art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

It’s interesting to see that people who were
previously very sympathetic to community art
movements are now the gatekeepers of
foundations and philanthropic institutions and
hold positions of power. As the gatekeepers,
they are able to channel money into areas
they’re interested in. (The Ford Foundation is
a good example of this.) But it seems like
funding for community programs is still a
concession to community pressure, a few
crumbs being thrown out in the face of huge
demands for change.
I have mixed feelings about the current
trend to transform community arts into an
academic field. We do need to encourage
artists to work in the community, but the
institutionalization of community arts troubles
me. If you’re working with school children or
teenagers—and so much community art is
made by youth—there are so many issues of
censorship to contend with. Dean Robert
Rindler, quoted in the Cooper Union case study,
referred to the “renegade aspect” of Cooper’s
Saturday Program, describing it as a program
based on critique, which challenged the
institutional relationship between authority
and responsibility.
I believe the roots of community art have
always been and remain marginal and renegade.
It’s art created outside the mainstream and for
that reason there’s a built-in subversive or radical
element to it. When you institutionalize it, you
control the process of how it’s made, and who
it’s made for, so it’s made less threatening.
You extinguish the potentially radical
possibilities when you contain it. In a school
situation, I can understand why you might want
to maintain control (especially when it comes to
sexual content), but the institutionalizing of
community art in schools—in an atmosphere
where there are a lot of limitations imposed
on the participants—neutralizes the work
because it has to appeal to everybody and
commentary, analysis, response 125
offend no one. How do programs like this
maintain their edge, when they become
integrated into a school curriculum?
As a public artist I was interested in murals
because they were a venue for sharing ideas
about politics and responding to social
issues. I gradually learned that one can’t just
impose one’s personal ideology on groups of
people—you have to have a conversation to
arrive at mutual understanding. The process
of sitting down and saying, ”Well I’m here
on the left and you’re there in the middle—
let’s look at those things that are important to
us and try to come to common ground,” is an
important step. My role asa public artist has
always included creating a space where
people meet each other to come to some form
of agreement. It wasn’t something I developed
sitting in a room while writing a proposal.
So it’s ironic that community art is being
taught on the mfa level in universities,
because, when it comes to talking about a
peer-teaching model, it’s the complete opposite
of my experience. People are graduating with
degrees in a field and then they’re going to go
out and teach, with academic credentials, a
process that came out of the community.
Community remains a euphemism for poor
and working people, for people of color, for
people who don’t have money or resources
and live in poor neighborhoods, usually
urban areas. Whether you’re talking about
those groups of people as your target
audience or about the need for more diversity,
there is certainly a need for work or art or
culture that addresses the community directly,
which you don’t see in the mainstream. Even
though there are inroads in the media, and
culture is becoming more global and rapidly
disseminated by the Internet, I still think if
you look at fine art in America there’s very
little diversity. It’s diversity that the
community arts continue to offer.