art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

52 art / vision / voice
mindsets to change and to begin to understand what culture is, and
the importance of culture, the importance of being connected to
something that enriches their lives, makes them healthy, so that they
learn to be committed to what it is that they are capable of producing.
Exposing them to resources that may aid them in their quest.
john I think that in terms of community arts, you can go all the way back
to Egypt, come up through Egypt, and back through to Thailand, back
to the pagoda and India, coming through the Russian icons, the
great cathedrals in Europe, all the way down to the Incas, the Aztecs,
all the way across the Aztecs. . . . All of that [art created by these cultures]
had a purpose, it was community-based.
The thing that’s significant about all of that work is that it was
designed for people who were visually, but not necessarily verbally,
literate. A person could walk into Notre Dame in Paris and read the
sculptures around the doors; you could read the windows inside, and
you’ve got the message. Basically the same thing is true in Benin:
people could walk in and look at the bronzes, woodcarvings, and
masks, and understand the iconography. I think education is simply
making people literate to the iconography of the visual life.
That’s the bottom line. That’s all it is.
You know, when we think about Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros . . .
the Mexican muralists, basically they took the visual language that
people commonly understood, and they put a political message
in it. . . . The language that we speak as a people primarily is focused
on the inner workings of the social-cultural structure of African
Americans. That is what some people refer to as African art.
Now, again, it’s important to have the skills to use the language.
You cannot use any language without linguistic skills. You can’t
write if you have no alphabet. There are no words unless there is
grammatical structure. There are no ideas recorded unless there’s
structure. People don’t understand that the [language visual artists
use] has the same criteria. If you don’t understand how to mix
color, you sure can’t be a colorist. If you don’t understand how to
sharpen a pencil, you can’t draw. But to understand form and all
of that, that’s learning the alphabet—that’s not poetry.
The thing that I think is our responsibility is to make young
people understand that. You have to help them learn the grammar.
The grammar is actually life itself. How do you translate what’s
happening outside the door — young people blowing each other
away, young girls starting families, raising children, not even
understanding what that’s about, families who don’t accept the
responsibility of raising their own kids, or those who have had the