Joanna Chin

Sometimes, I like to take a step away from the art itself to ask what art does for society.  In a world that often portrays our field as frivolous or boils our work down to how it can stimulate local economies, it’s a nice exercise to imagine how the thing to which we dedicate our lives actually contributes, and has even more potential to contribute, to bettering the world at large.

Shifting gears a bit, let’s talk about one of the most global issues facing…well, the globe: climate change.  A 2009 report by the Pew Research Center claims that the number of Americans who believe manmade global warming is real has dropped 14 % from 2008.  And, according to a Brookings Institute study, even among Americans who believe that global warming is occurring, there was an 18% decrease in respondents who said they were very confident that this phenomenon was taking place.

Speculation about the reasons behind the climate change movement’s loss of momentum abound.  While some popular hypotheses for its decline include the current economic crisis and the radicalization of the Republican Party in the wake of Obama’s election, one of the most interesting to me was in a Newsweek blog entry suggesting that many Americans are indifferent or unable to comprehend the long-term effects of climate change.  That indifference has emerged more strongly now because it’s much harder to prioritize abstract, far-away problems like climate change when compared to the daily threat of losing one’s job.

In Timothy Williamson’s “Reclaiming the Imagination,” he talks about how imagining future scenarios allows us to prepare for threats, which ensures our basic survival.  On a more sophisticated level, imagination (plus complex statistics and data) allows experts to create decision trees for say, possible strategies for U.S. military action in Afghanistan. To me, the true strength of art isn’t its economic impact or how it helps kids learn in school; it’s the way that it allows us to suspend belief and cultivate this ability to imagine scenarios beyond the confines of our current, individual reality.

Therefore, if one reason for the environmental movement losing ground is an inability to imagine the long-term effects of climate change, then fueling people’s ability to comprehend those consequences is key.  Art is one of the best tools we have to achieve this.  So, artists are uniquely positioned to be instrumental in strengthening Americans’ belief in climate change, which is an essential step to making larger change possible.

Recognizing the contribution that the arts can play in this dialogue, the CoolClimate Art Contest provides a formal opportunity for artists to join the discussion on global climate change.  This online contest encourages artists to explore how climate change is impacting our lives and what can be done to ensure a sustainable future for all of Earth’s inhabitants.  Inspire us to look beyond the current realities and do our part at http://www.coolclimate.deviantart.com/.

How has technology affected the way we interact with one another?
The proponents would say that it has opened up new doors, expanded possibilities. On the other hand, critics would claim that new technology and interconnectivity is negatively distorting the way people socialize.  On occasion, I’ve stopped and wondered whether we make relationships less significant when our primary means of interactivity is a collection of Facebook messages.

Thus, if technology is mutating our relationships, how has it affected our definitions of community?
Already, we see the expansion of communities online that are defined, not by geographic proximity or traditional social groupings, but by participation in chat rooms, tweeting, and wall posts.  The definition of community is morphing from neighborhood gatherings to encompass these web exchanges and, consequently, poses interesting challenges and opportunities for those using art in community development.

John Ewing’s 24/7 Interaction: Brookline – Roxbury, which opened this past Friday, demonstrates that, while technology is changing the way we interact, an inspired artist can harness new methods of communication to not only build community, but build community between geographically defined neighborhoods.

His project transforms two storefronts – one in Coolidge Corner, Brookline and another in Dudley Square, Roxbury – into large video screens, “providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into one another’s worlds” (johnewing.org).  Life-size screen images and AV technology will enable 24/7, real-time communication between residents of the two neighborhoods.

From the project’s website:

The neighborhoods we have chosen to connect are transportation and cultural hubs with rich and intertwined histories. They are only 2.4 miles apart and a city bus runs directly between them, yet very few people from either neighborhood visits the other.

Just as video conferencing technology, Skype, etc. has made it possible to simulate being in the same room as someone across the globe, Ewing’s use of technology all but erases the miles between the two neighborhoods. Furthermore, the video screens’ location on street corners and the combination of planned performance and spontaneity build community between communities by eliminating the physical and social boundaries between the people of Brookline and Roxbury.

How else is technology changing the way arts-based community development is defined and articulated in the work being done? How has technology helped or hindered the field? What other projects out there make use of technology to explore new, developing communities?…interactivity between communities?

*Photos from the Virtual Street Corners website.

Now, I know that as a young professional, I’m supposed to embrace technologies of all kinds and thank the online world for providing 24-hour, instantaneous information. But, sometimes (just sometimes) combing through 29+ pages of  Google search results makes me a little bit nostalgic for the days when the definitive publications on subject W were X, Y, and Z.

That was it.

No thousands of web pages, each containing a kernel of pertinent or significant information. No following trails of links to “x marks the spot” (i.e. that document that’s exactly what you were looking for), only to see the eternally-helpful “Page Not Found!” flash across your computer screen where the jackpot should have been buried.

Alas, those days of old-book smell and the whisper of (paper) pages under fingertips are dwindling and the challenge of finding substantive, legitimate information continues to grow.

Are you ready for slightly-embarrassing confession #2?
As a twenty-something year-old, I have, on occasion (read between the lines:  All. The. Time.), fallen victim to the overwhelming quantity and underwhelming quality of information available online. Like, for example, when I had the brilliant idea of posting a few websites about community arts as my next blog entry. Luckily, my colleagues here in Local Arts Advancement at Americans for the Arts noticed me threatening my computer screen with a 2010 Congressional Arts Handbook and swooped in for the rescue.

As a direct result of their cumlative knowledgebase, here are just some of the websites that  produce excellent resources to aid in contextualizing your arts-based community development work:

http://www.communityarts.net/
I’m pretty confident that most of you use CAN (Community Arts Network) as an online resource. A cornucopia of information – from recent news to studies and statistics—CAN is a fantastic tool for reviewing the basics, as well as keeping up to date with the latest buzz in the field.

http://www.cradlearts.org/index.php
CRADLE (Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education) has a beautiful website  that reinforces their mission to strengthen the expressive life of small and rural communities. An easy-to-navigate selection of publications and links to blogs makes this site a pleasure to peruse.

http://www.philaculture.org/resources/abcd
A good look at how a specific area’s approach to art-based community development connects to the wider field. This site does a great job of giving individual examples of projects and telling their narratives, while also starting to connect those to a simple 4-step plan to getting an initiative started.

http://www.livable.com/livability-resources
Partners for Livable Communities’ Culture Builds Communities initiative really hones in on how cultural strategies serve as an integral part of the economic and social vitality of a community. Their site very clearly outlines the perimeters of the program and, furthermore, links you to some really great “Livability Resources” where specific local projects drive best practices and publications.

http://www.sp2.upenn.edu/SIAP/
The Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) is a research center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice.  SIAP conducts research on the role of arts and culture in American cities with a particular interest in strategies for arts-based revitalization. Their site provides links to policy briefs and papers with a particular emphasis on empirical method to study the links between cultural engagement and community well-being.
Many of the papers listed were done in collaboration with The Reinvestment Fund, so similar resources can also be found at: http://www.trfund.com/resource/creativity.html

http://www.xroadsinstitute.org/
The Crossroads Institute website is one of my favorite sites. Founded in New Orleans, LA, in 2001, Crossroads Institute for Art, Learning & Community works with children, youth and adults throughout the United States to spread knowledge and build capacity regarding the use of the creative arts for learning and social change. Their fantastic online resources include their seminal publication, Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts, diverse media from their model program for at-risk youth in New Orleans, and a library full of lesson plans and administrative forms.

http://communityandculture.com/?p=15
This is a link to Tom Borrup’s Creative Community Builders website where you can find out about the top-notch consulting work that the group does.  However, it also houses his arts-based community development writing, which uses his consulting experiences as an entrée into thinking about field as a whole.

http://www.artsusa.org/information_services/research/institute_community_development/default.asp and
http://www.americansforthearts.org/animatingdemocracy/
And, lastly, how could I give a list of web resources for arts-based community development without including our own, in-house resources? Both the research-based writing from the Institute for Community Development and the publications from Animating Democracy provide useful and diverse thinking about how the arts are being used in the community context.

Are you thinking, wow, that’s a meritorious list, but I can’t believe she completely forgot/might not know about _____?  Got your own invaluable community development in the arts website? Definitely feel free to comment and add to my list.  If nothing else, I and my badly abused computer will thank you for your assistance.

I’m responding to the line after this, “What do you think?” According to many of the “tips” I read in the paper, I believe many of them will continue to stay constant and true – their context will adapt according to the time we are living in. However, I feel it would be highly interesting to bring up the point that it wouldn’t hurt for each of us to help our prospective organizations to develop similar tips for each of our fields that we believe will stay MOST constant and true. Not only will these tips include long and short-term goals – something the green paper emphasized in one tip – but goals that will continue to stay true and relevant in the present and future. More than likely, these tips will develop from comparing there relevance to the past, as well.

The idea of having a concise articulation of grounding philosophical principles or proven, core norms and standards makes a lot of sense to me.  Picking out those things that will stay the most constant and true is a way to provide some foundation around which the work can be centered, while also bringing a sense of continuity to that body of work.  The beautiful thing about Maryo’s “tips” is that she’s drawing from reflections about an experiment started over 40 years ago with which she’s maintained some real connection.  The longer the timeline, the more powerful the distillation of those years of experience becomes.  It’s being able to comment and reflect on a project decades later, a rarity in the community arts field, that makes these tips have such relevancy; it also makes it harder for others to duplicate them with the same long-sightedness.

That said, I think I would add a few disclaimers to this Green Paper.  The first would be to emphasize that these 50 tips were both informed by a very specific project and also intended to think expansively about community development and the arts.  To consider the tips outside of this important context would be like drawing conclusions from a sample comprised of only one respondent.  The fact that these findings were drawn from a single case over many years doesn’t diminish their importance, but it does leave more space for questioning the tips in the context of one’s own community development arts experiment.

Second, I believe that the framing and context of these tips can and will change in the next 50 years.  Community arts development as represented by the Wisconsin project is defined as integrally tied to people and places where people live.  With such a fluid core, this means that, perhaps even more than other arts-related fields, there is no possible way for the work to exist isolated from changing social, political, and economic climates.

Because I thought Ian Moss’s imperatives for the next generation of leaders in his blog entry about the Future of Leadership were both well-articulated and transferable to the community art context, I’m going to use them here to start framing the tips as I see them in the next 50 years. (We’ll see how this goes. I’m never completely sold by my ideas, so if this frame for discussion gets too stagnant, it will be abandoned post-haste.)

Inspired by your comments, Alie, the first frame will be about adaptability and flexibility.  As stated by Ian, “the reason we find ourselves where we are today is because things changed so fast and so completely in a single generation. If those two decades are any guide, the pace of change is not about to let up anytime soon.”  Some questions I’ll be mulling over (and fervently hoping for your thoughts on) are:

What tips presented in the Green Paper reflect this flexibility in the community arts context?  Is there an inherent flexibility to community arts practice?  The creation of tips that stay constant and true are useful how exactly?  Could “big picture” tips pose the danger of encouraging generalization of community work?…of leading towards less individualized approaches to community arts engagement?