art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

4 art / vision / voice
conventional arts offerings. By the time of unesco’s Intergovernmental
Conference on Cultural Policies in 1970, cultural ministers agreed
that “We must get rid of the idea that culture is a learned and refined
pursuit for a hereditary, moneyed or intellectual aristocracy. Culture
concerns everyone and it is the most essential thing of all, as it is culture
that gives us reason for living, and sometimes for dying.” The notion
of the “town artist” — long-term, resident artists whose work is integral
to community life — and the collective creation of public spectacles
and demonstrations are just two of the ways these realizations have
influenced ccd.
In Africa and the Caribbean, the concept of “negritude,” originated
in the thirties by Martinican poet and statesman Aimé Césaire and
popularized by Senegalese writer and president Leopold Senghor, was
strongly influential in valorizing indigenous African cultures against
imposed colonial cultures, validating traditional knowledge and forms
that had been suppressed by colonial powers in favor of European
ideas and forms. The model of theater for development (dramatic forms
used to convey information needed for social and economic development
and to engage people in considering its application) and the redeployment
of oral traditions—“orature”—to transmit new meanings are just
two of the developments rooted in Afro-Caribbean cultures that
have affected ccd.
Nearly 40 years on, the dust has begun to settle. People have carried
out a great deal of action research, learning through ccd practice what
it was impossible to garner from formal sources: the challenges and
opportunities inherent in community cultural development practice, the
values and aims that unite practitioners into a movement (however
loosely structured), the essential commitments that cannot be breached
without imperiling the work. Decades of experimentation, documentation,
and dialogue now make it possible to say that in its purest forms,
ccd has the following characteristics:
v An artist-organizer (or team) places cultural knowledge and skills at
the service of an identified community, whether of affinity (single
mothers, union members, Latino youth) or geography (the residents
of a particular urban neighborhood or small town). ccd is seen as a
liberating practice, opening the means of cultural expression to
communities often excluded or alienated from conventional art-making
and art world structures; for this reason it is most strongly identified
with communities seeking social inclusion and recognition, not with
those which already have access to social standing and privilege.
Augustin Girard, Cultural Development: Experience
and Policies (Paris: unesco, 1972) 22.
For much more extensive definitional and
descriptive material, consult Adams and
Goldbard, Creative Community: The Art of Cultural
Development (New York: Rockefeller Foundation,
2001), which is based on nearly three decades
of participant-observation in the domestic
ccd movement. The extensive bibliography in
that volume lists many of the formative works
from which these principles are drawn, from
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed to
Augustin Girard’s seminal cultural policy study,
Cultural Development: Experiences and Policies.