Episode 48
Why Listening — Not Loud Ideas — Should Lead Your Art and Social Change Practice
Can small stories, from out of the way places make a big difference. Jennifer Williams not only thinks so, she has spent her life sharing those stories and spreading the good word.
BIO
Jennifer Williams is an American artist based in London. Before moving to the UK, she co-produced the Williams Toy Theater, a touring puppet theater. In 1978, she founded and directed the Centre for Creative Communities (formerly British American Arts Association), London, which was open until 2009. The Centre worked across Europe and in the States to promote the building of sustainable communities where education and the arts have pivotal roles to play in personal, social, cultural, and economic development. Currently, she works as a professional artist making and teaching how to make hand-made books, illustrations, etchings, and photographs. She is an active member of the International Futures Forum.
Notable Mentions
Howard Gardner: Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is currently the senior director of Harvard Project Zero, and since 1995, he has been the co-director of The Good Project.[2]He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, as outlined in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.[2]
The Center for Creative Communities (formerly the British American Art Association): The Centre worked across Europe and in the States to promote the building of sustainable communities where education and the arts have pivotal roles to play in personal, social, cultural and economic development.
Chief Victorio: Victorio (Bidu-ya, Beduiat; ca. 1825–October 14, 1880) was a warrior and chief of the Warm Springs band of the Tchihendeh (or Chihenne, often called Mimbreño) division of the central Apaches in what is now the American states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. In Victorio's War from September 1879 to October 1880, Victorio led a band of Apaches, never numbering more than 200 men, in a running battle with the U.S. and Mexican armies and the civilian population of New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico, fighting two dozen skirmishes and battles. He and most of his followers were killed or captured by the Mexican army in the Battle of Tres Castillos in October 1880.
Margaret McKinney, (Mushroom Lady): Margaret McKenny was a garden designer, writer, teacher, photographer, lecturer, and conservationist, recognized both locally and nationally. She was an expert mycologist and founder of the Olympia Audubon Society.
Hayward Gallery: One of London’s most important spaces for displaying contemporary art and garden teak furniture designs, the Hayward Gallery is housed in an austere 1968 building that is both equally loved and derided by the majority of Londoners. Whichever camp you fall into, you’ll agree that it makes an excellent outdoor hanging space for the blockbuster exhibitions it puts on.’ (Lonely Planet)
Grantmakers in the Arts: is a national association of public and private arts funders - providing members with resources and leadership to support artists and arts organizations.
Judy Jennings: Jennings, who earned her bachelor’s degree in 1969, her master’s degree in British history in 1971 and her doctoral degree in 18th century British history in 1975 from UK, served as executive director of KFW for 16 years until her retirement in 2014. During her tenure, she established KFW’s Special Project, which provides art-making opportunities for families of incarcerated people. During this period, Jennings also served for six years on the board of Grantmakers in the Arts and became a founding member of the Art x Culture x Social Justice Network.
Howard Klein (June 15, 1931 March 1, 2021 was an American music critic, pianist, and former Director of Arts at the Rockefeller Foundation. He earned both a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Music from the Juilliard School. In 1973 he succeeded Norman Lloyd as Director of Arts of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1983 he became Deputy Director for Arts and Humanities for the foundation, a position he remained in until he left the organization in 1986.[1] He then worked as the Director of Artists and Repertory for New World Records.[2]
Alberta Arthurs is a consultant and commentator active in the fields of culture, philanthropy, and higher education. She was the director for arts and humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation most recently and, before that, she was president and professor of English at Chatham College (now Chatham University) in Pittsburgh. She has served previously in deanships and as instructor in English at Harvard/Radcliffe and held administrative positions and taught English and American literature at Rutgers University and Tufts University.
Common Threads, Uncommon People: Author, Jennifer Williams: This personal book features a series of interviews with artists and organizers, primarily in Europe, whose work has identified them as "agents of change" in one way or another. True to its title, the subjects have worked in a variety of unconventional ways to achieve their ends. Author Jennifer Williams weaves their stories together with her own thoughtful insights that draw some common themes from these disparate sources.
Art and the Changing City, Author Jennifer Williams This study on the arts and urban regeneration is one of the first to have the individual visual artist as its focus. Part One is an examination of broad issues facing visual artists in cities, including practice, place pay and property. Part Two examines workspace issues for artists, including the cultural infrastructure and workspace, spaces required by visual artists, organizational mechanism for the development of workspace, urban planning and finance. Part Three consists of profiles of the most innovative visual artist-run urban housing and workspace projects and programs for individual visual artists in several cities.
Alberto Rios is the Poet Laureate of Arizona. He has has authored numerous books of poetry and prose, including Not Go Away is My Name (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Whispering to Fool the Wind (Sheep Meadow Press, 1982), which won the 1981 Walt Whitman Award selected by Donald Justice; and the novel The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart (Blue Moon and Confluence Press, 1984), which won the Western States Book Award.
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Change the Story / Change the World is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.
Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.
Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.
Transcript
There's no denying that humans are makers. In fact, history's despots and dictators have shown us over and over how much effort it takes to keep our species from our incessant maker ways.
As hard as they try, that genie just keeps escaping. Making mischief, making scenes, making new, remaking old, making good trouble and bad. Making, making changes, making beauty never seems to end.
History also makes it clear that most making is not a solo affair. Our relentless productivity depends on another human capacity that despite the headlines, is as persistent as the impulse to create.
We call it cooperation.
Without it, our big brain, opposing thumb endowed species would likely not have survived the early trials of our incredibly fertile but unforgiving planet. Like many of our guests, Jennifer Williams is both a maker and a collaborator.
She describes herself as a connector, but there's an expression that is peculiar to Jennifer's adopted English home that I think really gets at what she does best and that is joined up as a writer, as a policymaker, as a provocateur, and as a maker of beautiful things. Jennifer has spent her life facilitating the connections essential to making the joined up world.
I met Jennifer at Skid Row in Los Angeles near the end of the last century.
We were there learning firsthand about the Los Angeles Poverty Department artist John Malpied's extraordinary theater collaboration with that community's unhoused citizens. We both agreed LAPD really had the right stuff.
It was a true community collaboration that centered humility, dignity and respect for first voice storytelling.
Since then I've been privileged to work and learn with Jennifer at the British American Art association and the center for Creative Communities, both of which she founded. Under her direction. These organizations perfected what I consider a model for provoking policy change linked to innovative action.
An approach that incorporates intense long term research, provocative writing and storytelling, thoughtful community centered policy development, and I think most importantly, creative collaborative convenings that demonstrate the ideas that are being shared. Put more simply, gatherings that walk the talk.
In our conversations we talk about all that, plus the importance of stories, the sanctity of tools, the confluence of puppets and people and and the power of gifts. This is Change the story, Change the world. My name is Bill Cleveland. Part 1 Tools and Stories Jennifer, welcome to the show.
I'll just begin with my overarching question. If you're to describe your life path to someone who doesn't know that path, how would you characterize it?
Speaker B:First of all, that I'm overall quite a quiet private person. But I am always have been always a maker of things.
Artworks, carvings, books, cutouts photographs, illustrations, tools, reconstruction of broken or old things. Like I turned an old treadle sewing machine into a potter's wheel one time and did that for quite a while.
I'm a constant kind of observer of light and of shapes and expressions, both local and on people.
And I always thank Howard Gardner for bringing to the fore that spatial intelligence was a thing that was probably under, underlooked at because that's where I came from and still do. I'm curious about everyone and that I meet, and immediately I try to work out what their individual spark is.
Speaker A:I'll just say that's a long and winding path.
Everything you just described seems to have manifested in the work you were doing when we first met in Los Angeles, when you were directing the British American Art association, which ultimately became the center for creative communities, both of which had a significant impact on community arts on both sides of the pond.
So you've been a maker of cultural objects and cultural policies, a keen observer of the natural world and of human nature, and an inventor of things and stories. That's quite a journey. How did you get onto it?
Speaker B:I'm greatly influenced by my father by example, because he was an inventor and maker and had a great, though modest, workbench in our basement. And from the time we were very little, he taught us how to use tools. I learned to sharpen chisels when I was 7 years old and have never forgotten.
He had quite a strong philosophy attached to all he did. He used to say, I don't think deeply, but I think all the time. And that really rang with me all my life.
And when his father, who was a big time colonel in the first war, he was off being in the war when my father was a little kid and he lived at home with his mother, but with a child minder and who was affectionately known as Indian John. And John was the son of a very famous Apache chief that died defending his family in the Southwest. And that I can now all confirm was actually true.
And my father and John had a great relationship.
And so one time, just one story within that, my father, the little boy, went with his mother to visit the wife of the colonel of the next fort they were being shifted to. And after lunch, the boy was given leave to go around the house while the ladies had their cup of tea.
And he found in the library a book which he characterized as the History of the Indian wars of the Southwest. So he looked into it and opened it up, and by gumbo there was a picture of Chief Victorio.
And so he said, could I borrow this book and he took it home, showed it to John, and he said, I never saw John cry before. He said, me padre.
Speaker A:Wow. It sounds like your father had a profound relationship there with a very different story of the world. And I suppose a number of lessons.
Speaker B:And some of them came through my father to us. And my father was with John from the time he was 8 till he was 16. So he was really his partner in life. That's huge.
Speaker A:It is huge. Your family life sounds incredibly rich. What other characters showed up in your.
Speaker B:Unfolding story outside that immediacy of the family? I had a number of extraordinary mentors.
Teachers, Girl Scout leaders, a modest but internationally known my colleague who lived in a log cabin on the grounds of the Washington State Historical Society.
Her name was Margaret McKinney, and she used to take us on mushroom hunting expeditions to the bottom of Mount Rainier and then teach us how to do spore prints and identify and all that stuff. And I also knew an accomplished Native American mask carver. And those were all really early times for me. And they just were what people did.
Speaker A:It occurs to me as you tell these little stories, that every single one of those people made enough of an impression that you just turned around down your path of life and you did those things.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker A:And you've ended up working with your hands as a maker of beautiful and useful things, and working with your mind doing research and crafting policies related to all that making. How did those two things come together?
Speaker B:Yeah, so we also lived literally next door to the State Capitol in Olympia, Washington. And from the time I was nine until I was 19, I was a page in the state Senate.
And so I got to know and lawyers and various people that came to make the laws and to produce public policy.
And that definitely served me well later when I got into the whole thing of coming across the Atlantic and starting to realize that I was going to be an artist all the time, but maybe I was going to be an artist working on public policy.
Speaker A:It's interesting, I can imagine you growing up and assuming that making was an artist. Absolutely. Natural thing that all humans do.
And then you ended up in the state Capitol, where people didn't actually make things with their hands, they made other things by putting their heads together and little arm twisting.
Speaker B:They made it up as they went along.
Speaker A:Yes, they did. What did you take away from the Washington State Capitol all those years?
Speaker B:What rose up completely stuck with me that that public process was the thing you could do. I don't think I ever heard a word like nonprofit or Anything like that.
But it was something to do with the people and their representatives that I just understood because I watched it happen. And so I just believed that's the way things were done, that policies were there to be debated and supported or rejected or whatever it was.
Speaker A:You must have seen enough things that went through the sausage making machine that turned out in some way to be useful to actually believe that the process had substance and meaning to it.
Speaker B:I remember having the thought that a farmer could come from Southeast Washington state and change the way a law worked for his community. At that time, the senators were not necessarily all politicians only, in fact, they only met every other year.
So they were professional, something else. And the interesting ones were lawyers and one was a nuclear scientist and he eventually became a state representative to Washington.
Speaker A:Part 2 Puppets and Grantmakers so, Jennifer, you clearly didn't abandon your creative impulses because your post legislative page world was very arts infused. In fact, you actually ended up in a puppet theater.
Speaker B:Indeed.
Speaker A:I think one of the things you said is inevitably when you did a puppet performance that some little kid would come up and ask, how does a puppet get made? And your answer was, you start by.
Speaker B:Making a choice in your life.
Speaker A:So how did you make the choice to join the puppet world?
Speaker B:I actually married one of the English teachers at the community college I went to when I was just out of high school and he was an excellent scholar of literature and mythologies.
And when Kent State and other Vietnam protests happened and people were called upon to be in the streets, the artists all met and said, we don't want to do that. We want to do our art.
Vietnamese anti war folk tale:And we did that all over the streets of Portland.
And it was so well received that we just carried on basically and started doing mythologies from all around Iran and Russia and all kinds of wonderful stories that were universal kinds of things. And Perseus and Andromeda and all those characters.
Speaker A:Yeah, that spoke to the stories going on in the street at the time, Right?
Speaker B:Yeah, this was now past the street, but just carrying on. I think we did that for 10 years after.
After that we had a wonderful Volkswagen bus, smoke a reefer, do the puppets tour of the whole west of the usa.
Speaker A:Yeah. And learned a lot, I would imagine. Probably. It doesn't necessarily follow that the transition from puppet theater to policy making.
In a sense, you became a very adept organizer, analyzer, crafter of ideas that ended up as policies and research that ended up as useful information.
Speaker B: UK, it was the bicentennial,:And I went, of course, because I was all excited because I loved the work. And the first thing I heard overheard was an English person saying, too bad all these Indians are dead. This is nice stuff.
And I thought, I wonder, what is the connection between US and UK culture? Why did somebody say that? And then I thought, what do. What does anyone know about. Really know about the culture or the arts of another country?
You might see a little bit of it, or you might see a pop song or something like that. So I started looking into what was US UK cultural exchange. And that's a long, complex story.
But pretty soon after that that I started thinking, I think I'll set up something and be an information agency, because artists don't have any contacts here. I had lots of stories of people who couldn't find a studio or didn't know where to make prints or all that sort of stu. So that was one thing.
And so I went to the US Embassy and I said, I have this idea, and I wonder what you think. And they said, oh, yes, yes. They thought I was going to be the agent for all American artists.
And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm going to do. But the lovely cultural attache said, you're planning to call it the US UK Arts Association. And he said the shortened name of that would be US Uck.
Aw. So. And you want to include everybody in Britain, so why not British American? So there you go. Yeah.
Speaker A:Out of whole cloth, you created the British American Art Association.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I have to say, when I first encountered it, it is one of those things. It's what artists do. There's a blank sheet of paper and then there's something on the paper, and all of a sudden it's a thing of substance.
And the name British American Art association just automatically conjures up. Yeah. Some big thing. And it actually worked that way for you?
Speaker B:It did indeed. Yeah.
But immediately I started realizing that except for the ones that were already international, like the big symphonies, the artists or arts groups didn't really know what they were getting into in the sense that the art has no references often, and you don't realize that you're also a real ambassador for your country, no matter what they want to say, why do you have that kind of haircut? What is. What is the President doing? I mean, you know, people ask things that don't have to do with your art, but it's also a big opportunity.
So you start to look, you know, is anybody going to support cultural exchange and why do they do that and how do they do that? So you start looking at the policies that they have in place and what would be the benefit of it.
And in the first few years, it was pretty clear that the place I really was in was Europe. And all the cultural exchange within Europe was.
I wouldn't say it was hot and heavy, but they were more used to it because there's only 12 miles between Britain and France, for instance. So that. But at the same time, we were a US Organization as well as a British.
So I found myself talking to the grant makers in the arts members because some of them were at least interested in the thought of cultural exchange, and what were they doing with regard to arts and community. And that was a big conversation. So what's the role there? And can I still be an artist? I remember writing it in a diary all those years ago.
Wait a minute.
But then I realized I could be an artist working on public policy development with and for all those entities I just mentioned in Europe and in the States, to some extent. And I think I told you there was a client of Howard Klein's at Rockefeller, and he was the first one to put in money, which is wonderful.
And yet when I would go to see him, Alberta Arthurs would always summon me up and say, come on, see me. I finally said to her, why do you see me? And she said, because you ask really hard different questions than anybody else.
Speaker A:So do you think having one foot in the uk, maybe another foot in Europe, and another foot in the US just provided a natural place for that curiosity that you grew up with to just start to. To grow mushrooms?
Speaker B:Exactly. And we all know the fungus is ruling the world.
Speaker A:What were some of the weird, hard, unusual questions that guided you in that.
Speaker B:Policy with the US Grant makers? I tended to migrate to those people from foundations that were more interested in arts and community, like Judy Jennings and others. Many others.
But it was curious to me that so many of the foundations, particularly the regional based ones, but not only said they wanted to support creativity and community development and education links, but when you looked at their policies and when you heard from the people on the ground trying to get money. The rhetoric didn't quite match the programming. You know, there were always politics within that that's governed Hugo, the funding for things.
And so you'd see these words. I think it, for me, it's a basic thing in this whole field. People use words like education, creativity, community.
Completely different when you just move across the street, let alone around the world. It's a deep problem. And when you went to Europe, people used words like education or community completely differently.
So it was really hard to talk about things.
Speaker A:I think for any American, one of the great learning experiences is to understand how different American culture is compared to the rest of the world.
And that this idea that the community and the creative process and learning and identity and culture and questions of who you are and where you are and how you make meaning in the world were far more intrinsic to the idea of, quote, the art world in Europe and in Great Britain than they were in the United States.
And I'm wondering if in that back and forth that you did, one of the things that you ended up able to do is to point out different ways of seeing and approaching cultural policy and investment.
Speaker B:Definitely one of the things that really hit me when I came here was that young people in particular were so much more political in Europe.
Now that's probably changed in recent years for both sides in the States, people just weren't particularly, maybe a little bit and maybe anti war, but not in the way here. It was just a different thing. And so there were all kinds of different starting points for all of the conversations that, that we're referring to.
Because people were involved in the politics of their country or their community.
Speaker A:Yeah, and actually, obviously if that's the case, you have this sort of common ground.
Young people involved in thinking about the world they're living in and their impact on it, who also end up being artists or being involved in some cultural behavior. And those things mashing together naturally organic.
Speaker B:And community arts here went way back to the early 50s, late 40s even, where there's still people around that were doing that sort of thing then. And they're having some of the same battles with the structures of the art world as it were.
But it was definitely a thing that happened in many countries, as we found out as we went into our common threads thing.
Speaker A:So you've mentioned common threads, which to me was inspiring an event and also a long term project that had an impact on me, both because of what it taught me and also what I would say is the profound substance of, was not just a little project, it was Almost a movement. So could you tell that story?
Speaker B:Yeah.
What we had started to realize going to all these meetings and such, was that there were projects all over the place in Europe and we invited 14 projects from communities in 11 different countries.
The formula was, in each project there was a spread of interests with expertise in arts, education, community development, plus at least one other equal partner of some other player with equally weighty goals. Public space, nature, higher education, town planning, literacy, et cetera. So it was a serious sort of structure that we were looking for.
And I used my network in Europe to find the projects which were, as I say, in many countries. We did that over an 18 month period, visiting them and reflecting and doing photos and reports and all kinds of things like that.
Near the end, we analyzed what had been a path to the success of each of the projects and realized that a pattern emerged which was agreed by all 14 projects.
Although each of the players had many different aims, in each of the projects they agreed that there was a progression of basic values that were equally present and essential to the success of each and every one.
And the conference that took place in Glasgow confirmed that in that exhibition, I think it's worth saying, the basic values that they all said, no matter whether they were in a library or in a housing thing in Belgium or whatever it was, they all said this progression was necessary absolutely in each one. Trust, sharing, participation, responsibility, futures and sustainability. And then without all of those, that it wasn't going to work.
Also, that's a place in for any kind of funder or sponsor or policymaker.
Speaker A:So one of the interesting things about that is, is that you came in some ways in midstream and sometimes and all of these people and places and activities came to this common ground. And to be able to say, well, yes, upon reflection, we all share the same design standards.
And so I was thinking about that same rubric that you just shared that also applies to the common threads effort itself, because you employed all of those qualities in the creation of this event and the research that you did and the beautiful book that you created, it was a creative act, it was an analytic act, it was a policy making act, which is unique because so many times people create these events and activities and well, here's the performance, the curtain closes, that's it, we're out of here. And that futures part, which to me is just totally critical, was obvious.
You're pointing towards what's next rather than, now that we've done this, let's pat ourselves on the back and go have another martini.
Speaker B:And the exhibition went to, I think, six countries, including usa Lima to Lima, Lima, Ohio.
Speaker A:Yeah. So could you just describe maybe a few of those amazing projects? Each of those stories was, you know, they're both delightful and inspiring.
Speaker B:I think the one that was most poignant for me was the one called Nature's Fairy Tale, and it took place in Lithuania. And the wife of the pair that made this up is it were was working for the education department in Lithuania.
The husband is a Russian and Lithuanian only speaking artist who does art every day. Quite a woolly mammoth of a bear.
Speaker A:Here's a description of Nature's Fairy Tale from Jennifer's book Common Threads, Uncommon People. That I think, sums up the power and beauty of that project. It recounts a conversation that she had near the end of her time in Lithuania.
Speaker B:In Lithuania, I felt like I was in a movie in which the viewer falls into a sort of trance while a magical kingdom is revealed.
For two and a half hours, Kestis and I discussed, through the dulcet tones of Bartenas and Dalia's translation, the relationship of art and community and between action and change. He eloquently unraveled how aesthetic awareness of one's surroundings can bring an understanding of diversity and a deeper connection to nature.
Having grown up in the former Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War, Kestis had watched his country in recent years slowly making its way back to independent life. He was keenly aware of what 40 years of neglect had done to the forests, the rivers and the wildlife.
But he also understood that a project such as Nature's Fairy Tale, by being made available to children, teachers and families, was strategically placed to do something much more powerful than simply build an aesthetic appreciation of nature. He knew it could also make an impact on the rebuilding of civil society in a country that had nearly lost it altogether.
Families could look at their environment critically, learn to appreciate and describe it, and crucially, participate in a sophisticated public conversation about a new way to live. They decided that what was missing was civil society had been destroyed by the occupation of the Russian time.
And so they've set up a project each year with different theme. One year it would be birds, another year it'd be trees.
And they would work with kids, inviting kids from all over the country and their biology teachers or theater teachers or whatever it was. So they always had at least one other discipline, not just art. And they would produce artworks, sometimes theater, but mostly visual.
And then they would do a show that not only toured the whole of Lithuania, but they made a catalog with everybody's name in it. They weren't allowed to put their names in public before that, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah. Yes. Actually, it's important to remind people listening is that this was a different Eastern Europe that we're talking about. Very different.
Much more stultified and rigid.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker A:Another of the projects that I remember with a wonderful name is something called Small Ugly Places with a woman architect at the helm, if I got that right.
Speaker B:Oh, yes, extraordinary. She was the one who. She was the one who taught me that you should follow the rhetoric. I said, what do you mean?
She said, our prime minister happens to have been an architect.
He said that this kind of values that one could place in communities and such was important in the national rhetoric about what the country was trying to do. So she said, follow that. She is an architect.
And so she set up this program going into schools and talking with the kids about mapping their local neighborhood and to make maps. And they learned all kinds of stuff, but to find the small, ugly places.
But then the next thing they did was that the kids, they were 11 years old, went to the town hall meeting and presented their findings. To say, there's an old people's home and it's too far from any cafe. And they would present these things.
Speaker A:Actually, here's a quote from a letter they wrote to the city of Oslo Technical department from class 3C and 4C. We have been studying the area around our school and have found a number of small, ugly areas.
Speaker B:We have also designed new benches, signs.
Speaker A:Rubbish bins and shelters.
Speaker B:And we need the help from the.
Speaker A:City to get these developed.
Speaker B:We value your help. It was a complete circle of activity.
Speaker A:Didn't they propose the redesign of public toilets?
Speaker B:That was one of them. That's right. That's right. There weren't enough public toilets for the old folks.
Speaker A:So you have 11 year old creative leadership manifesting in City Hall. And then you had an incredible crow festival in Italy.
Speaker B:Oh, the Merlo Maschio, the Festival of the Male Blackbird.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:And it still goes on. It's in its 27th year now, first of spring every year.
And that is to protest the fact that they used to trap the male blackbird and put them in cage, because they sing so beautifully in southern Italy. And then the festival each year they bring in two groups of seemingly opposing people, like Turkish people and Germans and Palestinians and Israelis.
One of them comes each time and talks about that with the public on that day, about what that's about.
Speaker A:Yeah, but also the metaphor, of course, is this natural wonder of the bird and his song. And of human inclination is to capture it and keep it for oneself. And it's basically a freedom festival.
Speaker B:That's right. And then on the back of that, they had Universitad di Strada, University of the Street.
And this wonderful artist architect named Delisi went into this really old part of Naples that really was thought of as a slum, is where they made the metalwork that would go around the street lights and all that.
And together with him, they did produce nativities, but also basically revitalized all of those craftspeople into making things, including little donkeys. Wonderfully artistic.
And one time they did a whole thing outside one of the entries to one of the tunnels that went through a hill in Naples, really taking that craftsmanship and giving them a focus of just things they could do.
Speaker A:Part three, Arts and the Changing City. Now, Common Threads wasn't your only project, but the through line for all of them appeared to me to be a focus on certain key questions.
What do we have in common here?
What do we learn here about communities, about human creativity, about how people do things that are sometimes surprising and profound in very small spaces that aren't grandiose? What did you take away that you felt that you wanted to spread, that you wanted to share?
Speaker B:I think that probably that's best illustrated by a set of projects that came before Common Threads, which.
The first one, there was a lot of talk here and everywhere about urban regeneration, so we did a whole thing which was called Arts and the Changing City, and then we did Arts and the Changing City, the artist in the Changing City, which had to do a lot with studios and had a lot of examples from USA, in fact, Wei Ming Liu in St. Paul. Did you ever meet.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely. Yes. You introduced me.
Speaker B:And then the last one was investing in the Changing City and getting all those people that were putting up socially responsible money. What's that about? So we tried to explore different aspects of the changing city and its interface with arts.
I have to say, the work is still pretty out there as far as people's consciousness.
Speaker A:Yeah.
But as we all know, the art world can be cloistered, you know, highly creative people and people who have the privilege to invest in other people's work, you can end up with an insular worldview.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And my experience of Common Threads, going back to those values, you walk the talk. You created a place where things were learned from people on the ground who were doing extraordinary, inspiring things.
And those stories themselves were, in many ways, a policy lever. I remember people going, I want to be a Part of one of those.
Not replicating it, but just there's clearly a spirit here above and beyond the policy and the funding and the structure that makes a project. Does that ring true?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very well stated.
I think you hear that appreciated most in successful and even unsuccessful arts and community projects because so many people have had to come to terms with the ongoing revelation that community is about creativity and arts and all those things and it just isn't recognized.
Actually, when we did Arts and the Changing City, the city of Liverpool wrote to us and said, you're absolutely right, we've just fused our cultural and economic departments. To me, yes, that was exactly the kind of thing I'm looking forward.
I don't suppose I'll see it, but at the big changes that are going to have to happen when climate change kicks in. Is it going to be possible to change consumption to participation?
Speaker A:In many ways, art and community work was a precursor to just ecological thinking, which is this is connected to this is connected to this is connected to this.
And artists who worked in that environment grok that right away you're going to go somewhere else because it can be very frustrating as you to realize that every thread in the fabric is connected to every other thread. And so you can't go pulling things apart without shaking things up for good and for ill.
Speaker B:I've been following the expose recently. How many fungi there are controlling everything that goes on in the forests and such.
They're all under there and the only thing we see are the mushrooms. But everything else is extraordinary. There's a new series by David attenborough in his 97th year, extraordinary about plants. And he did a whole.
There's a lot going on around fungi and their fact that they'll be there whatever happens.
Speaker A:Yes. And they speak to each other, they help each other, and in the strangest, most wonderful way, the more they find out about the insides of humans.
There's a similar kind of thing going on with the, I guess you would call them our fellow travelers in our bodies that are the microbes in our gut, et cetera. There's another ecosystem in there that we're only just learning about.
So one of the things that happens with these podcasts is that sometimes people use them as examples and share them with young people who are getting bright eyed and bushy tailed about this idea of making a difference in the world using human creativity.
If you imagine yourself sitting in front of them and they're asking the question, is there anything you could pass on that might be useful for us in this interesting world we're, we're going to be going into in our future. What would you pass on?
Speaker B:I think the first thing I would pass on is listen a lot before you start making any plans about what you or anybody else are doing or what you think of them. Listen a lot because it's so easy, especially now with all the connectivity, whether or not you have it on a particular day.
They're just things come up all the time and you just watch them and you start saying them. And I just, looking back on mine, I think I tried really hard to listen and listen before making plans. So that's one main thing.
The words I wrote down were tenacious creativity, cheerful, seriousness, visible caring for others, optimism.
These are attributes that we're needing more than ever now than ever before, with all of the problems, climate change or unruly high tech, continuing racism, refugees, those are all huge things that need all of that stuff. Tenacious, creativity, cheerful seriousness, visible caring for others, and optimism. So that's what I would say.
Speaker A:And the through line to me is, and it starts with the listening, unless you're just doing it pro forma.
But most serious listeners I know of have extraordinary humility because the reason you're listening is that you're expecting to learn something, indeed that you don't know and that you don't have an answer to.
Speaker B:I always remember advice to myself going to a conference to not question or make a statement until at least halfway through, if not 90% of the way through, because you just should be listening and finding out.
Speaker A:Well, and it's the ultimate question that anybody who's come into a new ecosystem always is asking, where am I? What's going on here?
And part of it has to do with, I feel like we live in a world where we carry our assumptions almost as a shield and we bash into a space. And if the world isn't really aligned with our assumptions, then we either reject it or ignore it, or we find it fearful.
And being able to sit back in your chair and give yourself permission to be a big time learner, it's actually a gift if you can give it to yourself. Yeah. And part of it is to recognize and take responsibility for being the newcomer on the continent where I am.
And pretty much everywhere you go, there are more layers than you can ever imagine of experience and wisdom and stories.
Part 4 the gift of Giving so a final question, which is in your musings and listenings and visitings, have you encountered some inspiring creative works that you would want to share with folks out.
Speaker B:There just last week, it was the 70th end of the Holocaust. This was a program that was done by the BBC.
It was called the Survivors and all of the Survivors and there were, I think eight of them were in their mid-70s, which I echoed with. And they were paired with a portrait painter. And over a period of months, these artists did the portraits.
But what you saw was a beautifully edited conversation between the artist and some of the revelations they had and the participant reflecting and thinking the emotions that came out and all that stuff you can imagine. That was very inspiring. They were beautifully done in all ways. And it just.
By the end of it, you just wanted to go hug everybody because it was so clear.
Speaker A:So that was BBC tv, is that right?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:The second thing I would put on my list, this is not self serving, but would be the change is the story. Change the story, change the world. I've enjoyed many of those and I congratulate you on that very much.
I think you and I have been pretty in tune for a lot of years, but I think this is a. Yeah, thank you. And the other is. I met this person at Grant Makers in the Arts actually, but he's.
And he's the poet laureate of Arizona and his name is Alberto Rios. I sent you one poem about artists. Yes, a great poem, another one that's come out and I just.
If I can indulge you and your listeners, it is one that he's written, I think, quite recently, which is called When Giving is All we have. And there's a little subtitle. One river gives its journey to the next.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:We give because giving changed us. We give because giving could have changed us. We have been better for it. We have been wounded by it. Giving had many faces. It's loud and quiet.
Big though small. Diamond in the wood nails. The story is old, the plot worn and the pages too. But we read this book anyway, over and over again.
Giving is for first and every time. Hand to hand, mine to yours, yours to mine. You gave me blue, I gave you yellow. Together we are simply green.
You gave me what you did not have and I gave you what I had to give. Together we made something greater from the difference. I love that one.
Speaker A:Huh? Absolutely. That's. Yeah, it just says it. Great poetry says something that you feel and articulates it in a way that transcends the words for sure.
Speaker B:I had made a little. Some copies of it and had one in my shoulder bag when I went to give some clothes in at Oxfam. Our Salvation army kind of store.
I don't know why, but I just gave this lady at the till a copy of this poem and I went out and I was looking at the books and she came over and she was totally in tears and she said, you cannot imagine what this has done for me at this moment.
Speaker A:I think these days we all need a bit more of that kind of thing, you know, a reminder that the village is still there.
Speaker B:I fortunately have a subscription to the Guardian and Observer newspaper, and I go out every day to get it. So I counted a couple weeks ago about 40 names of people that I see on my walk.
Speaker A:That's fantastic. Well, outside of our house, there's a path and there's a public bench.
And it just happens to be one of those spaces where people gather and we have a sort of a similar thing. Gossiping and passing the word on about the same old over and over. And that is a saving grace.
I will say that Bench and this Bench podcast have kept my head screwed on.
Speaker B:I tell myself that my collage making does the same thing.
Speaker A:I just have to say your art is a window into your magic spirit every time.
Speaker B:I just made a how to count book for little kids.
Speaker A:Oh, wonderful. Oh, that's fantastic.
Speaker B:One to ten. So I noticed one day looking down on my cutting floor that the scraps looked like birds. So I did a book called oh, Beautiful.
Speaker A:And so each book is handmade this way. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, that's great. One of the lovely things is there's always another one.
Just like you say at the beginning, you make up your mind where to go. All right. Okay, Jennifer, bye.
Speaker B:Bye. Take care for your time.
Speaker A:Okay, adios.
And thank you to our listeners out there across the US and the UK And India, Singapore, Canada, Cambodia, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Serbia and South Africa and the rest of the world. With your big ears, your big hearts, and your thoughtful comments, this show is a labor of love.
And we love that you're out there listening and hopefully learning and being inspired and speaking of learning.
For those of you who are teaching or doing research or just trying to absorb as much as you can about art and community change, we want to remind you about our new Change the Story collection.
This collection is our response to listeners who told us they'd like to dig deeper into Art and Change episodes that focus on specific issues, constituencies, or disciplines like justice, arts, cultural organizing, change, theater, children and youth, or music. If this interests you, please check it out at www.
Artandcommunity.com under the podcast dropdown or click the link in our show Notes Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. It's written and hosted by me, Bill Cleveland, and our theme and soundscape are by the stupendous Judy Munson.
Our editing is by Andre Nebbe, our special effects come from freesound.com and our inspiration rises up from the mysterious but ever present presence of OOP235. Until next time, please stay well, do good and spread the good news.
