In 1999 just before the New Millennium there emerged two ambitious community-arts umbrella organizations in America involving artists across a broad spectrum of artistic fields, regional bases and political orientations.
One, the Community Arts Network (CAN), was founded by the North Carolina non-profit organization Arts in the Public Interest – itself had come into existence only in 1995 – in conjunction with the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, with funding from various charitable foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The other, Imagining America, Artists and Scholars in Public Life, was initially founded as a partner of the White House Millennium Council and based at the University of Michigan, but in 2001 was turned into a consortium of colleges and universities and is now based at Syracuse University in New York.
Collaborating with other organizations including the Center for the Study of Art & Community already in place based in Washington state, these two new organizations have played visible, active and influential roles in shaping public perception and understanding of community arts.
The following is a selection of interesting, sometimes anecdotal, stories told by community-arts practitioners, found in the online Reading Room of the Community Arts Network. Although far from being a complete history, the selected stories furnish an accessible picture of community arts in the past century.
The first two quotes are stories about the earlier history of community arts, with the first told by Jan Cohen-Cruz, director of Imagining America.
From “An Introduction to Community Art and Activism”, by Jan Cohen-Cruz, February 2002:
“Not all activist community art has been in support of progressive politics. In the first 15 years of the 20th century, the mass pageant, actively re-enforcing the status quo in the face of mass immigration, was the most popular aesthetic form in the U.S. Ostensibly about “civic uplift,” pageants, in historian Linda Nochlin’s view, were grounded as much in an unspoken fear as a “wish to do good for the vast, unprecedented waves of immigrants arriving on our shores.” Pageants frequently depicted immigrants in native costume performing native songs and dances in the first act; they would reappear in “American” garb, singing the national anthem by the end. This was perhaps the first artistic expression in the U.S. of the notorious erasing effect of “melting pot” philosophy.
The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913, by contrast, represented immigrant workers as contributing much more than picturesque and disposable costumes and food traditions. Nochlin theorizes, “In participating in the pageant, they became conscious of their experience as a meaningful force in history and of themselves as self-determining members of a class that shaped history.” Created in the aftermath of a strike for decent working conditions that resulted in numerous workers’ deaths, it represented the battle between labor and the forces of capitalism while helping participants to deal ritually with grief over their slain comrades.
The Harlem Renaissance (1919-1929) was an early context for various models of African-American activist art. According to Patricia Schroeder, Angelina Grimke’s play, “Rachel,” was the “first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda” (107). It did so by appealing to gender similarities, using the theme of motherhood to engage the empathy of white women, too. W.E.B. Du Bois favored the activist strategy of realistic plays depicting positive images of African Americans. He called for an African-American theater “about us, by us, for us and near us.” In contrast, Alain Locke and the Howard Players favored artistic depictions of black folk culture, celebrating African-American cultural richness, without an overt political agenda. Art that celebrates culture and art that reflects oppression continue to be contrasting models of activism.
…In the 1930s, the U.S. experienced its only grassroots amateur movement of workers creating theater for workers. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, U.S. working-class culture propagated during the Great Depression, due to economic and political polarization. The concept of class culture “presupposed that the conflicting economic and political interests between workers and their employers necessitated a different cultural expression by the conflicting classes” (Friedman). Mass recitation, the most popular form, usually “pitted a chorus of workers against a capitalist or a representative of the capitalist class, such as a foreman or policeman.” The aesthetics of this activism was one part agitprop, riling up the audience and directing them towards a particular, propagandistic (i.e., one-sided) agenda, another part communal ritual for the already converted, and a third piece education, sometimes representing activist strategies on stage that workers later tried in their lives.
…El Teatro Campesino was created in the 1960s as an organizing tool to consolidate farmworkers politically. Aesthetically heir to the 19th-century Mexican carpa or tent show, El Teatro exuded the potential for popular performance that favors the underdog to create a vehicle of expression by the powerless. Chicano union organizer Cesar Chavez was aware of the power of humor as a vehicle of critique and mobilization. Not just company director Luis Valdez but the Chicano actors in the company knew those traditions, and thus contributed greatly to “La Causa” of union organizing (Broyles-Gonzales).”
From “Grassroots, Community-based Theater: A View of the Field and Its Context”, by Robert H. Leonard, December 2003:
“A hundred years ago, at the onset of the 20th century, the American audience was sick and tired of the theater fare offered by the commercial producers. New York producers and syndicates had a near monopoly on what toured from the big city out to the nation, and New York agents had a near monopoly on what those 2,000 stock companies produced locally. The bills of fare were mostly made of melodrama, vaudeville and occasional classics as interpreted by tours of the famous performers of the day or by those 2,000 stock companies. While the lure of charismatic personalities attracted Americans and created the star system, audiences at the turn of the last century wanted something else.
In Evanston, Illinois, as if expressing the collective desires of those years, a certain Mrs. Harrison B. Riley organized an informal play-reading club. The club devoted itself to reading plays that the New York syndicates were not producing and agents were not listing. The club members were reading the new plays of the European avant garde — such names as George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen from overseas and then, soon enough, the likes of native-born American Eugene O’Neill. These are the playwrights we now think of as the stalwart guardians of realism. At the time, these were the plays that presented ordinary people caught in the struggle of being human, dreaming of better lives and wondering how society had gotten into such a fix.
Originally known as “Riley’s Circle,” the small group of Evanston women were able to build a nationwide organization called the Drama League of America. It was formed in the spring of 1910, when Mrs. Riley gathered a conference of 165 similar play-reading clubs from communities all across the country. By 1916, the Drama League membership had grown to 16,000 individuals. These people represented a growing audience hungry for a theater that resonated with their own lives, the realities of their own homes and communities.”
The next two quotes are stories on the development of arts programs for persons with health or disability problems.
From “An Introduction to the Arts-for-Health Movement, or How the Arts Sneaked in on the Medical Model”, by Janice Palmer, November 2001:
“What surprised me right from the start was that the arts had a presence in hospitals all across the country. I knew, of course, that WPA murals had been painted in hospitals in the 1930s. But then I learned about the United Hospital Fund of New York’s art-acquisition program, and the astonishing art collections of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, all launched in the 1950s. Hospital Audiences Inc. in New York City was in full swing, placing artists in mental-health centers and escorting nursing-home residents to theatrical productions. Hospital arts programs were being birthed through percent-for-art programs in Seattle and Iowa City. This was an idea whose time was arriving all over the place, and though the public at large had no idea what was going on, the arts-for-health movement was already well underway.”
From “Art Centers for Adults with Disabilities”, by Elias Katz, February 2002:
“Prior to the 1970s, there was one art center for adults with disabilities, which was founded in 1968 by Ms. Wilmer James, a potter, at the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, Los Angeles, Calif. This art center continues to the present.
In 1972, after many discussions of the needs of adults with disabilities for a full-time art program, my wife Florence Ludins-Katz, a painter, and myself, a psychologist, decided to establish such a center. Since we had no models to replicate (we did not learn about the Los Angeles art center until 1975), we designed and implemented a new program, “Creative Growth,” …
…In 1981, we left Creative Growth to write, lecture and establish new art centers. During 1981-1982 we founded and directed Creativity Explored of San Francisco, and Creativity Unlimited of San Jose, and in 1984, the National Institute of Art and Disabilities (NIAD) in Richmond, Calif. These three centers continue to the present.
In 1974, Mary Short (wife of former California State Senator Alan Short) decided to establish an art center for adults with developmental disabilities in Stockton, Calif. She had visited Creative Growth and was impressed by the model. Mrs. Short founded the Alan Short Center in Stockton in 1975. She subsequently founded Short Center-North and Short Center-South, in Sacramento. These art centers continue to the present.
Since the 1980s, more than 25 art centers for people with disabilities were founded in California influenced by the model demonstrated by ourselves, Mrs. Short and others. Similar art centers were started in other states, as well as in Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, (Harima; Nishigaki) and Scotland.”
The next two quotes reminisce community arts during the 1960s’ anti-war and civil-rights era.
From “Dancing in Community: Its Roots in Art”, by Liz Lerman, September 2002:
“In the summer of my 14th year, I danced for President Kennedy at the White House as part of a group from the National Music Camp in Interlochen Michigan. After that, I would describe my life pretty much like this: quitting dance, going to Bennington and meeting Martha Wittman, transferring to Brandeis and jumping into the anti-war movement and guerrilla theater, quitting dance, trying to find my way with Ethel Butler in Washington, D.C. during a failed early marriage, quitting dance (my first husband wanted me to and I tried, I really tried, to quit, that is), teaching at a Quaker boarding school where I first tested my ideas about dance and community (more in another article), and life moved on …”
From “Deeper than Skin or Gender: Community Arts and Cultural Diversity”, by Alice Lovelace, July 2002:
“During my tenure as executive director of Alternate ROOTS, I administered the Community/Artist Partnership Projects (C/APP). The C/APP program exposed me to additional diverse communities and their practices. In Natchez, Mississippi, ROOTS funded a group of visual artists to make their exhibition of African-American art on Main Street visible during the annual Natchez Confederate Days as a way of countering the negative images the event conjured in the minds of visitors. In North Carolina, ROOTS funded a Latino labor organization to use the visual arts as a way to get people involved in helping to define the struggle for labor rights. The community was asked to create symbols of the Latino labor struggle and ultimately to design a logo that would inform and educate the public about their struggle.
My work in the South taught me that while each community is different, there are practices that carry over. That is because the South has played an essential role in the popular struggle for freedom, justice and economic equality. This shared struggle has created its own culture, the culture of struggle. Language and art are modes of communications rooted in this culture. However, because culture can liberate or imprison, we must not be blind pawns of culture. We must recognize that culture is a living entity and we are required to play a role in shaping our own culture.”
The next two quotes recall the active roles of arts in small communities.
From “Dancing From the Heart: Urban-based Community Arts”, by Richard Owen Geer, May 2002:
“Diverse and insular communities breed fundamentally different types of urban arts organizations. In Colquitt, Swamp Gravy partnered with a few organizations and involved a few leading citizens and then acted as a heart, pumping energy and enthusiasm into these existing networks. In Edgewater and Uptown where networks are numerous but very limited in their reach, SMS was forced to become both heart and circulation system. This takes time and is very resource-intensive.
In rural communities, the hot button issue is race, religion or both. Pushing the hot button just enough is how, without being destructive, community performance projects become vital and challenging to their communities. In Edgewater and Uptown the hot button is politics: who shall live where, and how shall the money be spent. For several seasons now, we’ve dealt with this hot-button issue by trying to speak each point of view, by making SMS a place where people encounter their neighbor’s issues. What we’ve learned is symbolized by Shim in this year’s production.”
From “Authentic Passion: An introduction to the arts in rural and small communities”, by Janet Brown, March 2002:
“In reality, the arts flourish in rural and small towns in every form because of committed artists and arts activists who live there. Many of these people don’t think of themselves as artists nor do they think of the arts as some special thing that we should all be talking about. They are motivated by a love for an artform whether it’s music, theater, visual arts or dance that, often times, defies the repressive stigma that modern-day America has put on the arts in more sophisticated institutionalized settings.
In rural communities, people come together to present art for people they know and to support artists they know. It is not uncommon for communities of 5,000 people or less to sponsor arts activities where the entire town is involved, either as performer or audience member. Activities like festivals, talents shows and community celebrations of all kinds feature artists from the community. In the rural Midwest where 4-H is still extremely active, children enter painting, design, sculpture, theater and musical competitions at county fairs and then move up to the state fair. Girl scouts and boy scouts work on those drama, music and art badges year around. What might be perceived as the bygone days of Norman Rockwell paintings are alive and well in many small towns in America today.”
The last three quotes tell stories of how community arts and artists have been adapting to politics in a new era.
From “INROADS: The Intersection of Art & Civic Dialogue”, by Andrea Assaf, Pam Korza and Barbara Schaffer-Bacon, August 2002:
“On the island of Hawaii, residents of the rural region of Kohala deliberated how best to restore a statue of King Kamehameha I, a hero revered as the indigenous unifier of the Hawaiian islands and native son to Kohala. Should the statue be restored to the mainland artist’s original intent of gold and bronze finish, or should it be repainted in life-like colors, thereby continuing a longstanding community tradition? Through the respectful collaboration of conservator Glenn Wharton, the Hawaii Alliance for Arts Education and Kohala community leaders and cultural practitioners such as Raylene Lancaster, a multiplicity of gatherings and activities were designed to engage local residents in the decision-making process. Drawing from both indigenous Hawaiian and Euro-American traditions of community engagement and public discourse, activities included hula ki’i (image dance puppetry), “talk story,” consultation with kapuna (elders), a high-school debate with public forum, and an opinion ballot. Through these activities, larger issues of history, identity, ownership, development, tourism and preservation were raised, and consensus was eventually reached to continue the community’s practice of painting the statue. In this example, the King Kamehameha I statue, a pre-existing work of art, became the focal point for civic dialogue and offered an entry to a larger set of issues; at the same time, art making or cultural practice that was dialogic in structure was utilized to educate, stimulate and engage community participation.”
From “Community Arts and Technology: Confessions of a Quiet Practitioner”, by Joe Lambert, May 2002:
“I remember speaking to fellow community artists about having joined the digital revolution and hearing their responses about how virtual realities were going to replace our connection to real world, and how designing computer interaction was fodder for the Nintendo generation.
It sounded like my parents talking about television.
It sounded like Paleolithic parents talking about their kids staring at a fire.
I couldn’t relate. Computers were a tool; tools can be used for social benefit, or as weapons against communities. Developing a method of progressive practice meant hanging out in the medium and developing one’s schtick for popular dissemination.
More to the point, my fellow community artists argued that computers were the tools for an elite class of users. How could you go into a community of working people with machines that cost $5,000 each and expect to make a sustainable, accessible program? In 1994, that was a real dilemma. One colleague that year called the Internet “the newest form of white flight.” And at the time, I really couldn’t argue. As a poor-theater organizer who once viewed a length of rope and a platform as all the props and set needed for a successful production, I felt a bit ashamed of my indulgence. But underneath my attitude was: Be patient, cost will not always be the principal factor mitigating broad digital literacy.
The emergence of the Web in 1995 changed this dialogue. Suddenly, particularly on college campuses and among the generation entering the workforce at the time, the digital was redefined as the means of revolution. Activists immediately jumped on the Web form as alternative broadcasting, and Sub-Commandante Marcos and the Zapatista movement had dozens of Web sites that emerged overnight to carry clandestine media ventures into the public sphere. The current antiglobalization movement, and many of the arts activists tied to it, traces the roots of their efforts to these early interventions in the Web, as well as e-mail.”
From “Power and Mastery — Negotiations in Community-based Visual Art”, by Neill Bogan, October 2003:
“The dynamic of the “community master” can be found in many locations, as in the vernacular Southern art called yard show. This work has usually started with one complex individual who feels called to deliver a message to her or his neighbors through elaborate outdoor visual creation. This artist figure, certainly in a complex relation of belonging and not-belonging to the community, often recruits others — family members, children and admirers — to complete the work in way that mirrors the process most “professional” or visiting community-based artists use. I regard this work as “community-based” because it involves the marshalling of local resources around an image of power and interest to local people. It is remarkable work because it takes low-cost materials and transforms them. The “outsider” label often attached to these works, is a product of modernist marketing myth, useful largely for breaking them up and moving the bits into galleries to be sold.
…Finally, the situation in New York following 9/11 produced interesting phenomenon of community-based work, though for once there was no real lack of resources, but rather an outpouring of them, due to the fact that all strata and divisions of community were forced to deal with a single issue at one time — the emotional response to the attack and the need to provide symbolic responses. The outpouring of projects has ranged from the most immediately improvised through dozens of grassroots and populist efforts, to the most grandly planned and funded, capped of course by the efforts to memorialize Ground Zero itself. The result has been an encyclopedic set of negotiations and interactions between empowered and disempowered community segments. That the official monument-making process has taken on all the subtlety of a cudgel is only a sign of the return to normalcy of New York City politics, and a diagram of how plentiful resources are engineered into seeming scarcity.”
Although these are only tidbit snapshots of various facets of arts in the community, together they provide a valuable and meaningful glimpse into a century of community arts in evolution and in action.
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