did manage to get three dedicated committee members and we started meeting every month or so to talk about possible projects for [the organization]. Scheduling meetings became so difficult that the work of exploring all those things was limited. We organized an interactive display for a large event involving activities to divulge popular history and elicit current popular victories. But the organizers did not seem to want our help except for making signs for protests.

Eventually, [the organization] had an internal upheaval as they found they were having trouble expanding their membership and were short the funding they needed—and I got laid off. Around the same time the committee had organized a series of workshops to expand our knowledge and to offer to the wider membership. The turnout was so low for the first two that we canceled the last one. Shortly after, the committee unofficially disbanded.

It seems at times that there are two different kinds of failure within community arts practice. The more discussed is the type of failure that has an explicit sense of redemption to it, the type of failure where one is still able to make something out of it. We could call this the silver-lining failure, where something ended up making the experience/project have a sense of tangible value in the end. For example: “The concert was cancelled and some members were furious but we got a group of us together and had a potluck and a meaningful conversation and came to a greater sense of understanding our differences.”

What do we call it when plans go awry and there is no sense of tangible success; there is no potluck and meaningful conversation at the end? There is an argument to say that nothing should be called a failure and that doing so is demeaning to the process and spirit of cultural practice. However we still maintain metrics for determining the relative success of a particular event or project. These metrics can take many forms: Did the mural get finished on time? Did people feel good about the project? Did the project receive continued funding? Did we expand our audience? Did the community want to do the project again? What if the answer to all of these questions is a resounding “No”? We could call this type of failure abysmal failure. This is the type of failure that is much harder to speak about, the type of failure harder to explain to funders, to community participants and to one’s peers.

Anonymously Reported Case #4

Ten years ago I was working with a group of youth artists as part of an organization dedicated to social change in a mid-sized American city. We had created a program design that was based in the ideology that political efficacy could only be achieved when politically engaged artistic projects took the lead from the activists and organizers who were “experts” in the particular issue at hand. In this way, we thought we were avoiding the problem of politically engaged artistic work being created in isolation from actual movements, and therefore of no use to those particular movements. But what ended up happening was that the youth rebelled against this structure, calling the professional organizers “Big Bosses.” We realized that we had failed to engage the youth artists in political education that would allow them to have their own frame of reference for the particular issues. We actually ended up creating the extreme opposite of the dynamic we were trying to avoid—but in fact this opposite was also politically ineffective.

Over the years I have come to think that the best politically charged art/propaganda is created in an environment in which the artists truly understand the issues—not one in which the artists are seen as only in service to political movements directed by “expert” organizers. This experience has shaped the rest of my work in the ten years since, spurring me to consistently work toward a model that values peer education, process and feedback.

Sometimes, however, it is difficult to see the ways in which unsuccessful projects can “spur” future projects as correctives to past failures. Take for example…

Anonymously Reported Case #5

I think I would file this under “public learning moments”—you know, those times when everything blows up and it happens in front of hundreds of people. In our case, we were organizing a large annual convening of artists and activists. In the planning process, we learned that at the same time as our festival was to occur, there would also be a large Native American Pow-Wow happening. We saw this as an opportunity to engage Native American/indigenous theater artists in our festival and partner with the Pow-Wow organizers to create some cross-pollinating programming.

The programming committee decided to present the Native American/indigenous theater companies in the same space that the Pow-Wow was being held. They thought that this would further community collaboration and allow the Native American theater artists exposure to a large Native American audience. But Pow-Wows are often held in large sporting arenas, and this one was too. So the theater artists showed up at the appointed time to perform within the context of the Pow-Wow, but what they encountered was not the conditions under which their theatrical work could be presented in its best light: They were being asked to perform in a large arena full of tables, booths, people chatting and fluorescent lighting—a gym. The space allowed for none of the conventions of theater (lights, sound, silent audience attention and a set start time).

At the festival’s closing event, the Native American artists raised a vocal protest to the conditions under which they had been asked to perform, contrasting them with the lovely performance conditions of other non-Native companies. They let the gathered crowd of 250 people know that they felt disrespected and that the setup had served their art poorly. We, the festival organizing staff, were publicly taken to task. We had to figure out—on the spot—how to respond respectfully and productively within the context of a large public event. Of course, there were many conversations that came after, and the lessons learned were integrated into future programming. But at the time it felt like a train wreck!

We can liken these failings in community-based practice to the experience of falling. Acrobats talk of falling as both something they accept and prepare for:

The first thing to know about falling is that everyone is going to fall—there is no avoiding it. There are different ways to fall depending on what direction you are going in: For example, when we are falling backward, the first thing many of us want to do is to catch ourselves with our hands. This can easily result in broken arms and wrists, and dislocated shoulders (and often does). This is where training comes in: We have to practice fighting the impulse to catch ourselves with our hands and arms. Training in falling helps us to practice taking the impact with our rear ends and consciously pulling the arms forward, where they can actually help our bodies go into a rolling shape.[2]

Image from a “Getting It Wrong” workshop with community art practitioners. Photo by Nicole Garneau Click here to enlarge

This element of training seems key. These acrobats do not aspire to fall; they are not saying that falling is a something they pride themselves on doing, but they accept the inevitability of it, prepare for it, and by doing so are able to fall gracefully. Within the context of an acrobat’s training they receive the knowledge of how to do their routines with finesse and poise and, just as critical, receive knowledge about how to fall. Within the discussion of this paper this lends us to ask: Are we able to define and thereby teach ways of falling within the field of community arts practice? The acrobat quoted speaks about her body going “into a rolling shape”; what then is our version of a rolling shape? What specific vocabulary do we need to describe the best (and safest) way to approach a failed or failing project? What specific strategies and tactics can we put in place to allow our projects to fail gracefully, ensuring the best possible outcome for community participants and ourselves?

The research and writing of this paper led to the creation of two separate expansive conversations where these failures, both on the micro and macro level, were candidly discussed. In April 2009, we convened a group in Monterrey Bay at the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, and in October 2009 we gathered with colleagues in New Orleans at the annual meeting of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. We used these convenings as points of departure to cultivate larger conversations. We are working toward creating a structure of inherent safety where individuals can, without fear, share and listen to these failures in order to create more determined strategies that can be used to explicitly address the varied territory of failure. Helpful within this discussion is an examination of previously solicited case histories, the correlation of these problems with those in other fields including medicine, and an avoidance of self-pitying self-aggrandizement. Brave and honest conversations about failure are an untapped resource. Our vision is to create an open-sourced framework within which individuals, groups, and communities can be supported in repairing projects gone wrong within their own arenas.

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.

Nicole Garneau is associate director of community partnerships in the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago. She also teaches in Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago and in Women & Gender Studies at DePaul University. Nicole is a practicing performance artist based in Chicago.

Sanjit Sethi is co-director for the Center for Art and Public Life and Barclay Simpson Chair of Community Arts at California College of the Arts, Oakland.  His own work consistently deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, memory and movement in the urban sphere—all of which involve various disparate social and geographic communities.