{"id":27280,"date":"2011-02-08T06:46:43","date_gmt":"2011-02-08T11:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artbridgesblog.ca\/?p=3697"},"modified":"2011-02-08T06:46:43","modified_gmt":"2011-02-08T11:46:43","slug":"selection-from-community-arts-the-museum-a-handbook-for-institutions-interested-in-community-arts-ontario-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artbridges.ca\/fr\/selection-from-community-arts-the-museum-a-handbook-for-institutions-interested-in-community-arts-ontario-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Selection from \u00ab\u00a0COMMUNITY ARTS & THE MUSEUM: A Handbook for Institutions Interested in Community Arts\u00a0\u00bb (Ontario)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> Here is a selection from the ArtsAccess<\/em> Project’s \u00ab\u00a0Community Arts & the Museum: A Handbook for Institutions Interested in Community Arts\u00a0\u00bb (<\/span>download in PDF (7.45MB)<\/a>
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\nCommunity Arts: By Whom and For What?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0We are sitting in a circle around a \u201cfire\u201d \u2014 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 \u2014 in the middle of the Brantford Museum. The flickering flame illuminates the three generative questions mounted on the Plexiglas: How do you understand \u201ccommunity\u201d and \u201cart\u201d? What community(ies) do you speak from? How is your artmaking process \u201cin relationship with\u201d community or communities?<\/p>\n

This is the first gathering of the ArtsAccess<\/em> 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 \u201cart\u201d because multiple forms of cultural expression were not separate from ceremony and daily communal expression. Notions of \u201ccommunity\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Collaboration<\/strong>
\nA hallmark of community-engaged artmaking, collaboration is based on reciprocity and can take many forms \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Creative Artistic Practice<\/strong>
\nOur notions of what is considered \u201cart\u201d 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 \u201ctwo rivers that meet\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Critical Social Analysis<\/strong>
\nThe 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Commitment<\/strong>
\nWhile 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 \u2014 putting a song on everyone\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Context<\/strong>
\nWe 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\u2019s ArtsAccess<\/em> initiative aimed to make \u201ca viable home for community arts in our respective institutions\u201d and, to that end, Thunder Bay has opened up its gallery space for community arts projects and now sees ArtsAccess<\/em> not as a \u201cside car\u201d but as \u201cpart of the car\u201d (Sharon Godwin, Director). The challenge, perhaps, is to learn to name and grab the moment, finding the possibilities within each particular time and place.<\/p>\n

Nurturing an Ongoing Intercultural Conversation<\/strong>
\nThe 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:<\/p>\n