Episode 13: DIVA CATS Pt. 1

Episode 13: DIVA CATs

Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

What’s A CAT?

I usually bring a packet of seeds and give everybody some seeds. Because I think that that's what we're doing. Planting those seeds in our field, right, ... because we're growing things and that notion of working with people, collaborating conceiving things together, imagining things together and co- creating things together. Roseann Weiss

Actually, I don't teach, Parker Palmer says, you can't teach anybody anything, you can't teach math, can't teach science, you can't teach art, all you can teach is who you are. And so, I've spent most of my life being a listener and listening for stories and then helping people tell their stories, Con Christeson

I make art in the community I'm a community caregiver, whatever is required, that's what I'm going to do. I'll go clean up the “beep” I just beeped myself. You know, sometimes I make that “beep”, and sometimes I clean it up. Pacia Anderson

How does your work show up in the community?

Taking what I've learned ... making work with other people, creating things that are visible to the community, building a community around the studio that I have in the Cherokee Arts District here in St. Louis ---a laboratory. Con Christeson

I find that I'm a conduit or perhaps a bridge would be another way to talk about it. and maybe that's what training is. connecting people, putting people together, finding ways to put things in front of people that might be useful to them. Roseann Weiss

What questions should activist artists be asking?

...have you been asked for your help? Have you been invited to do this particular thing? How do you know the people that you want to offer your help to even need your help? How do you know that your help isn't harmful? Pacia Anderson

And if I if I'm going to consider myself successful. I want to know that you can answer the question, how do you see yourself? How do you see others and how do you see others seeing you? Con Christeson

How do we gather what do we do when we gather? How do we make sure that everyone knows that they're welcome? How do we make it so that we can continue to do so for a purpose that benefits all of us and encourages the best parts of our humanity? Pacia Anderson

Transcript

November 17, 1998, St. Louis Missouri. The subtly illuminated room is filled by a circle of 18 utilitarian chairs. A large sheet of butcher paper spans backstage wall. At the very top, a five-inch-high hand lettered heading shouts out “SESSION 1: GETTING TO KNOW OURSELVES.” A series of questions are scrawled underneath. 

What is Art? -What is Community?

What is Community Development?

What is the History and Ecology of Arts-based Community Development?

Where do I fit in this landscape?

A young woman carrying a backpack approaches the circle tentatively. She scans the wall briefly and takes a seat. Over the next ten minutes, she is joined by other women and men until the stage is filled with the stuttering chatter that often accompanies the awkward dance of new acquaintance. A few minutes later a lull in the murmuring chorus is filled by the piercing sound of a bell. The voices in the circle fade as the cyclic ringing descends on the group like a sonic curtain. After a few seconds, a woman sitting in the chair furthest from the room’s entrance breaks the silence. “Welcome everybody, to the St. Louis Arts Commission and the Community Arts Training Institute. She leans forward and carefully places a pair of Tibetan temple bells onto the floor next to her chair.” I can’t tell you what an honor it is to be sharing this circle with you this afternoon.”

In this episode of CSCW we will explore how a small arts training program called CAT help build a powerful network of creative change agents and established St. Louis MO as an innovative leader in the burgeoning community arts field. 

Bill Cleveland: From the

and Community, this is Change the Story Change the World. I'm Bill Cleveland.

The long and circuitous journey that led to the ringing of bells opening the Community Arts Training Institute, or CAT, began with a phone call some four years earlier. Dyan Wiley, then with the Arts Extension Service of the University of Massachusetts at Amerst, (AES), wanted to talk about creating a community arts training course for their summer institute for arts administrators. We both agreed that the time had come for this. Spurred by the availability of US Department of Labor (CETA) arts job funding in the late 1970’s, the number artists and arts organizations becoming involved in arts- based community development had been growing year after year. By 1994, community arts programming was showing up all over the country—sometimes with amazing results.

Unfortunately, this proliferation was also exposing some significant problems throughout the nascent field. --- Namely, that many of the artists and arts organizations involved were unprepared for the extraordinary complexity of the work. 

The result was a three-day intensive.¹ The curriculum for the Community Arts Partnership Institute was conceived and presented by Dyan Wiley, community arts veterans Bob Leonard, and Alice Lovelace, and myself in the summer of 1995. The highly experiential, arts-infused program emphasized the history and dynamics of social change, the development of equitable community partnerships and deep reflection about the high level of responsibility inherent to the work.

In the fall of 1997, Ann Haubrich, a participant our second summer institute, contacted me to talk about creating a similar program for the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission or (RAC) where she worked. For some time, RAC had been funding community arts project. The ups and downs of that experience convinced Ann that it was time to start professionalizing the field in St. Louis. To really serve the region, we agreed RAC’s Community Arts Training Institute or (CAT) program would need to have an annual presence. We also felt it should be cross-sector, which meant involving both artists and professionals from other arenas, like human service, healthcare, and public safety. The resulting five-month intensive had an cross-sector faculty and a curriculum designed with and for the local community.

Now in its 23rd year, CAT has produced a network of over 350 arts, human service, health care, and community development collaborators who are using the arts to help build healthy communities throughout the St. Louis area, and helped establish St. Louis as a national community arts/creative placemaking hot spot. 

A few months ago, I had the privilege of speaking with three women who have been deeply involved in the CAT as both participants and faculty over the years. Con Christeson, who was a member of CAT’s second class has established both a local studio / laboratory and global constituency as a community artist and trainer. Pacia Anderson, a 2014 CAT fellow and continuing faculty member, Is an award winning poet who has applied her skills as a writer and organizer in service to community programs all over the St. Louis region. Roseann Weiss, who coordinated CAT from 2004 to 2018 recently, joined with Con and Pacia to take a CAT inspired workshops sponsored by Americans for the Arts to communities across the country. That is, until the pandemic effectively shuttered the world. 

In this episode, the first of two devoted this trio we are calling the Diva CATS, Pacia, Con, and Roseann share stories about how they became so deeply involved in the global community arts movement in one of its epicenters.

Part 1: Where the Heck Are We? 

Bill Cleveland: Let me begin by just asking checking in with each one of you as we go around, you know, obviously with the world that we live in currently. How are you doing, Pacia? Why don't we start with you? How are you doing?

Pacia Anderson: I am well, When the New World first gave birth to itself in the middle of March, which is a benchmark for a lot of people who work in the so-called gig economy or artists who are teachers. You know, it was weird. There was a feeling of this oddness in the air. But I think I've adjusted I've come to rest that. hopefully never go back to the way that things were. Being so overly taxed in every aspect of our lives physically, mentally, emotionally, creatively, always in pursuit of the do, you know, I'm really grateful for the time of sequester so we could practice rest. Also grateful for that time, because now when I feel myself falling back in that pursuit of the do, that's what feels odd, you know. So, I'm doing well. I'm feeling grateful for this shift and for living in just a new way of being that we actually had the time to sit still and imagine.

BC: Thank you, Con, how is your journey? 

CC: Everything that I was doing, including teaching at the universities, turned on a dime. And the stress of performance was juxtaposed by the sense that I've really been given a gift, and I have not been able to make art with other people except for one group. And that group of HIV positive men were locked down in their residence by a very wise program director, and because of that, I was able to spend some time each week creating a magic carpet and imagining not only what happens after homelessness, but what happens to after you survived a pandemic So it was a gift for the most part. And I've learned a lot from the parts that we not easy, but there were definitely lessons.

BC: So, Roseanne.

RW: Yeah, this is really been. A moment of thoughtfulness. I find this juxtaposition of intersecting upheavals, in and how we must relate to each other right now in spaces like this. And upheavals in the streets because of the things that have happened and the things that have been revealed to us. Those things also make an internal upheaval, right? So, I don't feel very peaceful right now, I feel very much like there is a disturbance. And I'm not sure what's going to happen. I tend to be an optimistic person, so I believe that we are going to figure this out, but I think it's taking the world a long time to understand the moment that we're at, because there's no going back. And first, you have to understand where you are to understand where you're going. And I think we're all still trying to understand where we are.

BC: I spend a lot of time talking to myself, I Walk five miles every morning in a park and there are people there doing what people are doing in order to survive this. They are singing into the sky by themselves, they're drawing things on the sidewalk, messages to people, they are dancing. and then I'm I'm there talking to myself, and so every day, it's Covid Chronicles 

To me, the most striking thing has been the fact that. It makes complete and absolute sense that our struggle with our racial history is manifesting right now and. The reason I say that is, is that this is a stress test for each individual, for families, for everything in society and I believe that at moments like this, the cracks that are most most vulnerable, that are ready to go, that have been there for the longest, that have the deepest pain attached to them, are the ones that are closest to the surface and ready to pop.

Part 2: The Road To CAT

BC: So let me segue into the first story I'd like you to tell. And that's your personal story. So let me begin with the first question and Pacia we'll start with you. What is your work in the world, and how did you come to it? 

PA: My work in the world, is to see, observe, use, inspire, color, and imagination, and contemplation as a way of living out our purposes for being here on this planet. And, I do that in a variety of ways, sometimes it's just sitting on my porch shooting the breeze with my neighbors. Other times it is working in schools and rec centers and with different organizations as a teaching artist, teaching poetry and spoken word, history, language, visual art. Sometimes it is sitting on panels and boards and talking about civic duty and arts-based community development. And sometimes it is being in neighborhood and community meetings, yelling, or telling jokes, or railing against the system, or complimenting someone on the food that they brought. the center, the intersection of all of that is community. How do we gather what do we do when we gather? How do we make sure that everyone knows that they're welcome? How do we make it so that we can continue to do so for a purpose that benefits all of us and encourages the best parts of our humanity? 

BC: How did you come to this. What led you to become the Pacia force of nature that you are 

PA: How I came to the work, I feel like the work either came to me or was always there. In considering this question, I had to go like way, way, way, way back. I was born in the late 70s. I grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and our family had some challenges. And so I spent a lot of my three to 18 year old self in the foster care system, actually aged out when I was 18. 

PA: And our situation was really unusual because my foster mother and my birth mother had a really wild, and crazy, and weird, and loving relationship. So, my mom would just come by the house. Sometimes we would just meet like we were family. So, we were afforded an opportunity to still have this relationship with my mother. The point being, I had these two mothers who were, you know, just awesome in their own way. My birth mother, was a songwriter an artist, you know, and I didn't really acknowledge that until I felt like it was OK to give myself permission to say that I was an artist, too. And she loved to write letters. If my if you made my mother angry, she would write you a ten-page letter and put it in the mail. Right. If she got bad customer service, she would write a letter. So, I have these memories of like my mom, like expressing her art through writing these songs and writing these letters. We got free cable a lot because she was writing these letters.

But then my foster mother, was a super-duper church person. She was 60 years older than me. So we were always going at it. But she did these really amazing things. she was a nurse. And so she would go off to all these disasters, these floods and things and volunteer with the Red Cross. And she ministered to people who were in jail every Saturday, and over the course of her life, had taken in like 40 or 50 foster children. And when she found out that I was into poetry, she, literally made me like every Sunday get up and say these poems, right? So I had this mother who was an artist and then I had this mother who did all this work in community. And I never even considered how that was part of the makings of me until a couple of years ago, 

And so I feel like the work kind of came to me in the same way that I used to have to make my bed and wash dishes every single day, and I hated it. Now I get up and I make my bed right away and I get done eating. I do the dishes right away, these two, you know, my mother and my foster mother kind of like showed me very, very early on what it means to be an artist and what it means to work in community. And I feel like I'm kind of the product of that. 

BC: Wow, what a beautiful story. Everybody's story is. So unique, so unique. Con, what's your unique story, how do you define what you do and how did you come to it? 

CC: So, I grew up in a pretty insulated giant Catholic Irish family in Nebraska. I don't remember needing for much, in spite of the fact that one time I saw my dad's paycheck and we had there were five sisters and two brothers, and his paycheck was, I don't know, six hundred dollars for the month And he was an alcoholic. All his brothers and sisters were alcoholics. But somehow, we managed to live in this neighborhood with two hundred other children and all went to the same school. And all through school and in college, I did a lot of creative things: calligraphy, dance, drama. Just, you know, working with other people, thinking together, moving together, engaging a creative process was what always made me happy.

And I met the father of my children when I was in college the first time and married him, moved across the country several times. I. was in graduate school but did not ever finish because I spent six semesters in the ceramics department studying with Wes Smiley, who taught me many things about life. And I decided I just couldn't do that anymore, I just needed to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. And this was at the age of thirty-eight.

And I remember standing in my garage and I said to myself, OK, I have to pick, I have to pick the music, the dance, the theater, the whatever, whatever. And a voice said. creativity is creativity, you've been given all the tools. And I I heard the voice, I don't know from whence it came, but I can clearly still hear it. And I left that marriage. I left that small town and I left one child behind because she was missing high school. And I came to St. Louis and after about six months, I got a job as GED teacher. And oh, by the way, since you're an artist, could you do art in the shelter five hours a week? I'm like, sure. 

The shelter Con is referring to is a St. Louis facility for unhoused men where began to teach painting and drawing. She also collaborated with a photographer who to give the men camera’s so they could photograph and share...