I am attending a conference in St Louis hosted by the Regional Art Commission of St. Louis and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture of Cleveland. The conference’s title is Rustbelt to Artsbelt: At the Crossroads, Arts-Based Community Development Convening. I attended the initial At the Crossroads conference two years ago and found it a fascinating opportunity to connect with grassroots community engagement activity around the country.
I will not attempt to present an overview of the whole conference here. (I’m not sure I could.) This post is an outgrowth of a session I chaired here Friday afternoon. Titled, Transforming Arts Institutions: The Path to Sustainability, it featured Stephanie Moore talking about economic development work and cultural mapping (taking inventory of cultural assets in an area-neighborhood, city, or region) as means of fostering engagement; Lyz Crane talking about arts organizations as “good neighbors,” utilizing organizational assets to build relationships with their communities; and Kiana Day from Houston Grand Opera’s HGOco talking about that company’s community engagement work.
For a variety of reasons, we did not have time to address with session attendees the core questions it had been my intent to raise. I promised them an opportunity to respond via this blog. All readers are invited to weigh in.
As background, many At the Crossroads attendees have grassroots organizing or social action backgrounds or orientations. Many have a deep and profound concern for social justice. One of the ways that concern sometimes gets played out is in questioning the legitimacy of a funding infrastructure that disproportionately supports mainline arts organizations that serve what might be considered to be “1%” cultural interests. Some conference attendees question whether such organizations are even capable of making change in the relationships they have with their communities.
As I suggested in Bimodal Engagement, I think there is evidence that it may be possible and even that some such change is underway. But given that, here are the questions I had hoped we could discuss:
- Can arts organizations alter course?
- What are the means by which they might do so?
- What learning is required of arts organizations making a change?
- What strategies might be employed to encourage arts organizations to change?
In terms of the construction of the session, this post is “a day late and a dollar short.” However, it provides session attendees and anyone else reading this an opportunity to participate in the discussion if they are so inclined.
I have no idea whether any of you will take the time to think about and respond to these questions. If you do, I welcome your participation and thank you in advance.
Engage!
Doug
Mr. Borwick — Thank you for your thoughts at the Rustbelt conference. I was excited by the way in which you framed the discussion, and I also was disappointed that all of us in the audience missed the chance to hear these questions addressed in a broader conversation.
I organized the “Re-Thinking The Rural Arts” panel at Rustbelt, many of whom were in attendance for your panel. We regretted missing the chance to ask these panelists how they would contextualize these ideas within a broader sphere of the American arts that included rural artists and organizations.
The individual presentations were uniformly excellent, though I was struck by how many of the ideas and community strategies discussed have been essential to the survival of rural artists/organizations from the very beginning. The term “sustainability” itself is probably going to have different resonances in rural, urban, and suburban places. In a broader conversation — across geographies, economies, and cultures — we would have a lot to learn from each other.
I offer this not as a criticism of the panel, but to express that I wish further discussion could have been possible in the allotted time–and that we could have returned in greater depth to your opening questions. Thank you again for bringing the Transforming Arts Institutions panel together and offering Engaging Matters as a place for continued dialogue.