The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

I think that it is very important to have access for
transformation as well as alternative routes for
transformation. The tension between both—as
well as the collaboration between both—is
absolutely critical for continuing to create and
sustain new visions of art. I also believe it is
critically important because I am old enough
to remember, as a young woman growing
up, as a girl growing up, my mother telling me
that I could be anything I wanted to be. But
when I looked around, I didn’t see anybody I
wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a housewife
and I didn’t want to be a teacher and I didn’t
want to be a secretary and I didn’t want to be
a nurse. That was about all I saw. I remember
that I was in college when I discovered Doris
Lessing and Simone De Bouvier. That was the
first time—at 20 years old—that I found out
there were women engaged with the world
and impacting the world. The reason I think it
is so important that everyone and every community
be represented as widely as possible is
that it helps all of us better understand our own
identity. It also helps us expand our concept
of who we are as a people and as a nation.
If we keep everyone who isn’t Anglo or middle
class or whatever dominant-status-quo criterion
on the margins, it deprives all of us. This is not
about depriving a segment of the population
that may get their entertainment or their arts
on the edges. It deprives all of us. I believe
it also deprives our country, and I think it is
directly responsible or correlated with some of
the social problems that we wring our hands
over, like school dropouts, gang affiliation,
drug use, etc. If you are not represented, if
you are not visible, or if your visibility is reflected
through a very narrow lens so that you are
only visible as a gang banger on TV or a drug
dealer or a housewife or a goofy whatever,
then it is very hard to aspire and dream and
imagine a different reality for yourself.
At Working Classroom, after struggling for a long
time with these issues, we decided to make a
statement and put it in writing so that we would
all be held accountable. We did this because I
think that accountability is one of the things we
haven’t talked about a lot. After 35 years, we
can’t keep just discussing an issue. We have to
make a decision, put it in writing, and do it. It is
about hiring people and investing in their future.
I think that, unfortunately, a lack of diversity in
the arts isn’t only true in New Mexico. Working
Classroom’s artistic director is Mexican, and she
is in her 20s. Last year, she attended a Theatre
Communications Group training at Princeton.
The training was for emerging artistic directors
(meaning young), and there were only two people
of color at the session. This was very disheartening
for me because I would like to think that it
is something that was true for my generation but
has changed or is changing; it is very depressing
to see how little the picture has changed.
Before I try to describe how we try to
achieve our model, I want to read
our core values statement:
We believe the arts both mirror who we are
as a nation and help us interpret where we
are headed and what we want to become.
As long as some communities are invisible or
underrepresented, the reflection is distorted
and the conversation incomplete.
Working Classroom prepares students to
contribute to a more nuanced definition of
our collective identity.
To this end . . .
• We recruit the majority of our students,
board, staff and instructors from what
we call “historically ignored communities”;
• We nurture students' ability to work in
their native languages;
• We utilize formal and informal education
to prepare students for professional
success;
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