Bill Cleveland

The Community Arts Movement Is (Still) Flourishing

Posted by Bill Cleveland, May 25, 2016 0 comments


Bill Cleveland

A new report from Intermedia Arts provides evidence of the burgeoning community arts movement. Its author, William Cleveland, provides thoughts on some of the report’s findings and what it means for the future. Read more about the full report here.

Once upon a time, in the summer of 1993, I joined High Performance Magazine as a contributing editor. The magazine, then in its 14th year, was being published by artist, Steve Durland, and journalist, Linda Burnham out of the 18th St. Arts Complex in Los Angeles. At the time, High Performance was covering an art scene that the mainstream arts community was going out of its way to ignore. Nevertheless, the magazine established itself as the voice of the burgeoning community arts movement in the U.S., providing a first hand, first voice window on artists and arts organizations making art at the crossroads of social change, and community development. 

The magazine published its last issue in the fall of 1997. Less than two years later, Steve and Linda, went digital with both an online archive of past issues, and a new web presence called the Community Arts Network (CAN). For many US-based activist artists CAN quickly became the documentary hub of the rapidly changing community arts universe. Ten years, and roughly 10,000 stories, articles, essays, case studies, editorials, and research papers later CAN went dark. When this extraordinary site stopped publishing in 2007, many of us in the community arts field felt a terrible absence.

One aspect of CAN I particularly missed was the site’s documentation of training programs available to the then nascent field. This was partly because I was deeply involved in teaching myself, but also because the proliferation of training was such an interesting window on how and where the community arts movement was putting down roots. Since 2007 though, that kind of data collection and reporting has been largely unavailable—at least until now. 

Earlier this year, I was asked by Intermedia Arts, in Minneapolis, to lead a study to find out where community arts related training is taking place and where there may be future interest. Partnering with Animating Democracy, at Americans for the Arts, we identified a study cohort comprised of leadership from 423 local arts agencies who indicated their interest and/or involvement in community arts in the 2015 Americans for the Arts local arts agency census. In addition to training opportunities, we also looked what kind of community arts activity and support was manifesting in these communities. The resulting report, Options for Community Arts Training and Support was released last week.

What we found: One of the coolest things that can happen in a research project is when your assumptions and expectations are blown out of the water. When we started the Options project the assumption was that, given the recent bump in in community arts/creative placemaking investment, there would be more related activity out there. So, we expected more projects, more training, and more interest. What we did not anticipate was that the “more” would be as massive as it appears to be. I’m saying this with the caveat that because this was a field scan (rather than a comprehensive study) the large numbers of training programs (110), and the high levels of community arts activity (74%), and interest (90%) reported by our cohort likely under-represents the true dimensions of this expanding community arts universe. WOW! 

To get a more accurate picture of how our respondents were defining community arts activity, we also asked them to describe the community issues and outcome areas they saw their efforts impacting. Three of those cited, “cultural policy” (82%), “education” (84%), and “youth development” (65%) as areas that are often associated with local arts agencies. Another,  “economic and community development” (83%), likely reflects the fact that local arts agencies have been making their case for the arts in economic terms for some time, as well as the recent attention being paid to creative placemaking as a stimulus for both financial and social capital. Possibly more noticeable, given their strikingly cross-sector nature, are such areas as the environment (31%), civic participation (24%), race relations (23%), and land use (23%).

Another interesting aspect of our study was the variety of terms used to describe what was once just referred to as “community arts.” The most common labels included: creative placemaking, community arts, community cultural development, public art, socially engaged practice, arts-based community development, cultural animation, art for social change, cultural community building, and cultural mediation.

This proliferation of terms can be seen as another indication of increased interest and investment in cultural work that engages the public sphere. I also see it as an indicator that a realm of contemporary artistic practice that, not too long ago, was considered obscure and second-rate has now been embraced, validated, elevated, romanticized (and in some cases sanitized) in a wide variety of ways by people and institutions representing a diversity of perspectives and interests

So, what does one make of what is truly just a snapshot of one of the more dynamic parts of America’s cultural ecosystem? It's clear that in recent years an increasing number of artists and arts organizations have been partnering with other community sectors to advance the healthy development of their communities. The result has been a proliferation of boundary crossing arts-based collaborations. Along the way, an increasing number community arts organizations and educational institutions have recognized that the people involved in these collaborations could benefit from training that supports effective community arts partnerships. That’s the good news.  The bad news is that, given the rapid growth of the field, in six months much of this data will probably be stale.

For me this drives home the point that this burgeoning field needs a new CAN—a digital forum that would be part library, part neighborhood newspaper, part historical society, and part community college for people involved in arts-based community engagement. My dream for CAN 2.0, if I may be so bold, would incorporate the power of self-organization, citizen journalism, distance learning, and virtual collaboration, linking local-to-local, local-to-global, and global-to-global. The result would be an accessible and useful space for documentation, learning, and exchange for the broad range of artists, arts organizations, and cross-sector partners who using the arts to advance more caring, capable, and sustainable communities.

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