art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

126 art / vision / voice
It can be argued that anything that gives
legitimacy to the field is probably a good thing.
The more it’s written about and explored
critically, the more it’s going to develop into
something that will change the nature of art
making and have an impact on the contemporary
art world as well. The idea of these parallel
universes in the art world became very
apparent in the 1980s when organizations
and groupings of artists based on race or
gender created their own work, which then
filtered upwards into the mainstream art
world. Perhaps that’s always been the cycle,
but it would be nice to think we could change
the way culture is made in this country.
In reading the case narratives of Mary
Valverde, Leslie Hewitt, and Antoine Touze, I
was struck by their instincts and their intuition
about what makes a real collaboration work. It
took much longer for me to learn from my
mistakes—and I made a lot of them. All three,
Mary, Leslie, and Antoine, were involved with
Cooper’s Saturday Program, which probably
made a big difference. They learned early in
their careers that peer teaching is a huge part of
community art making.
Whenever I collaborate with the community,
I feel I’m going to learn something and that
my collaborators and I are peers. To assume I’m
going to control what happens is arrogant—
there has to be mutual respect as well as room
to listen to what other people have to say.
That isn’t as easy as it seems because teaching
is really about sharing knowledge. So many of
the young people I worked with were so
damaged by the school system that they really
did not want to be told how to do something.
And yet they had no skills, so it was a juggling
act — trying to understand how to
communicate, how to teach without imposing
something on people they felt uncomfortable
with. Some of the teenagers I worked with
in youth programs actually went to court in
the morning then came back, or had attention
problems so they really couldn’t sit in a
structured situation for very long.
When we were painting community murals,
in order to teach and engage the young people,
we had to be creative. We used Polaroid
cameras and slides, had people role-playing in
the streets, and we relied heavily on oral history
and sketching in the scenarios we developed in
the workshops. We didn’t have Barnes & Noble
stores in those days, and many kids didn’t even
have books in their homes, so we had to ask
them to tell their own stories by relying on
family and neighborhood histories.
If there is anything to learn from the Queens
project, it is that attention to process is one
of the things overlooked or not emphasized
enough in the field of community arts. The
process of how one gets to the point of
making art is not just the art workshops
themselves, but all the planning that precedes
them, all the discussions between artists and
community that bring them to some form of
agreement about what it is they want to do.
And that process gets shortchanged when it’s
created months in advance of actually meeting
the community—or if the same handful of
artists are continually approached by community
groups because they have a model project that
can be applied indiscriminately to any
neighborhood. The process gets shortchanged
when people don’t realize that dialogue is
sometimes very contentious, so their fear of
confrontation leads to censorship. It’s not an
easy process, because there are people who are
not always happy to have community arts—they
don’t know what it is. They’re threatened by it. I
see that there’s a need for advocacy and a need
for people to take risks. Administrators have to
meet the artist halfway and sometimes that
dialogue is not smooth. That’s all a part of the
collaborative process —the planning, discussion,
and dialogue that has to be seen as long term. In