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| We the Youth, Haring and CityKids |
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| AIDS Memorial Quilt |
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| LA Commons |
Community Arts also known as Dialogical Art, and Community Engaged Art is described by the internet as “an artistic activity based in a community setting.”
Maryo Gard Ewell at the Colorado Council on the Arts, also called a community arts tradition keeper and grew up in the community arts movement, provides this working definition:
“Community art is of and by the people of a place and culture, often facilitated by a professional artist. It reflects the values, concerns, and meaning of living in that place or culture.”
And this analogy:
"Long ago, I heard Merce Cunningham speak at a conference. An audience member asked him to name his best dance. He said something like this: “Everyone's body moves in a different way. The best pieces I've done have been for a particular dancer, and while many people can dance [a piece] well, only one person can dance it almost perfectly.” There's my analogy. A given piece holds its deepest meaning for, and can best be evaluated by, the people of the community that have made that piece."
Some community art:
Bread and Puppet Theater
Founded in 1963 in the NYC by Peter Schumann
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| Early Poster |
“It’s bread and puppet, and we mean that. The puppetry is to create the situation to share the bread, because without that you couldn’t persuade them, in a capitalist country, to come and eat bread. They’d be too skeptical."
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| Bread and Puppet anti-war parade, NYC, 1967 |
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| Oscar Romero puppet, Washington DC, 199 |
Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
“K.O.S., the Kids of Survival, coalesced around Tim Rollins in the early 1980s, a time of inclusion and shifting autonomy. Artist and activist Rollins had been hired to design a program to teach literacy through the arts to students considered at risk of academic failure at IS 52 in the South Bronx. His skill in the overcrowded classroom inspired him to set up an independent studio for the more seriously involved students. Succeeding at the seemingly impossible task of educating kids at risk led Rollins to the equally impossible task of facilitating works of art made in collaboration with his students that are now held by museums and collectors around the world. For Rollins, art is a means to knowledge, an ensemble of opportunities. His enthusiasm paved the way to a world beyond the dilapidated South Bronx of his students’ childhoods. Thirty years later, K.O.S. artists now hold workshops in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. A museum retrospective of works created between 1982 and 2000, curated by Ian Berry for the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, recently stopped at the ICA Philadelphia and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle."
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| Tim Rollins and K.O.S. Workshop for Amerika IX, 1987. Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina. |
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| Animal Farm - New World Order 1989–92 |
Detroit Summer Grace Lee and James Boggs
Detroit Summer is a multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit, working to transform ourselves and our communities by confronting the problems we face with creativity and critical thinking. We currently organize youth-led media arts projects and community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and parties." Detroit Summer develops youth leadership for today’s movement by involving university youth from all over the country with local youth…
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| Detroit Summer Mural |
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| Gardening |
(R)evolution
"Evolution is not linear" - GLB
Los Angeles Poverty Department
Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) was founded in 1985 by director-performer-activist John Malpede. LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people, and the first arts program of any kind for homeless people in Los Angeles.
LAPD’s activities and projects have used theater and other arts to thematically focus on a constellation of inter-related issues of continuing importance to Skid Row, and other low-income communities.
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| States of Incarceration |
A common element is to create acknowledgement for the accomplishments of the neighborhood. In articulating the new reality of the neighborhood, we create a narrative that causes re-thinking of a variety of issues, including: gentrification and community displacement, drug recovery, the war on drugs and drug policy reform, the status of women and children on Skid Row and mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty.
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| Talent Show, 1985 |
Skid Row is a designed area, designed to concentrate the poorest citizens and services for those citizens in a restricted area. But this “containment policy” for Skid Row (officially described as such in planning documents of the city) has backfired, in the classic “watch out what you wish for cause it just might happen” mode. The containment and segregation of Skid Row has resulted in the grassroots creation of a real community.
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| Call home, 1991 |
Immigrant Movement International, Tania Brugera, and IMI Corona
Immigrant Movement International takes its name from three words with a specific context:
- Immigrant, as it is the word used by legal and political institutions to label people who establish themselves in a new context.
- Movement, as a way to create an alternative to the mainstream position, in the tradition and legacy of civic movements in the history of political advancement.
- International, as it recognizes the impossibility of discussing migration without addressing local and international perspective.
IM International is our acronym expressing international as the identity of people who migrate outside of their place of origin. Being international as we understand it is traveling with all your human rights.
Sometimes we simply use IM as play on words affirming our right to be acknowledged and to belong .
Bruguera examined growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants. Bruguera also delved into the implementation of art in society, examining what it means to create “Useful Art”, and addressing the disparity of engagement between informed audiences and the general public, as well as the historical gap between the language used in what is considered avant-garde and the language of urgent politics.
IMI, Corona
IMI Corona has been functioning primarily through the community and has been focusing recently on issues reflecting the neighborhood including immigrant rights, feminism, language justice, and gentrification
Dia de los Muertos
South Asian Womens Creative Collective (SAWCC)
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| Her Stories: Fifteen Years, Queens Museum, 2012 |
SAWCC held its first meeting in March of 1997 at the offices of the Sister Fund in Manhattan. Fourteen South Asian women of diverse ages and sexualities attended that meeting, invited through word of mouth and meetings at various grassroots spaces, particularly Sakhi for South Asian Women and the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association. Soon after, women began to gather monthly at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop to facilitate and present their work. At that time, there were no other (feminist or otherwise) South Asian arts–based organizations in New York, making SAWCC an eclectic and unique space of support and community.
Current Mission Statement:
SAWCC is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the advancement, visibility, and development of emerging and established South Asian women artists and creative professionals by providing a physical and virtual space to profile their creative and intellectual work across disciplines.
We use the UN definition of South Asia, which includes: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan & Sri Lanka.
Freedom.Safety.NOW
Creative Action Against Gender-Based Violence in response to the horrific violence wrought upon Jyoti Singh Pandey in India in December 2012 and on women’s bodies everyday around the world.
Laundromat Project
Make Art | Wash Clothes | Build Community
We amplify the creativity that already exists within communities by using arts and culture to build community networks, solve problems, and enhance our sense of ownership in the places where we live, work, and grow.
We envision a world in which artists are understood as valuable assets in every community and everyday people know the power of their own creative capacity to transform their lives, their relationships, and their surroundings.
Theory of Change
The Laundromat Project believes art, culture, and engaged imaginations can change the way people see their world, open them up to new ideas, and connect them with their neighbors. When artists have the opportunity to build and contribute their unique skills and perspectives to the needs of their neighborhoods, they can be invaluable assets in furthering community wellbeing. When the skills and strategies for igniting creativity are made broadly available to everyday people and purposefully applied as tools for visioning a new and better world, these can be powerful forces for positive, transformative change. We know we have been successful when, over time, our neighbors—artists and everyday people, newcomers and old-timers, individually and collectively—become more involved in the civic and cultural affairs of their communities, feel more deeply connected to the places and people where they live and work, and bring a sense of creativity to community concerns.
LINKS TO ALL THE ABOVE AND MORE
Bread and Puppet Theater
K.O.S + Tim Rollins
Detroit Summer
Los Angeles Poverty Department
LAPD Vice Article
Immigrant Movement International
IMI Corona
South Asian Womens Creative Collective - SAWCC
Laundromat Project
Ro Garrido and A Living Room on Roosevelt
Theaster Gates
THANKS GUYS
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