Relevance & Reform: a Remixed Response to Randolph Belle

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By Eboni Senai Hawkins

“In a capitalist system, culture is a system of control.” – Todd Lester – Founder, www.freedimensional.org

It’s 3am.

I just got off the phone with a friend of mine – a talented visual artist – who is threatening to become a Republican and abandon her practice. She says that the American public has voted with their dollars and that she cannot continue to make a living in a society that doesn’t see art as relevant. Especially now that she’s a mother.

Our conversation started at 1am.

Throughout it all I had to draw upon the immense spirit of collective action present at the Emerging Program Institute, an intensive offered by the Alliance for Artists Communities for culture workers interested in creating or strengthening residencies for artists.  Todd Lester’s quote struck me to my core.  Upon hearing about Quan’s plan to cut arts funding, my first response was, “F— Oakland! We can do it on our own, we MUST do it on our own.” The personal is political, right? As a single woman, I would never wait around for a man who had courted me and left me dry to one day wake up and recognize my value. I would go out and seek other options, secure in my self-worth.

It is now all about options.

Lester’s organization, Free Dimensional, works with an international network of individuals who are interested in providing safe space for artists who have been persecuted for their work. They do not accept money from government agencies, depending on foundation and individual support.  I am ready for Oakland to do the same. To turn away from the City, turn to our neighbors, engage them as cultural stewards, and say, “Hey, I’m doing this really beautiful/amazing/RELEVANT work. Why don’t you come to a rehearsal, check out my studio? How would you like to support a show?”

I appreciate Randolph Belle’s wisdom and continued enthusiasm after years of working around Oakland arts and culture. I trust his proposal that “reforms to the permitting, planning and zoning processes to expedite housing, venues, and special event projects would generate significant impact.” It is a broader way of approaching recent roadblocks.  I want to temper the heat of my disbelief, the sting of budget rejection. I want to believe that Oakland will value its artists. But I know we have to value ourselves first. We have to take inventory – what we have, who we know – and leverage that to a sustainable future.  It is time for Plan B, C, and D.

My friend is not going to become a Republican. Of that I’m certain.  I can’t say that she’ll continue her practice. I know that she’ll forever be a mother. Faced with the economic realities of raising a child, my passionate words on policy meant very little. So I spoke about relationships.

I spoke about a neighborhood where a child might see an artist doing their art. Where that child, coming home from school one day might ask the artist a question, “What are you doing?” and follow up with a “Why?”  I spoke about the subtle shift that occurs when a child, a family, a neighborhood, a COMMUNITY maintains consistent contact with creative thinking. How creative thinking would seep into every day life. To the point that, hopefully, when it’s time to vote again, that art isn’t some thing on a pedestal. Art is your neighbor.

 

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Eboni Senai Hawkins is the Producing Artistic Director of see. think. dance.

After valuable experiences in arts administration (Jacob’s Pillow Dance, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet), she took a leap of faith and started working directly with the art and artists she loved.

Inspired by the opportunity to present intimate performance in a low-pressure environment, Eboni curated a short program for the June 2007 Mission Arts Performance Project (MAPP) hosted by the Red Poppy Art House, featuring dancers Antoine Hunter and Rashad Pridgen.

 

The response from the primarily visual arts/music audience was overwhelming and in collaboration with Todd Brown and the Red Poppy’s Street-Level Curating Program, Eboni established see. think. dance. to produceTruth + Beauty (November 2007), Word. Warrior. Music. Movement. (March 2008), and Urban Art Sessions(May 2008).

May 2008 also marked the formation of and the first performative installment by The Intimacy Project, an ongoing collaboration between artists/educators who draw creative inspiration from their connection to the African continent and are deeply invested in social change through the re-integration of the mind and the body.  Losing a dancer at the last moment and concerned with the flow of the evening’s program, Eboni overcame her fear of the stage to perform a duet with actor Kwesi Hutchful, a movement composition incorporating media installation, tempest tossed by lauren woods and layered with a recorded version of Intro to Kemetic Science by David Boyce.

In 2010, heavily influenced by the REVIVE workshop, Eboni created the annual REflect film series as part of the Black Choreographers’ Festival: Here and Now. Subtitled “The Black Dancing Body on Film”, REflect mines the rich visual history of Black dancers and choreographers on film through a dynamic selection of documentaries, feature films, and shorts.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

 

Expanding The Vision

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By Arlene Goldbard

Many thanks to my fellow bloggers for providing abundant inspiration! The big questions of cultural policy are so vital and matter so much, yet they are seldom publicly discussed even by the people who care most. Who are we as a people? What do we want to remembered for, our vast creativity, or our prodigious ability to punish? How are our answers reflected in the way we do (or don’t) nurture community cultural life?

I was moved by Eboni Senai Hawkins’ beautiful essay on making public space for art. “Dance demands a kinesthetic empathy, a way of experiencing art bodily simply by watching,” she wrote, remarking that “Such empathy has the potential to pierce the layers of urban existence and bring together Oakland’s diverse yet self-segregated neighborhoods.”

Some of the most powerful arguments for art’s public purpose are coming to us now from science, supporting that point. Neuroscientists have have found “mirror neurons” in the human brain. When we observe someone else (or imagine ourselves) experiencing a feeling or performing an action, these nerve cells are activated very much as if we had performed the same actions with our own bodies. Mirror neurons enable understanding of other people’s perceptions, actions, and feelings.

But while this ability to feel empathy is encoded in our physical beings, empathy does not automatically infuse our own life-choices, any more than possesssing the physical equipment for dancing or singing means we will actually do either. Moving from the latent capacity to the practice of compassion must be learned. When we sit in a darkened theater, opening our minds and hearts to stories very different from our own, the tears, laughter, or perplexity we feel activates our motor neurons, setting that learning in motion.

Kenji C. Liu’s essay on art as a human right asks powerfully important questions, such as this:

The ability to work together for a beautiful and just world while being free from economic calculus and quantifiable value is not in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but perhaps it should be. Would our cultural strategies and policies benefit if we framed this kind of “freed art” as a human right and necessary for true democracy, just like education and freedom?

I’m always amazed that the right to culture is rooted in the simplest language of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” It seems so innocuous, but as has often been noted, the authors are unlikely to have understood what it would actually take to embody the right to participate freely. I think of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, now incommunicado in detention in an undisclosed location. Imagine what would be required to grant him that right, and we begin to see the challenge.

I wish more US-based artists and advocates would become familiar with the remarkable policy statements the rest of the world is adopting. Read the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, for instance, and ponder why the U.S. has not signed it.

Randolph Belle’s thoughtful and moving post on what you might call race-blindness in Oakland’s development (if you don’t want to call it racism, outright) points to indicators that can’t be ignored:

 

….Every African American cultural invention has been subsumed into the larger culture to a point where the source is no longer recognizable, and Oakland, as a traditional center of Black culture and one of a number of “Chocolate Cities” around the country is a petri dish for cultural change. Consider this—Yoshi’s produced a jazz compilation with no Black artists, later apologizing and calling it an oversight. The First Amendment and the Serenader, where the best live blues, jazz and R&B could be heard, are distant memories. Rap can be heard in every corner of the planet, but as a thoroughly co-opted artform, I find nothing redeeming in what’s been deemed commercially viable. No consideration was given to the importance and historical significance of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater when the Academy of Art, (ironically), evicted them from their long time home….

Morally, the challenge he raises brings to mind Martin Luther King’s statement, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

In policy terms, I think Randolph Belle has it right: we know in our bones that cultural meaning and cultural fabric are central to lived experience. No one can deny the significance of the examples he cited. Every city has a reservoir of such stories: long-established neighborhoods leveled to make way for sports stadiums or freeways or red-carpet performing arts centers, leaving untold human damage in their wake.

As a result of long and diligent pressure, environmental impact assessment is demanded when a city wants to remove older structures or build new ones. The underlying idea is that the well-being of plants, animals, and aquifers should be a consideration, not just dollars and cents. Imagine for a moment that Oakland and every public entity had to produce a cultural impact study, assessing the effect that proposed actions would have on social fabric and community cultural life. Imagine how different our cities could look today if this had been required—and heeded and enforced—in the heyday of “urban removal.”

Imagine.

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Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She is currently writing a new book on art’s public purpose. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

 

 

Aerosol Writing and Community Mural Policy

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by Desi W.O.M.E.

Reactionary politics are always dangerous. The policies that are created in those moments often have long-lasting unforeseen consequences that are equally difficult to undo until another catastrophe forces another emotional reaction and the cycle is repeated. Richmond muralists have recently come under such a threat that threatens to handcuff their ability to create public artwork. A change in policy is needed, but one that promotes the creation of artwork rather than bureaucratizes it. In this article, the Community Rejuvenation Project presents three simple policy changes that can protect murals from destruction rather than frontloading their process with a series of political obstacles.

The controversy began when the Richmond Graffiti Abatement team painted over an aerosol mural created by local youth in the community. Students at Gompers High School had been given the responsibility of caretaking a portion of the Richmond Greenway, a former railway that has been transformed by the community into a bike route, gardens, and a site for artwork. The students, with the support of their teacher, Gretchen Borg, received permission from a property owner near Eighth Street to create a mural. With approximately $1,000 of their own money, the youth purchased spray paint and spent two weeks creating the mural that was aerosol writing of their chosen names. Mrs. Borg went to the city repeatedly to make sure that everything was done properly, including attempting to get a permit, which she was told was not required. Nonetheless, the graffiti abatement team painted over the mural after associating some of the signatures with illegal graffiti that has occurred in other areas of the city.

Richmond’s abatement policy states that anything deemed “graffiti” must be removed, regardless of whether or not the work is approved or even commissioned by the owner.  Several other legally commissioned murals have been destroyed by the city due to such labeling but this is the most high profile incident and the most challenging because of all the documented steps that Mrs Borg took to ensure that mural would be safe.

Richmond’s graffiti mandate amounts to a sanctioned prejudice against a specific aesthetic. Any works created with spray paint appear to be subject to removal. This would potentially include the Community Rejuvenation Project’s Robots and Butterflies mural that was commissioned by the RACC.

Richmond’s response has been equally problematic. After apologizing to the students, the city police chief gave a 10 minute powerpoint presentation outlining how graffiti was a huge problem and the city’s response to the Gomper’s mural, however unfortunate, was in line with its abatement and policing policies. The city would continue to remove murals labeled as graffiti regardless of owner approval or not. The city council saw this incident as potentially embarrassing but indicated that the solution lay in creating a public mural approval process that would make murals legitimate. Councilmember Tom Butt repeatedly asked the youth if they would be satisfied if they were given a voice in the approval process, to which the youth seemed agreeable. Richmond Arts and Culture Commission (RACC) manager Michelle Seville was given the task of drawing up a mural approval process in 60 days.

There are several problems with this approach:

A mural approval process fails to address the real problem with what happened with the Gompers mural. The error was not in the youth’s artwork or their approach to the property owner or the city. The failure was directly at the hands of the abatement team and the police who destroyed the mural. However, in creating a mural approval process, the city is instituting additional bureaucracy for the artists rather than developing methods to protect murals once they are created. Each new work is subject to review that slows the process, requires the artist to potentially have to redraw their sketches multiple times, and tone down any challenging themes. The end result will be a slower and more painful process that will reduce the interest of artists to participate. For the youth already involved in the illegal aspects of writing, that bureaucracy will close the door to their interest in creating sanctioned works.

On the other hand, this moment is an opportunity to enact some simple yet powerful adjustments to the abatement mandate that will precipitate the creation of more new works and help to transform the image of Richmond from violent and bleak to creative and growing.

First, the Community Rejuvenation Project recommends the creation of a mural registry to protect existing murals. Rather than focus on a mural approval process, develop a method to protect existing works once they’ve been created. This registry can be used by the abatement agency to avoid the destruction of legally created works. Further, the community should be capable of registering street art and unsanctioned works that it wants to keep in the community. Removing a mural in the registry would require a petition by a significant number of local residents as well as dialogue with the artist.

Second, we recommend that citizens and non-profits be given the ability to petition to adopt a wall from absentee commercial property owners. Both Richmond and Oakland’s policy has been to notify property owners of the presence of blight and give them a deadline to remove it. If the owners fail to meet that deadline, the city will abate the blight and bill it to the property owner in their annual property taxes. Citizens and non-profits should be given the ability to make similar notifications to the property owner. If the owner fails to respond to a community petition in a comparable amount of time, the petitioning group should be able to adopt the wall at their own expense and create artwork that can be entered into the city registry.

Third, the city should have similar program that adopts high-blight walls and employs artists and youth to paint murals on them. A similar notification process to the commercial property owner would be followed. This will allow for increased youth civic engagement, the creation of lots of high-quality artwork throughout the city, and less on-going blight problems. The focus for these mural initiatives should be the high-target, highly visible, and large-scale locations. Theoretically, an effective abatement strategy should lead to less abatement each year. If the city’s costs for abatement are not decreasing incrementally, then the city councils should redirect some of the abatement budget to long-term solutions such as murals.

Richmond current trajectory is poised to effectively prevent the creation of all but the largest and least controversial murals. Those projects will require experienced, professional artists who have learned to navigate the city bureaucracy, have the finances to wait months to get started while to wading through the commission meetings, paperwork and approval process. This policy will not give the youth a means to express themselves except in the approval process for other artists.

On the other hand, Richmond has the opportunity to take a bold step to protect the artwork in its city, lift the sanction on youth-based aesthetics, and open the doors to new works by arts of all backgrounds, styles, and experience. Let’s hope that Richmond makes the right choice.

 

 

 

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Desi W.O.M.E is the founder and director of the Community Rejuvenation Project. Painting since 1990, Desi helped organize and contributed to 33 murals last year, as documented in Rejuvenation: 2010 Mural Anthology, available atwww.crpbayarea.org. He is a founding artist at United Roots, Oakland’s Green Youth Arts & Media Center and facilitates aerosol writing studies at Oakland Unity High School. Desi is currently working on a Peace & Dignity mural with P.H.A.S.E.2, Vulcan, Mike 360, Elijah Pfotenhauer, Beats 737, Pancho Pescador, and numerous youth on 41st and International in East Oakland. He is thankful for the opportunity to share this with you and thankful for the company he keeps.


Creating Real Outlets for Cultural Arts Expression

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by Jacinda Abcarian

BEMIE (www.myspace.com/bemerules) is a 23 year old artist from Oakland. As a “punk rapper” his two self-proclaimed necessities are food and a cell phone.  But faced with mainstream media outlets that shut out new talent and literally play the same seven booty-music songs in rotation each hour, he struggles to get known.  While Facebook, MySpace and YouTube provide free platforms for self-promotion and marketing, they still do not come close to the exposure he would get on KMEL or Wild 94.9 for example. This sad lack of outlets for artistic expression calls on us to explore new routes.

Nonprofit organizations like Oaktown Jazz Workshops, Youth Radio, and Youth Speaks, work hard to create real outlets for artistic expression in a time when there are so few. Youth Radio’s reporters are on national outlets including NPR and Turnstylenews.com, Oaktown Jazz Workshops’ musicians play venues including Yoshi’s Jazz Club, and Youth Speaks’ poets are featured on HBO.

When doors shut in the faces of our youth we work hard to create new outlets for them. Take the Oscar Grant tragedy for example. Youth Radio worked with community artists to create a public mural in memory of Oscar Grant, the Oakland 22-year-old who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle.   (www.youthradio.org/about/oscar-grant-mural) An effort to transform the community’s pain and anger into art, Youth Radio invited muralists from the group “Trust Your Struggle” (http://tys.mvmt.com) to paint on boards covering the windows of organization’s home in downtown Oakland.  The downtown group created an iconic picture of Grant’s face that supporters of Grant’s family replicated for Facebook avatars and tribute posters.

Unlikely approaches to fostering artistic and cultural development often work the best.  My ex-husband from West Africa told me that as a youth development strategy, all of the “discotechs” (dance clubs) in his hometown would open their doors to teens from 4-8pm, the critical after-school hours when most youth crime happens. They would serve only juice and soda and have DJ’s spinning, providing a safe and fun place for youth to be themselves. After 8pm the clubs would only be open to adults.  What a creative way to utilize the community’s resources!

When it comes to implementing cultural policy in Oakland we must be open to non-traditional, innovative models that inspire young people to engage with the arts, but most importantly, that are accessible to the youth themselves.

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Jacinda Abcarian is a graduate of Youth Radio’s class of 1993 and is its current Executive Director. She moved from a student and peer teacher to an award-winning reporter and producer. She has worked as a reporter for WRFG-FM in Atlanta and as a journalism fellow at NPR in Washington, D.C. Awards include a Golden Reel from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for Accidental Shooting, and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award for her producer role in the series, Emails from Kosovo. She was recently honored by the Gerbode Foundation with the prestigious 2010 Gerbode Professional Development Fellowship award. Abcarian has been active in initiatives promoting prevention of tobacco use and gun violence among youth. Abcarian earned a B.A. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and completed Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management at Harvard Business School. She is also a member of the City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission and The Crucible’s Advisory Council.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

A response to "Kristi's Rant"

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by Sanjit Sethi

Kristi,

Thanks for your thoughtful remarks. When you state “we need to change something” I am reminded of the quote from the Sufist scholar Rumi that says new organs of perception come about as a result of necessity, therefore in order to increase one’s perception one needs to increase necessity. As you accurately point out Oakland (and other communities) needs more compassion, opportunity, and investment. We may very well be at the state that Rumi speaks of, of increasing our necessity through response to rampant violence, devastating budget cuts, and a society that favors a corporate culture over a creative culture. All of these things have pushed our necessity, as a larger community, further. With an awareness of this new reality comes (ideally) a rich and vigorous conversation on values. What is legal vs. illegal? (You speak compellingly of graffiti artists and their ability to legitimately express a voice.) Cultural vs. commercial? (We see great examples from social entrepreneurship that these can be combined.) And finally, political vs. civil? (The ability to creatively protect people’s physical integrity and safety as well as protecting the right to express oneself and the right to assemble).

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Sanjit Sethi is Director of the Center for Art and Public Life, and the Barclay Simpson Chair of Community Art at California College of the Arts.  Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia, and an MS in Advanced Visual Studies in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sethi has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and a Fulbright fellow in Bangalore, India, working on the Building Nomads Project. Sethi continued his strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration as director of the MFA program at the Memphis College of Art. His work deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, and memory. Sethi recently completed the Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance, an olfactory-based memorial in Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond Voting Stories, a collaborative video project involving youth and senior residents of Richmond, CA. Sethi’s current works include Indians/Indians, the Urban Defibrillator, and a series of writings on the territory of failure and its relationship to collaborative cultural practice, all of which involve varied social and geographic communities.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

To Face Ruin Is A Victory

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by Kenji C. Liu

In my last post, I suggested framing art as a human right, in the sense that community art is a practice that can sidestep or challenge the spreadsheet mentality that exists in the United States when it comes to arts and culture policy.

This is not to say that we can completely escape this mentality, as recent proposals to zero out arts grants by the City of Oakland show. Oakland is a vibrant arts city despite the lack of robust institutional support. With some notable exceptions, much of it is grassroots or on the down-low.

Although we need this kind of city and state support and should advocate for it, if arts looks for its value only through the affirmation (funding) of the state, we are in dangerous territory. This is because, as Arlene Goldbard rightly points out, our country’s priorities are largely in punishment and destruction. These are profitable industries, and support for arts suffers at all levels because of it.

From 2009 to 2010, I coordinated Oakland Word, a popular program of the Oakland Public Library funded by the California State Library. Oakland Word offered free creative writing workshops at four library branches to the general public in poetry, fiction, memoir, and more. Hundreds participated in classes, public readings, and many were published in an official anthology.

Oakland Word was about community capacity-building and expanding use of public libraries as a free resource. As the coordinator, my premise was simple and drew from Paolo Freire–to write the word was to write the world. This meant that developing the capacity to tell a story was directly related to the ability to shape one’s own world. Libraries are filled with thousands of worlds–why shouldn’t they help generate new ones?

The demographics of Oakland Word’s participants were mostly women and people of color, all people whose lives are often not reflected positively in mainstream discussions. To be able to tell a story and have it affirmed as legitimate was for many a very significant experience. As someone who had benefited from other community writing programs, it was a joy to run.

Despite its great success, the program was unable to continue after a year because the grant was not renewable. In any case, it was also uncertain how much money would be available because they were hacking out the budget up in Sacramento.

These are our priorities as a society. The economic system we live with shapes our political system, which shapes the funding system we petition, which influences the practices and possibilities of the organizations we work for. And of course, this impacts the people who rely on our programs.

I recently watched a short documentary about the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Through his freethinking, socially engaged and very public art, he came to be regarded as dangerous by the authorities.

When the Chinese government bulldozed his art studio, he examined the ruins and declared that it was his greatest work of art. Is there something we can learn from this, the ability to face ruin and flip it, turn it into a victory?

I don’t have the answer, but perhaps we have a piece of it.

 

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Kenji C. Liu is a writer, cultural worker, and 1.5 generation immigrant from New Jersey currently residing in Oakland. He has an MA in Anthropology and Social Transformation from the California Institute of Integral Studies and has worn many hats: Asian American Studies instructor, graphic designer, meditation teacher, deejay, and diversity consultant leading workshops nationally. Kenji’s poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes (Finishing Line Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in or is forthcoming from Tea Party Magazine (not related to the conservative movement), Kartika Review, Lantern Review, Kweli Journal, and the anthology Flick of My Tongue (Kearny Street Workshop, 2009). He is program director at the Geneva Car Barn and Powerhouse which offers arts-based youth development and leadership training for San Francisco District 11 residents. Prior to this, Kenji coordinated the Oakland Word program at the Oakland Public Library, which offered free creative writing workshops to the general public.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

 

Working (our butts off) to Preserve Cultural Policy in Oakland

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by Jacinda Abcarian

I think we all know that our place within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs determines how much time, energy and money we can spend on enjoying and creating art.  For many of Oakland’s youth, physiological and safety needs are top priorities.  This is why free and affordable arts offerings are so important but often left out of cultural policy discussions. Families with money can always find cool, engaging programs for their kids. But what about families that can barely pay the bills, or teens and young adults who cannot afford to work as unpaid interns at progressive arts organizations or focus on their personal development because they need to work? This is where Bay Area nonprofit organizations such as Oaktown Jazz Workshops, Youth Radio and Youth Speaks come in to play critical roles.

Teens and young adults in Oakland are the reason I love to come to work each day.  Their energy, resilience and love of life are refreshing and make my job of chasing funding to keep Youth Radio thriving all worth it. When they walk through the doors of our 20,000 square foot headquarters at 17th and Broadway, they enter a safe, professional and respectful environment.  We provide a setting that stands in stark contrast to the bleak, authoritarian schools and juvenile halls they come from.  Unfortunately, nonprofit leaders are burning out at high rates from trying to string together miracles on a shortage of cash. We need help, but help is clearly not on the way. Today’s headlines show that the government needs to cut 4 trillion from the budget, but is not looking to cut one cent from the Pentagon. As the classic bumper sticker reads: “It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”

On my “up” days I like to think that arts and culture can’t be stopped due to lack of funding. Just look at the birth of hip-hop culture in New York City in the early 80’s.  Created by “have-nots” hip-hop culture is now central to a multi-million dollar industry that has spread in popularity worldwide! But back to reality…with so little financial support for implementing cultural policy in our schools and communities, Oakland’s teens are hurting. The dropout rate is at a staggering 40%, making the Oakland schools known across the nation as “dropout factories.”  A little infusion of innovative arts programming would go a long way in this city. Take 17 year old Oakland high school student and participant at Youth Radio, Ria. I saw her crying on a park bench one morning and asked her what was wrong. She told me that her grades were not good enough to secure a work permit, and furthermore, she may not have the credits she needs to graduate. I phoned her principal who stated, “Ria is failing all of her classes except for one.” “Which one is that?” I asked. His reply-“Performing Arts-she has an “A” in that.” Ria told me that she got to take performing arts as a senior but that all of her other classes were so dull she just couldn’t pay attention.  If she had that class freshman year, she may never be in the position she is in today. Of course I do not mean to take away from the importance of hard work and just plain home-work, but I share this story to show how one simple offering, like a class in performing arts, can inspire a young person to get up each day and actually look forward to going to school.

Cultural policy is not just about making sure the local opera house stays open, it is about preserving what most would view as basic elements of a decent and just society including public libraries and public broadcasting. With funding for these and arts education being stripped away daily, as Arlene Goldbard so well describes, our youth need nonprofit organizations now more than ever.

 

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Jacinda Abcarian is a graduate of Youth Radio’s class of 1993 and is its current Executive Director. She moved from a student and peer teacher to an award-winning reporter and producer. She has worked as a reporter for WRFG-FM in Atlanta and as a journalism fellow at NPR in Washington, D.C. Awards include a Golden Reel from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for Accidental Shooting, and the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award for her producer role in the series, Emails from Kosovo. She was recently honored by the Gerbode Foundation with the prestigious 2010 Gerbode Professional Development Fellowship award. Abcarian has been active in initiatives promoting prevention of tobacco use and gun violence among youth. Abcarian earned a B.A. in Sociology from UC Berkeley and completed Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management at Harvard Business School. She is also a member of the City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission and The Crucible’s Advisory Council.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

The Civics of Cultural Sustainability

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by Randolph Belle

“Sustainability” is one of the more versatile words you’ll hear these days.  In several conversations there could be several different trustees of any sustainability movement.  You might hear an environmentalists referring to eco-friendly practices to save the planet; philanthropists and foundations talking about the future funding strategies of a cultural or charitable activity, or; what I’ve been focusing on, our ability to preserve the integrity of distinct cultural contributions in spite of extreme external  forces.

By looking at popular culture, it’s apparent to me that you don’t need a unique product or talent to succeed in entertainment today.  You don’t have to be able to sing to be heard- autotune; you don’t need to play an instrument to make music- gadgets; and songwriting must be at an all-time low. So it’s important not to lose sight of the many local artists, who are keeping all forms of art and culture alive and well.

Artists will always do what they do, but the way cities promote cultural engagement is through policy.  Policy can’t control what a person makes as art, but it can dictate what receives public support. Oakland public policy experiences a disconnect between written implication and potential to produce a favorable result.  For many, many years, there has been no comprehensive policy, or sufficient political will to invest in the most bountiful, naturally occurring resources that Oakland has- the arts.  The arts are now often referred to in terms of art and “neighborhood beautification”- huh!?!?  The arts in Oakland are fundamentally an economic and community development issue, and with plenty of proven examples of how to increase economic activity through investments in the arts, we need to force the change we believe in.

With recent city budget proposals, which eliminate 100% funding for the arts, it’s clear that new and enterprising policy strategies need to be developed and implemented now to fuel Oakland’s new-found cultural mecca-tude, lest it be lost.  If there will be no money, then we should certainly demand a plan for the future. Let me be clear though- I am in no way suggesting a protracted “strategic planning process” which yields exactly what I got from the last three- a stack of papers.  (You can view the last Task Force Report on the Arts and Economic Development at the SOA site).

Actually, the Cultural Funding Program, while of significant benefit to some organizations in the city, directly benefits only a small portion of the broader arts community.  Most people involved in the arts have never, and will never receive any public support.  So If current funding for the arts is to be severely reduced or suspended, the opportunity is now to develop a new, restructured, more efficient and effective model that supports all segments of the arts community and promotes economic development as well as cultural enrichment.

New policies should focus on broadening access to cultural opportunities and encouraging public/private partnerships to create jobs and revenue in the creative sector.  The policy reform framework should include a number of key components.  Reforms to the permitting, planning and zoning processes to expedite housing, venues, and special event projects would generate significant impact. Economic development policy reform would provide incentives and business assistance to arts-related businesses.  Organizational restructuring in city government could create an inter-agency collaboration between CEDA, Redevelopment, Visit Oakland, Public Works, Health and Human Services, Recreation and the Police Department.  Such inter-agency collaboration would realize efficiencies in service delivery and budget allocation, thereby accomplishing more with less.

Oakland is in a time of possibility.  There are major challenges, but we’ve also got some major arts policy implementation opportunities available.  Now is the time to mobilize and engage in the process- on boards, commissions, informal groups and as individuals.  Public forums on the arts by the Emerging Arts Professionals, Support Oakland Artists, the Oakland Cultural Trust, as well as others, are a place to start.  Get involved and get it moving!

 

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Randolph Belle has enjoyed 20 years in the arts, business and nonprofit management in Oakland. He’s started several commercial art and design companies and served in a wide variety of civic and service capacities. Randolph is the founder and Executive Director of Support Oakland Artists, a nonprofit art and community development corporation that works to enhance local artists’ ability to thrive and fuel economic development throughout the region.  Randolph has served as the President of the Board of Directors at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland and Vice Chair for the City of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission.  Randolph is currently on the board of the Museum of Children’s Art, the Oakland Film Society, the Advisory Board of the Crucible and is the Education and Workforce Development Director for the Oakland Media Center.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

 

Cultural Stewardship (from the San Francisco Ballet to Big Freedia)

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by Eboni Senai Hawkins

“Katrina played a big part in spreading bounce… We were displaced all over the world.  People were trying to find bounce music like it was a drug.” ~ Big Freedia (on Late Night with Carson Daly)

I was introduced to Big Freedia – a transgender star of New Orleans’ bounce music who has a hit song entitled “Azz Everywhere” – last year via Namane Mohlabane and the New Parish.  In that one concert, it felt like all my worlds – Southeast college parties, Brooklyn dancehall sound systems, and gender-fluid Oakland – had collided and settled comfortably around me.  I can only imagine what it would have felt like if I had been one of the hundreds who had come to the Bay Area from New Orleans. The rapid tempo, the booty-shakin’ bass, the gritty, insistent call and response could very well have sounded like “home.”

At one point in the show, the beat dropped out and Big Freedia’s acapella verses hit hard.  We all stopped gyrating and caught our breath to witness this person who was giving her all, working a limelight that was a long time coming and might not last.  I looked around and wondered, how many in the room could feel the history in Big Freedia’s voice and follow that thread to the story of New Orleans?

If we’ve learned anything from DJ Kool Herc having to reach out to hip hop fans to cover medical expenses, we cannot depend on market forces to assign value to the subcultures that make up this nation’s legacy.  It is too easy to equate cultural stewardship with a certain class.  At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that the cultural forms that have the investment of time and money from their audiences are the ones that thrive and become representatives of what we value as a whole.

One day I found myself inputting plans in my Google Calendar for an evening out.  San Francisco Ballet at the War Memorial Opera House at 8pm… Big Freedia at Public Works at 11. In that moment, it saddened me to think that while the San Francisco Ballet has multiple tiers of support, is touted as one of the city’s gems, and will probably live on for another 73 years, the event at Public Works is only one of Big Freedia’s many solo shows in a packed schedule. She performs up to six nights a week, working the music circuit from nightclubs in New Orleans to SXSW, attempting to bank on a “trend” that’s just reaching cult status after 20 years.

Who will be cultural stewards for Big Freedia and bounce music?  Can we get the hipsters that dive into the safe space of “shaking for Big Freedia” to also support the post-Katrina communities that remain dispersed throughout the U.S.?  Can we get urban Black communities to embrace “Big Freedia, the Queen Diva” AND move towards accepting the LGBTQ community as a whole?  In the attention deficit world of “click, click, done” via Kickstarter campaigns how do you get someone who buys one ticket to one concert to understand the effects they could have on a subculture?

Sometimes you have to start where you are, build relationships, and hope the significance sinks in.

In the dance world, intimate artist-audience conversations are too often a “benefit” reserved for high-level donors.  When I created the DANCEfirst! salons at the Museum of the African Diaspora, attendees jumped right in, taking in performance, asking the hard questions after, and coming back the next month.  In the push for empowered citizens of culture, I am inspired by local institutions who are making the move to deepen relationships.  YBCA’s Big Idea Nights earned it a reputation as “that museum that throws really good parties.”  Oakland Museum’sOakland Standard gets me out almost every First Friday for the eclectic, socially-responsive activities that celebrate local community.

If we look at engagement alone, cultural stewardship is evolving. We are a DIY, participatory culture – we curate our own shows and raise our own funds.  Now we just need to be consistent.  See ourselves as “supporters” and not just “consumers”.  The difference is what will ensure that the art we value, that speaks to our multiple voices, continues to receive the support it needs to be heard.

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Eboni Senai Hawkins is the Producing Artistic Director of see. think. dance.

After valuable experiences in arts administration (Jacob’s Pillow Dance, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet), she took a leap of faith and started working directly with the art and artists she loved.

Inspired by the opportunity to present intimate performance in a low-pressure environment, Eboni curated a short program for the June 2007 Mission Arts Performance Project (MAPP) hosted by the Red Poppy Art House, featuring dancers Antoine Hunter and Rashad Pridgen.

 

The response from the primarily visual arts/music audience was overwhelming and in collaboration with Todd Brown and the Red Poppy’s Street-Level Curating Program, Eboni established see. think. dance. to produceTruth + Beauty (November 2007), Word. Warrior. Music. Movement. (March 2008), and Urban Art Sessions(May 2008).

May 2008 also marked the formation of and the first performative installment by The Intimacy Project, an ongoing collaboration between artists/educators who draw creative inspiration from their connection to the African continent and are deeply invested in social change through the re-integration of the mind and the body.  Losing a dancer at the last moment and concerned with the flow of the evening’s program, Eboni overcame her fear of the stage to perform a duet with actor Kwesi Hutchful, a movement composition incorporating media installation, tempest tossed by lauren woods and layered with a recorded version of Intro to Kemetic Science by David Boyce.

In 2010, heavily influenced by the REVIVE workshop, Eboni created the annual REflect film series as part of the Black Choreographers’ Festival: Here and Now. Subtitled “The Black Dancing Body on Film”, REflect mines the rich visual history of Black dancers and choreographers on film through a dynamic selection of documentaries, feature films, and shorts.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) on Saturday, April 16! Register here.

 

 

Who Can We Be?

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by Arlene Goldbard

In my first post, my goal was to expand our narrow debate over arts funding to include the large and urgent questions of value that should drive cultural policy. I brought up really big issues (such as the fact that we spend more than two annual National Endowment for the Arts [NEA)] budgets on war each day, seven days a week). But even if you want to stay more tightly focused on questions of art and culture, it’s a big landscape.

Every public sector has a cultural policy, whether they say so or not. In some places, it’s explicit. For instance, some nations mandate a certain amount of domestically produced content on TV or in movie theaters, to support their media sector and keep from being overwhelmed by U.S. product. In other places, policy is implicit: what can you deduce about U.S. cultural policy from looking at arts education in elementary schools today? No one has to say it’s totally expendable for us to get that message; public actions do the talking.

Cultural policy is always driven by values. As a nation, what are our goals for cultural development? Whose culture counts? What do we want to preserve, protect, or promote? Values are encoded in the way we allocate funds, in zoning and regulations, in the priorities reflected by our history books and museums.

A couple of years ago, I teamed up with other artists and activists to articulate Art & The Public Purpose: A New Framework putting forward five key elements of a new national policy recognizing culture’s central role in stimulating social imagination, empathy, and national recovery.

The Framework didn’t take off the way we hoped. It turned out that the Obama administration was as reluctant as its predecessors to invest in artists and cultural development. The right has been successful in making the arts a toxic issue, and no administration has been brave enough to buck that. But despite officials’ trepidation, the five initiatives articulated there are still key to a viable, democratic cultural policy. And if I had to name the three most important things to do to improve U.S. cultural policy, I’d choose these three underlying principles of the New Framework:

Create a “new WPA,” a public service jobs program addressing all our national goals—clean energy, excellent education, sound economy, good health and more. It should include putting artists and creative organizers to work for the common good using every art form and way of working: providing well-rounded education, sustaining and caring for the ill, engaging elders in creativity, rebuilding community infrastructure to reflect our best. Seventy-five years ago, the WPA supported five arts programs as part of FDR’s program to recover from the Great Depression. It worked. Today, unemployment is a scandal and a shame, and jobs are still the engine of prosperity; when tied to public purpose, no investment brings greater impact.

Invest our resources to promote cultural equity. The right to culture—to honor those who came before, express ourselves and take part in community life—is a core human right. Our national policy should mandate equal opportunity to contribute to and benefit from cultural life, whether our families are indigenous to this land, have lived here for many decades or just arrived; whether we live in cities or the countryside; regardless of color, creed, orientation or physical ability. The way we support, protect and promote culture should reflect our best, our national commitment to equity, fairness and inclusion, instead of favoring the wealthiest and whitest institutions above all others.

Make culture count in public policy. Every community’s cultural fabric is made of shared places, customs, values and creative acts. The stronger it is, the more likely that kids will stay in school, businesses will thrive, neighbors will celebrate and learn from each other. When we forget this, we pay a price. How would our cities be different if policy-makers had considered the cultural lives of the neighborhoods leveled to make way for new stadiums, performing arts complexes and freeways? Cultural policy should be modeled on laws assessing environmental impacts, considering the human and cultural cost of public actions—and not just dollars and cents—before approving plans.

Sometimes simple solutions are the most powerful. Just adopting these three principles would completely transform our national cultural policy from a weak and vulnerable system modeled on private patronage to an engine of cultural democracy.

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Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her Web site: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development was published by New Village Press in November 2006. She is also co-author of Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in In Motion Magazine, Art in America, Theatre, Tikkun, and many other journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe, on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of integral organizations. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, and public and private funders and policymakers including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Independent Television Service, Appalshop and dozens of others. She is currently writing a new book on art’s public purpose. She serves as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.

Don’t miss Reframing the Arts : Advocating for the Public Culture at Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) on Saturday, April 16! Register here.