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

• We promote human rights and peace
through the arts, seek and nurture
international artistic collaboration and
do not accept contributions from weapons
manufacturers. 1
Now, after Erica Garcia’s presentation, I am
going to have to change historically ignored
communities to recently historically ignored
communities. The students came up with
that term because they really thought that it
described the allocation of resources better than
minority or at-risk, which is another great term.
The last bullet point was a struggle for our board.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with
New Mexico, but our entire economy is based
on weapons manufacturing. All those beautiful
mountains that you saw in Shawna Sunrise’s
video are honeycombed with nuclear weapons.
Our model is based on the following tenets or
pillars: The first is simply representation, changing
and expanding canons, producing work, visual
images, etc. If you look at Luis Jimenez’s work
for the first time, for example—I don’t know how
many of you are familiar with his sculpture—most
art people, the first thing they talk about is the
medium that he uses [painted fiberglass], but
I think the most astounding impression for me
when I saw his work was realizing how accepted
Eurocentric sculptural canons are. It is only
when you see Luis Jimenez’s work or something
similar that you begin to question everything
you have seen and everything you have read
about for your entire life. So, I think representation
is key to transforming the arts. The project
that we worked on that Shawna Sunrise helped
shepherd through the public art funding process
was initiated when we decided to create a
world-class sculpture garden in a very poor and
marginalized neighborhood in Albuquerque.
One asset the neighborhood had was a very
beautiful walkway. The artist, who we were
so lucky to find, was Haitian, Eduard Duval
Carrie. He created the head of the sculpture,
and student artists created the base. What
they did was walk around the neighborhood,
house to house, and ask for a token, an icon, a
representation, and those collected representations
were enfolded in the resin to form the base
of the sculpture. The people in the community
come to see the sculpture and look for their
contributions to it. So, he managed to create
a sculpture that was representative of every
single culture and almost every single family in
the neighborhood. I think that it will stand as a
model for us forever in terms of what we do.
The second pillar of the program is opportunity.
We work with a scaffolding model, where we
bring in directors, actors, and artists from all
over the country and all over the world so
that students have the opportunity to work
repeatedly with successful professionals from
their own backgrounds as well as from other
backgrounds in the United States and from
around the world. What we give artists besides
the opportunity to nurture the next generation
of artists and actors and directors is the
opportunity to work, to have a budget, to have
a theater, to have a support staff, to have a
studio. In turn, they nurture the next generation
of artists so that it becomes a sort of scaffolding
concept. The older artists in the program then
nurture the middle-school students coming up.
One of the important aspects of this is the concept
of footsteps. Saying “you can be anything
you want to be” is often a meaningless cliché.
When you have footsteps carefully planted by
someone who grew up in circumstances similar
to your own, the cliché becomes a possibility.
People who are nationally and internationally
successful can get you into good schools, can
cast you, can hire you, and I think that kind
of mentoring is a critical component of a successful
leadership-development program. We
have established internships for our students at
places like the Santa Fe Opera, the Tamarind
Lithography Institute, as well as in other countries.
We have had students go to Nicaragua,
Thailand, Mexico, Brazil. We do this so that
students from the communities we work with
have the same access to the global market and
the global community that more affluent young
people generally have and take for granted.
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