Here is a selection from the ArtsAccess Project’s « Community Arts & the Museum: A Handbook for Institutions Interested in Community Arts » (download in PDF (7.45MB)








Community Arts: By Whom and For What?

« We are sitting in a circle around a “fire” — an installation consisting of a candle mounted on a large stone encased in a Plexiglas tipi created by my co-facilitator, Mohawk architect and historian Bill Woodworth of Six Nations — in the middle of the Brantford Museum. The flickering flame illuminates the three generative questions mounted on the Plexiglas: How do you understand “community” and “art”? What community(ies) do you speak from? How is your artmaking process “in relationship with” community or communities?

This is the first gathering of the ArtsAccess partners. It is Fall 2006. We begin with stories from Aboriginal artists: Joe Osawabine, Anishnabe artistic director of De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre from Manitoulin Island; and Shelley Niro, Six Nations artist. They remind us that community art is not new and is constantly being reinvented in multiple hybrid forms. Aboriginal nations inhabiting this land before the arrival of Europeans had no word for “art” because multiple forms of cultural expression were not separate from ceremony and daily communal expression. Notions of “community” also underwent dramatic changes through colonization and they continue to take on new meanings as virtual communities link people globally around common interests. At the same time, there is also a resurgence of place-based community arts.

Perhaps what we are witnessing, then, is both a desire to recover artmaking as an inherent human right and communal practice and a longing for a sense of community, whether defined by place, blood, identity or interest. As we move around the talking circle, the arts animators working out of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (KW|AG), the Woodland Cultural Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) share their own responses to the core questions and envision a project that honours the diversity and creativity of all Ontario communities.

In teaching in the Community Arts Program (CAP) at York University, I try to expose students to a wide range of practices and to the diverse roles of artists and community members. My goal is to open up dialogue that probes why, for whom, with whom and how we engage in community arts. I share this questioning with related practices such as community cultural development, cultural work, activist art, cultural democracy, place-based art, popular education and communications.

While I resist any simplistic or formulaic understanding of this emerging and much-contested field, I have used five Cs to explore interrelated features or principles underlying diverse community arts practices: collaboration, creative artistic practice, critical social analysis, commitment and context.

Collaboration
A hallmark of community-engaged artmaking, collaboration is based on reciprocity and can take many forms — whether among artists, between artists and communities, or among community members initiating their own creative projects. Artists may fall on a continuum in this process, from those who are deeply embedded and can individually produce work that resonates with community members to those who refuse to impose their own ideas or techniques while facilitating the artmaking of ordinary citizens. The organizations with which artists partner also shape the form of collaboration: by partnering with ROOF, The Working Centre, and St. John’s Kitchen, ArtsAccess artists working out of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery collaborated with populations that might not have engaged directly in producing art about their lives.

Creative Artistic Practice
Our notions of what is considered “art” are being decolonized, moving beyond the disciplines that have defined western fine arts traditions to include Indigenous rituals and hybrid practices appropriating popular culture as well as domestic and diasporic art forms. A circular community garden on Walpole Island in western Ontario echoes the forms of the “two rivers that meet” and reintroduces native plants, thus reclaiming the garden as a spiritual communal ecological art form. The first Canadian Centre for Digital Storytelling in Toronto trains immigrant women to use computers to tell their stories with their own images and voices, breaking silences that have been reinforced by racism, sexism and dominant languages, while developing employable technical skills. The forms are infinite and the boundaries between them increasingly blurred as approaches create spaces for many diverse strengths and desires.

Critical Social Analysis
The concept of community arts has often been associated with marginalized groups and has also fed a process of naming, challenging and transforming power relations. Jumblies Theatre in Toronto worked with children at Camp Naivelt near Brampton, Ontario, to recover and recreate the complex and sometimes painful history of the Jewish Socialist camp through interviews with elders, interactive re-enactments, quilting, installations, puppets and music. The Letters from the Dead performance (directed by Honor Ford-Smith) commemorating black youth killed by gun violence has engaged accidental audiences on the streets of downtown Toronto and Kingston, Jamaica, in public mourning and dialogue about the multiple systemic causes of increased violence. The curriculum on First Nations history that ArtsAccess partner Woodland Cultural Centre, in Brantford, Ontario, developed with the Hamilton School Board brought a deeper historical and critical social analysis into these schools using art.

Commitment
While there is increased funding for community arts, limited project-based support may not have a long-term impact in communities. Sustained commitment to social change requires accompanying people for the long haul, as musicians in the US civil rights movement or in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa did — putting a song on everyone’s lips, not just in their ears, unleashing a powerful transformative force that built over time. Commitment here refers to not only a vision of a more just and sustainable world but also a willingness to be changed while promoting change. The most effective community arts facilitators bring this openness and humility to the collaborative process, helping people to discover their own strengths and creative capacities. Artist Catherine Campbell’s collaboration with University Settlement House (adjacent to the AGO) has built a relationship with local Chinese residents who will continue representing their stories beyond the timeframe of the ArtsAccess project. In Parkdale, a Toronto neighbourhood, the Painting Our Stories community mural project is unfolding in many unanticipated ways as residents, associations and local businesses alike collaborate with storytellers, community activists and artists to unearth the histories of the neighbourhood and to bring the walls alive with potential dialogue. Participating community leaders see these murals as integral to educating and organizing the community around social-justice goals.

Context
We are always working within constantly shifting economic, political, social and institutional contexts that shape everything we do, offering both constraints and possibilities. The Beautiful City Billboard Campaign has brought together an alliance of local arts groups in the Greater Toronto Area to lobby for a municipal billboard fee that would double community arts funding. Sioux Lookout Aboriginal artists and educators have gained municipal support to host the 2012 forum of Community Arts Ontario. The AGO’s ArtsAccess initiative aimed to make “a viable home for community arts in our respective institutions” and, to that end, Thunder Bay has opened up its gallery space for community arts projects and now sees ArtsAccess not as a “side car” but as “part of the car” (Sharon Godwin, Director). The challenge, perhaps, is to learn to name and grab the moment, finding the possibilities within each particular time and place.

Nurturing an Ongoing Intercultural Conversation
The principles and practices glimpsed in the above examples generate debate about the diverse meanings of community arts and also raise questions that merit public dialogue:

• How do we counter the mainstream art world’s perception that community art is bad art — that it is social work or adult education rather than a serious mode of cultural representation?
• Similarly, how do we help social-justice groups to see art as more than just a tool for education or a frill on the serious work of making social change?
• How do we prepare emerging artists/animators of collaborative projects to thoughtfully engage diverse kinds of communities in process-driven creation? What are viable formal and informal educational strategies?
• What spaces are there within museums to nurture the creativity of all Canadians and the collective expressions of diverse communities? What are the obstacles to finding a home for community arts in art galleries and museums?
• How do we expand the resources that are available to grass-roots groups and diverse communities to create and exhibit art that is meaningful to them and that expresses their unique identities?
• How can we move beyond the “project” framing of community-engaged artmaking to develop long-term processes within neighbourhoods, within organizations, within communities of interest that truly make a difference to our collective well-being?

In a technologized North America fixated on the HOW, the deeper questions we must ask are BY WHOM and FOR WHAT are we promoting community arts? Who benefits and in what ways? The ArtsAccess project has helped to open up this dialogue. Let’s keep the conversations and the creative community engagement alive! »

Professor Deborah Barndt
Community Arts Program, York University, Toronto, Ontario

-The handbook was compiled and edited by Tara Turner and Judith Koke. This selection is posted with permission from Judith Koke; Deputy Director, Education and Public Programming at Art Gallery of Ontario

« This handbook is the legacy of the ArtsAccess project, a four year partnership between the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, and the Woodland Cultural Center…This handbook is for anyone, artist, museum or community organization – interested in creating a community art project. » (from the AGO’s Art Matters Blog)