art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

10 art / vision / voice
to humanize the information and tailor its delivery to local receptors.
Such an approach will entail some community arts methods, because
the writers and producers of these works will need to interact with local
people to learn something about their cultural values, vocabularies, and
taboos so as to ensure that the messages they produce can be received as
intended by the local population. But the value thus added lies in more
effectively communicating a message from the center to the margins,
and as advertisers everywhere have demonstrated, such techniques might
just as usefully be employed to carry a message that is not so worthy,
as when they have been used to spread damaging agricultural practices,
such as replacing self-generated seed stocks with expensive patented
hybrid seed, or introducing chemical-intensive forms of pest
management.
What makes community cultural development different from canny
advertising, what gives it special merit, is that its means and ends are
inseparable. They may be stated in terms that are at once spiritual and
political: to use the expressive gifts that are uniquely human to convey
the special contributions of each cultural community to our existential
task of understanding and repairing the world we share.
That brings us to the present. Knowing there are pitfalls doesn’t oblige
us to succumb to them. To preserve community cultural development
work’s value in awakening awareness and nurturing agency, practitioners
must be willing to take risks, risks that may chafe against a framework
of institutional caution. But principled commitment on the part of
academic leaders would certainly reduce the friction, preserving the
inseparability of ccd’s means and ends in academic settings. Several
basic commitments will help a great deal:
v To respect community knowledge and practical experience. Theory,
in the community cultural development world, emanates from practice,
from a process that derives principles from practical discovery rather
than theoretical conceptualization or extrapolation from other fields.
If the leaders of academic institutions venturing into community arts
understand that they are helping to craft a partnership between two
valid forms of knowing—if they are willing to validate and incorporate
non-academic knowledge into their curricula and projects—they
will ameliorate much of the risk of distortion that results from the
imposition of inappropriate approaches or requirements.
v To link community and institution. The most important way to
embody respect for the field’s multiple forms of knowing is to establish
strong working relationships between academic and community
programs. There should be meaningful roles for experienced