Self-Care: Why it Matters for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers!

Bill Cleveland: 00:00:35

So here's a question I've been thinking about. If you're a community artist, activist, or cultural worker, who's looking out for you?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. I'm Bill Cleveland. This is the third part of our series on the building blocks of effective community arts practice.

And if you've been with us, you'll know we've taken on some big ones. In episode one, we talked about accountability, who we answer to, and why that matters.

In episode two, we got into leadership, how it shows up in this work and how we pass it on. And today we're talking about self care, not just a little self help, take a break every once in a while kind of thing.

We're talking about real deal, long haul sustainability, what it takes to keep doing this work without losing your mind, your body, or your community in the process.

I'm joined again by my brilliant partners in this series, artist and cultural historian Lenny Sloan and educator and movement builder Barbara Shaffer bacon. Between the three of us, we've racked up over 120 years of experience doing this kind of work.

And yep, that makes us feel kind of geezer y, but hopefully useful, too.

In this conversation, we get into everything from housing and healthcare to studio time and burnout, from community support networks to the deep question of how you untangle your identity from your work. There's even a story about a COVID vaccine program that involved tattoos and tequila. So, yeah, you don't want to miss that one.

This episode is a reminder that community care starts with self care, and that if we want to build strong, just communities, we've got to take care of the folks doing the work, too. So let's jump in to our third question.

Bill Cleveland: 00:02:58

If you are committed and devoted to the strange amalgam of being a cultural activist, an artist in community, how do you take care of yourself?

Leni Sloan: 00:03:13

You want to start?

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:03:13

BYRON My first connection to the self care concept came from a woman named Linda Stout, who's an organizer who started a program for movement leaders called Spirit in Action, leading retreats that were sort of R and R and renew and refresh, I'll say, to organizers and artists and activists in a variety of movements. And she really did recognize that they needed to step away. They needed to think about themselves.

So that was my first, I think, my second sense of self care that I have seen folks come at in a variety of ways is really thinking about their basic Maslow's hierarchy. Do they have a place to live? Can they support themselves or their family?

And to begin to demand or expect the kind of compensation or resources that allow them to take care of themselves and their lives. Being an artist is challenging.

Being an arts activist, a community arts leader, is really having to put yourself out almost 247 when you're fully in the work. And so even someone like Liz Lehrman said, I need my studio time. And studio.

Studio time was her self care, as she described it, that she couldn't always be negotiating with the community about what was going to be on that stage. Stepping back and being able to create work in which she was fully in control was a piece of that.

Leni Sloan: 00:04:52

So first of all, I talk about bandwidth. Now, do I have the bandwidth to do this? How much bandwidth is this going to take? Because I'm a septuagenarian and I am more measured.

Of course, you both knew me when I said, let's all leap.

But now I'm more measured about, am I the best leaper for this Housing artist health, who discovered, for example, that the gig artist in central Pennsylvania had at least two common things. Most of them did not have insurance and most of them were tattooed.

At the beginning of the COVID thing, you had to have a doctor to write you the prescription to go to get the shot. But if you didn't have a doctor, which many gig artists didn't.

So we were trying to find out, where are the common grounds where we can demystify all the noise about COVID So we created a program with the local hospital and the local bar that said, a shot for a shot. Roll up your sleeves and show us your art.

You use your body as a canvas and you get your Covid shot and a shot of whatever your favorite beverage is from the bar. My quick example is artist housing. Again, I'm saying, do you know that you are eligible for Section 8 housing?

And they go, well, that's for poor people. I'm like, child, you are poor. You are making. You are making under $18,000 a year. You are eligible for. You can turn it into a live workspace.

I would love the whole Section 8 neighborhood to become an artist village.

Bill Cleveland: 00:06:47

So when I visited Serbia in the middle of the fight against Milosevic, I spent time with a theater dance company called DA. And DA was resisting 247 with their work. And they had a clandestine rehearsal space. Their performances were always public.

So they would be on the steps of this place or in this public square at the time, you'd have to think of them as a guerrilla arts company. So the number one question people in this country ask is, how's that possible? I mean, these are sort of almost enemies of the state.

How do they live and work? How do they have a roof over their head? How do they eat? Where do they get health care?

And I just look them in the eye, and I said, well, this is the great irony, right?

In Yugoslavia at the time, the diminishing, shrinking Yugoslavia, you had a long history of public services, and most people lived in public housing, and everybody had health care. And in this case, everybody had families.

So there was actually an infrastructure that allowed them to fight the government as artists on the government dole. And it's an irony. Artists in this country, they come out of whatever training they have.

They're excited, they're full of vim and vigor, they're independent, trying to make a way.

And then if you look at the histories of graduates of art schools, you can see that a significant number of the people who have professional training in the arts actually end their career when their first child is born, because there's no safety net for them, and they obviously have an obligation to do whatever it takes to take care of their family.

Leni Sloan: 00:08:51

And I was going to ask why. Underlying Barb again with Maslow, how housing, health, and child care are the three things that are really facing. Maturing artists want families.

They need schools, too. Their children have to have their tonsils out.

Bill Cleveland: 00:09:12

The thing is, artists are canary in the coal mines. Everything that is difficult for artists.

Sole proprietor, gig artists stitching together a life in ways that are creative and entrepreneurial and vital to their communities, are on thin ice in the same way that so many other people are on thin ice. If you look at an artist and you say, okay, so what are your top three issues? They'll tell you the issues.

They'll be the same as somebody in West Virginia or whatever, right?

Leni Sloan: 00:09:42

A truck driver or.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:09:44

Exactly there. There are a few catch 22s in there, I think.

I think for artists and creatives and creative organizers, like some arts administrators like myself, there is the fact that I love what I do. Love it all the time. It feels integrated. I have friendships and family and community through my work.

I have some autonomy and authority to act and interact. I have the fact that I gig a little means I have a little freedom and control over what I do or what I choose.

And often in conversations with people, I was so happy in my work, it felt like such an incredible privilege. Compared to people who did not enjoy what they did for a living or those challenges or compromises.

So I think that I call it a catch 22 because I think it, it gets, it's like dark glasses that get in the way of seeing that what is sustainable and what do you really need and what do you need right now? Because it's. What's the word? It's addictive. It is addictive to do this work in some ways.

And it has some of those qualities that keep you wanting to be in the middle of that mess right before the parade happens, that keeps you in the middle of it.

And I do think that the other piece of self care is letting go of having your identity tied up in the work so that you would step back and be more conscious of cultivating leadership that can share the, the heavy load and the positive opportunity more sooner so that you can step back and stay in but not have to carry it on your shoulders forever.

Bill Cleveland: 00:11:36

So Barbara, the thing you mentioned, which is that our industry, however you want to describe it, it's a passion based industry that what you lack in the material wealth is often in terms of self care, your soul is fed, that you have a soul feeding source that you can go to, that nobody controls. You can make work. And one of the most amazing things, I did a study for McKnight, they said let's look at all of our McKnight fellows.

And this was I think 40 years of fellows. So I don't know.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:12:18

Right.

Bill Cleveland: 00:12:19

I remember that 10, 10, 15 a year and just study them. What, where are they, where did they go, what makes them tick?

And more than anything we want to know what the ecosystem for artists like that is and how it works.

Some pretty amazing things jumped out in the study and I just thinking about these assets that often people in a passion based industry have that others don't. One of them was that all of them had a long train of people that they learned with, that remained sources of support, sources of continued learning.

I mean they defined themselves as continuously learning and calling upon this amazing community of their students and their mentors who they saw all together. That's a vital force in anybody's community. The other one is that most of them told a story of what it took to just stay in the work.

As you well know, if you stop for a long enough time, it's very difficult to jump back in.

And so many of them had families that invested in their ability to continue the work that they loved and that's extended families, not just nuclear families. And they could just name.

They gave me a place to live, money from my parents, my grandparents knew that I was in this and I was never ever gonna be rich. And it was something that was hidden. Those stories were not well known outside the arts community. And it really is that there is a family of artists.

And last one was so many artists basically said I need places and I need stuff. I need rehearsal space, I need amplifiers, I need guitars, I need kill and I need scaffolding, I need lights.

I don't own it all, but my community owns it all. And it's in constant motion. We are always exchanging and sharing.

So there's this invisible ecosystem of support that artists bring with them that it's true other people who are line workers in a restaurant or whatever probably have less access to. I'm not going to say they don't have families that love them and support them, but there's something to that that was really striking to me.

Leni Sloan: 00:14:58

You reminded me of a time in: 1974

And it was a tremendous now it was done under the seat of the Comprehensive Education and Training act and they acknowledged at that time that artists were workers and tradesmen and they needed their support. We've not had a program since that time.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:16:07

It's true, Bill, what you cited and the specifics that you happened to mention.

There was a study done in the Berkshires recently amongst 12 or more arts organizations that basically it's called the Pay Equity Report and it says basically entry and mid level cultural workers in the region couldn't afford to do their work if they didn't have other means of support, if they weren't married to somebody, if the family wasn't supporting them, if they weren't working a second job. It's an unsustainable, literally unsustainable.

Leni Sloan: 00:16:39

Now what is the name of that report?

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:16:41

It's called Pay Equity A Study. It's fascinating.

Bill Cleveland: 00:16:45

So we'll put a link to that report and many of the other things that have been shared here.

Which prompts me to say that my hope here is that these stories and reflections about, you know, accountability and leadership and self care have Been useful to the folks who have been listening and stimulate more of the same and maybe puts a few cracks in the silos we sometimes end up occupying.

Leni Sloan: 00:17:15

I don't think we're silos, but I do think we're kind of outposts and fortresses in this climate.

We need to talk to each other, we need to circle the wagons, we need to take X rays of each other and write prescriptions for each other because we are all we got in the end.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:17:35

Yeah, it's true.

Bill Cleveland: 00:17:37

Yeah, we are.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:17:38

I was going to say Grace Lee Boggs talked a lot about the fact that movement leaders didn't spend enough time in reflection. She was constantly talking and calling for reflection.

And I think, although Lenny, I objected strongly to thinking that the three of us were the right people to be talking about community arts action now, I think we do bring that luxury and privilege of reflection and big picture that is made this fascinating and wonderful to do well.

Bill Cleveland: 00:18:14

And just for the fact that we've lived long enough so there's these spaces where we've been hanging out.

Leni Sloan: 00:18:18

I think what we do is we bring survival skills to the conversation. Thank you all so much. It's great to be with you all.

Barbara Shaffer Bacon: 00:18:27

And Lenny's so good to have this exchange.

Bill Cleveland: 00:18:29

There we go.

Speaker B: 00:18:31

And as I close this conversation with my good friends Barbara Schaefer Bacon and Lenny Sloan, I am reminded of the fact that community arts work is not just about passion, but also serious care for ourselves and each other. Here's a bit of what rose up for me. First of all, self care is not just personal, it's structural, too.

Artisan cultural organizers often work without safety nets. You know, healthcare, housing, childcare. Real self care means advocating for systems that support what everybody needs to thrive, not just artists.

Then there's the stuff we don't see. We talked about how artists sustain each other through organic networks of shared resources. You know, the invisible infrastructure.

Amplifiers passed around, kilns borrowed costumes shared. It's a powerful form of community care. It's also a model that other sectors could learn from. Finally, reflection sustains the soul.

As Grace Lee Boggs emphasized, New McVotes need to make space for reflection and healing passion addictive. But burnout is real.

Reclaiming creative space, setting boundaries and cultivating new leaders allow for the work to continue and make space for new energy to emerge. Like Lenny said, we're all we got in the end.

So thanks everybody for listening and be on the lookout for more of this Building Block series and aprobu of that next week.

We'll be talking about how an organization that has been supporting and nurturing change making creators for almost 50 years is navigating the current storms with our guest, alternate Roots Executive Director and Auntie of Cultural Exuberance and Sanctuary, Wendy Schenefelt. Art is Change is a production of.

Bill Cleveland: 00:20:43

The center for the Study of.