Can Artist activists and cultural organizers become trusted community leaders?

Bill Cleveland: 00:00:00

Can artist activists and cultural organizers become trusted community leaders? And if so, what does it take to lead with integrity, courage, and imagination?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, where activist artists and cultural organizers share what it takes to lead creative change. This episode is the second in our special series where we're unpacking the building blocks of effective art and social change practice.

At a time when democratic values are under pressure and authoritarian forces are on the rise, we believe that artists have a critical role to play, not just in resistance, but in helping to build the caring, capable and equitable communities that democracy requires. Now, in our last conversation, we explored the question of accountability, what it means, who defines it, and why it matters.

Today, we turn our focus to leadership. What is cultural community leadership in the context of a society at odds, in turmoil, and looking for answers?

In this episode, we'll take a look at how leadership can be reframed through metaphors like the wedding planner, the parade leader, and the soul shepherd.

We'll also hear some interesting stories of artistic ingenuity in places like death row, neighborhood schools, and an internment camp, and show how creative leadership can make a surprising impact. Then we'll explore some foundational traits and practical strategies for leading with courage in a time of chaos and uncertainty.

Once again, I'd like to welcome my partners for this series, namely activist, performer, impresario, historian, and creative shapeshifter, Lenny Sloan, and educator, author, art and democracy animator, and sage cultural advisor Barbara Schaeffer Bacon. Barb, would you like to start us off?

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:02:07

So, first of all, I agree with the note that Lenny offered, which is that many cultural activists are already community leaders, and so we, we can ask, how do they become valued in that role?

I was, Lenny, thinking about the prickly cactus who scratches and aggravates and annoys, but eventually they get everybody activated and moving, and then they also can have the capacity to convert those scratches into connections and so on. And I was talking about parade leaders who see that there's some movement and just get out there and get in front.

And we have others, I think many who are really good at creating a parade, who know how to begin to help a community bring their energies forward. And then the last one, which I didn't share with you earlier, Bill is wedding Planner. Because I was trying to think about the person.

I think of Marty and others as cultural animators.

They're often creating the vessel so that community members and other artists who are not the community organizers can play an active and really productive and creative role. And I was thinking about wedding planners. Their job is to make something happen that is, in fact, for someone else. It is really not about them.

It is to really help enact the vision that folks have and to put it together in a way that really comes together and is forever memorable and is forever memorable.

Bill Cleveland: 00:03:52

So for those of you who were not with us last week, Barbara's mention of Marty is a reference to the theater artist and creative change agent extraordinaire, Marty Pottinger, the playwright, performer, and cultural organizer who has mixed theater and social justice and civic engagement to tackle an amazing range of community issues like urban renewal and neighborhood identity, public works, labor rights, police reform, and much, much more. I have to say, Marty Pottinger is quite the wedding planner.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:04:30

There was a marvelous sculptor in Detroit, and he was asked to put a. Create a piece in a neighborhood in a sort of green, in the middle of a roundabout or an intersection.

And he was known for figurative work and abstract big works. He made a very small pedestal with a plaque so that the community could honor their heroes every year and add names to the plaque. He got it.

He totally understood what people were saying they wanted in their community.

Hiubert Massey: 00:05:02

Art is important to me because it's like documentation of life, life of a community and a celebration of a community. I just like the ideal of a piece of artwork that just has a real big impact upon communities.

Bill Cleveland: 00:05:20

That was painter and sculptor Hubert Massey talking about the impact of his work in his hometown of Detroit.

Leni Sloan: 00:05:30

I'm going to use that Wedding Planner. It's perfect. Because what you're supposed to do, the most economical way possible, is to create magic.

And Webster defines magic as the manipulation of ordinary things in extraordinary ways. That wedding planner is saying, okay, we're going to take these two things and put them together, and you're going to love it.

And you're going to take Picture it forever.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:05:58

I love that.

Bill Cleveland: 00:05:59

Yeah, you'll be surprised.

Leni Sloan: 00:06:01

You'll be surprised. And it is affordable.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:06:05

And the best justice of the piece I ever saw was actually an educational psychologist. And he interviewed the bride and the groom separately before the wedding and at the ceremony.

He created their narrative of the journey to get together in such a way that every single person, whether they knew the bride or the groom, really felt a part of their narrative like. And I think about also that as this kind of a metaphor where communal meaning is created, it is that moment.

Leni Sloan: 00:06:44

My Yard is an homage to Ruth Asawa, the visual artist, because in her origin story is the Japanese concentration camps and the cyclone fences around those camps.

And her mother's vision of art, in which she took snippets of their clothes and boiled them in vinegar and water to make dyes, and then dyed the weeds and wove them through the cyclone fences and made these huge things. We think of Ruth Asylum now making art work for art or airports or like huge. But how does he learn to work in that scale?

And she learned by cutting a piece from her pink dress and pulling two weeds and drying them and weaving them through a cyclone fence with imagination. And I think that's the obligation that the artist has to bring to the community's imagination. Imagine yourself differently.

Bill Cleveland: 00:07:46

And Ruth is the perfect example of what I call the multiple facets of creative community leadership. I don't know that she ever decided, I'm going to lead a parade. But she was a person who was drawn to complicated situations.

She lived in her community. She cared about her community. She cared deeply about education.

And my encounter with her was she turned a school, Horace Mann School in San Francisco, into an artwork by way of, I think it was a fifth grade class. She said, for a year, we're going to be a museum of the community. And we're going to learn all the things that you learn when you're a museum.

What's the story here? How do you collect those stories responsibly? How do you translate what you've collected?

How do you share it in a way that other people can understand it? All those skills. And at the end of the day, all those kids, they became curators of their family and community stories.

They became collectors, they became translators, they became the lecturers, they became the tour guides. Their room, their classroom became the physical space that was transformed over and over again over the course of a year, depending on what they did.

And people would say, well, Ruth turned our educational experience into something completely different and really enhanced and built what education could be not with the idea that she was creating the model that was going to save the world. It's because it made complete sense.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:09:40

That's why I feel that I would like the children to have an area in which they can make decisions.

And when they can make decisions about design, about materials, about what they do, then I think that that's really the first step in problem solving and becoming a real first class citizen.

Bill Cleveland: 00:10:05

When she engaged those students, she said, I have an idea. What do you think of it? And this would be what we would do.

And so from the get go, the accountability there was, we are in this together, and I know some stuff that will be helpful to us because I've been around the block, so I'm a really strong believer in situational leadership as a way of thinking about what a leader can be.

And to me, that is the kind of person who doesn't parachute in, knows where they are, knows their potential place in the scheme of things, and wields their power with clarity and grace. When called for.

Leni Sloan: 00:10:50

That is really important as the jigsaw puzzle. If you are the grass, you should not try to be the sky. I wanted to add another example, and I think that this ties the many questions together.

And Bill. I'll start it. And you can certainly comb out my memory and add the fact.

Bill Cleveland: 00:11:12

Okay.

Leni Sloan: 00:11:14

When Bill was the director of arts and Correction, he told me a story about a woman who was teaching portrait painting on death row. Because the men's cells lined up in the back to a passageway that the food cart went down, and all they had was a slot they could open. Barbara.

That the food was pushed through. But this woman, and I believe her name is Lynelle.

Bill Cleveland: 00:11:50

Yeah, Lynelle Herrick was her name.

Leni Sloan: 00:11:55

Realize that those portals were lined up perfectly to the cell across from them and that the men could look across the cell into each other's faces and practice. Men on death row practice fortune.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:12:12

Oh, wow.

Leni Sloan: 00:12:13

Now, that is a community. That is a community whose purpose is to degenerate. That she brought a regenerative experience through looking at.

Manipulating ordinary things in extraordinary ways, looking at the architecture of that place and finding a way that she could create a studio experience. And I carry that story all the time.

Bill Cleveland: 00:12:40

And what she did was she transcended the extraordinary, toxic. I mean, if you can imagine a more toxic place. Yes.

And she transcended it and essentially became the creative mayor of death row more than just the portrait project. I mean, her presence, her regularity, her devotion, her dedication, with absolutely no aspiration for what we would call typically leadership.

She was a soul.

Leni Sloan: 00:13:12

Soul shepherd. And she also got these men barber.

But not to turn away from their own personal grief and look into the faces of someone up there serving your community. And a community that you don't expect to ever be a community. But finding.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:13:33

Wow, that is incredibly powerful.

Leni Sloan: 00:13:36

This an editorial opinion. The artist is different than the artivist because the art of his plans to use the structure, the power and the policy to advance a thing.

And the art form melds with the policy and the art of this. And change occurs.

Now, change can occur by looking at a beautiful picture, but change can also occur by painting the wall across from the housing project with a beautiful mural. So every time you look out your kitchen window, you see art by Jane golden in Philadelphia is door.

Bill Cleveland: 00:14:20

Absolutely. Jane. Jane golden with the Mural Arts Project in Lillier in Germantown, also in Philadelphia, and Judy Baca, the Mural Mother of L. A.

Each in their own way sparking, leading a mural arts movement, producing thousands and thousands of images that some folks saw as just big pictures. But those women knew that they were creating a subversive, hidden in plain sight, reclamation and celebration of stifled history.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:14:53

Well, Lenny, so I made one note here, which I couldn't believe I was writing down, but I have always referred to your work when you were the commissioner in the state of Pennsylvania as subversive work.

You held a key, and your key was if you want a plaque for celebrating the sesquintennial in your community, you actually need to go and discover the stories of women and children and African Americans in your town at that time.

And this is the part it's like what I loved about what you did there was Trump, like, you went in and you figured out what power you had and you didn't ask permission, and you did it. You said, this is what you have to do. I've just decided. And you have to do it, and you have to do it in teams, no less.

You need your economic person, your hotelier and your arts council and your history person, all there. And then I'm going to keep bringing you together. And no, none of us know what we're actually doing, but we're going to figure it out.

And that is exactly what happened.

Leni Sloan: 00:16:02

I wanted to put Gun Runner for the Arts on my business card, but my niece, who's a successful artist in Washington, said, you do not in Washington want to put Gun Runner on anything.

But when I was at the National Endowment for the Arts and when I came to the Inter Arts program, the interdisciplinary arts program, at a time when the program was about to be discontinued because it funded Serrano's Pissed Christ and just Holly Hughes and Tim Miller.

And so I found myself before the late, great Sydney Yates in the appropriation committee as the director of Inter Arts, trying to explain Piss Christ. Now, I am a deeply religious person and I have my crucifix on my body.

But it required me to put aside my immediate rejection and look at Serrano as a young Catholic Latino who had gone to these altars and seen these jars and relics, and he was being absolutely true to Catholic iconography by putting these crucifixes in his own urine. Now, Sidney Yates, Barb, if you remember, that didn't listen to me.

He made a deal with the Western senators that it was called Corn for Porn, that in addition to them supporting the National Endowment for the Arts, they would allow them to graze their cows on farming lands.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:18:02

Yeah, that's what you do when you're in the Interior Department.

Leni Sloan: 00:18:07

So I kind of learned from that, Barb. Well, did I change it or did he? Does it matter? We saved the thing.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:18:16

But to this conversation, too, in that dialogue, stayed always at the center. When you say you're a fan of animating democracy, you mean it in a deeper way than anybody else.

But because you are a practitioner, you were making changes in the narratives that communities were telling about themselves, and you were making changes in the conversations that were happening at national parks and other historic sites.

But you cared that the people experiencing that experienced a quality dialogue that could have meaning for them and that would be facilitated with respect. And it's really the two. You weren't really just out there in a radically subversive mode. You were so practical.

Leni Sloan: 00:19:01

Well, thank you, first of all. Thank you. I owe that to a gentleman by the name of Randy McCaus.

And Randolph McCosin was the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts when I came. And on my second day, he called me to his office and he said, I want to tell you two things about this job.

One is you have the power to convene, and nobody should ever take that away from you. And the other is if you convene a group of people, you better have a plan. And so I remember those tools. And we have the.

That's the artifice has the power to convene. You can say, well, let's just go in the room and talk about it.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:19:46

Well, and they know that the convening is as important as the outcome of the convening.

Bill Cleveland: 00:19:52

So you just described Barbara, in describing Lenny's practice, says, okay, is that there are leaders who work in a way that relates to the first question we asked, which is, who are we accountable to as servants to the will of the people?

There's another aspect of leader, which is a diagnostician, a person who sees things from a perspective that others do not enjoy and can, in fact, say, there is something that needs to be healed here, and I'm going to give you an opportunity to be your best healing selves. And here it is.

Leni Sloan: 00:20:44

Here's your X ray, and here's your prescription.

Bill Cleveland: 00:20:51

And here, I think, is a good moment to pause this discussion, which we'll pick up again next week with a question about the importance of self care for community engaged artists. So thank you Lenny. Thank you, Barbara. Before I leave, I'd like to share three things that jumped out for me from this discussion.

First, leadership is situational. It's not a technique.

Cultural leaders don't always wear a badge or follow a script, but they rise up to meet the needs of the place and the people around them, often listening more than pontificating. Next is my soapbox Trust is earned by being there, in a senior center, in a classroom, or even in a courtroom.

Cultural leaders show up consistently, make space for others, and stay grounded in the stories of the communities they serve. And finally, something we can never forget. Imagination is a leadership muscle.

The ability to see a better future, invite others into it, is not a soft skill, it's a civic one. Cultural leaders bring that capacity to every table they're invited to sit at.

Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community Art. Theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the Maestro.

Judy Munson Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOT235. So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. Once again, please know this episode has been 100% horrible human.