Posts

TOMORROW

by Sanjit Sethi

I want to make a distinction between spending the resources to fund or not fund a specific cultural project and the ability to devote resources to think about the long-term direction of where one wants to allocate resources towards cultural cultivation. Inherently cultural policy is a process of navigation. Navigation is about knowledge, the knowledge of the terrain, but just as importantly, it’s the ability to apply a series of skills to ascertain the direction one would like to go based on a range of factors some of which are in your control and some of which are outside of your control. Individuals or organizations that drive cultural policy should see themselves at the helm of a vessel where one is taking into account the determination to go in a particular direction, while at the same time accounting for multiple factors, which try as we might, are uncontrollable. The boat may be under your control, the engine may be under your control. There are many things that are under your control but those aren’t the only factors affecting your journey, and one needs to consider and think through those factors. Cultural policy should work in the same way.

Cultural policy becomes staid and automatic the moment it thinks it is the sole driver for any form of change. Similar to the navigator, the best drivers of cultural policy are ones that act with a degree of humility and with the acknowledgment of the forces they cannot change yet need to exist within. To my mind the two key ingredients to cultural policy for the next ten years are innovation and ethics. Oftentimes it can give us comfort to feel that policy drives programming. I think this is a mistake. Instead innovative programming should provide us with real world examples of how something works or doesn’t work, which then can determine a new direction in which policy itself can move. In the day of the 24-hour news cycle and twitter it is easy not to focus on the details; we can get caught up with the large picture, the big event. As millenials assume their place as the next generation it is important to take note of the many aspects that drive them, of cultural diversity and collaborative models of education, to name a few. The test of cultural policy of the future will be to harness innovation in a manner that continues to involve those individuals not already at the table.

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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.

Kristi’s Rant

by Kristi Holohan

 

Art is a language. Art can be used as expression and communication. Arts teach innovation, creativity and philosophy. To speak this language we need to be exposed to Art’s tools-materials, positive instruction, and techniques.  We should be nurtured, positively guided through our experience and listen to each other’s expression as a form of cross-cultural communication. The tools of Art are scarcely provided where I live in East Oakland and when they are it is far too infrequent. Oakland’s Cultural Arts and Marketing Department, Oakland Parks & Recreation, Youth Upraising and East Oakland Youth Development Center, East Side Arts Alliance and Community Rejuvenation Project do offer some means to provide Arts but this funding and programming is hard to receive, ALWAYS at jeopardy, and pits Art’s workers against each other. All of this work is amazing, but we need to support neighborhoods that are operating in economic depravity, desperation and isolation from support of the well tax-funded communities. It is on this premise I’d like to speak in relation to the Arts community:

My friend’s story.

My friend (and mother of two) was telling me how she was pistol whipped the other day; it fractured her skull. She lives about 5 blocks from me in between 35th and Fruitvale. She said wasn’t scared, her son is a survivor of gun violence. OPD said they were going to catch whoever did this and put them in jail for life-she didn’t want that. She doesn’t want to isolate her community.

We needed to change something. Oakland needs more compassion, opportunity, and more investment in ALL of our community. We need to have a city where programming is seen as value, opportunity and community has options besides criminal activity and policing.

Institutional Neglect towards the Youth.

It is hard for me to prove the direct comparison between lack of Arts and our community disparity because easily available current public not updated properly. The most accurate depiction of Oakland Street Violence (taken back in 2008 by SF Gate) is a map of homicides in neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are also lowscoring in the Academic Performance Index (2009) charting Oakland Public School student aptitude effectively removing Arts programming from the school because it is not seen as an essential Core Academic Subject.

Without integrated community Art and Cultural programming in a public setting Art’s are secluded from certain communities.

Criminalization

Young Graffiti Artists in neighborhoods that offer minimal art programs are considered criminals for expression with a spray-can. South of Fruitvale there is no access to art stores for drawing books, only hardware stores with sharpies and spray cans. Representatives from Oakland’s Public Works Agency and graffiti abatement have stated an interest in working with Oakland’s “unsanctioned” painters because murals and integrated community artworks reduce vandalism. Meanwhile Public Employees are tracking graffiti work to chase “GANGS” in neighborhoods and then criminalize painters who associate with gangs with all of the crimes of that vandalism crew. These terms are not only marginalizing but result in increased hostility from all parties. If one were to look closer at graffiti, one would see its life changing aspects. I have had youth interns say to me, “graffiti saved my life from street violence”. It is essential that we support avenues for this form of popular expression. Some of the greatest artists of today are graffiti artists showcased and collected by major International Arts Institutions and holding spectacular events attended by community. I’d like to see integrated community conversations held to provide alternatives.

In addition, our community has a large amount of people who are deemed “illegal”, many of whom are artists who are not allowed to participate in their expression on a legitimate professional level.  Often times, people have had no choice but to come to this country as youth, with families seeking political and or economic asylum. I encourage our governing bodies to lift restrictions on citizenship and to embrace our cultural community at large. We cannot continue to isolate people and expect justice peace and equality in our society.

Oakland Shines

Oakland and can be seen in the International arena with the Scraper Bikes, Oakland’s famous venues, thriving Galleries, cultural events, Hip Hop celebrities, and Turf Dancing sensations. These local Arts gain International notoriety. Arts and Culture are Oakland’s most important asset and an answer to injustice.

Arts in Oakland are essential for community and expression. We need to make strides to nurture instead of marginalize our biggest assets Culture and Arts.

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I’m an artist, teacher, non-profit community worker at ACE Arts and a Directing Member of Rock Paper Scissors Collective. I have worked teaching mural painting, Sewing and Textiles, Drawing, Clay, and Woodworking, techniques in underserved communities and with assistance from a number of established Arts Organizations. I have received a number of public commissions to facilitate integrated community artwork, which can be found around the greater Bay area. My facilitation has been recognized by local and national media sources. I am very passionate about Art’s accessibility to all as an essential tool for a stable and sustainable future.

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

Cultural Sustainability in the New (Oakland)

by Randolph Belle

The (Oakland) in the title of this submission can probably be swapped out for many cities across the country, but the concept of cultural sustainability has been an increasingly pressing issue for me of late. I look at my role in the arts community, my existence as an African American and what distinction should be made for me as an African American cultural worker.  The conversation for me then turns to what other’s roles are and what effort should be made in recognizing and maintaining the contributions of individual cultural groups in what some would call a post-racial society.

With so much talk of environmental sustainability, I find it ironic, and myself left a bit empty, with the thought that we could save the planet and lose a people. Recent reports confirmed by the latest census data shows that Oakland has lost 25% of its African American population in less than a decade. It could be said that as the people go, so does the culture.  Oakland is right where San Francisco was a few decades ago when I was growing up there, (and we know how that one turned out), but having been one of the more active arts participants in Oakland for the past twenty years, I feel uniquely qualified and personally compelled to fully engage this conversation.

The indicators, individually or collectively, are pretty apparent.  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.  Are these just coincidences, or evidence of something requiring more of our attention.

For anyone asking themselves “What’s the big deal?” or “It’s not like that”, or even “You’re too sensitive”- my hope is that you fall in to one of a couple of categories- indifferent or oblivious, because the other option is much more alarming.  You may not feel any responsibility to individual cultural sustainability, or realize that you should, but there are ramifications, intended or not, to that state of being.

The result of that in Oakland has been a persistent tension that can only impede the ultimate potential of the cultural renaissance we’re currently experiencing. This dynamic started becoming evident in the Yerba Buena Center’s two shows about Oakland in the mid-90’s, which, in my opinion, devolved into an issue of race.  It’s also seen in how the Oakland renaissance is commonly represented, devoid of any historical perspective and reminiscent of how Columbus “discovered” America.  The “new” Oakland has no acknowledgement that Oakland has always been one of the most culturally rich and diverse cities in America, waiting for and opportunity to shine.

I totally understand that these issues are far more complex than can be summarized in a single blog post, but it does call for an in-depth, ongoing and honest conversation, which I intend to pursue until we come to an acceptable conclusion.  In the end, I still feel that the cultural contributions of everyone should be enjoyed by everyone, but we should also be mindful that a spirit of reverence to existing and historical cultures; and some attention to the sociological implications of the drastic shifts in populations need to be considered if Oakland is to become one of the great global centers of the cultural arts.

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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.

Art as a Human Right

by Kenji C. Liu

“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.” – William Morris

William Morris was a late 19th century artist and socialist who divided art into two types – the type done by and for the people, or popular art, and its opposite, art tied to commerce or capitalism. He saw the latter as contradictory – the tying of something that gives life to something that destroys it.

There are others who have complementary views – Hannah Arendt drew a distinction between work and labor. Work was an activity done by humans to make a beautiful world, whereas labor tied one’s activities to mass production and profit-making.

In the late 1970s, the term cultural work was coined and had an explicitly anti-elitist and anti-capitalist view of art. Cultural workers saw the creation of culture as being a grassroots activity, capable of being done by all, without profit as its primary goal. In this sense the practice of art is democratization and self-determination.

In our current society, the value of an activity is tied to its present or potential economic value. This is implicit not only in the for-profit sector but in the non-profit sector as well, where funding is tied to measurability of outcomes. As funding for arts declines, we may try to measure artistic activities in order to argue, for example, that art too can also fit within an economic calculus, because it improves productivity. Yet funding for arts continues to disappear.

As artists know, creativity is not an entirely rational, measurable practice. One of art’s strengths is that it is a whole other way of understanding the world. Its value, so to speak, is that it offers a practice that is not automatically enmeshed in economic usefulness.

We can stand in that value. 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?

 

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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.

TODAY

By Sanjit Sethi.

The landscape of cultural policy is a constantly shifting one. Not unlike the rapidly changing face of our planet we can similarly see changes in cultural policy by looking at both larger national / global policy as well as by examining more intimate local policy as it relates to specific communities. While the phrase “think globally, act locally” is somewhat tired and overused, it still holds relevance to an approach towards enhancing a community’s ability to celebrate who they are – one of the cornerstones of cultural policy. Due to factors including, but not limited to, the economic downturn, the housing crisis, and state / local / national governments feeling budgetary constrictions, it is easy to lose any semblance of a thoughtful process in examining the direction that cultural policy is headed. In many ways these factors, these seemingly uncontrollable forces, shape and shift any attempt towards enacting cultural policy both on the national / global scale as well as in our own backyards.

Currently art and government organizations are trying to stay alive. They are trying to meet a varied and diverse constituency with limited resources. Painting with a broad brush, many organizations operate in a manner in which the policy and decision making is far removed from the day-to-day aspects of programming. Cultural policy cannot separate itself from issues of immigration policy, social justice, human rights, and equity. It is ideally a celebration of diversity, a celebration of sameness and difference. And yet cultural policy is very much under attack by a jingoistic backlash in this country (best witnessed by the Tea Party Movement) that seeks to homogenize and polarize.

 

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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.

Making Dance Visible: Prioritizing Place for Public Performance in Oakland

by Eboni Senai Hawkins

“Our communities need to see our artists doing their art.” ~ Senay Dennis (aka Refa 1)

As a transplant from New York (8 years and counting), I have come to expect the performing arts to take over the landscape during warm weather in major cities.  New York sets the bar with Summer Stage across 5 boroughs.  L.A. organizes Grand Performances in spite of its urban sprawl. Chicago, with only 2.5 real warm months, has a jam-packed schedule at Millenium Park.  San Francisco’s approach is a little disjointed but at least the effort is there: Stern Grove and Outside Lands fill a niche. And in SF, when all else fails, there’s always someone performing at BART & MUNI’s busiest stations.

So what’s going on in Oakland?

Oakland is home to some 90 parks, (compare that to Brooklyn’s 39).  With so much public space, why are we only graced with two days for the Art and Soul Festival, four days of Sundays in the Redwoods, and a smattering of lunchtime performances as part of Sweet Summer Sounds?  In the debate around encouraging arts appreciation in youth, why are we not making it simple, direct, and affordable?  While we’re at it, why not change the focus in favor of involving whole families through a dynamic network of outdoor, neighborhood-based performances that span the range from music to dance to theater?

Outdoor performances (usually) = free performances.

The economics don’t add up. Nor should they, according to Arlene Goldbard’s urging that we “start with open eyes: refuse to pretend this debate is about money; explain how the arts are being used to send a political message.”  Oakland’s political message is a charged one that mimics the overall United States emphasis to exercise control and boundaries rather than encouraging diverse communities to connect around public performance.  What if, post-Mesherle verdict, the City of Oakland spent less on overtime for law enforcement officials and invited Turf Feinz and Youth Uprising to engage the public in a dance demonstration at Frank Ogawa Plaza?

What if Oakland committed to outdoor performances as much as is its highly-publicized restoration projects?  CBS Outdoor contributed $6.5 million in billboard revenue so that Oakland School of the Arts could pre-pay its first seven years of rent to the Fox Theater.  What if the City negotiated with CBS Outdoor to use a portion of the billboard’s continued revenue to support site-specific performance activating the Uptown Sculpture Garden?

In the midst of the furor around Mayor Quan’s most recent push to cut Oakland’s arts funding, we also need to look at our neighbors’ understanding of “the arts”.

I would bet that the majority of Oakland-ers, like the majority of Americans, don’t define themselves as artists or see “the arts” as vital to their lives.  Even in the Bay Area, where we are supposedly so culturally-literate, I listen closely to the subtext when young second-generation business owners think artists are people who just want to “live off society” and graduates of Berkeley High are instantly cynical when a new acquaintance describes herself as “an artist.”  What if Oakland’s residents, encouraged by the presence of dance and music almost in their backyards, became more active cultural stewards, showing just as much enthusiasm for new bars and restaurants as the performance-packed but seemingly one-off Uptown Unveiled?

Performance artist, Adesola Akinleye, discussing the overlapping elements of bodies and buildings, writes:

“… The person who watches dancing does none of the physical work themselves but in perceiving the performance they experience the rhythm of it as though it were in their own body…  I see choreography working in such a way that the audience becomes aware of their own feeling of the aesthetic of the body in space.  I aim for my work to continue to be alive within the space when the dancing bodies have finished; for the dance to have left a trace.”

Dance demands a kinesthetic empathy, a way of experiencing art bodily simply by watching.  Another video featuring Turf Feinz is “RIP Rich D”.  The intense and simple beauty of humans finding an outlet for mourning through movement has accumulated over 2.5 million views on YouTube.  Such empathy has the potential to pierce the layers of urban existence and bring together Oakland’s diverse yet self-segregated neighborhoods.  Especially if we commit to it in public.

 

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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 We Are

By Arlene Goldbard .

I admit it: I’m obsessed. I turn my attention to the way we spend our commonwealth as a nation, and like a song you can’t get out of your head, the cultural policy questions that matter most to me keep cycling through: Who are we as a people? What do we want to remembered for, our vast creativity, or our prodigious ability to punish?

Most mainstream debate about cultural policy in the U.S. actually focuses on one question, arts funding. Recently, the focus has been on cuts to the budgets of state arts agencies and the National Endowment for the Arts. (If you’re interested, check out my 3-part series on the subject, “Life Implicates Art.”)

Cultural policy is much, much bigger. It’s the aggregate of public statements and actions affecting cultural life. That includes support for artists and arts organizations; regulations and other policies affecting the commercial cultural industries (for-profit film, TV, music); telecommunications policies that regulate the internet, TV, and radio; education policies affecting what is taught, whose culture is deemed worth learning—and much, much more.

The tiny portion of public funds going to arts and culture has been accurately described as the equivalent of a rounding error in categories like public spending on the military or prisons. Nevertheless, when budget-cutting happens these days, culture is treated like a significant center for cost-savings. Politicians use the arts as a form of symbolic speech, to signal a get-serious attitude. In return, they get a lot of credit for almost no impact on the deficit.

It reminds me of a joke that’s making the rounds, inspired by recent events in Wisconsin: a CEO, a Tea Party member, and a union member are sharing a plate of cookies. The CEO takes 11 of the 12 cookies, then turns to the Tea Partier and says, “Watch out! That union member wants a piece of your cookie.”

The truth about arts funding is even more stark: for the last decade, we taxpayers have been spending the equivalent of two annual NEA budgets a day, seven days a week, on war. In the recent legislation extending Bush-era tax cuts, the U.S. Treasury lost $225 billion in revenues from tax breaks specifically tailored to benefit high-income taxpayers. In our version of the joke, the CEO is the world’s largest war and prison industries; the union member is an artist; and the Tea Partier is all the other social programs duking it out. But it isn’t one cookie out of a dozen we’re fighting over; it’s barely a crumb.

People who specialize in framing public issues—campaign advisors, for instance, and other strategists—tell us it’s not the facts and figures of an issue that matter most, it’s how the issue is framed. How big is the picture? Who is in it? How do the pieces connect? One popular way of explaining this is to show a group of people two pictures. In the first, group members see a bunch of sick-looking cattle in a field. When asked why the animals are ill, they speculate that the farmer has neglected them, or they have a virus, or they don’t have enough food. Then the picture is switched. In the second image, the frame is enlarged. Behind the hill, group members see a huge factory, belching black smoke. Suddenly, other reasons for the cattle’s illness occur to them: the air is polluted, chemicals are in the animals’ drinking water, and so on.

Our arts funding debate is like the first picture, a frame far too small to hold adequate information. What do you want to fund, politicians ask, school lunches or the arts? Health care or art? But when we pull back for a long shot, we see that those aren’t the choices. Officials are choosing tax breaks for the wealthiest over cultural funding; they are building prisons faster than schools and quibbling over an NEA budget that equals half a day’s worth of war funding.

If we bring the big picture into the frame, what values are driving our current cultural policy? I’m ashamed to say that they are the same values the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., listed 44 years ago in his famous speech at Riverside Church: “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.”

We can change this, but we have to start by telling the truth about what’s at stake. Who are we as a people? What do we want to remembered for, our vast creativity, or our prodigious ability to punish?

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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.