art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

8 art / vision / voice
Some leading community artists have persisted long and hard enough
to become downright venerable, winning major national honors and
attention (for example, choreographer Liz Lerman and visual artist
Amalia Mesa-Bains have both received prestigious MacArthur Fellowships,
and muralist Judy Baca was honored with a Hispanic Heritage Award).
This has a positive impact on the reception of their field of work as
a whole, a spillover effect.
At the same time, an increasing number of veteran community
artists have become accomplished teachers at the university level,
attracting students and often forming the nucleus of embryonic degree
programs such as those mentioned at the beginning of this essay. While
practitioners coming into the university after long work at the grassroots
level is a new development, ccd does have an academic lineage that can
situate these practitioners within a tradition of teaching and learning.
For example, Robert Gard’s 1955 book, Grassroots Theater, describes
his experience beginning in the 1940s as a theater professor at the
University of Wisconsin, helping to establish both theater and writing
programs for residents of rural communities in the region. As head
of Wisconsin’s arts extension service, he helped to create Arts in Society
magazine in the late 1950s, the first domestic forum for thinking
about community cultural development. And one of the first municipal
community cultural development programs, San Francisco’s Neighborhood
Arts Program, begun in 1967, was the brainchild of two San Francisco
State College professors, Art Bierman and Rod Lundquist, who talked
the city’s Board of Supervisors into underwriting their idea.
While veteran ccd practitioners have become more widely recognized
and have begun to occupy academic niches, a growing number of artists
situated within the mainstream art world have borrowed methods
and approaches from community cultural development, integrating the
images, handiwork, and words of non-artists into their large-scale,
often public, productions.
In fact, there has been so much activity in this last category that it
has aggregated into a current art-world tendency, which has created
confusion about the nature of community arts work. Community cultural
development may not respect conventional art categories (such as the
boundary between theater and sculpture or between high art and craft),
but that is not to say it rejects all distinctions and definitions. Mainstream
playwrights may borrow oral history materials to construct their
characters; installation artists may use non-artists’ writings, snapshots,
and other memorabilia to construct their environments; and other artists
may incorporate community members into their public performances
or make use of their skills in creating large-scale visual art pieces.
The resulting work may be wonderful, but is it community cultural