All Over the Map: The Top 20 Stories on the Community Arts Network, 2009

As in every other measure of 2009, the economy jumps to the top of the list of what CAN readers cared deeply about last year. They chose CAN’s essays about jobs for artists, the creative economy, capitalism and funding for cultural projects over most other topics. But they also cared about childbirth, teaching and education, public health, documentation, criminal justice, rural and urban cultures, international crisis, spirituality and much more.

Glancing at a list of the 20 most-read CAN stories for 2009, another thing to notice is its geographical diversity. There are stories about community arts in Little Rock, San Francisco, Canada, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Charleston, S.C., rural California, Israel, Milwaukee, Bowling Green, Los Angeles and Baltimore.

Also notice that these essays were created by a diverse slate of writers from many perspectives — veteran artists and cultural critics like Liz Lerman and Arlene Goldbard and beginners like April Gentry-Sutterfield and Anusha Venkataraman as well as a public servants like Maria X. Martinez, deputy director of the San Francisco Health Department's Community Programs, and public-health educator/artist John Sullivan.

Below we present an annotated list of the Top 20 (acknowledging that essays published late in the year may have many more readers to come). Note that many of these essays are followed by online comments from readers, and six of them are from Community Arts Perspectives: A Publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, co-published for the second year in a row by CAN and Maryland Institute College of Art.

Here’s the Top 20 list for 2009

1. A Proposed Job Swap To Save American Capitalism
By Liz Lerman
Coming in first with just under 6,000 readers was choreographer and MacArthur Award-winner Liz Lerman. In her opinion piece, Lerman asks: Do Wall Street executives deserve big bonuses during hard times? Does increased arts funding have a place in an economic stimulus package? She lists the qualities in artists' resumes that make them the perfect hire for getting the economy back on solid footing, including their demonstrated willingness to work ridiculous hours for no pay and keep working until they get the job done right; their utter inexperience with bonuses; their lack of need for financial incentives and their willingness to work on a project because they love and believe in it; and their ability to work on a tight budget and work well with others. As for what Wall Street executives would gain from working as artists? Read on… [LINK]

2. The New New Deal, Part 2 - A New WPA for Artists: How and Why
By Arlene Goldbard
The second in a series of essays by Goldbard (the first part, in 2008, got just as many readers), this one crafts a new WPA for artists, including a budget. Her plan’s elements include Communities Creating Culture, supporting partnerships between communities and experienced cultural development practitioners; Enlivening Public Institutions, supporting teaching artists and others working in social institutions; an ArtistsCorps modeled on AmeriCorps, with significant training components; a National Story Archive aimed at cultural preservation; and Community Cultural Development Centers in neighborhoods nationwide. The whole program has a price tag of $5 billion, a sum equal to two weeks’ worth of Iraq War costs at that time (January). [LINK]

3. The Creative Economy: Views from Abroad
By Tom Borrup
Arts leader Borrup, now a community-transformation consultant, reports from the November 2008 Creative Clusters international conference in Glasgow, and adds some thoughts on what community-based art can bring to the table. "Ingredients I believe are central to the Creative Economy equation," says Borrup, "include the role of artists, respect for indigenous/multiple cultures and equity (both economic and cultural). Unfortunately, they are not always present in the mix." He compares frameworks for creative industries in the European Union and the U.S., reviews what are thought to be core fields and best practices, and analyzes the "mixed bag of models" presented at the conference by practitioners from Croatia, England, Scotland, Denmark, New Zealand, Jamaica, Singapore, Mauritius and Sweden. "The Creative Economy at its best, I found," says Borrup, "is about communities taking responsibility for their condition and creating meaningful work and a viable economy with the most powerful resources at their disposal." [LINK]

4. Giving “Birth” in Little Rock
By April Gentry-Sutterfield
Gentry-Sutterfield, “a mom and free-lance theatre practitioner and teaching artist” writes about the impact of a national childbirth campaign on her town, Little Rock, Arkansas. Gentry-Sutterfield attends a local production of the nationally touring project "Birth: The Play," written by Karen Brody and based on Brody’s interviews with more than 100 American women about their low-risk experiences of giving birth. Since its initial staged reading in 2004, the play has been produced with local casts more than 100 times across the U.S., and spawned BOLD, a national movement to educate women to make informed birthing choices within a system friendly to their needs and wants. Brody once lived in Little Rock, and she couldn't understand why so many of her peers, educated women with low-risk pregnancies, were treated as high-risk cases in the hospital delivery room. Then she realized that Little Rock serves as home for a teaching hospital that specializes in high-risk births, and its procedures were engendering a climate of fear around childbirth. Gentry-Sutterfield interviews the local cast of "Birth" and finds common ground. [LINK]

5. Book Review - Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame
By Anusha Venkataraman
Reviewing a new book by artist Beverly Naidus, "Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame" from New Village Press, Pratt grad student Anusha Venkataraman calls it "just the sort of book that reassures socially engaged educators that they are not alone." Naidus focuses on her work in higher education, currently at the University of Washington in Tacoma. She delves into the historical movements and thinkers that influenced her socially engaged artistic practice, and describes, says Venkataraman, what they all have in common: "...that they advocate, implicitly or explicitly, a politics of pedagogy that fundamentally shifts the power dynamics between student and teacher, haves and have-nots, oppressor and oppressed." She also notes that the author addresses critical questions that the engaged educator faces in his or her endeavors, and presents examples of her students' work. [LINK]

6. Promoting Social Justice with San Francisco's Most Creative Capital
By Maria X. Martinez
In this article arguing for art for social justice, Maria X. Martinez, deputy director of Community Programs for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, takes a brief look at the way artists in San Francisco "not only document social change; they promote, inform and shape it." Arguing for more policy support, Martinez notes artist-driven campaigns to end youth violence in the Mission District; fight evictions in Manilatown and Chinatown; cross the great divide between predominately white feminists and women of color; defeat censorship and found the S.F. gay political movement; educate about pesticides in farmwork; fight the death penalty; and more. Says Martinez: "...art is the intellectual underpinning of social change; nowhere is there more potential and more need for art than here and now." [LINK]

7. The Long, Hot Summer of Service: Community Artists on The Job
By Arlene Goldbard
Goldbard makes the Top Ten again with an up-to-the-minute story about national service initiatives that were making headlines last summer, generating new hopes for community arts jobs. She details the opportunities embedded in President Obama's United We Serve campaign, and the groundbreaking text that's included in the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009 that lists socially engaged artwork as one of the activities eligible for the pilot Social Innovation Fund. Goldbard discusses volunteer programs, service corps programs and other job training and employment initiatives being piloted around the country. A few examples are highlighted in each section. [LINK]

8. Social Imagination: Documenting Engagement in Canada
By Linda Frye Burnham
This multimedia offering features a collection of videos from Canada, “Documenting Engagement: A Community Arts Media Institute.” Documenting Engagement, (a project of the Pacific Cinémathèque and others) brought together nine mid-career artists from across Canada to examine the practice of community-based arts and the potential of digital video as a means of documenting the aesthetics of engagement inherent in their work. During the three-week residency, the community-based artists worked with senior artists and producers to assemble their own footage into summary shorts. Seven of the videos are embedded in the CAN article, in English and French, along with lessons gleaned from them. [LINK]

9. Silk Road Theatre Project's Alternative Cultural Education
By Carol Ng-He
Chicago interdisciplinary artist Carol Ng-He teaches in "Myths to Drama," an interdisciplinary arts-integration program in the Chicago Public Schools created by Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury of Chicago's Silk Road Theatre Project. Gillani and Khoury — of Syrian and Pakistani ancestry — devised the program "as a creative response to the attacks of September 11, 2001," says Ng-He, and "to counter the negative representation of and sentiments toward Muslim and Middle Eastern people." They founded the theater company to showcase works by playwrights of not only those backgrounds but also from a larger geographical area visualized as the Silk Road, a network of trade routes across the Asian continent connecting China, Asia and the Mediterranean world. They hope to engender a multicultural discourse addressing issues faced by the peoples along the Silk Road, their descendants and those in the diaspora who reside in North America. Ng-He interviews Gillani about their school program and also describes her own "Myths to Drama" class exploring ancient China with fifth-grade Chicago students. [LINK]

10. The Eye & Tooth Project: Confronting Capital Punishment in Texas
By John Sullivan
Activist artist John Sullivan, recounts an experience in legislative theater. Sullivan is a public-health educator who uses Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed strategies in collaborative environmental-justice projects. He co-directs the Eye & Tooth Project, a series of interactive performances and workshops that bring personal stories to the debate over the death penalty in Texas, where most U.S. executions now take place. Recently, Eye & Tooth initiated a "rolling forum” of performances that would visit major Texas cities to support an abolition agenda during the 2009 session of the Texas Legislature. Here Sullivan documents E&T's use of Suzanne Lacy’s “Stages of Community Art” structure to develop the project. Participants included UT theater students, members of MEChA, experienced TO actors and the sister of a Texas death row inmate. The project also aimed to educate actors and audience to sign abolition and urgent action petitions and to support an annual “Lobby Day” at the Texas State Capital. Sullivan says the project "sought continuity between the performance — an activation process that predisposes an audience to go out and do something active — and the legislative process that was happening, almost literally, right across the street." [LINK]

11. Restorative Justice and Visual Restoration in Philadelphia
By Robyn Buseman
A criminal-justice specialist talks about the theory behind the mural arts program she directs in the inner city. [LINK]

12. Exchanging Gifts in Charleston, South Carolina
By Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
A Charleston critic looks at a local/global community arts project: The Future Is on the Table. [LINK]

13. Good Work: Ethics and Community Cultural Development with Children and Youth
By Stephani Etheridge Woodson
"Good work" in community cultural development, says an ASU theater professor, requires competence, justice/fairness, respect and shared authority & authorship. [LINK]

14. Signs of Welcome, Signs of the Possible: Public Practice in Rural California
By Emily Roehl
Mills grad student Roehl writes on Suzanne Lacy's Public Practice students working with residents of a small California town to create Laton Live! REUNION / REUNION. [LINK]

15. Cannons and Muses: Art in Real-time Crisis
By Moran Been-noon
An Israeli-born artist reports on an international collaboration that began in Israel when two art students organized an "urgent conference" during the 2009 Gaza war. [LINK]

16. Do It Yourself: Producing Performance Art on Election Day
By Pegi Taylor
Public artist Taylor writes about artists who organized site-specific performances at polling places in Milwaukee, Nov. 4, 2008. [LINK]

17. The Art and Craft of Integrating “Social Justice Ally” Curriculum into Service-Learning
By Kate Collins
Bowling Green (Ohio) State U. theater scholar Collins gets at the central problem of teaching community-based art practice to university students in the real world: privilege. [LINK]
 
18. Enlightenment Through Collaboration
By Brett Cook
A collaborative project in South Central Los Angeles could make you believe in magic. [LINK]

19. The Art of Discussion: Defining Community Art Methodology
By Rebecca Yenawine
The founder of Baltimore’s Kids on the Hill presents six strategies for success in making community art that addresses social issues. [LINK]

20. Creating a Monster: Capitalism in the Community Arts Classroom
By Brandi Rose
Chicago grad student Brandi Rose says her fellow students are learning the ins & outs of funding for nonprofits, but some young innovators are turning away from that model. [LINK]

Original CAN/API publication: January 2010