art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

order for real process to occur, there has to be a
commitment to a community arts project
beyonda year or two.
Programs like the Wallace Foundation’s
Community Arts Partnerships are pilot
projects, put out into the world for people to
react to. That creates an enormous pressure to
be successful. Instead of short-term funding,
why can’t we ask for a long-term commitment? If
there isn’t a commitment to maintain these
programs beyond one or two years, even three
or four, then there’s no way to build on what has
been accomplished, no way to grow. The
Queens project demonstrates how it’s
absolutely essential that there be a long-term
investment in this process.
Artists also need to believe that this kind of
work has validity, and it’s important that they
are not forced to work in prescribed ways.
Artists need to challenge people’s expectations
and accept the responsibility or fallout for
failing that. Artists should always ask what’s
next and try to make something happen that’s
different and unusual and radical. In my own
way I feel pretty marginal to the art world, and
that means a certain amount of freedom in
that you don’t have the same pressures as
artists with galleries that require them to
produce a certain kind of work.
Several years ago, I was selected to
participate in an arts program sponsored by
the National Endowment for the Arts called
the Mid Atlantic Artists & Communities:
America Creates for the Millennium Project.
Funds from the federal government were
allocated to a re-granting program which
disbursed the money to arts councils and arts
organizations across the country. Fifty
organizations were asked to select artists to
design community projects for each of the
fifty states. This was a pilot program created
by Hillary Clinton in response to the
dismantling of the nea by the Republican
commentary, analysis, response 127
congress and the elimination of funding for
individual artists. As a visual artist, I was
asked to work in East Los Angeles and design
a collaborative project with the Chicano
community.
It’s interesting to me that re-granting
programs have emerged as an alternative to
funding artists directly through fellowships
and artists’ grants. Agencies like the Mid
Atlantic Arts Foundation, with their built-in
hierarchies of funding, seem deliberately
designed to maintain control over artistic
content. I’ve always felt if you are going to
seek money from the government or from
public sources then you have to play by the
rules—you can’t expect to do anything you
want. On the other hand, on a more positive
note, I think the Mid Atlantic Artists &
Communities Program was created out of
recognition that there was a cultural climate
of fear and suspicion in the country that
needed to be addressed—a tangible hatred of
culture and artists. One way to correct this
was to bring artists into the community,
asking them to act as diplomats. Amid the
uproar in Congress over the work of Andres
Serrano and the role of public funding of art,
there was a lot of discussion about good and
bad art, and issues of quality.
I agree with Antoine that the issue of
“quality” is important. Antoine was concerned
with the level of expectations of the skills of
the students, but issues of quality affect all the
judgments made about the impact of
community arts and the need for programming
of this kind. We can probably all agree that
there is no universal standard for quality, and
that a discussion of quality has everything to do
with the context in which you’re looking at
culture. But there has been very little
discussion about quality with regard to
community art. Why? I wonder. Do people
think community art is bad? Do people equate