art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

I was born in New York in 1949 and grew up
on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As a teenager,
I attended the city’s High School of Music &
Art. Growing up in the city, my earliest
memories include walking to school through
Harlem during the 1964 riots and
participating in demonstrations against the
war in Vietnam. A few years after graduating
from high school, I moved to the Lower East
Side and became involved in community arts
projects that had their roots in federal
poverty programs and the teacher’s strike in
the ’60s. Many of us were affected by what
was going on politically and socially across the
country. We were searching for ways to connect
arts to activism and larger grassroots
movements for change. Even though I came
from a Japanese American family, where I was
taught to be obedient and docile, I wholeheartedly
embraced the ’60s counterculture,
which encouraged people to look at social
institutions and to question everything from
personal and sexual relationships, to the ways
children are taught in schools and the lack of
health care for poor and working people.
My decision to work in the community was
driven largely by economic and social
conditions, but other artists were inspired by
the political art coming out of countries like
Cuba and China. Even so, there weren’t any
guidelines or models to work from in those
days. There was a feeling of being in uncharted
territory. We felt like part of a huge
movement, but in reality, many groups were
divided along racial and class lines. We were
fairly isolated and the neighborhood you lived
and worked in shaped your perspective on the
commentary, analysis, response 123
Response from an Artist: Reflections on nyc cap
and a Career in Community Art
Tomie Arai
world. Geography defined community, which
took on a much more local meaning. The
information network wasn’t the same as it is
now, in the age of the Internet.
Artists working in the community were not
viewed as making real art. The art world
dismissed community art as second class, and
considered it “ghetto art” because it was created
for urban neighborhoods. Making
community art meant going against the
grain and finding other people with similar
feelings about working outside the
mainstream or looking outside existing
institutions and making new connections on
your own. A lot of people I worked with were
artists of color or artists whose work
addressed social and political themes that
were unpopular in the art world. Finding
alternative audiences and forms of validation
motivated artists to move outside traditional
mainstream venues and discover other ways to
make art. The community was the place to go.
Much of this history has been erased or
lost. Cities are huge sources of cultural
energy; even people who have been doing
interesting projects in urban communities for
decades are probably unaware of what
happened 20, 30 years ago on the Lower East
Side. I am pleased that people are now taking
an interest in the community arts
movements of the ’60s and ’70s. The work
that was created by huge numbers of people
during that time is virtually gone and exists
only in the memories of the people who
participated. It’s important to document those
efforts and preserve that legacy.