art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

La Resolana
cap Directors Share Stories of Partnership
Amalia Mesa-Bains
voices
Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Co-director of the Reciprocal University for the
Arts Project and Head of the Department of Visual and Public Art at
California State University, Monterey Bay
Carmel Avegnon Sanders, former Assitant Director of the Center for
Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago, where she
was also on the faculty
Ken Krafchek, Director of the Master of Arts in Community Arts program
at Maryland Institute College of Art and former Director of cap at mica
Marina Gutierrez, Director of Cooper Union’s Saturday Program and
Co-director of its Saturday Outreach Program
Ron Bechet, Chair and Associate Professor, Xavier University of
New Orleans Department of Art and Director of Xavier’s cap program
introduction
conclusion: la resolana 95
The development of this casebook arose out of a genuine desire on the part
of the art schools and universities participating in the cap consortium to
understand what we had achieved. We hoped both to develop documentation
of our work with community partners and to disseminate information
regarding our successful partnerships and the strategies that brought
them about. Many of us in the field of higher education are ourselves
artists who have worked in communities and wanted to document the
connections and common knowledge that has been developed by the
partnerships we have created. The aspect of the consortium brought a
natural collective sense to the work we were doing.
Many of our communities are enriched by traditions of storytelling.
The African griots are tellers of oral histories, and their practice of call and
response is a way of sharing information within the community. In the
Latino community corridos (history songs) and la resolana are forms of
storytelling which perpetuate the sharing of community knowledge. The
term la resolana refers to a tradition in New Mexican villages, where elderly
men and women spend their afternoons seated against sunny walls,
swapping yarns, telling jokes, and discussing all sorts of serious matters.
Tomas Atencio, the New Mexican scholar, concludes that la resolana serves
as the communication center for traditional villages. Young people who
drop by to listen absorb both cultural history and life lessons. The value