art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

cap program sites
Reciprocal University for the Arts Project (ruap)
California State University, Monterey Bay
Seaside, California
Center for Community Arts Partnerships (ccap)
Columbia College Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
Community Arts Partnerships (cap)
Saturday Outreach Programs
School of Art
Cooper Union for the Advancement of
Science and Art
New York, New York
Native American Youth Outreach Program
Institute for American Indian Arts
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Community Arts Partnerships (cap)
Maryland Institute College of Art
Baltimore, Maryland
Community Arts Partnerships Program (cap)
Department of Art
Xavier University of Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
A Brief History of the
Community Arts Partnerships
a brief history of cap 13
Six Community Arts Partnerships (cap) programs were created in 1999
with Wallace Foundation funds. Each created unique programming
and all came together with institutional and community staff to speak,
listen, and learn through a series of national conferences. This
documentation project was born in that dynamic interchange.
The cap sites provide high-quality arts programming for youth in
diverse communities across the country. By connecting students and
faculty in higher education institutions with the expertise cultivated in
community-based organizations, the caps are also educating a new
generation of socially engaged arts leaders. Each’s cap’s mission is to
facilitate collaborative partnerships between colleges and community
organizations that exchange ideas, curricula, and strategies, and to
engage in rigorous discussion of pedagogy and practice.
The cap programs engage university-based artists, teachers, and
administrators; community-based artists, activists, and organizers;
college students; and community youth. The programs engage in a wide
variety of performing and visual arts—including drawing and painting;
photography and video production; theater, music, and dance; and
traditional native arts such as beading and pottery. They also serve
diverse constituencies—two caps serve primarily African American
communities; one serves both urban and rural Native Americans;
another serves a predominantly Mexican-American community; and two
serve very diverse communities that include Latino, African American,
Asian American, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern families.
In the initial years of the consortium, Wallace Foundation funding
provided support for a national CAPInstitute, which developed a
non-hierarchical and democratic consortium model to provide a forum
for discussion and a locus for the dissemination of knowledge gleaned
from the experiences of the cap programs. While the CAPInstitute’s
work as a consortium of the Wallace Foundation grantees ended in
September 2003, most of the programs were institutionalized and continue
to run. The directors of the ongoing cap organizations have worked
together to create this collection of case studies to serve as a guide for
practitioners and as a text for students in community arts degree programs.