art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

case authors
Amalia Mesa-Bains
and Joan Weiner
the reciprocal university for the arts
project is a collaborative effort of
csumb’s visual and public art and music
and performing arts departments.
Looking In/Looking Out
Learning about Real Partnership in
Watsonville, California
Reciprocal University for the Arts Project,
California State University, Monterey Bay
i. ruap overview
case study: california state university, monterey bay 81
The Reciprocal University for the Arts Project (ruap) at California State
University, Monterey Bay (csumb), created as a Wallace Foundation
Community Arts Partnership, provides community-based arts programs
to partner organizations in four disparate communities surrounding the
university’s campus in Seaside, California—approximately 15 minutes
north of Monterey. ruap comes under the auspices of the departments
of Visual and Public Art and Music and Performing Arts. The heads of
those two academic departments serve as co-directors of ruap.
ruap supports the development of relationships between the university
and the communities of Monterey, Seaside, Salinas, and Watsonville. These
relationships are embedded within our interdisciplinary and servicebased
arts curriculum. With ruap, we have attempted to break from the
traditional model of arts education outreach, efforts that are typically
missionary at their core. We prefer the model of reciprocity.
Richard Bains (head of music and performing arts and co-director
of ruap) and I came to csumb in 1995, we found the university struggling
with how best to serve the surrounding region. At that point in the new
university’s history, the notion of service was defined by the idea that we
had something we should give to people. As educators with long careers
in community arts, we knew that it was more likely the opposite — that
there were values, strategies, and practices in those communities that
could help the university to realize its own lofty goals and vision.
Consequently, it was decided that reciprocity would be the organizing
concept used in working with local communities, and that community
knowledge would be central to ruap.
After meeting with several dozen community groups early in the
planning stages for ruap, we saw our vision to be inherently tied to
social practices that had to do with community and public life, both in
the visual and public arts and in music and performing arts.
We believe that art is a transformative practice that arises from
people’s struggles to make sense of the world. Art is a language and a
form in which people express their deepest needs and beliefs, and in
doing so, art lives for them.