Animating Democracy Chapter 2: Can the Arts Help Re-Build Democracy

ANIMATING DEMOCRACY Chapter 2

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What is an animated democracy?

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[00:00:49] BC: So that was Pam Korza from our last episode, describing the essence of the creative change work she and her partner in crime, Barbara Shaffer Bacon have been supporting, and studying and, dare I say, fomenting over the last two decades through an initiative of Americans for the Arts called Animating Democracy. In that conversation, we explored the history of arts animated, democratic practice through such projects as the Aids Memorial Quilt, The Vagina Monologues, and Traces of the Trade.

In this episode, we begin by digging a little deeper into the challenges and complexities of the work, through the story of a small Hawaiian community. Uh, beloved statue in distress. And the legacy of a revered Hawaiian king. We also look at other examples of the work and examine the longterm prospects for arts animated democracy initiatives across the country. At a time. When both the definition and the desirability of democracy is being debated.

And important note. Thirty-six minutes into our story, this episode contains disturbing descriptions of postcard photos that document the history of the lynching of African Americans in this country.

Part five. King Kamehameha.

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[00:02:31] BC: That was animating democracy. Co-director Barbara Shaffer Bacon.

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[00:03:18] BC: One of the first Kohala community members consulted was the statues community caretaker. Here he is from a documentary on the command may of project. That has provided many of the community voices you'll hear in this episode.

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[00:03:48] BC: Now Kohala had cared for the statue as best they could over the years. But recognizing the statues, deterioration was serious and needed immediate attention.

They also solicited the help of a professional art conservator named Glenn Wharton.

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My initial take as a conservator was, Let's figure out how to get the paint off so we can bring it back to what the artist originally wanted. That's my training. That's what we do.

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[00:05:09] BC: But while the Hawaii Alliance was coming to grips with the broader issues facing the community, Glenn Wharton was rolling up his sleeves, eager to begin work without, really considering how the project might be influenced by the social, cultural and political issues rising up in the community.

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[00:05:49] PK: There's a lot of mistrust, in the native populations based on how government operates and is often exclusive. And so, the Hawaii Alliance see this opportunity of this dialogue around the statue as emblematic of an almost a rehearsal for larger dialogues that need to happen on the island.

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[00:06:22] Glenn Wharton, Conservator: People were telling me, “No, no, no, we don't want you to gild it. We want you to paint it.” I thought, okay, fine.

Well, maybe we should paint it. And then other people would say, “Oh no, we should gild it. If it was originally gold leaf, it should be gold leafed.”

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One of those and elder, the renowned traditional teacher singer. Culture bear Raylene Ha'alelea Lancaster understood how important it was that Glenn's conservatorship. Was grounded in service to the communities, cultural legacy and stories.

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[00:07:45] BC: Raylene took it upon herself to introduce Glenn to the vital history, and spirit life represented by Kamehameha. She did this by inviting him to meet the stories firsthand. By walking the land. She took them into a densely forested ravine that still contained rock walls that held the Taro patch that Kamehameha had farmed. They visited a Heiau, a sacred place where Kamehameha spent time in contemplation. As Raylene's gentle mentorship started to sink in it became very clear to Glen that his work in Kohala required that he wear two hats -- one as an expert, art conservator and the other as an open-minded, open-hearted student of the community now realized he was there to serve.

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[00:08:50] BC: Glenn also came to appreciate that as an outsider he could not navigate this social and spiritual landscape alone.

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[00:09:45] BC: This emphasis on tradition makes it possible for community members to become hands-on participants. Making hula Ki i puppets that hula master John Ola Lake incorporates into a hula ki i just for Kohala that tells Kamehameha’s story through the eyes of birds that perch on the statue’s shoulders.

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And so, attaching some of the Western notions that we had about dialogue at that time to this place was really wrong. And fortunately, you know, it was a strong base of organization and local people who, kept pushing back and helped us to understand what was unique about that.

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[00:12:13] PK: Yeah, they actually did vote about the statute at the end.

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[00:12:19] PK: They chose to continue to paint. And then there was a whole process in association with Save Outdoor Sculpture, SOS. But, Glenn Wharton, who was the conservator, considered sort of a renegade for this project choice and going with it. but he was very open to it. he, trains the local people in how to do the restoration so that they could continue to care for the sculpture themselves.

BC: And there's one thing here that’s interesting. Often, public art making is a thing that happens at a particular moment in time. And then people kind of forget about it, which is very different from sacred traditions, where the making and the placement of a sacred object. it's the beginning of a relationship with an obligation that is assumed in shared by the community. Here's how Raylene Ha'alelea Lancaster described the project's impact on the Kamehameha Day celebration that followed the statues completion.

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[00:13:38] BC: That day at the statues, rededication, Raylene, and her hula hālau surprise Glenn with a new hula ki i, recognizing him and the community for the long learning journey that they had taken together.

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I was deeply moved to tears.

When I first came, I thought, “Oh interesting, a hula dance in front of the monument.” By the end I saw, no, no, this is an offering. This is something coming from very deep inside of these people. And it's an offering, not just to Kamehameha, it's an offering to Hawaii, to North Kohala, once the two coins pass and that spirit that's invested.

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[00:15:08] BC: So, the work in Hawaii clearly had an impact on this community Kohala. And on the continuing struggle with gentrification on the island and certainly on Glen. And as I understand it, like Traces of the Trade, the ripples from the work continued long after. Barbara wasn't there a book?

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So, that ripple has been very big in that field where he took it. And I think we've, we've learned to be, to be able to track ripples that have nothing to do with big media, but to see, how individual artists have, shared their practices and their learning. And, those are the ripples that keep going on.

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Part Six. Building Trust.

I think. The reason that most people don't understand this kind of work is that the making of community is in fact, embodied learning. It's a learning process, not a technique. It's not the building that we build because of it. It's not even that statue. It's the process and it's so hard for a commodified mindset to be thinking about an effort like Kamehameha producing 10 years, 20 years of ripples in the community. But, if you are succeeding, you are setting loose energies, relationships and ideas that may only bear fruit decades from the so-called time of completion.

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And the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange at the time being artists in residence at the Music Hall and taking on this current issue, around a dance related project. And the nature of how they worked in community, the number of people that they engaged in conversations, and ultimately drew their gestures into a dance piece, performed it on the ships and in the context of the folks who work there.

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[00:18:46] BC: That was Liz Lerman, who was a guest on Episodes 63 and 64 speaking at one of the dozens of community gatherings that took place during the Dance Exchange’s, Portsmouth Shipyard Project.

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The history of the people who've come before you, and how it connects to all of us. And we hope, in exchange, that you might think just a little differently about dancing and about moving.

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[00:19:43] BC: Here is Chris Dwyer, reflecting on the shipyard projects, legacy many decades. Later.

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And that was certainly true. Of Evelyn Sorrell, who became mayor. She didn't think children should be going to the music hall for school day performances because the buses were in the alley, and they were blocking traffic.

But Evelyn is the person who completely turned around and not only the Because of the shipyard But a lot of the spinoffs that were the community aspect of the project. Evelyn wanted arts to be throughout the city and to be something, as she would say, for the people. It was Evelyn who was the true shipyard convert who opened the path for the cultural plan.

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[00:21:03] BC: And so now we have this extraordinary thing where someone points back and says, wow, “All this give and take and all the relationships that got created around the Shipyard Project well, they're an indelible community asset.” And in this day and age, this seems extraordinary, but. I just like to say that human history has shown us over and over that this is the path --- that this is how it's supposed to go.

It's called cooperation, right? When humans actually listen and debate and give and take and cooperate, that defines what we call a community. A place with a name on a map that doesn't remember all that, and doesn't maintain the relationships that allowed it to grow and heal and transcend all the challenges it has faced, is not a community. It's a transactional marketplace that has very little relational memory and even less imagination. So, when someone from across town comes up and says, “Hey, we really kicked ass on that shipyard deal. Here's something else I'm thinking about doing. That is the kind of legacy gold that I think Shipyard personifies, but is often forgotten. And recognizing and studying those kinds of things is really important.

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[00:22:34] BSB: Yeah, that is it. I do really, agree with that, the emphasis on, on, the transformation piece. I think, it's hard in communities now because there's enough churn literally in who's living there. At any given time, there are people who are actively included in what people think of as the community, and others who are not so for whom that hasn't been their experience.

And we think these projects and ...we get evidence that these projects often go beyond it, the expected, or the, established, certainly beyond the established. But, I do think it's a continuing challenge now that you can't expect community muscle or community memory, or that it's not so much that you can't expect it, it's that you have to expect it to be rebuilt.

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So, what have you learned about artists joining with communities with the intention of stimulating healthy, inclusive, robust civic dialogue about difficult and contentious community issues?

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So, we had the goals, and we had their reporting. And the work of the liaisons, and the learning exchanges to understand what had actually happened. So, we could look at the intentions, we could look at the outcomes that were there, unexpected and other. And we began with a process with Suzanne Callahan to look at them, and begin to group them.

And we ended up with a grouping of families of outcomes that run perfectly parallel to any kind of community organizing framework.

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[00:24:46] PK: Yeah, and there's changes in knowledge and awareness of issues, changes in the actual nature of dialogue, the tenor of it, who's engaged in it, what forms it takes, that sort of thing.

changes in capacity to, both employ arts in the context of dialogue and engagement, as well as the capacity to build projects, build infrastructure, build the program of it, changes in action. and behavior, so that people are actually mobilizing. People are, coming together to, to activate around, potential, benefits or changes, in community.

And then the last one was changes in. in conditions or policies or systems, the level of the larger frames for how things happen in communities.

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[00:26:01] KG: Organizers can't do the work that we do. Without art culture. and I want to make two points about this. One is that art is not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but it's a contributor to social change and to narrative shift is central to organizing. Why is that?

So we know that policy advocates and organizers and lobbyists, Sometimes can win policy and legislative reform, for the good. But what happens is when power changes hands, those concessions get rolled back. And I think they get rolled back in large part because we never deal with the narratives underlying the progress.

And so, we have a system in place where we've got organizers taking on, institutions, and artists trying to shift the way we think. And artists really have a way of penetrating popular culture in a way that organizers never will, because that's not how organizers think. And in fact, artists don't think like organizers, which makes it such a wonderful collaboration.

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[00:27:32] BSB: in Lima, Ohio. where Michael Rhode and Sojourn Theater did a major project. They did training in interviewing, they did training in dialogue. And that was a place that paired, the practice of artists and the practice of dialogue to train because their emphasis was that the dialogue facilitators would be local citizens.

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[00:28:14] BSB: Race relations were a part of it. And the issue on the surface was county had the water, city needed the water. But race was at the core of it, and they did name it. And they did look at it, meanwhile, how many years later, I don't know, there is a, police shooting of an innocent woman in her bed, in a police raid and the community is, a wreck.

And the high school principal calls Michael Rohd and says, we need what you did and invites them to come back and to prepare students and others for the opportunity for dialogue.

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[00:29:00] BSB: And every single one of the examples you've shared the core issue, I think. Is trust. Lack of trust. Broken trust. Betrayal. And then, the healing and the trust making that is absolutely necessary even to get into the same room together under these circumstances. Could you talk about the skill set that is needed to make these kinds of things happen.

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And in, in Lima, I think it was the, a farmer who at the end of the whole thing said when they saw the vignette about their perspective on this civic issue, They said, “Well, you got us right, so I assume you, you got everybody right.” And so that was like, the trust had been built within that farming community, but they were now open to listening to the other side's perspective or multiple perspectives.

And I think there also... we, we heard from a lot of artists about ethical issues that they were concerned about. “When you take someone’s story how do you not be in an exploitative kind of situation with that story? How do you respect it? Do you make it anonymous? Do you bring people back to the story?”What that story is how it's being presented before it's being presented, big time.

And they did that in Lima too. They did barnstorming around the community and presented scripts and had people give feedback. So that kind of trust, factor I think is enormous in this work. You are absolutely right.

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[00:32:06] BSB: Some of the projects. used provocation. And it wasn't, you know, enter gently. it really was, we're going to show something different. We're going to do something differently.

I think of the Henry Gallery, and the Jewish Museum. both of those had, lightning rod kinds of exhibits that really, were going to cause people to react.

So, they were building engagement and dialogue around something provocative. So, at the Henry Gallery, which, Seattle is a space where the genome was being researched. They were, presenting art that looked at what happens when we start to play with our human genome.

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[00:33:04] Narrator: With its finger on the pulse of artistic experimentation, the Henry was one of a handful of art museums whose artistic activity at the end of the 20th century reflected on and responded to recent trends in genetic and genomic research. But cracking the secrets of life also raises a thicket of social, legal, and ethical questions.

Many argue that genetic information and its uses are especially vulnerable to adverse refraction through the lenses of power, fear, social prejudice, and economic interest. As curator Robin Held explains:

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Citizens can be part of the conversation in genomics. Artists, naturally, don't all agree on biotech issues, and several viewpoints are presented, but what is shown mirrors that view. The potential impacts on our daily lives, and that's worth talking about.

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[00:34:24] PK: The Jewish Museum was putting forward work that was focused on the perpetrators in the Holocaust, the question; How are we complicit in allowing such a thing to happen? And with some intention toward drawing younger audiences into the museum, with a different, angle in on the topic of the Holocaust.

And they took seriously every level of the museum infrastructure to be, introduced to why this angle and how are we going to deal with this from, the janitors, to the docents, to the curatorial staff, to the education staff, to the media. And creating spaces, for people who may actually have a visceral, traumatic trigger happen in seeing these works of art to have a space to go to where that could be, processed in a respectful and sensitive way.

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They went on, to advise our next institution and that was the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh that showed Without Sanctuary, photos and postcards of lynchings. And the institution made the decision to do that, not in consultation with the community.

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I believe the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator at lynchings. Too often they compulsively composed silvery tableaux--- positioning and lighting corpses as if they were game birds shot on the wing. Indeed, the photographic art played as significant a role in the ritual as torture or souvenir grabbing, lust propelled the commercial reproduction and distribution of the images, facilitating the endless replay of anguish. Even dead, the victims were without sanctuary.

These photographs provoke a strong sense of denial in me, and a desire to freeze my emotions. In time, I realize that my fear of the other is fear of myself. With each encounter, I can't help thinking of these photos in the march of time and of the cold steel trigger in the human heart.

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[00:37:39] BSB: But afterward, the Warhol went back to the community and worked with them to create, uh, uh, means of presentation that they could, support, or many people, probably not everyone, which included creating a timeline, that had, African American achievement across the top.

And the lynchings enumerated in each county all across that same period of time. And a separate exhibit for African American press and things that were going on in the African American community at the same time. And they also did a lot of training, and designed a very intentional space for dialogue, a lot of different means of dialogue, not just talking in a circle, but postcards and lots of ways for people to express themselves.

Which... all of these practices, are now much more common with many kinds of exhibitions, in museums around the country. And they are also used artists in residence. So, the interpretation was often with artist educators, teaching artists who could design for the kinds of groups that were coming in.

They had a video booth where someone could just literally record their response individually and... But the Jewish museum folks went literally and sat in the museum with them and helped walk them through the things that they might, do or think about.

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And the artists and communities that you've introduced us to through your stories, I know, take this very seriously and have applied that skill set in a way that both respects and navigates those fault lines and lays the foundation for the integrity and healing force of the work. And I just liked the call out that an organization like Animating Democracy that supports this kind of learning, And work is really important ... and we need more of it yesterday.

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PK: Marty Pottinger.

BSB: Marty Pottinger

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So, if Urban Bushwomen is doing their Hair Stories Project, that means, and if you want to be a dancer with Urban Bushwomen. You have to be, you have to learn how to enter and exit communities. You have to learn how to facilitate dialogue. You have to learn how to do it based on the creative work you just presented to them. It is part of how they do their work in the world and it is beyond the creed, the artistic director. It's beyond that singular vision. It is a practice that can be shared, that can be passed on, that can be expanded on and applied in different situations.

I think that's one of the things I saw as we kept moving forward, in that sense, the groups were broadening their, their impact by how many people they could work with. And Urban Bushwomen, I feel like they really, have viewed their role in the world, as training.

Any activist in the community can come to their summer institute and learn to utilize movement and dance in their work, in their community. It's not for dancers. It's not for choreographers, but that is the medium that they're going to learn through. And, and they have moved their practice in so many ways through that. It's amazing when you hear folks who have been a part of that, institute who are all over the country talk about that work.

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So animating democracy has a long and rich history. And things have evolved very quickly in these parts. So, the question is: From your perspective, what has changed and what has remained.

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That's a trend that is welcome. And, and I think we've been building toward that kind of ramp up so to speak. And the creative placemaking, through Art Place America was, again, building on a trajectory of work and really, infusing more and more communities and getting into rural places again, where a lot of this stuff really had roots. The Black Lives Matter activity that happened after George Floyd, has certainly been an impetus around issues of equity and, diversity, and reckoning with injustice, and historic injustice and bringing attention to the telling of history.

Those are some of the things that I think of that are... that have been key.. catapulting more attention to this work and funders, coming along. A lot of resourcing is happening toward these kinds of, arenas of concern.

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Now there's an active presence. We had only a few foundations that were really Issue oriented not about the arts seeing that there was a role that the arts would play in moving the policy work and so on that they were doing. But I think that changed in very big ways.

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[00:45:38] BSB: One project that I think is trying to grab this moment at that scale is the One Nation / One Project partnership in 20 something cities. I think with community, health centers, working on a creation of a play that echoes something from the federal theater, and new communication work around public health. And they are really working to be doing this in partnership and to do a project of scale, that can kind of move a nation.

In COVID, you know, folks being really proud of the mutual aid society that they created in their community in that time. I'm going to say that some of that is artists finding agency in where they are. So, we had some gains. We had the income projects where artists and others are getting a guaranteed income, and larger residencies. California committed huge dollars to residency.

So, there are actually examples of things being, invoked at a policy level or with public funding that are, really going into public space, into municipality work, in strong ways and being noticed.

At the same time, we can't look back and say, because we were Animating Democracy for 20 years, the country is in a better place. I think everyone is feeling like the country is not in a better place.

I am a hundred percent sure of the difference the work had has made. Not just our work, but the work. I am a hundred percent sure it has over and over again in community after community, artists by artists proven effect and value.

I think there's there is example and hope in what we see happening at ground level in many places. And the cumulative is ultimately what we're aiming for because I don't think that there's any one big national something or other that's going to shift everything dramatically.

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And yet, we had some, collaboration with the International Teaching Artists Coalition, a year or more ago because they have a, international work going on by teaching artists all over the globe around climate issues and in very innovative ways working with youth. you know, resourcing, being concerned about evaluating impact because they really do want to build, all of those different, six families of outcomes. They want to address those things in young people, and the educators who work with them, and the communities that they're a part of, to, to think seriously about it,---climate change.

So, those are the glimmers of hope for me. really grassroots up, that I hope we find ways through the imaginations of artists as a force for, what's our subtitle, , the artistic imagination as a force, for change.

BSB: Say it...

PK: The artistic imagination as a force for change.

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