art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

100 art / vision / voice
educational system often makes them wary of new offers for participation.
In several of the cases, it is clear that these past histories, and the
accompanying deep sense of disenfranchisement, have been a silent
aspect of the misunderstandings and misconnections that arise
within the partnerships.
When these cases reveal successes, the lesson is often that both
process and product are equally important in community-based art
making. A reciprocal process that results in work based on collaborative
narratives brings together the expertise of the artist with the voice of
the community. It requires authentic community participation with
the ultimate goal of animating the issues, needs, and assets of that
community. The products of this process will also reflect the vision of
the artist, whose aesthetic must complement the aesthetics inherent in
the community—based in local cultures, histories, and practices.
To better understand communities different from our own, other
models of cultural understanding must be applied. In the Reciprocal
University of the Arts Project at csumb, the cultural citizenship model
has been useful in working with the histories of immigrant groups.
Cultural citizenship is, as defined by csumb faculty member Rita
Benjamin, “the ways in which people organize their values, their beliefs
about their rights and their practices based on their sense of cultural
belonging rather than their formal status as citizens of a nation”
Particularly important are the struggles for space and cultural rights
that shape community identity and connect to an understanding of
artistic responsibility and problem solving that focuses on social
justice and enhancing the role of the arts.
The cap institutions have learned that the need to better prepare
faculty and students to work in settings unfamiliar to them and to
better understand issues of social justice is inherent in cultural work
across communities. Social justice is understood as the distribution
of resources to meet the needs of all members to be physically and
psychologically safe and secure. In a social justice model, individuals are
both self-determining and able to interact democratically with others.
Students working in communities which have struggled for their rights
must be prepared to reflect on issues of power—how the community
senses its potential, where actual power lies, and the nature of social
responsibility toward others. In a curriculum that prepares students to
work with respect for community knowledge, justice is a primary value
of political life and in the spaces where people live together. Social
justice education is:
Student-centered Collaborative
Experiential Intellectual
Analytical Multicultural
Value-based Activist
Rita Benmayor, “Narrating Cultural Citizenship:
Oral Histories and First Generation Latino and
Latina Students,” New Pedagogies for Social Change,
special issue of Social Justice Journal (2003).
Benmayor is on the faculty of the csumb
Institute for Human Communications.