#DareToDream: Our Friends in Scotland Dream Out Loud

by Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

#DareToDream takes off on 27 October—designated #DareToDream Day—when “every creative citizen in Scotland is invited to share a dream for the future on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using the campaign hashtag.” To get an idea of the scope of this national action, check the Facebook event page or the map for local events happening between now and the end of November, engaging an impressive list of partners. Check the resources page for a range of great tools. “There are lots of different ways you can join in with the #DareToDream campaign. Dreams can be wee or huge, and absolutely everyone can take part, in any language!”

#DareToDream is part of the annual Scottish Storytelling Festival, sponsored by TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland), and directed by Mairi McFadyen, National Storytelling Co-ordinator of the Scottish Storytelling Forum, “a diverse network of storytellers, organisations and individuals supporting Scotland’s vibrant storytelling community.”

Even though #DareToDream will happen halfway around the world, there’s a USDAC connection. As the website says, “Our #DareToDream campaign is inspired by the #DareToImagine campaign in the US, sponsored by the people-powered U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.

One of the ways #DareToDream expands on storytelling is to invite stories in the form of images and songs as well as narratives, reflected in the accounts populating the #DareToDream blog. Storyteller Beth Cross starts her contribution to the blog with a beautiful quote from Brenda Ueland of Hands on Scotland:  “Why should we all use our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate.” (I was honored to be asked to contribute an essay to the blog as well.)

Storyteller Lizzie McDougall and community members working on the Gold and Silver Darlings Story Quilt, a visual celebration of over 30 traditional stories from the North and Inner Moray Firth in the Scottish Highlands.

On a more personal note, I know it’s a big generalization, but: Scotland is cool. And that makes me very curious to see the stories #DareToDream inspires. With a population of just over five million (New York City alone comprises 8.5 million) and an incredibly rich cultural life, things happen on a remarkably accessible and participatory scale. For instance, the September 2014 referendum on independence for Scotland lost 55-45 percent, with a phenomenal 85 percent of eligible voters (which for the first time included those 16 and older) taking part, as compared to the less than 29 percent of U.S. voters who cast ballots in our recent Presidential primary, the most hotly contested race in living memory.

When I visited Scotland well over a year before the independence referendum, everyone I met was already debating the pros and cons of independence from Britain—and telling stories to back up their opinions. (If you want to wonk out a bit, check out my blog on Scottish Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop from June 2013.) And when the rest of the U.K. voted by a narrow margin for Brexit in June, withdrawing from the European Union, 62% of voters in Scotland opposed withdrawal. Hyslop, whose full title is Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs, has been working hard to keep Scotland in the EU.

What stories of Scotland’s future will be shared in #DareToDream? The USDAC salutes our friends in Scotland for an incredible national action! We’ll be following closely through the end of November.

Meet the USDAC's first Regional Envoys!

The USDAC is thrilled to introduce our first four Regional Envoys. Each of them will be working in a different multi-state region to connect artists, activists, and allies to each other and to USDAC organizing. Beginning in January, they’ll be available to help activate USDAC values in your community through workshops, technical assistance, and more. For now, join us in giving them a warm welcome!

West Coast Regional Envoy

Raised between Oakland and San Francisco, Katherin Canton envisions living in a community that values creative and cultural expression for all. She earned a BFA from California College of the Arts with an emphasis in Community Arts through a studio practice in photography and textiles. During her time at CCA, she was the administrator and Community Collaborations Director at the volunteer-run arts center Rock Paper Scissors Collective; she developed funding, business, and partnership processes that resulted in awards from the East Bay Committee Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation, and the City of Oakland’s Cultural Arts Program. Katherin organizes with Arts for a Better Bay Area and consults with the Housing Rights Committee of SF. As the Co-Director of Emerging Arts Professionals SF/BA, she strives to build a visible network for artists, local/small businesses, and government to communicate and share resources.

Southeastern Regional Envoy

Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams, MA-TLA, is Principal and Chief Storytelling Officer at Narratives for Change. Embracing “all things narrative” as her work in the world, Yvette is a poet and essayist, teaching artist, and narrative practitioner in applied behavioral science. A passionate mixed-media artist, Yvette uses collage and fiber arts to express stories. Projects span autoethnography, story circles, writing workshops, developing leaders, narrative inquiry, and facilitating community change. Goddard College and the University of Denver are where Yvette completed her graduate studies in Transformative Language Arts for Personal and Social Change and Creative Writing. She publishes on the topics of intersectionality, diversity and inclusion, transformative narratives, and "women as leaders of their lives." The Community Foundation of North Florida ArtVentures recognized Yvette’s writing and awarded her a grant to support the completion of her essays and letters project. Jennifer Chen Tran, Fuse Literary Agency, represents Yvette’s work.

New England Regional Envoy

Devon Kelley-Yurdin is a maker, educator, and community arts activist living in Portland, Maine. She specializes in illustration and design, printmaking, and art direction, as well as community arts administration and collective/cooperative models. As a Vermont native and graduate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn who has also lived in the Bay Area; Austin, TX; and rural Maine, Devon carries a diverse set of skills and community experiences in her tool belt. She believes creativity can be found everywhere, and that putting together a well curated outfit or finding the perfect bread-to-filling sandwich ratio are perfectly viable creative activities. Her activism and personal art practice are formed around the belief that art is a powerful avenue to learn new technical skills, discover ways of thinking and looking, explore ideas of place and community, learn histories, and find points of connection with others.

Southern Regional Envoy

Harold Steward is a Dallas, Texas-based arts administrator and theater practitioner who is dedicated to social justice and cultural equity. He currently serves as the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center and is a founding member and Director of Marketing for the Next Gen National Arts Network. Harold is also the Artistic Director of Fahari Arts Institute, a multidisciplinary, black queer arts organization in Dallas. He is a graduate of the inaugural class of the Zilphia Horton Cultural Organizing Institute in association with the Highlander Research and Education Center. Harold is a proud member of Alternate ROOTS and serves on the Board of Directors for the National Performance Network.

Don't yet have an Envoy covering your region? Don't worry! Over the next two years, we are developing a cohort of 12 highly creative and strategic Envoys who will serve as the public face of the USDAC in their regions. We plan to open a call for the next four Envoys in the spring of 2017. Please join the mailing list to stay posted on this and other opportunities: www.usdac.us/enlist

Standing With Standing Rock: Testimonies from the USDAC Lawrence Field Office

At the beginning of September, Cultural Agent Dave Loewenstein and Citizen Artists Nicholas Ward and Amber Hansen of the USDAC’s Lawrence, Kansas, Field Office joined fellow activists and artists journeying to the Sacred Stone and allied camps on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation near Cannonball, ND, site of opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). This blog incorporates excerpts from their personal accounts. On Friday, 30 September, in Lawrence, the Field Office, in partnership with the First Nations Student Association at the University of Kansas, is sponsoring a march through downtown Lawrence followed by an evening of storytelling, arts and music.

Nicholas and Amber: One week before departing in early September to join the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in solidarity against the DAPL, USDAC Citizen Artist Michael Bradly of the Lawrence, KS Field Office quickly organized a collection of supplies from the Topeka and Lawrence communities. When videographer Nicholas Ward left Lawrence, his minivan was brimming with camping gear, art supplies, and other requested items for the encampment. Winter coats (donated by Vermilion, SD’s Civic Council Center) were crammed in up to the ceiling. Two days later, Nicholas, Amber Hansen, Connie Fiorella and Dave Loewenstein arrived at Sacred Stone Camp. We were later joined by members of The University of Kansas’s First Nations Student Association and Black Lives Matter.

Dave, Arriving at Oceti Sakowin Camp: After a 12-hour, 750-mile windblown journey north, the encampment—really a village—appeared as we coasted into the valley where the Cannonball River meets the Missouri. From afar, it resembled an embroidered quilt framed by sage green hills and blue water; closer up, it resolved into a mosaic of tents and tepees and flags and fires. I’d never seen anything like it: a giant family reunion combined with the Occupy encampment at Zuccotti Park and a county fair. There were people representing more than one hundred fifty Nations, a school for kids, corral for horses, community kitchens, medical tents, a radio station, and more.

At the entrance marked by hand-painted signs, we were welcomed with open arms and ushered through a corridor of brightly colored flags from Tribal Nations across the continent. We found the donation tent and got help unloading. It was festive and purposeful: people lifting, cooking, chopping, organizing, playing, conferencing, planning, befriending. We made camp close to the Cannonball shore.

Camp Kitchen

Nicholas and Amber: We set out on the 2nd of September to deliver requested supplies and to document the water protectors’ resistance against the DAPL. Our specific focus, tuned to the key of USDAC, was to tell a more nuanced account of the cultural and arts based efforts emanating from the heart of the encampment. [Watch the video here!] On this day, the combined camps swell to an estimated 5,000 people.

Our first day at the camp we spoke with Remy, a direct-action activist and movement artist working with First 7 Design Labs. On this day he was the facilitator of the camp’s first horsemanship event—even as the now-infamous dog attack and pepper spray incident perpetrated by employees of DAPL took place two miles to the north. Speaking passionately about the role of arts and culture in the camp’s greater community, Remy led us to a trunk filled with large-scale banners created with children at the camp’s school. “It’s more than just a banner when we take this to protests or to rallies. We’re taking those handprints, those prayers, those messages that are wrote on there and those are our people, so we’re not alone. When we take that up there we are taking our friends and our family.”

The USDAC urges us to imagine a world where arts and culture, stories and song come before the concerns of capitalism and quantification. In many ways this encampment is the embodiment of that vision.

Lakota elder Cedric Goodhouse, Sr. tells us that, “Our art is kinetic. Song, dance, language and art, is kinetic art. And by that I mean it’s movement, it’s holistic in movement, so you can hear it, you can see it, you can feel it, and that’s what music does, and then it helps you to understand better what’s going on.” He went on to tell us about new songs that are being written to mark this time and how music has been used to bring people together and to mark time throughout history.

Dave: Connie and I carried our first paintings to the Info/Donation tent, discovering that while we had been working, front-line protectors stationed where bulldozers had destroyed documented sacred sites were attacked by DAPL private security. Medics were dispatched. “Democracy Now!” was there. Here is their account.

Connie and I drove north to see for ourselves. We wove our way through beautiful rolling hills, past glimpses of the river, until the road was suddenly blocked by North Dakota State Police. Ten officers in full military gear behind heavy-duty concrete barriers: their purpose was not clear. As we slowed, a pole-mounted camera took photos of us. No questions, just a motion to keep going. Getting back was a different story. Nearly everyone was rerouted 30 miles out of the way, but somehow we squeaked through (I’m a white guy in my 40’s and told the officer we’d just been out getting ice cream cones….)

The ACLU and Amnesty International called the roadblock a civil rights violation, demanding that it be removed: "The U.S. government is obligated under international law to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of Indigenous people, including the rights to freedom of expression and assembly….Public assemblies should not be considered as the 'enemy.'”

Nicholas and Amber: The 11-hour drive home offers headspace for much reflection. The people we met are custodians and stewards with a long view of the ecological and spiritual health of this land. Considering the competing visions put forth by the tribes and the oil companies, it’s easy to choose who we’d want as upstream neighbors.

We take with us an unwavering confidence that those we have met are operating on an ecological altruism backed by prophecy and a deep sense of community pride that is growing stronger each day. In some ways, the protectors have already won.

We are humbled to be in the presence of so many people of all ages working together to create this multicultural community infused with the spirit of protection and resistance. On our journey home, we plan how to carry the experiences of our time at Sacred Stone back to our communities, standing in solidarity with the water protectors.

Dave: Our last night in the camp, most people and horses made their way north to the site where destruction had been halted and the dogs were unleashed. Our half mile-long procession spread across the road. At the site, we crossed the fence and with a blessing entered sacred land. We formed a large circle on the prairie filled with sage and wild flowers. Elders sang. We all prayed.

I was nearly overwhelmed by mixed feelings of loss, joy, and a sense of purpose. This was not only a denunciation of something bad and destructive, it was and is also a clarion call to the world, reaffirming the values of interdependence, gratitude, and love, acknowledging the incredible gift (and responsibility) of being able to share the earth with its creatures, waters, and peoples for a brief moment.

As the waxing crescent moon rose in the south, the northern sky started to flash, then rumble. Our Lawrence friends shared s’mores by the fire before a sideways rain forced us into our tents. We awoke to a calm, cool and overcast morning. Although our hearts would stay, we headed south towards home with the Missouri as our guide. 

For up-to-date information about the continuing opposition and background on the proposed pipeline, visit the Camp of Sacred Stones website and Facebook page. 

Suburban Living and Civic Ritual: An Interview with Citizen Artist jesikah maria ross

Last month, Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard talked with Citizen Artist jesikah maria ross, a longtime community media activist and documentary producer based in Davis, California. It’s been ten months since jesikah and her neighbors took part in the USDAC’s #DareToImagine national action last October. She wanted to share the impact that arts-based organizing has had in her community and talk about some of the larger questions it raises.

jesikah maria ross: I moved to a neighborhood called Davis Manor in 1998. My husband and I bought our first house here. There were some very big issues rocking the neighborhood, and as an artist-activist I immediately organized a neighborhood association.  Over the next 15 or 20 years we have done an amazing amount of projects from redeveloping our shopping center to planting new street trees and labeling storm drains, installing a traffic circle, all sorts of things.

Over the last few years we’ve not been as active. It occurred to me that we always come together when there’s a problem, and I thought maybe we should do something differently to build our connections and relationships. So two years ago I started these neighborhood happy hours once a month, first Friday. Hanging out with neighbors, we started talking about our shared desire to do some neighborhood projects. We had all these ideas, a lot of them having to do with art and beautification.

We started calling ourselves the Creative Action Team, the CATs. I was getting emails from the USDAC talking about the #DareToImagine event in October, 2015. At the eleventh hour—it was like mid-September for an October event—I came back to the CATs and said, “What do you think if we have this #DareToImagine event?” There was a Neighbors Night Out event planned then for the city of Davis, inviting neighbors to come together and share a meal. The CATs said “Sure, let’s do it for the city event.”

Arlene Goldbard: It sounds as if it was fairly catalytic for you.

jesikah: Yes. This is the first time that I’ve done a participatory art project in my own neighborhood. I’ve spent the past 25 years doing civic storytelling projects all over the world, but never in my own backyard. And I’d also not done a project that wasn’t in response to a problem. Most of my projects are issue-based, a lot of them social-justice oriented.

This is not like some spectacular neighborhood. This is the first suburb of Davis, built in the ‘50s with cookie cutter tract homes, it doesn’t have amenities like the rest of Davis. But we think it’s fabulous and so our frame was “how do we make it more fabulous?”

I also realized the sheer power of doing something delightful. I was invested in a very different way. We basically put it together in three weeks. We all pulled it off and had a good time. There was some aspect of joy and delight and like “let’s put on a show!” That has really captured my own imagination: how do I do that more?

Arlene: Describe some of what happened.

jesikah: We transformed a street into a festival space. From 4-8 pm greeters welcomed people and invited them to roam through five Imagination Stations. The first was a giant neighborhood map, where they could add their names and some skills or interests. There was Curious Corner, where people could talk about how we might improve our neighborhood. We had an Intersection Imagination Station where we printed out copies of the different intersections in our neighborhood and invited people to draw what they’d like to see in those spaces. The one people loved the most was the Time Travel Cabana, a guided journey to the future to see how we had made the Davis Manor this amazing place. We had a circle of hay bales with a Moroccan tea table in the middle, a parklet with a giant seesaw. Then we had a big potluck and let people know that we were going to gather all of the information and have a community meeting as a next step, report back and figure out what we wanted to do. Most people came early and stayed the whole time—about 100 at the peak.

Davis Manor Imagination Station layout

Arlene: What emerged from that?

jesikah: the CATs got very energized. We all kept looking around and thinking “We did this!” And it gave us that lift to say, “Okay, we can carry this forward.” We took the massive amount of data that was generated and compiled and distilled it. About 60 neighbors came to the follow-up meeting. We presented what we’d learned, asked for any clarifications and additions, and then got into affinity groups by different categories, like social events: people wanted to do yoga in the driveway and salsa lessons and a samba parade and movie night.

A lot of people wanted to do something with our very challenged minipark—in terms of who uses it and how they use it and not being a safe place. So there was category about parks and trees and green infrastructure. There was one about a beautification project of some sort like a mural, maybe a street mural, because we don’t have any available walls. We formed workgroups with point people and made plans to call everybody back in a couple months.

In the interim, we found out that there was a grant from our city’s Civic Arts Commission for public art and there was a lot of interest in a street mural. So we wrote a grant and got that.

We’ve continued the monthly happy hours and have been moving towards some of the social events and other workgroup ideas. But our main focus is the street mural—the community designing and painting a mural on asphalt.

We did a whole community design process, an online survey of our neighbors to see what intersections they would prefer, a walking tour to evaluate the sites. In the end, it was the place we had the #DareToImagine event, which had better infrastructure around it for things like a parklet and benches to make it more of a plaza.

#DareToImagine follow-up meeting in Davis Manor.

Arlene: You told me you find yourself feeling some unease about how agreeable and supportive this has been. Can you say more?

jesikah: I recognize that it’s a luxury to bring people together absent a problem, for the sake of just making your place better. And I realize it’s a luxury to have such a great group to work with. It’s just I come from a background of working on issues of inequity and justice with diverse groups who are pretty challenged who have pretty immediate needs, and this project has none of that. The work I’ve done in the past feels hard, sometimes unsustainable, often slow. And this went fast. It was a total success. It feels great and we just want to do more.

I think, “Wow, I want to work with fun people who have energy and motivation and are smart in my own backyard to do non-issue-based creative place making.” It’s hard to reconcile that new impulse with my core values and work history.

Arlene: Yet I see what you are doing as trying to create social fabric in response to a real problem: what is life like when social fabric doesn’t really exist and every relationship is ad hoc? You go next door to complain about the noise or discuss where to put your garbage cans on trash collection day. But we have this big dilemma of weaving social fabric in this nation.

Most neighborhoods—especially like where you are, small apartment buildings, single-family houses—are pretty culturally homogeneous usually unless they’re on the cutting edge of gentrification. So those experiences are potentially transferable to different ethnicities, age groups, income levels, and so forth.

They can also build a foundation. This multi-year process of weaving social fabric can create a ground you can come to and layer on other conversations which may not be so congenial and convivial but which people in the neighborhood need to have. Right now in the United States of America it’s really good for white people to talk about what white supremacy is and what we can do to disrupt that. Mostly we don’t sit down with our neighbors and start that conversation. But what would happen if you did? What if you said we’re having a discussion group after happy hour about what’s happening in society right now and how we each feel about it, how we feel implicated and if there’s anything constructive we can do and do you want to come to that too?

jesikah: My personal hope for the whole #DareToImagine event that segued into this amazing community design process is for us to be building our sense of community so that we can have whatever conversations people want to have and see each other as allies, even if we don’t agree or even like each other. It’s about fellowship and complicity.

We had Mark Lakeman from The City Repair Project in Portland who does these street murals come down and do a kickoff party to show examples to get our ideas flowing for our first community design meeting. He used the term re-village. How do you re-village your neighborhood? How do you create a shared sense of terrain and history and a shared future? Not just know your neighbors but come do things with your neighbors. I hope that as we go forward we scaffold these levels of neighborliness.

There’s another term the USDAC introduced me to, the idea of a civic ritual. If I had to draw a through-line from the work I did to form the Davis Manor Neighborhood Council and the work of the CATs to do creative placemaking projects, I feel like it’s about making space for civic ritual. I hadn’t really framed up the problem addressed by that activity. And I think you’re right: it addresses the isolation in suburban living.

Shift Happens: Make The Future at CULTURE/SHIFT 2016

By Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

We’re excited. Really excited. In a little over three months, Citizen Artists from across the U.S. will be converging on St. Louis for the USDAC’s first-ever national convening, CULTURE/SHIFT 2016. Registration is now open and space is limited, so sign up today at the early bird price.

The USDAC is working in partnership with the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission—the RAC’s Community Arts Training Institute is justly admired for the quality and longevity of its work—to produce this November 17-19 event. Our aim has been to design a gathering that offers deep learning, real connection, tons of fun, and enough inspiration to bring home to last you all year. Here are just a few highlights:

• An opening ritual that honors the land, the ancestors, the assembled, and our overall intention of achieving the nth degree of serious play in pursuit of cultural democracy.
• A first-person guide to the region and culture, from Ferguson to both sides of the Delmar Loop, created by local artists and activists.
• Hands-on artmaking experiences that invite you to add your own voice and vision to collective creation.
• The launch of the USDAC’s full Cultural Policy Platform, inaugurating the national culture-shifting conversation that needs to underpin real change.
• A remarkable mix of workshops, design labs, presentations, and interactive learning offered by USDAC National Cabinet members such as T. Lulani Arquette, Catalyst for Native Creative Potential, Lily Yeh, Urban Alchemist, Roberto Bedoya, Secretary of Belonging, and Makani Themba, Minister of Revolutionary Imagination; plus folks like Antoinette Carroll of St. Louis’ Creative Reaction Lab and Cultural Agent Sarah Boddy!

We’re using a structure that tags sessions four ways: People, Policy, Play, and Art&. Every participant is free to choose whether to stick with one theme or skip around.

Register today!

Personally, I’m really excited about the policy series (we’re calling it the Wonk Institute) dedicated to creating policies and programs that make cultural democracy real. It starts with foundational wonk lore—definitions, formative ideas, brief history, and elements that make up cultural policy here and around the world—then drills down into experiences such as:

• designing a 21st Century Culture Corps with Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz;
• looking at cultural equity from all angles with Carlton Turner, Minister of Creative Southern Strategies; and
• exploring practical ways to put culture on city agendas with Caron Atlas, Minister of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts.

Meeting less than two weeks after the Presidential election, the timing couldn’t be more opportune. No matter what happens at the ballot-box, we’ll be together, turning our energy to all the ways we can join forces to generate and amplify creative strategies for change. If you’ve taken part in USDAC activities so far, you know that meeting online is a mainstay: user-friendly and cost-efficient, to be sure. But here are some of the things you can’t do online:

• Finally meet those great people you’ve connected with in Citizen Artist Salons or as Cultural Agents in the flesh! Hug like you’re long-lost buddies, hang out together knowing you don’t have to log off in a few minutes, dream and scheme at leisure.
• Sign up to present an 18-minute FRED Talk (stay tuned for details).
• Take the time to ponder the big questions: How can we galvanize support for culture that cultivates empathy, equity, and social imagination? What are the leverage points for shifting from a consumer culture rooted in isolation and inequality to a creator culture rooted in community and equity? How does shift happen and what can we do to help it along?
• Sing your heart out with Citizen Artists from across the U.S.

Register today! We’ll be keeping you updated regularly. We’re all looking forward to seeing you in St. Louis!

Cultural Democracy Now: Urge Democrats to Invest in Artists & Community Cultural Development

Political party platforms stake claims to the policies and positions voters are asked to endorse in electing a party’s nominee. A platform that can galvanize voters has to point to a future we actually want. The USDAC is all about envisioning a future animated by empathy, equity, and social imagination. Let’s dream together of a platform that actually captures that vision: would you vote for a candidate who supported this plank?

“It's time for a new public service jobs program, putting artists and others to work repairing physical and cultural infrastructure.”

Then please sign and share the USDAC’s petition to ensure that arts and culture are embedded in all efforts to strengthen our communities and address our social, environmental, and economic problems! If you're part of an organization with a website, newsletter, or social media platform, please spread the word.

It’s not that candidates, once elected, always follow their parties’ platforms. But some historians have concluded that the wider candidates’ margin of victory, the more likely they are to pursue the planks they ran on—and vice versa, a narrow margin equals a watered-down platform. At this writing, Republicans are trailing by quite a bit in the polls. What if the following plank were part of the Democratic platform the next President ran on?

“Democrats support cultural equity—a fair share of resources and power for all communities regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, orientation, geography, or other characteristics—in programs affecting America's cultural life.”

If you like that prospect, please sign and share the USDAC’s petition to bring us one step closer to true cultural democracy and cultural equity!

The Democratic Party has been calling for input on its platform. (We’d be glad to offer our two cents to the Republicans as well, but they aren’t asking.) You can watch hours of Platform Committee hearings and debates on C-SPAN if you’d like to see how it works. It's a negotiation, open till the convention. The party’s account of the first platform draft omits details on some key controversies: a vote to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement failed, climate activists want much stronger language and aggressive policies, and so on. Across the spectrum of issues, activists and policy wonks are working hard to affect the next two rounds of deliberation: a full Platform Committee meeting in Orlando on July 8-9, and a final vote of the entire convention in Philadelphia July 25-28.

Why? A platform can trigger far-reaching action: in 1860, 100 Southern Democrats walked out of their convention when it failed to pass a plank extending slavery, while the Republicans’ 1860 platform anti-slavery language was remarkably strong, establishing clear lines of conflict that ended in Civil War.

Why? Even a scrap of language in a party platform can seed future possibility. In 1872, the Republican Party platform referred to “the loyal women of America,” declaring that “their demands for additional rights” deserved “respectful consideration.” There was a tremendous amount of activism and perseverance to back up that assertion, and by 1920, three quarters of all state legislatures ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, ensuring women the right to vote. 

Suffragists asserting their rights in 1872 with a quote from Susan B. Anthony: "No self -respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party that ignores her sex."

Cultural issues are vitally important to a future shaped by creativity, equity, and belonging, but right now, few aspects of culture are even part of the platform conversation. The Democratic Platform Committee’s first draft asserts “moral and legal responsibility to honor the sovereignty of and relationship to Indigenous tribes—and acknowledge previous failures to live up to that responsibility,” which is good news. Now it’s up to us to get other essential aspects of cultural democracy on the agenda. Imagine a platform that includes this core commitment:

“Democrats commit to invest in community cultural development as part of all public social programs.”

Adopting this plank would ensure that “Funding for community cultural infrastructure—for local spaces, skills, and materials—and for the work of artists as an integral part of all public programs related to social well-being—policing, education, health care, environment, and other essential social programs—must be priorities.” Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Everything created must first be imagined, including social policy. We have to start with a bold, vibrant, and far-reaching vision to inspire each other to take the steps that will make it real.

Citizen Artists and allies, please put your energy on the side of social imagination by signing and sharing the USDAC’s petition today! 

The Possibilities of Parks: Thoughts After a Creative Placemaking Colloquium

by Yolanda Wisher, USDAC Chief Rhapsodist of Wherewithal

On Thursday, June 2, 2016, I attended the Nature of Communities: Parks and Creative Placemaking Colloquium at FringeArts in my hometown of Philadelphia, PA. The colloquium was part of an NEA/Our Town funded project led by The Trust for Public Land and City Parks Alliance. One of the major goals of the project is to “advance the practice of creative placemaking in creating and sustaining parks for people and strong communities.” The Trust for Public Land defines creative placemaking as “a cooperative, community-based process that leads to new and rejuvenated parks and open spaces reflecting local identity through arts and culture.” (For another take, see “Human Rights and Property Rights: Placemaking and Placekeeping.”

The colloquium, the first of its kind held in Philadelphia, gathered locally and nationally known experts and practitioners in the fields of art, culture, design, creative placemaking, city planning, transportation, and parks and recreation to share knowledge and best practices through five breakout group tracks: Partnerships & Communication, Community, Big Ideas/Advancing the Field, Process & Governance, and Funding. Lily Yeh, Urban Alchemist on the USDAC National Cabinet was in the house! The collective wisdom from the breakout groups as well as the learnings from an earlier disseminated Creative Placemaking Awareness & Experience Survey will be compiled into a field guide on parks and creative placemaking to be published next summer. Artists, cultural workers, park leaders, and community organizers are the target audiences for the toolkit which promises to be a treasure trove of both emerging and tried-and-tested strategies for envisioning, initiating, stewarding, and sustaining creative placemaking in parks.

The kick-off of the colloquium involved a panel of folks already doing this work around the country: Jennifer Toy of Kounkuey Design Initiative, Toody Maher of Pogo Park, Mitchell Silver of New York City Parks & Recreation, and Seitu Jones, an independent artist. I was reminded by this extraordinary panel that good parks have always been the best chill spots, the gathering grounds for family reunions, the nostalgic landscape of music festivals, the impromptu battleground of the masses, and the breeding grounds for artistic innovations like hip hop. Mitchell Silver, a city planner turned park big boss, said that for many who didn’t grow up with backyards or decks, parks were an “outdoor living room” where one learned to play ball or had a first date or that first sloppy kiss. He encouraged the design of a “seamless” city full of “parks without borders” (like those high fences that seem to hold the trees hostage), parks that are unique to their neighborhood culture, parks that are designed with future generations in mind, our descendants who are bound to experience public space in different ways than we do now.

Elm Playlot, a pilot project of Pogo Park in Richmond, CA.

All of the panelists affirmed that this democratic and visionary planning can’t happen without community participation, buy-in, and leadership. As Toody Maher said, “parks have to be built from the inside out.” Maher, in full force with community members in Central Richmond, California, founded Pogo Park in what is known as the “Iron Triangle,” a neighborhood with a reputation for being a high-crime “warzone.” Once a place avoided by children and families, the park has been transformed into “a green oasis,” where family and community events flourish. Maher, an entrepreneur and inventor, assisted members of the neighborhood in building real architectural models of their plans for the park rather than having an outside planner come in to interpret their ideas. They also built and installed park fixtures and equipment themselves. Maher said that the process “made everyone an expert” and later led to a truly unique and collaborative park design, which the community continues to take pride in and preserve.

This feeling and reality of community ownership and investment is critical to sustaining parks, and artists and cultural workers can be part of the spark that lights this fire, working with, in, and around community alliances and divisions to help unlock individual and group creative potential. In my breakout group on Partnerships & Communication, we talked a great deal about the training and credentials artists need to do this work of inclusive community building and engagement that brings all of the local demographics to the table, understands the strengths, expertise and knowledge of a community, and helps to guide an emergent, flexible, ethical project process.

Garden beds being installed in St. Anthony PPS, a project led by Kounkuey Design Initiative in Coachella, CA. 

Here in Philly we have the big diva Fairmount Park, one of the largest parks in the country. Fairmount Park started out of the estate of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the park system includes such landmark sites as Boathouse Row, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, and Bartram’s Garden. The park is legendary for the way it’s been preserved despite the city’s infrastructural development and community boundaries. It’s a model of urban planning in which it would seem the park won more than it lost. There’s a little piece of the park in every neighborhood. But it’s the not the only park in Philly. There are lots of other smaller regional and neighborhood parks that get varying amounts of love and attention. Last week, I made a visit to both the Morris and Awbury Arboretums here in Philadelphia and reflected on the incredibly beautiful and pristine sanctuary of these protected and curated spaces. They remind me of the garden stroll scenes in Masterpiece Theater movies. They also remind me that not everyone was and is permitted such beauty. Parks have been contested spaces. Parks haven’t always been for everyone, and there’s still plenty of policing of parks around the country, whether it’s close to home with Philly musicians being booted out of Rittenhouse Square or next door in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park, where a basketball court is the site of neighborhood conflict and illustrative of a larger narrative of gentrification and displacement.

Despite being one of the “experts” who were well-fed and air-conditioned in exchange for my infinite wisdom, I left the colloquium determined to spend more time with my family and do more work as an artist around the corner in my own local parks and open spaces. Something of the DNA and the raison d'etre of cities lives in these beautiful nooks and crannies that we all create and maintain with our goodwill. They could be some of the most unsegregated, authentic and liberating spaces that exist in our cities. They could be free and accessible meditation rooms and gyms for our spirits to be renewed and our health improved. These efforts to activate parks with art and culture shouldn’t be considered lightly and must involve the voices of many. It’s about time for all of our parks to become truly open spaces, where local culture and creativity not only survive but thrive.

Visit the Trust for Public Land to find out about local park campaigns near you and subscribe to its blog to find out when the field guide is published next summer.

Super PAC Prototype Projects Are Off and Running! Meet the Micro-grant Winners.

Less than two months ago, we announced the creation of the USDAC Super PAC (Super Participatory Arts Coalition) and invited anyone who had a prototype Super PAC project to apply for a micro-grant. From among an impressive array of exciting applications—thanks again to all who applied!—we’ve awarded $300 grants to 11 projects that promise in surprisingly different and intriguing ways to demonstrate through culture what real democracy looks like.

Our goal was to find projects that use arts and culture to answer these questions:

In the midst of this volatile election cycle, what kinds of participatory projects can activate agency and remind us what democracy actually looks like—both within and beyond the context of electoral politics?

With the airwaves full of polarizing rhetoric, what creative public interventions can disrupt narratives of hate, uplifting love, connection, and equity? 

And expressed these aims:

•  stir meaningful connection and conversation in this polarized moment
• disrupt narratives of hate, uplifting love, connection, and equity
• activate a sense of agency and encourage democratic participation (within and/or beyond electoral politics)
• remind us that those who came before us fought for our rights (including voting)—rights many don’t use
• embody what democracy actually looks like, reminding us that democracy depends on our voices being heard.

Below you’ll find the winners, including a brief summary of each project and the name of each lead applicant. Where we have it, we’ve also included something more about each project’s aims from our kick-off conversation earlier this month.

Stay tuned for more later this summer, when we launch the full-on USDAC Super PAC with videos from prototype projects and a free downloadable Super PACket with intervention ideas (including how-tos for the prototype projects) and other helpful tips to spur creative public participation leading up to and during this fall’s presidential debates (between September 26 and October 19). At that point, everyone will be invited to take part as an ExtraSuperDelegate, creating a Super Public Act of Compassion or Super Participatory Act of Culture that fosters dialogue and connection, activates civic agency, and encourages full democratic participation. In the meantime, we’re excited to announce micro-grants to these wonderful projects.

SUPER PAC PROTOTYPE PROJECTS:

Make America Crate: the soapbox, reinvented. Don Wilkison, Kansas City, MO.  

Don described his process of turning a large found crate into an “oversized public speaking platform—a plywood painted structure that mimics a small wrestling ring, decorated with American flags.” He prompts people with questions about what makes America, then videos their responses for sharing.

LawnCare: repurposing political yard signs for community expression. Sarah Berhnardt, St. Louis, MO.

You Deserve a Decolonized Democracy: guerilla sticker art campaign and town hall dialogue on the democracy we dream of. Jamilah Bradshaw, Richmond, CA.

“The project,” Jamilah told us, “Invites people to think about how democracy can feel to them. You deserve a democracy that allows you to feel free and allows you to feel your power. The campaign is around both our beloved Prince and the election of local officials, asking ‘Who is the mayor of Erotic City?’ It invites people to look at our identities as citizens and our identities as sensual people, spiritual people, to see that those aren’t mutually exclusive. We invite dialogue through this art: how can democracy feel for you? How freeing can democracy be?”

Pop-Up Projection: sparking dialogue with a portable projection screen in public space. Khamall Howard, Oakland, CA.

Kamall told us, “I’m constructing an arch and screen from scratch with canvas and wood. I’ve been going around communities under the moniker Blackbuster, showcasing digital works for and about communities of African descent. For this project, we’ll showcase a movie, maybe Do The Right Thing. We have a screening and the screening leads to a discussion. It’s really democratic because everybody can voice their opinion about what they’ve experienced…They come for fun, have fun, and also leave thinking.”

A Blackbuster screening in Oakland in November 2015.

BYOV—Bring Your Own Voice: reading aloud and speaking up in public space. Josh Adler, Brooklyn, NY.

Josh explained that he hopes “BYOV will help create a more robust language about dialogue around the issues that are important to us, using literature, the things we are reading. We’ll create a popup reading series that is easily replicable as a model for people to share what they’re reading that’s inspiring them about particular topics.”

Buffalo Commons Un-Voting Fair: playful pop-up fair with messages for public officials, historic reenactments, hugs, zines, and more. Sara Taliaferro: Lawrence, KS.

Sara explained that the fair will include “a lot of things that seem to be traditional elements,” but with a twist. She listed an “un-voting booth where you can talk, write, or make art about why you do or don’t vote, with questions to prompt you. There will be an area for one-on-one conversations called ‘Let’s Keep Caucusing.’ Plus a nonpartisan hugging booth, and much more.”

Signs of Respect: repurposing yard signs to create interactive local narratives and celebrate local heroes. Danny Spitzberg, Oakland, CA.

Pop-Up Story Booth: oral history on the go, collecting stories of displacement and resistance in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Ali Toxtli, Ridgewood, NY.

Maria "Gaby" Caicedo joined our kickoff call to explain how “gentrification impacts communities of color. Bushwick is undergoing a housing rezoning plan, with the community invited into the project. We want to enhance the participation of the ordinary citizens who walk down the street. How do people see the change? We’re creating a portable story booth to take to different sites and collect neighborhood narratives. This is just happening under our noses and we don’t really know what it is. We’ll deliver the stories to council members and talk about how people can get more involved in these decisions.”

History in the Making: Papel Picado Now: lifting up this traditional Mexican craft as a means of community-building and communicating important messages. Karina Puente, Philadelphia, PA.

Karina explained that the project references “the Mexican folk art called papel picado.  It’s cut tissue paper, traditionally seen in Mexico in sacred celebrations like weddings and Days of the Dead. I’m creating PDF illustrations with traditional designs and messages like ‘we vote,’ ‘we’re important,’ ‘we matter.’ The aim is amplify visibility for Latino communities and people of color, coming together to create beautiful and fun artwork that has deep meaning and opens dialogue. I’d love to collect the pieces that are made and build a beautiful mural or wall, countering Trump’s idea of a wall with a different vision.”

Karina Puente with one of her papel picado pieces.

Democracy Uncut: A Hearable Dialogue on Race and Social Justice: piloting an innovative filmmaking technique to create meaningful dialogue/media around traditionally polarizing topics. John Sankofa, Baltimore, MD.

John explained that this video project is “built on the idea that democracy works best with conversation, which is preferable to armored tanks and riots. We’re trying to take some of the toughest topics and find ways to bridge the gap between two starkly opposing groups.” They’ve adapted a technique called Question Bridge, “posing questions and videoing one group at a time and then letting the opposing group view those questions and reply on video. You take out the noise, the clutter that happens when you get two opposing groups at the same time, ending up with a hearable dialogue….I can’t hear you when you are screaming at me.” 

Les Agents Provocateurs: choreographed flash-mobs to challenge consumerism and reclaim public space. Les Agents Provocateurs, Everywhere.

On our call, a lead Agent Provocateur told us, “We want to create the same flash-mob performance simultaneously in 20 different cities worldwide. The performance is dancing riot police, which is recognized globally. Imagine them assembling in a public space in riot formation and breaking into a kind of Chorus Line movement, Broadway meets the official use of force. It’s a way of competing with commercial spectacle by using public space.” 

Artists’ Jobs for the Public Good

by Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

On May 26th, the USDAC presented a Citizen Artist Salon entitled “Time for a Culture Corps! Artists’ Jobs for the Public Good, Then & Now.” (You can watch the video here.) Our idea was to learn from the history of public-interest jobs for artists, preparing the ground for new ideas and possibilities, then share some of them.  

This is more than a brainstorm: on November 17-19, the USDAC will hold our first-ever national convening in St. Louis. On the final day of CULTURE/SHIFT 2016, we’ll launch the full cultural policy platform we foreshadowed back in September with An Act of Collective Imagination.

Calling for artists jobs in the public interest is certain to be part of the platform, so here’s our question: how do you envision that?

Our May Citizen Artist Salon started with history (I presented that segment); then continued with Cultural Agent Michael Schwartz—muralist,  community activist, and founder of the Tucson Arts Brigade—describing the long-term efforts to get this subject on Tucson’s agenda which led (among other things) to his being hired as manager of the City of Tucson Mural Program; then moved on to a presentation by Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz—media-maker, Columbia University Visiting Scholar, and Aspen Institute Franklin Project fellow—who is developing a program on the Americorps model.

To imagine most powerfully what may come, it helps to know a bit about the past. For instance, I find it inspiring that both times—the 1930s and 1970s—this country’s response to an economic crisis has led to public service jobs, small human factors were catalytic in connecting those jobs programs to the public interest in art. See what I mean:

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the smaller programs that preceded it were sparked by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s friend George Biddle, who had studied in Mexico with muralist Diego Rivera. He put the notion of a publicly supported mural program into FDR’s head. Based on that success, when the WPA was created to address massive unemployment, one of its most important parts was Federal One, with major programs in visual arts, music, theater, writing, and history. Add up all the artists supported via Federal One and you get 40,000 jobs (the equivalent of 100,000 in today’s population) at a cost of $27 million (adjusted for inflation, the equivalent of $471 million today, more than three times the current National Endowment for the Arts budget). It all started with Biddle whispering in FDR’s ear, which led to the Public Works of Art Program being established in 1933.

"Security of the Family," WPA mural for the  Health and Human Services Building, Washington D.C., by Seymour Fogel, an apprentice to Diego Rivera on his Rockefeller Center mural. 

The Federal Theatre Project was one of the most innovative and far-reaching Federal One initiatives, headed by Hallie Flanagan (who got that job courtesy of WPA head Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s closest advisers, who’d known her from Grinnell College). Under Flanagan’s leadership, the FTP’s “Living Newspaper” productions treated such controversial and urgent topics as the spread of syphilis (Spirochete) and pervasive poverty and exploitation (One-Third of A Nation). The Negro Theatre Unit supported Black theaters in 15 different cities. And that’s just a sample of what was accomplished in multiple art forms.

If Biddle sounds like a fluke, consider this: when the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) was passed in 1973, it was intended as a way to create jobs in a time of high unemployment. But a man called John Kreidler, who had worked at the Office of Management and Budget in Washington, saw its potential for artist’s employment. The project he designed with the San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program provided the first 125 CETA arts jobs (with recipients chosen from among a thousand applicants, working as muralists, circus performers, poets, workshop leaders, and in a slew of other arts jobs). The idea spread across the nation: the Department of Labor estimated that CETA arts jobs amounted to $200 million in 1979 alone.

These stories make me think about the way accident and serendipity sometimes determine the course of events, taking us to destinations we could never achieve by tiptoeing cautiously through the proper channels obtaining permission to innovate.

Who’s out there now who could connect us to the next WPA or CETA?

The thirties and seventies programs were very different: Federal One was national, with projects in every state and many localities, coordinated from the top; CETA was based on local governments and nonprofits (“prime sponsors”) applying for job funds to be used locally. (If you want to learn more about either of them, we’ve compiled a few suggested references here.) But they had one critical thing in common: both were created to address unemployment in many fields, so they were widely supported by those advocating public intervention to balance the deficits of the commercial marketplace. They weren’t special-interest programs created only for artists, a hard sell at the best of times.

So what’s next? What are the best ways to pursue broad public benefit so the work of artists for the public good is integral, valued, and supported?

I advocate a “thousand flowers” approach. I don’t think there’s anyone in Washington right now who will jump at the chance to champion a new WPA (although you never know: hopeful energy does rise at every presidential election; you’ll note that several of the essays linked in our compilation of references were written in 2008-9, early days for President Obama). But I also don’t think we should stop advocating for a full nationwide jobs initiative. Each time the people who want that back off because their hopes don’t seem “realistic,” the bar of possibility gets set a little higher, the prospect of fruition gets a little more distant, the compromises grow weaker.

During the Citizen Artist Salon, Michael Schwartz pointed to one type of local alternative: he detailed how he and Tucson Arts Brigade colleagues had been attentive to public-sector social aims and the ways participatory public art can address them. For instance, they carried out research that demonstrated that unwanted graffiti appeared far less frequently where community murals were present in Tucson, and that helped to make a powerful argument for a city-sponsored public art program which is now responding to community needs and as a result, channeling fees to artists.

“Within every government agency,” Michael said, “there are dollars that anybody on this teleconference could access with our skillsets. They need our skills, and it’s a matter of matching up those bids with our skills. Every single day there are thousands of these bids that go online looking for people to offer programs. Federal government, local government, tribal governments are all in great need of our services.” Click around the Tucson Arts Brigade website to learn exactly how Michael and his colleagues have succeeded.

Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz—herself an Americorps veteran—described how she is developing “Community Artist Year,” a pilot effort in Santa Fe, NM, whereby young artists and administrators can be placed in yearlong posts in cooperating nonprofits. She pointed to the fact that applications for service jobs through Americorps range from five to 13 for each available post, so demand hugely outstrips supply; and it’s especially hard to sustain a service year when you have to rely on the small stipend offered, especially in communities where rentals costs are high. She is looking to make “room for young adults who are interested in bringing creative service to a service year opportunity,” and devising interventions that can make that feasible.

Mi’Jan’s pilot idea is grounded in the principle of reciprocity: “Make it a mutually reciprocal positive relationship, an opportunity for everybody. What if cultural institutions, community-based organizations, and participants designed this program together for everyone’s benefit?” In her vision, the design includes residential support, a dedicated mentorship circles, professional development support, and more.

One of my favorite ideas is simply repurposing funds allocated to organizations and agencies to pay for their public information—especially where the brochures, PSAs, and public meetings they produce are the kind everyone ignores—to employ artists to create visual images, theater, or moving image media that actually engage and connect people to positive social goals the agencies were created to pursue.

Cast your mind forward a few years. Let’s endow you with magical policy powers, with the capacity to craft generative visions and to ensure they are enacted. What is your dream of artists’ jobs for the public good? Help us propose the most creative ideas by sharing yours at hello@usdac.us. 

Many Thanks! Part Three of Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change

by Lora Jost, Sara Taliaferro, Thad Holcombe, Juda Lewis, and Amanda Monaghan

NOTE from the USDAC: This is the third of three blogs on Heating Up. We want to share all that went into this impressive series of events cosponsored by the USDAC Lawrence Field Office. Part One detailed the wide range of activities working in unison. Part Two was be an interview with planning committee member Sara Taliaferro, focusing on how the series was organized and the impacts it has already had. Part Three, below, lists all of the people and groups who helped make it possible, and what they did.

The exhibit Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change and related events contributed to an important conversation in our community about climate change and demonstrated our deep commitment to the people and creatures of this earth. Through our efforts we forged friendships and sowed the seeds for what we hope will be future collaborations on this and other important social justice and environmental issues.

The exhibit and event series was an all-volunteer effort and a huge undertaking. It was led by a joint planning committee of the USDAC-Lawrence Field Office and LETUS (Lawrence Ecology Teams United in Sustainability, a coalition of faith-based ecology teams in Lawrence.) The planning committee wants to acknowledge and thank all of the individuals and groups who helped make this project possible.

The seeds for this project grew out of a 2014-event in Lawrence, KS, called The People’s Climate March Maker/Speaker Party (see more here), a project in solidarity with The People’s Climate March in New York City. The Maker/Speaker Party was the first USDAC Lawrence Field Office and LETUS collaboration, and the kind of project that the national USDAC leadership and LETUS were encouraging at the time. The USDAC/LETUS group later partnered with Gary Dorr, a KeystoneXL “pipeline fighter” from Oyate Wahacanka Woecun, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe's “Shield the People” project. Dorr brought the USDAC/LETUS event together with an event that was in the works at Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU), and our joint event took place at South Park in Lawrence, KS.

Joan Stone dances to the poetry of Elizabeth Schultz during their performance Mrs. Noah in Poetry and Dance.

The Maker/Speaker Party inspired members of the USDAC-Lawrence Field Office and LETUS to work together again, kicking off a year of informal idea sharing and discussion before more concrete plans were made for a new project. Additional brainstorming occurred through a LETUS-led discussion series on climate change, and at a meeting sponsored by the Kansas Area Watershed Council.

The USDAC/LETUS planning committee began intensive work on the exhibit and event series in the summer of 2015, towards project completion the following spring. Thank you to committee members Thad Holcombe, Lora Jost, Juda Lewis, Amanda Monaghan and Sara Taliaferro for driving the project over the course of many months, and for taking the lead on coordination and implementation. Pablo Cerca, Jill Ensley, and Ariday Guerrero also helped with committee work. They and committee members wrote proposals; coordinated outreach to environmental groups, art organizations, artists, and speakers through meetings, phone calls, email letters, and office visits; fronted money for the project and requested donations; chose event dates and coordinated plans with multiple groups, performers, and venues; wrote and emailed press releases and community calendar announcements to numerous newsletters and media outlets; did an extensive radio interview and spoke to the press; regularly updated our parent organizations; created and maintained Facebook pages for each event; created a project webpage; designed, printed and distributed posters and flyers; took on the roles of panel facilitator, emcee, and “carnival barker” at three events; installed the art exhibit that also included our own artwork; coordinated food and beverages for receptions; set up, attended, participated in, and photographed events; and hosted a thank-you party. Whew!

Many others from the broader USDAC-Lawrence Field Office and LETUS groups were involved, too. We especially appreciate the support of Dave Loewenstein, Jill Ensley, Nick Ward, KT Walsh, Amber Hansen, and Michael Bradley. Thanks to Theresa Wilke of LETUS, for reaching out to the Spencer Museum of Art’s “Art Cart” towards their involvement. Thanks to Chuck Magerl for helping with outreach to HINU professor Daniel Wildcat, and for event advertising at his popular restaurant The Free State Brewery. An important meeting early in the planning process included representatives from Lawrence-based arts and environmental groups and the University of Kansas (KU), who provided feedback on our early project proposal and suggested artists to involve. Representatives from HINU provided feedback on the project, too. Kirsten Bosnak was an important consultant on media outreach, and the Lawrence Journal World, Topeka Capital Journal, Indian Leader, and KKFI’s EcoRadio KC, covered our events.

Thanks to the following groups and individuals whose direct involvement in project events made each one possible. A big thank-you to HINU professor Daniel Wildcat for consulting with us on the panel discussion How Can We Work Together on Climate Change and for making connections for us on the Haskell campus. Dr. Wildcat welcomed us into his office for many impromptu meetings and arranged the use of a lecture hall at HINU for the panel event. We also appreciate the help of his student assistants Alexander Rodriguez, Barb Wolfin, and Lori Hasselman. Thanks to the panelists Thad Holcombe, Eileen Horn, Jay T. Johnson, Saralyn Reece Hardy, and Daniel Wildcat; to singers Ron Brave and Alex Williams; to HINU student artists for their work displayed at the panel reception; and to LETUS members who provided cookies and drink for the reception. Thanks, too, to woodworker Mark Jakubauskas for building artistic wooden boxes as gifts for the panelists and singers.

Thanks to poet Elizabeth Schultz and dancer Joan Stone for their beautiful collaborative performance, Mrs. Noah in Poetry and Dance. Thanks to Caryn Miriam-Goldberg and Ken Lassman for their careful planning and caring facilitation of the writing workshop, A Change in the Weather: Writing From Climate Change Art. Thanks to Kristina Walker for coordinating the Spencer Museum of Art’s “Art Cart” event, Landscape Transformations. Thanks to Neal Barbour, Director of Youth Education at the Lawrence Art Center, for putting us in touch with the student curatorial team Hang12. Hang12 coordinated the teen exhibit Effecting Change, and Will Hickox of the Watkins Museum of History arranged for the museum to exhibit their work. A big thank you to the HINU student group Eco Ambassadors, who coordinated Haskell’s 1st Annual Wetland Restoration Day, a workday that involved many community volunteers, and was an important affiliated event in our series.

A big thank-you to the board of the Lawrence Percolator for their support of our project and for the use of their space, with special thanks to Bobbi Rahder, Matt Lord, Sean Sullivan, and Eric Farnsworth. We love you Lawrence Percolator! Thank you to HINU professor Joshua Falleaf for connecting us with HINU art teachers David Titterington and Rachel Van Wagoner, who reached out to HINU art students to participate in the Heating Up-exhibit and helped them develop their art and deliver it to the Lawrence Percolator.

Daniel Wildcat makes a point during the panel discussion How Can We Work Together on Climate Change, with panelists Jay T. Johnson, Eileen Horn, Saralyn Reece Hardy, and Thad Holcombe.

We wish to thank all of the artists, poets, and performers whose work appeared in the exhibit Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change on opening night. Special thanks to Robert Baker, Josh Connor, and Roger Holden of The Delta Blues, and Amber Hansen, Johni Lacore, Monica George, and Cheyenne Hansen of Ovaries-eez, who collaborated on a musical adaptation of Langston Hughes’s I've Known Rivers. Thanks to Dennis Etzel, Sandy Hazlett, Nancy Hubble, Denise Low, Topher Enneking, and Mary Wharff for their poems and poetry reading; to Maureen Carol and Sara Taliaferro for helping with the reading; and to Doug Hitt for sharing about his coauthored book, A Kansas Bestiary.

And finally, thanks to the amazing artists whose work provided the scaffolding for this entire project (you are amazing): Marin Abell, Angie Babbit, Samuel Balbuena, Georgia Kennidee Rikie Boyer, Matthew Burke, Ethan Candyfire, Pablo Cerca, Rena Detrixhe, Jill Ensley, Neil Goss, Lisa Grossman, Kyuss Hala, Oliver Hall, Lori Hasselman, Eleanor Heimbaugh, Nancy Hubble, Lora Jost, Kayla Kent, Cleta LaBrie, Dave Loewenstein, Amanda Maciuba, Katie Manuelito, Justin Marable, Nancy Marshall, Amanda Monaghan, Molly Murphy, Tim O’Brien, Hirsuta Pilosa, Cameron Pratte, Laura Ramberg, Michelle Rogne, Damia Smith, Kent Smith, Vi Stenzel, Sara Taliaferro, David Titterington, Garret Tufte, Alyx Stephenson, Geraldine Emily Walsey, KT Walsh, Nicholas Ward, Mary Wharff, and Cortney Wise.

Systematically Organic: An Interview with Sara Taliaferro—Part Two of Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change

NOTE from USDAC: This is the second of three blogs on Heating Up. We want to share all that went into this impressive series of events cosponsored by the USDAC Lawrence Field Office. Part One detailed the wide range of activities working in unison. Part Three, to come, lists all of the people and groups who helped make it possible, and what they did. Part Two, below, is based on an interview Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard conducted with planning committee member Sara Taliaferro, focusing on how such a series is organized and the impacts it has already had.

Arlene Goldbard: How did this impressive program evolve?

Sara Taliaferro: Climate change is such a big issue that one often feels a sense of being overwhelmed, not knowing where to start. But also the sense of urgency and that we can never do too much. Different groups were already having conversations about what can we do as an action on climate change. Somewhere during those early conversations the call went out through national USDAC to take part in the People’s Climate March in September 2014. That became the galvanizing action. It took it out of those smaller private conversations into a more public arena. 

We had a solidarity march and an artmaking event. Folks from Haskell Indian NationsUniversity got involved—that was where we held our first Imagining. Some of us were part of a book group who had read a book by Dan Wildcat, a professor at Haskell (Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge). So some of his students and others came together and joined the USDAC and Lawrence Ecology Teams United in Sustainability (LETUS) in making the events in Lawrence happen.

Volunteers receive instructions at Haskell’s 1st Annual Wetland Restoration Day.

Arlene Goldbard: Part One of this blog series describes a year-long planning process. How did that build a foundation for people saying, “Okay, it’s time to make a plan?”

Sara: After the Climate March, the LETUS folks held a series of meetings. There was a series of lectures and focus groups. Lora and I ended up in a group with some other USDAC folks who were artists and creatives who wanted to bring that sensibility to climate change actions. A small core of us started meeting. Early on, we brainstormed all the possible things we could do; the list was much more ambitious than what we eventually did! Then we started talking about what’s our capacity: what can we do?

All these relational things happened. Lora had this conversation with a local business friend. The three of us walked over to Haskell and poked our heads into doors and said, “Hi, we’re here. We don’t want to take up your time now. Can we come back?” They invited us in, and we ended up talking with Professor Wildcat and his students. Haskell is very active on sustainability and climate change issues. They have a group and that was one of the events in our series, the Eco Ambassadors. 

And then the conversation started. The planning committee met almost every week for over a year. We were fairly systematic and organic about it at the same time.

Arlene: I like that pair of words systematic and organic. This is a real contrast with putting out an email and saying “You all come” rather than doing that time-consuming, sustained work of relationship-building that I hear you say was so essential here. How did it come to pass that you narrowed things down to the impressive range of events that were actually sponsored?

Sara: Well, it wasn’t a juried process. Someone said “curated process,” and that might be appropriate. We contacted artists who we knew or knew of who had already done climate change art. We always made sure that we had a core group of people who wanted to be involved. It was kind of organic. We came up with an initial list of people who we invited directly, and through conversations and connections in the community: “I have a friend who is a ceramist who did this really beautiful piece on climate change, please look at her work and see if it is something that you want.”

Arlene: Anything else to say about the process of organizing?

Sara: It was important to check in with each other early on. This is something that we do at our Field Office meetings too. We never cap the initial ideas or put the kibosh on anything. At some point we shift gear and ask what might you personally have capacity to do: “What does your life look like in the next year? Are you willing to be the champion for this piece?”

Each of us had core responsibilities and a commitment to show up to meetings. Sometimes it was incremental but we always carried the plan forward and had a very strong sense of where each other were on our capacity to make it happen. And the other part was that the richness of our relationships only deepened. We met for coffee: it was time we took that it didn’t feel like it was another meeting. And if we felt like it, we’d take a couple of weeks off. So having that intentionality and flexibility I think is important. Each of us had some homework to do and bring the next time. So, yes, having structure and flexibility.

Arlene: Talking earlier, you recounted how people said that the panel, for example, gave them a different experience, a more fully dimensional, embodied presence. What was that feeling, where did it come from? 

Sara: My experiences in helping facilitate different events for USDAC gave us a notion of how to structure things differently. We engaged with people as soon as they came in. We had Alex Williams performing instrumental music when people came in. Once people gathered and it was time to start we had Ron Brave, a Lakota singer, sing and drum. Before he did that, he explained to us a couple of words that his grandfather had taught him: a word that talks about the interrelationship of all things—plants, insects and everything on the ground, like the moving parts of a clock, that if they are in harmony everything functions as it should. And then he had another word which talks about those things not being in harmony. The song was about that, and that set a tone.

We had it fairly organized and formal for the first part and then we had a series of questions. Then we opened it up: the audience got up and the panel went out into the audience and we did “Burning Questions, Lightning Answers” [individuals wrote down burning questions, then picked someone near them they did not know and took two minutes to share quick answers to each]. The room just lit up. At first it was personal and quite reflective, then everyone was introducing themselves to someone they didn’t know, each listening and then telling something important.

We had people from all these different circles; none of them had all been in the room together. We talked about the role of art and stories and music and popular expression. People saw that as a real way to open a conversation and make an impact that is different than throwing words at something.

Poet Topher Enneking reads at the opening for Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change.

Arlene: You had a lot of partners in this. In particular, what does it say about the future work of the Field Office?

Sara: Every organization I’ve ever belonged to, there is always this core of workers and people who show up, and there are people who float in and out who are willing and very able to engage on a specific project or a specific action or event. You just capitalize on that—as long as you don’t wear out your core people.

You keep this extended mailing list. People who don’t show up for meetings come to events and get charged up. It’s like putting a little pebble in a pool and the ripples go out and you make connections. Accepting and embracing that idea of getting new champions for specific projects and then the core of us also show up. And have great potlucks. Celebrating is another big part of it.  Don’t forget to celebrate!

On a personal note, I did feel empowered by not thinking about these things alone in my home or my office but by reaching out and continuing to show up. It had a transformative effect on me and helped me to feel that my own capacity has expanded. Also as a group—I looked around the table as we were doing the post review and I said, “We did something amazing here. We are all amazing!” And of course, people are not in it for their own egos and they all just said, “Oh well, oh well..” And I said, "No, really, let yourself feel it! It's true!"

Arlene: Own it!  That’s part of the compensation: to see what the impact it made.

Sara: I have been part of so many different efforts—and I continue to be—where I put in a lot of time and in the end all you can get is a badge that says “you’ve participated.” But with this, I walked out of it thinking we are all stronger together and none of this felt like a waste of time. It felt like something more because we did it. So wow. 

Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change A series of cultural and educational events in Lawrence, Kansas, Part One

by Lora Jost, Sara Taliaferro, Thad Holcombe, Juda Lewis, and Amanda Monaghan (planning committee members)

NOTE from USDAC: This is the first of three blogs on Heating Up. We want to share all that went into this impressive series of events cosponsored by the USDAC Lawrence Field Office. Part One, below, details the wide range of activities working in unison. Part Two will be an interview with planning committee member Sara Taliaferro, focusing on how such a thing is organized and the impacts it has already had. Part Three lists all of the people and groups who helped make it possible, and what they did.

On a cool spring evening in March, a flood of people gathered for the opening of a community art exhibit called Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change. The Lawrence Percolator, a flourishing community art space located in a downtown alley, hosted the opening on a Final Friday, Lawrence’s monthly open-gallery night. The exhibit was the first in a series of related events on climate change that took place during the month-long exhibit. The series included a panel discussion, dance and poetry performance, writing workshop, children’s art workshop, teen art exhibit, and community workday to help restore the Haskell Wetlands.

The art exhibit and opening event included the work of over fifty artists, poets, presenters, musicians, and spoken-word performers whose work, showcased together, made a strong statement that climate change is an urgent concern in our community. The exhibit presented climate change through the lens of many makers with diverse viewpoints, bringing nuance to the issue beyond simplistic black-and-white portrayals often seen in mainstream media. Some of the art pieces concerned the roots of climate change and the effects of fossil fuel consumption on the weather, water, animals, and people. Some of the art conveyed despair. One piece was about creativity born from crisis. Additional art pieces offered hope, visualizing ways to work together toward solutions.

The exhibit opening reception for Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change.

The exhibit opening highlighted poetry and music, including a musical/spoken word adaptation of Langston Hughes’s “I’ve Known Rivers” performed by musicians from two bands, The Delta Blues and Ovaries-eez. The event also included a reading of poems by seven Lawrence and Topeka-based poets, and a brief talk by Doug Hitt, co-author of the richly illustrated book A Kansas Bestiary that celebrates Kansas wildlife.

The event series was co-sponsored by the USDAC Lawrence Field Office and LETUS (Lawrence Ecology Teams United in Sustainability, a coalition of faith-based ecology teams), assisted by Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU) and the Lawrence Percolator. For photos and additional information about the exhibit visit the Facebook event page and LETUS webpage.

Music and spoken word performance by The Delta Blues and the Ovaries-eez (Cheyenne Hansen, Monica George, Johni Lacore, Amber Hansen, Josh Connor, Robert Baker, and Roger Holden) at the opening for Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change.

The second event in our series, How Can We Work Together on Climate Change, was a discussion with five panelists who spoke to a packed hall of seventy people at Haskell Indian Nations University. Lakota singer Ron Brave welcomed audience members to the event and sang. Moderator Sara Taliaferro introduced the panelists: Saralyn Reece Hardy, director of the University of Kansas’s (or KU’s) Spencer Museum of Art; Thad Holcombe, retired university campus minister and LETUS moderator; Eileen Horn, Sustainability Coordinator for Douglas County and the City of Lawrence; Jay T. Johnson, KU professor in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science; and Daniel Wildcat, HINU professor in the College of Natural and Social Sciences. Alex Williams, an HINU graduate and doctoral student at KU, performed a special song that she wrote to close the panel.

Unlike many presentations on climate change that focus on science, this panel addressed the cultural shifts and ways of being needed to address the climate crisis. Pastor Thad Holcombe invited us to become "sacred strangers,” moving beyond the predominant culture’s excessive individualism by participating in diverse “anticipatory communities” that support eco-justice, where people recast for the present ancient practices of asceticism, mysticism, and prophetic insight, affirm the sacred web of life, and gain wisdom through the arts.

Professor Daniel Wildcat shared from an indigenous perspective the importance of respect and relationships. It is not important only that we do something, but how we do something. He asked, what if resources were not viewed as resources but instead as relatives? What if the notion of individual autonomy were also balanced with an unalienable sense of responsibility? Saralyn Reece Hardy spoke of the role of the artist in this moment; artists must encounter what is happening in the world right now with courage, must perceive without rest, and find meaningful ways to incorporate issues and observations into their lives and work. We are in a “period of elegy,” she said, and must grieve the things we’ll never see again. For more information about the panel and photos visit the Facebook event page.

Mrs. Noah in Poetry and Dance, our third event, was a collaborative performance, performed twice at the Lawrence Percolator in the midst of the art exhibit, by poet Elizabeth Schultz and dancer Joan Stone, both retired professors from KU. The performance, as described in the program notes, included Stone’s “insightful dance interpretations of Schultz’s poems, reflecting on the relationships among humans and animals, examining how catastrophes disturb these relationships, how the resulting tremors connect us, and how we survive together, learning from one another.” For more information and photos visit the Facebook event page.

A Change in the Weather: Writing From Climate Change Art, our fourth event, was a free writing workshop open to the public, led by former Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Miriam-Goldberg and naturalist and writer Ken Lassman. The workshop included writing from prompts about our “internal and external weather” in relation to climate change. The workshop leaders oriented eight participants to write about their immediate experience of place at the Lawrence Percolator, and later to experience and respond to the art in Heating Up: Artists Respond to Climate Change as a writing prompt, too. For more information about the workshop and photos, visit the Facebook event page. 

Three affiliated events sponsored by additional community organization completed the series. The Spencer Museum of Art’s “Art Cart” event, Landscape Transformations, and Hang12’s exhibit Effecting Change, involved art made about the environment by children and youth. The Spencer Museum’s drop-in children’s activity station, held at the Lawrence Public Library, invited children, families, and other groups, to learn how to create a landscape pencil drawing inspired by works in the Spencer’s Classroom Collection, and to “watch them transform with water.” Effecting Change was an exhibit by teens that ran concurrently with Heating Up, curated by the Lawrence Art Center’s youth curatorial board Hang12. Their exhibit statement reads, “Climate Change is an issue that impacts all of us. To bring awareness to this subject we asked artists to use repurposed materials within their artwork to take a stand on Climate Change and environmental issues.”

The final event in our series, Haskell’s First Annual Wetland Restoration Day, was coordinated and led by HINU’s student group Eco Ambassadors. Eco Ambassadors invited Lawrence community members to help seed and plant, remove weeds, plan paths, restore the Medicine Wheel, and remove an extensive barbed-wire fence, as initial steps in restoring the Haskell Wetland following the recent completion of a controversial highway through the wetlands. For more information and photos visit the Haskell Ambassador Facebook page and the event page.

For press coverage of our project visit:

Lawrence Journal World

Indian Leader

Topeka Capital Journal

Compassionate Living Social Sculpture: Urban Alchemy at the Village of Arts and Humanities

Lily Yeh, Urban Alchemist on the USDAC National Cabinet, is a master at creating ongoing arts projects and environments like the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, which she founded in 1986. USDAC Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz interviews Lily and visits the Village.

Mention Lily Yeh to anyone who knows her. You’ll see eyes widen and a smile appear. She’s one of those people who seem to be navigating the world on a slightly different plane. Tiny in stature, she is grand in spirit. She speaks so passionately about creativity, wonder, and possibility that anyone listening seems to tap into those forces too. Originally from China, Lily has made a life of creative, collaborative community work, developing what she calls “compassionate living social sculpture.”

In February, we met for lunch in Philadelphia to discuss the “living” nature of her work. “All action needs to bear fruit,” says Lily. “Like nature, you don’t grow a leaf for no purpose. You don’t grow flowers for no purpose. You try to bear fruit and so it multiplies. And so for me as an artist…I work the ground and fertilize and give people goodwill. I’ve got to see something happen for my fulfillment and I’ve got to see art that has the power to transform. How do you reach that point? There are many different ways. You can have art that reflects community—community art, that’s good. Democracy. But then you need the artist’s own passion and discipline…When people see that, like a beautiful piece of music, you don’t need to know the story or how to compose or to listen, it touches you.”

Seeding thriving participatory projects around the world, Lily has become a master at dancing the line connecting the artist’s impulse and the community’s vision. “How do you let a program open to the sky and the rain and let people come in?” she asks. “People’s attention is like sunlight and people’s creativity is like rain. How do you be open to that?”

The German artist Joseph Beuys coined the phrase “social sculpture” to suggest that society itself is a work of art and that everyone’s creativity and artistry is a part of making it. “Everyone human being is an artist” Beuys wrote in 1973, and our collective endeavors constitute the “total art work of the future social order.”

Lily’s community projects are social sculptures, inviting all to participate in creating something new that can shape the shared social, cultural, and environmental context. By adding the words “compassionate” and “living,” Lily identifies what makes her social sculpture distinct. Every project starts from a deep place of compassion, infusing the project’s DNA, giving projects an organic life far beyond Lily’s presence.

Lily’s contribution to Philadelphia—the Village of Arts and Humanities—is one of her longest-running and deepest-reaching “compassionate living social sculptures.” In 1986, Lily was invited by her friend, the African-American dancer, choreographer, and teacher Arthur Hall, to create something in the abandoned lot next to his cultural center, the Ile-Ife Center for the Arts and Humanities. What began as a grouping of mosaic sculptures and a mural now includes more than 250 parcels of land.

A day after meeting with Lily, I took the bus to the Village in North Philadelphia. The bus is crowded: an old man drops a bag of medication; a young woman amputee sits in a wheelchair. Every seat is taken on this somber gray day. Outside, many houses are shuttered, abandoned, or in a state of disrepair. Then the heart of the Village comes into view: vibrant mosaic benches, mysterious statues, a giant mural, and a cultural center.

I’m greeted by Brenda, who shares her story. One day, her kids stumbled across Lily creating sculptures in the park. They returned day after day to help. Brenda came by to see what was going on and she too was hooked by the energy. Lily asked her if she wanted a job and Brenda, on welfare at the time, said yes. Decades later, she’s still there, having watched her children and grandchildren transform through the Village’s afterschool arts programs.

On the wall behind Brenda’s desk are framed photographs of beloved Village characters: local resident heroes like “Big Man,” who helped steward the development of the Village, serving as ambassador to the wider community. My tour guide today is El Sawyer, who has stepped into that role: a grounds and program manager who weaves connective tissue that allows the Village to function. El is a documentary filmmaker and a national consultant on programs to reduce recidivism. He is just as likely to be on a panel at the White House as on the phone with a neighborhood kid facing a family crisis or jail sentence. El met Lily through the arts program at the prison where he served an eight-year sentence. She helped introduce him to filmmaking, a career that’s now taking him across the country and—since parole is over—around the world.

The Village of Arts and Humanities defies easy categorization. It feels much more like an organism than an organization. There’s nothing overtly new or glamorous, but as we walk these city blocks passing crumbling roofs, extraordinary mosaic murals, and chicken coops, there’s a sense of beautiful, organized chaos, a constellation of initiatives and relationships in an organic state of change and symbiosis. El Sawyer calls it “invisible technology.”

In this Village, men recently out of prison can get a good job maintaining the grounds and be visible members of a community (with a potential job pipeline to the nearby university); vacant houses become afterschool video editing studios or homes for new tenants at highly reduced rates; neighbors experiment with gardens and greenhouses; one floor of a building might house silk-screening and fashion design, another a dance studio, and the next a library “hotspot” run by the city, where a woman who left New Orleans after Katrina tells us the Village was the one place she felt welcome and supported. Young folks are employed to paint the façade of an entire block of three-story buildings according to the color palette chosen by each small business owner. The Village can be as innovative and nimble in creating daycare centers and health services as in developing artists-in-residence programs, annual theater festivals, and parades.

El and I stop by the Village’s storefront space. Women are making paper and binding books, turning their old criminal records into new narratives as part of a reentry workshop facilitated by the People’s Paper Co-op in partnership with Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity. This is one of dozens of programs initiated over the last three decades at the Village. I think back to Lily’s statement—“I work the ground and fertilize and give people goodwill”—and marvel at how fertile this ground is. The more culture-shifting activity that happens here, the riper it becomes for more. The Village is in a state of constant becoming, offering a multiplicity of stories and “strategies for belonging,” to borrow a phrase from USDAC National Cabinet Minister of Belonging, Roberto Bedoya.

All of this is happening without significant city government support, El tells me, not thanks to it. Mostly funded by foundations, the Village—like the vast majority of cultural institutions under a certain size—is constantly in survival mode, looking for the next grant. What if that weren’t the case? What if the Village of Arts and Humanities was not an anomaly, but exactly the kind of “strategy for belonging” that every city invested in? What if this kind of “invisible technology” and  “compassionate living social sculpture” were embraced as core elements of urban planning and pillars of public investment?

As our time together draws to an end, a taxi driver pulls up. He’s come here today to talk with El about how he can start a Village in his neighborhood.

USDAC Super PAC, HI-LI Projects, and Funding for Democracy in Action

Have you ever heard of “The Human Library?” How about “The American Town Hall on Anything?” These are just two projects in the USDAC HI-LI database (that stands for high-impact low-infrastructure), sharing cultural interventions that can be done by anyone, anywhere, with minimal resources.

Did you read about Mona Hadyar, who set up a free coffee and donuts booth in Cambridge, MA last year, inviting people to “Talk to a Muslim”? Or the “Round Dance Revolution” in Canada, started by indigenous people through the Idle No More movement?

Between now and May 10th, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is reviewing proposals for micro-grants—$300 stipends to create and document prototype projects that use arts and culture to answer these questions:

In the midst of this volatile election cycle, what kinds of participatory projects can activate agency and remind us what democracy actually looks like—both within and beyond the context of electoral politics?

With the airwaves full of polarizing rhetoric, what creative public interventions can disrupt narratives of hate, uplifting love, connection, and equity?

Mona Haydar and her husband, Sebastian Robins, outside a library in Cambridge, MA, December 2015.

Why have we created the USDAC Super PAC? Because as election campaigning ramps up toward November, we’re struck by how often big money controls the discourse. Conventional Super PACs heap up money. Debates easily deteriorate into sound-bites and insults. Voting is treated like the sum total of democratic participation, even though millions pay taxes without the right to vote or are deprived of that right as punishment.

We can do better than this!

Since the USDAC began in 2013, across the U.S. we’ve seen artists and creative organizers apply their skills and sensibilities to genuine dialogue and deliberation about the real issues and real opportunities we face. Between now and November, we want to invite everyone to step up as ExtraSuperDelegates, creating Super Participatory Acts of Culture or Super Public Acts of Compassion.

That’s where you come in. Up to ten projects will be chosen for support through the USDAC Super PAC (Super Participatory Arts Coalition, that is). They’ll be completed by mid-July, then featured in the SuperPACKet toolkit we roll out this summer to inspire many more projects around the nation during election season. If your prototype project is chosen, you’ll help motivate others around the nation to adapt your ideas to their own circumstances and communities. Press and social media attention will help spread them further.

We’re looking for creative projects that:

• stir meaningful connection and conversation in this polarized moment
• disrupt narratives of hate, uplifting love, connection, and equity
• activate a sense of agency and encourage democratic participation (within and/or beyond electoral politics)
• remind us that those who came before us fought for our rights (including voting)—rights many don’t use
• embody what democracy actually looks like, reminding us that democracy depends on our voices being heard.

Projects must be participatory (proposals to write a song or a script won’t be funded, for instance, unless they’re being created for participatory public events and uses) replicable with a cash outlay of no more than $300 (you’re welcome to supplement that with bartering or scrounging if you like).

The body politic needs your creativity! Please apply before the May 10th deadline. Check out the guidelines and link to the simple application form here. And if you have questions, please feel free to contact us at hello@usdac.us.

USA: MIA (Again) on Cultural Rights and Cultural Development

by Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

Ed Carroll, a friend in Europe, sent me a query: “How come there was not one mayor in the USA that was prompted to submit an application to the Agenda 21 for culture? … The absence on the Map is quite extraordinary.”

My reply? “What a good question!”

“The map” is a graphic on the international award page for cities and regional and local governments that have adopted cultural policies “linking the values of culture (heritage, diversity, creativity and transmission of knowledge) with democratic governance, citizen participation and sustainable development.”

This time around, 83 cities and local governments submitted proposals. As you will see when you click on the map, not a single one came from the United States.

You could say this is unsurprising, since no U.S.-based local government association takes part in the sponsoring organization, the committee on culture of the world association of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), “the global platform of cities, organizations and networks to learn, to cooperate and to launch policies and programmes on the role of culture in sustainable development.” Its mission is “to promote culture as the fourth pillar of sustainable development through the international dissemination and the local implementation of Agenda 21 for culture.”

(The other three pillars are economic, social, and environmental. So far as I know, my friend Jon Hawkes originated the notion of culture as the fourth pillar in his 2001 book, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s essential role in public planning, still well worth reading.)

“Agenda 21 for Culture” is UCLG’s founding document; you can find the text here. It’s pretty inspiring as a statement of operating principles and practices for cultural democracy. You’ll find a great deal of resonance with the people-powered USDAC’s Statement of Values.

Even more inspiring to me are the action items. For example, the Pilot Cities of theCulture in Sustainable Cities initiative, in which selected cities are supported in a two-year program to develop local cultural policies that are completely and effectively integrated with sustainable development.

So “how come there was not one mayor in the USA that was prompted to submit an application to the Agenda 21 for culture?” It’s a long, sad story, but I’ll try to explain standing on one foot.

It’s been an enduring element of U.S. policymaking orthodoxy that we have no cultural policy. (Of course, every nation has a cultural policy: most go through a process of formal adoption, but when it comes to the USA, you have deduce it from what’s written between the lines of a zillion decisions about funding, regulation, education, broadcasting, city planning, and so on.) It pretty much started in the early sixties when the campaign to establish something like a National Endowment for the Arts picked up steam. In the waning days of the Cold War, the specter of state art of the type characteristic of the Soviet Union was a dealbreaker in Washington, so the people who created the NEA bent over backwards to avoid it. In fact, they designed the agency as a kind of adjunct to private philanthropy, a legacy that persists.

Things got worse when Ronald Reagan withdrew in 1983 from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), the chief international body dealing with cultural policy. The cited reasons focused on “politicization,” which translated into Reaganite opposition to things like attempts to ensure a multidirectional flow of information undominated by corporate press. The U.S. didn’t rejoin till 2003, but we stopped paying dues in 2011 to protest giving Palestine membership, losing our vote two years later after failing to resume dues.

Other than using international cultural policy forums as political footballs, the U.S.’s main involvement has been to scrupulously avoid doing the right thing. Check out the impressive list of parties to the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions: keep scrolling to the bottom to see that none of the U.S. administrations in the decade-plus since this inspiring convention was passed has seen fit to sign it.

Okay, I’m tired of standing on one foot, but you get the idea. Either our policymakers are entirely unaware of the opportunity to integrate culture and development in a way that supports the health of both; or they know about this vital global conversation and collaboration, and just don’t think it’s a good idea.

If you think the mayor of your town should not only know about Agenda 21 for Culture, but might actually value the dialogues, tools, and examples his or her counterparts around the globe have provided, consider sharing this blog. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Chief Policy Wonk: I’m always happy to help.

Human Rights and Property Rights: Placemaking and Placekeeping

What do you foreground in terms of meanings? The trap of creative placemaking is it can't figure out whether it's a property rights movement or a human rights movement. It really is dominated by it being a property rights movement, so that feeds gentrification. If you can create agency and try to talk about placemaking/placekeeping as a human rights movement, there's a difference in strategies that can come out of that frame, and that's really what we need to do.

Roberto Bedoya, Secretary of Belonging, USDAC National Cabinet

On 8 March, the USDAC’s first-ever Citizen Artists Salon focused on “Creative Placemaking, Placekeeping, and Cultural Strategies to Resist Displacement.” Citizen Artists from across the U.S. signed up to take part in the free 90-minute video conversation. (If you don’t want to miss the next one, be sure to enter your name and email address here to be notified of USDAC events and opportunities.) If you missed it, the video is just a few clicks away here.

A moment from the 8 March 2016 Citizen Artist Salon

Taking off from the growing attention and resources directed to “creative placemaking,” Cultural Agent and Chief Weaver of Social Fabric Jess Solomon began by framing the topic: “Creative Placemaking has been described as a process of community development that leverages outside public, private, and nonprofit funding to strategically shape and change the physical and social character of a neighborhood using arts and cultural activities. While there are ample examples of placemaking activities resulting in positive change, some placemaking activities can also support gentrification, racism, real estate speculation, all in the name of 'neighborhood revitalization.' Across the country, ‘Creative Placekeeping’ has come into usage as a counter to Placemaking. Placekeeping has been described as the active care and maintenance of a place and its social fabric by the people who live and work there. It is not just preserving buildings but keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, while supporting the ability of local people to maintain their way of life as they choose.”

Three presenters summarized their perceptions and experience. Roberto Bedoya began by talking about how he'd conceived the alternative frame of placekeeping in terms of “spatial justice.” “People live by metaphors and they live by frames,” Roberto said. “They need to imagine what they can do, so it's not to damn completely placemaking and all the funding agencies that are supporting that work, but also to offer a different way in which you can deal with the politics of disbelonging. On the border, there is a politics of belonging and disbelonging. The racial profiling down here of brown people and the status of the undocumented community—there's this politic about you don't belong because you're brown, you don't belong because you're queer, or you don't belong because you're poor. That informed my thinking about the placemaking frame.”

Cultural Agent Betty Yu of the New York Field Office has worked with coalitions of local housing and human rights groups to plan several events using collaborative, creative projects to call attention to spatial justice. She stressed the importance of building partnerships grounded in local knowledge. “We have to really respect the knowledge base of the activists and the organizers coming into this space. As activists and cultural organizers, we have to ask ourselves: what side do we want to be on in this work? And we're often seen as a gentrifying force.”

I'm a native Brooklynite, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, my parents are garment workers, immigrants from China and Hong Kong, so I already I have some legitimacy, I think. But the large majority of artists I work with, whether they're black or brown or yellow or white, who are doing partnership projects with communities are often seen as the gentrifiers. So immediately, from the beginning, we have to figure out how to do we develop these partnerships and really honor the legacy of cultural organizing in these communities already. How do we help aid and amplify that work? It's not about us have that Christopher Columbus attitude, having that colonial mentality, and I think there's a lot of examples of that.

Cultural Agent Betty Yu

Cultural Agent Dave Loewenstein of the Lawrence, KS, Field Office talked about the East Lawrence community's experience trying to make neighborhood voices heard in a large “creative placemaking” project that represented a significant infusion of resources for Lawrence—but one they feared would not benefit the neighborhood residents targeted for “revitalization.” Dave said, “You have to address the inequity in the power structure. If folks can't have equity in decision-making, it's all a lot of talk. So that's been one of our biggest pushes, giving people information about what do people mean when they say 'placemaking,' or do they even know? Referencing other communities, talking to people who've experienced these kinds of projects already”—which is what activists in Lawrence have tried to do with the East 9th St. Placekeepers site, which aggregates public documents, news coverage, and links to relevant resources.

There’s much more worth hearing on the video, including exciting exchanges and illuminating contributions from Citizen Artists. Be sure to watch it here.

Called to Lawrence: A Great Film and Field Office Visit

By Arlene Goldbard, USDAC Chief Policy Wonk

The last weekend in February, my husband and I took a train trip from our home in Lamy, NM, to Lawrence, KS, for the premiere of Called to Walls, a film that tracks a series of community mural projects led by Cultural Agent Dave Loewenstein of the USDAC Lawrence Field Office.

The filmmakers—Nicholas Ward and Amber Hansen—first got involved as mural assistants on this Mid-America Arts Alliance Community Mural Project, which supported half a dozen three-month residencies in small towns chosen by competitive application. In Tonkawa, OK, Newton, KS, Joplin, MO, Arkadelphia, AR, Waco, TX, and Hasting, NE, Dave oversaw community design and painting processes open to participation from anyone and everyone.

I greatly admire this film for many reasons. Dave is a model community muralist who genuinely respects and honors each community’s right to self-representation while managing to remain relaxed in the face of every challenge such projects throw up. (See Dave’s blog for a running account of his work; there’s a particularly nuanced discussion of the mural process in Tonkawa, OK.)

And Called to Walls explores just about every possible challenge. In Tonkawa, the project had to cross a yawning divide between the tribe that gave the town its name and the overwhelmingly white community. In Joplin, the start of the mural project coincided with a devastating tornado, and the project had to contend with local powers-that-be who wanted a mural that focused on attracting visitors rather than depicting people’s experiences of loss and hopes for healing.

There’s a remarkable passage that turns on whispered opposition to the central image in Arkadelphia’s mural, a commanding figure of a brown-skinned woman. We see Sammy Blackmon, a local artist who is depicted in the mural, talk about the education he received at the Peake School (a collaborative project of Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, itself the subject of a new film). We see local residents struggling to bridge the racial divide as they discuss how their history should be depicted. And then a TV reporter shows up at the mural site for a meeting called when a member of the design committee says there’s feeling abroad that the complexion of the central figure should be lightened. When no one arrives to defend that viewpoint—when everyone assembled in the hot sun to debate the question turns out to be on the same side—my heart lifted.

From a Dream to a Promise in Arkadelphia, Arkansas

All the themes central to this type of inclusive, collaborative public art are explored: who has the right to tell history; how the textured truth with all of its contradictions can be depicted; what are the responsibilities of an artist who sets out to help a community answer such questions?

Called to Walls is on the festival circuit right now. Once that’s done, I hope it has a long and successful life in educational distribution, because it is exactly the film that aspiring community artists and everyone who wants a part in weaving cultural fabric should see. And I’m not just saying that because I have a small part in it. [Full disclosure: I’m featured as an on-screen commentator and credited as the “Voice of Reason,” a title I’d really love to keep.]

Dave, Nicholas, and Amber are all stalwart members of Lawrence’s USDAC Field Office. I spent a richly satisfying afternoon with fifteen or so Field Office folks talking through their plans for the next few months.

Coming right up is a collaboration with Lawrence Ecology Teams United in Sustainability (LETUS), Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU), and the Lawrence Percolator: a series entitled “HEATING UP: Artists Respond to Climate Change,” encompassing many events including an exhibit, workshop, panel discussion, and performance “intended to bolster a community conversation about climate change and what we can do about it.”

Field Office folks are thinking about cultural issues that need their attention. Where can they be most strategic and effective? Right now, gun violence is on people’s minds. Kansas has long allowed concealed weapons to be carried in public spaces and buildings so long as the owner has a permit. But now the state has adopted laws allowing people over 21 to carry concealed weapons, without the formerly required permit or gun safety training. Although guns were previously forbidden in schools, beginning in July 2017, they will be permitted in public universities, which is making many students, parents, and faculty members nervous about on-campus safety. How can cultural organizing help to shift support from privileging gun owners to privileging the safety and well-being of all citizens?

As in many other communities, displacement of long-term residents by projects that end up gentrifying neighborhoods is a key issue, especially in East Lawrence. (We wrote about it back in August, if you’d like to learn more). A key obstacle to placekeeping is that cultural fabric has no standing in law or policy. There are legal grounds to stop a neighborhood being torn down for a new development if an endangered plant or animal habitat is impinged upon, but not if cultural fabric—longstanding customs, celebrations, sites, artifacts, and associations—is endangered.

Lawrence Field Office members are exploring promoting the adoption by the city of a Cultural Impact Study process that mandates taking cultural harm into account much as the Environmental Impact Study process does for the environment. I am excited about working with them to adapt the USDAC’s basic model to Lawrence’s needs. (You’ll find a model resolution and a fuller discussion in An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research.)

They recognize that one of the challenges of culture shift—showing people that culture matters, that rather than merely being a frill on our social fabric, it’s the crucible in which we work out a livable future—is getting past embedded attitudes or blind spots. “What does ‘culture’ mean to people?” someone asked. “How can we get past the ideas that the only grounds for arguing for culture are economic?” asked someone else. These are essential questions with widespread relevance, just the sorts of questions local USDAC folks need to be grappling with in their own communities.

I was impressed with the seriousness of intention I saw in Lawrence, and the tremendous creativity and enthusiasm people are bringing to their work. If people can figure out how to tell the story in one town in the heartland, they can do the same in every other part of the country. Speaking for myself, they inspire confidence.

Our State of the Union is a Poem

By Arlene Goldbard, USDAC Chief Policy Wonk

It’s been two weeks since the 2016 Poetic Address to the Nation was performed live at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, filmed by PhillyCAM, and live-streamed by Free Speech TV. You can see the video here.

If you’ve been following the USDAC,  you know that the Poetic Address is the culminating artistic gesture of an annual civic ritual sponsored by the USDAC, the People’s State of the Union—this year, #PSOTU2016 for short. Groups around the U.S.—schools, community centers, faith communities, humanities councils, arts organizations, and many more—downloaded free Toolkits and hosted their own Story Circles. Individuals anywhere uploaded their own stories to the Story Portal, where you can read them now.

If the PSOTU stopped there, it would make a powerful statement that expressed the USDAC’s foundational principles. It says that democracy is a conversation, not a monologue, that all our voices are needed to assess the state of our union, that the lived experience of people in communities counts as much as—perhaps more than—expert opinion or official statement.

But it doesn’t stop there. The next step is to craft the Poetic Address to the Nation. With the guidance of the USDAC’s Chief Rhapsodist of Wherewithal (and newly appointed Philadelphia Poet Laureate) Yolanda Wisher, an incredible group of poets across the U.S. composed sonnets and another wonderful cohort close to Philly wrote poems inspired by stories uploaded to the Portal. These were arranged in sequence to compose this year’s Poetic Address.

Still, it doesn’t stop there. Stories from #PSOTU2015 formed the body of information we used to devise the generative cultural policy proposals in An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research, the publication we issued at the end of September 2016. #PSOTU2016 stories will again tell us what people care about and what they want when we create our first major cultural policy platform, to be released in November.

As Yolanda put it in her introduction to the Poetic Address, #PSOTU2016 “embodied the simple truth that the state of the union is not an annual declaration, but something that we create together everyday. We’ve also embodied the truth that all our lives are the material of art, and all our experience is worthy of being uplifted into poetry. So, what state of union will we choose to create? Democracy for the few or a cultural democracy for everyone?”

Poetic Address to the Nation cast taking a bow after the performance.

As #PSOTU2016 unfolded, someone put this question: So what? So what if we all tell our stories and they become a poem? Why does that matter?

Everyone who is working in the arena of art and social justice gets similar questions all the time. I often respond with another question: so what does matter more?

There’s a conventional attitude that says art is insignificant: entertainment, a frill, a luxury, that we should save our energy and resources for important things. Depending on who is making this assertion, the meaning of important shifts. Our national policymakers have chosen to spend a huge proportion of our commonwealth on war and punishment: I often cite the statistic that we are spending more than three annual National Endowment for the Arts budgets a day on the military, seven days a week. That’s one way to measure importance.

Others think priority ought to go to direct action to protest those same conditions, that anything else is a diversion or self-indulgence. It’s not that any one form of action is definitively proven to be most effective, even though some people will stake that claim. All that can be known is that when many of us choose to use our own gifts and instruments to raise awareness and inspire action—whatever our gifts may be—the wellspring of change is replenished.

The truth—as Citizen Artists everywhere know—is that to change the world, you have to change the story. To shift culture, which shifts behavior, you have to ask the real questions, the ones that are being glossed or ignored. As the late great James Baldwin put it: “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” You have to hold up a mirror so people see themselves truly, as resilient and powerful even while the status quo broadcasts the message that power rests with others and it’s best to come along quietly.

Tell me, what could say it more heartfully, hit home more strongly, than these stanzas from “Seek Shelter” by Trapeta Mayson & Monnette Sudler?

Oh give me shelter in this fractured Union
Give me shelter in this fractured Union
Stitch up these worn bones
Open my mouth
Rip this silence from my foreign tongue
Move this wedge of indifference
Show me a sign that I am home
Take away our boxing ring of conflict
where we bloody each other with pride and prejudice
Put out a welcome mat

Oh give me shelter in this fractured Union
For I too am a sister and a prodigal son
I’ve walked the earth and need to settle
Give me space to be
Let me be
let me be in this United Place of America.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider the way that Sarah Chalmers tells it, why she believes that sharing our stories and singing our poems matters greatly. Sarah is a founding member and Director of Civic Engagement for the Civic Ensemble, a “civic-minded theater company” based in Ithaca, New York. This year was Ithaca’s second experience with convening Story Circles for the People’s State of the Union; read Anne Rhodes’ account in the USDAC blog.

I spoke with Sarah after #PSOTU2016 to learn more about how it had unfolded locally. The Civic Ensemble uses Story Circles to devise issue-based plays, so Sarah has a lot of prior experience with them. Like a great many Citizen Artists, Sarah is super-busy. But when she saw that #PSOTU2016 was coming around, she leapt into action to help organize an event. “I think I was the person this year that was like, ‘Hey this is happening again.’ We do this even though we don’t really have time because we’re always looking for ways to get into a bigger conversation, to get our community thinking ‘What’s the big picture here?’

“The fact that our stories are shared with a national audience, that the people at USDAC are reading those and using an artistic approach to expressing what’s a national conversation that’s really coming from the people—that’s the pedagogy that we live by. To be a part of that is something I just wouldn’t want to miss out on.

“We consider ourselves Citizen Artists ultimately. That’s how we identify and how we talk to people when they work with us. It’s not about just making a play. Making a play is our vehicle and it doesn’t mean it’s not a beautiful thing in itself. We appreciate the art of it. But what’s the question? What’s the challenge? And the challenge is the fact that it brings us together to make something different, that we can create our community.

We don’t have to accept what’s being told to us. We need to recognize our own power.  To me, the Story Circle, it’s unassuming, but it has the potential to help us recognize that.”

The UN Visits Jackson, and A Cultural Agent Testifies

In January, members of the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent visited Washington D.C.; Baltimore; Jackson, Mississippi; Chicago; and New York City as part of its mission of assessing “the situation of African Americans and people of African descent.”

USDAC Cultural Agent Monique Davis was there in Jackson, testifying on issues of food injustice, and Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard had an opportunity afterwards to ask her about the experience. Before saying more about Monique’s testimony, here’s a little of the context for the UN visit.

As the Working Group’s report puts it, members “gathered information on the forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance that they face. We studied the official measures and mechanisms taken to prevent structural racial discrimination and protect victims of racism and hate crimes as well as responses to multiple forms of discrimination. The visit focused on both good practices and challenges faced in realising their human rights.”

After detailing the many positive developments (such as criminal justice reforms and improved healthcare programs) brought to the Working Group’s attention, the report goes on to preface an even longer list of concerns with this statement:

Despite the positive measures referred to above, the Working Group is extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African Americans.

The colonial history, the legacy of enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism, and racial inequality in the US remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today. The dangerous ideology of white supremacy inhibits social cohesion amongst the US population. Lynching was a form of racial terrorism that has contributed to a legacy of racial inequality that the US must address. Thousands of people of African descent were killed in violent public acts of racial control and domination and the perpetrators were never held accountable.

Contemporary police killings and the trauma it creates are reminiscent of the racial terror lynching of the past. Impunity for state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

The Working Group

Arlene Goldbard: So the UN came to Jackson?

Monique Davis: We were one of five cities, and it was a huge honor for our small, sleepy southern town.

Arlene: You testified before the panel. What did you talk about?

Monique: I talked about my personal experiences of living in a poor community and shopping at a local grocery store, comparing that to my experience of shopping at that same grocery store chain in more affluent neighborhoods. How the quality and variety of produce is different, the lighting is different, even the background music is different, the cleanliness of the store is different. I talked about how our neighborhood is plagued by convenience food stores that don’t offer fresh produce. Many of our families are time-starved: they need something to be quick and easy. We may almost have to go to the drawing board again to teach people how to take advantage of fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables because there’s generations of families that only know how to cook things that come out of a box and the impact on their health means mass re-education that needs to happen.

Arlene: Food is culture too, and what you’re describing is a food culture that puts the seller’s convenience and profit above the well-being of the families who consume the food. Here’s a quote from their report, which sounds like it was influenced by your testimony:

The Working Group learnt that African Americans have limited access to food variety including healthy food as they are concentrated in poor neighbourhoods with food outlets selling unhealthy and even expired food. African Americans have the highest rates of obesity which is linked to “food deserts”. Racial discrimination impedes the ability of Black women to maintain overall good health, control their sexuality and reproduction, survive pregnancy and child birth, and parent their children. Black women in the USA die from pregnancy-related complications at a rate three to four times higher than White women.

Did you hear any of the other testimonies?

Monique: There were powerful stories about mass incarceration. People spoke about a recent trial where a gentleman in Stonewall, Mississippi, was pulled off his horse and buggy and strangled by a police officer. (Note: Here’s a description of the killing of Jonathan Sanders.) People testified how under- and unreported that was because it was rural Mississippi. People spoke of the lack of prosecution of the people that are responsible and that fact that even though time has progressed, some things still haven’t changed as much as we would hope.

I was really impressed by the panel, I think they heard and honored the testimony and they even practiced some of the story circle principles we use—like after people shared just took a deep breath and said “thank you.” I was pleased that they gave people’s stories the honor and attention that they deserved. That was a great experience.

Arlene: It sounds like it. Just the fact of it happening is so interesting. You know how it is, the UN sends election observers to other countries and we feel very smug about our democracy. But in 2012, they sent election observers here. Now the UN is saying people of African descent in the United States are not well treated, as an international body, we have a responsibility to look into that. That recognition is powerful in and of itself.

Monique: Exactly. Just that they felt the need to come here is something kind of monumental.

The Working Group’s report ends with an impressive list of recommendations, the first of which is to “Establish a national human rights commission, in accordance with the Paris Principles. The Government should establish within this body a specific division to monitor the human rights of African Americans.” In a USDAC framework, what they are talking about is the right to culture, a fundamental and indivisible human right reflected in our Statement of Values. Many thanks to Monique for representing this truth to the UN.

Field Office Dispatch: New York and Philadelphia

We are delighted to present these updates from the Philly (Cultural Agent and Chief Rhapsodist of Wherewithal Yolanda Wisher) and New York (Cultural Agent Betty Yu) USDAC Field Offices. To get involved, just drop us a line at hello@usdac.us.

Philly Field Office

In October 2015, the Philly Field Office soft-launched with three successful DareToImagine actions in Chinatown, Germantown, and Hunting Park. The Field Office partnered with Asian Arts Initiative, Germantown Artists Roundtable, and Edison High School to host Imagination Stations that invited passersby to make a #DareToImagine button or a Philly Phriendship Bracelet to give to a stranger, or a papercut flag showing off their neighborhood pride. Local poets and musicians performed re-imaginings of traditional patriotic tunes. And in Germantown, the Germantown Artists Roundtable hosted “Civic School,” where folks waiting for the bus could vote for one of three issues they wanted to see tackled by newly elected Supreme Court judges: full funding for public schools, $15 minimum wage, or gun control. Most found it hard to choose. 

The Philly Field Office plans to continue building its core team and clarifying its focus this spring through spearheading large & small-scale participatory events across the city in collaboration with arts organizations and city institutions. And in the meantime, the Poetic Address to the Nation is coming right up. Learn more about the livecast here. 

Citizen Artists Lenny Belasco, Juliette Quoquoi and Tieshka Smith hold down the Germantown Imagination Station. (Photo by Yolanda Wisher, October 2016)

DareToImagine button maker at Germantown Imagination Station at Greene Street and Chelten Avenue. (Photo by Yolanda Wisher, October 2016)

NYC Field Office

The USDAC NYC Field has kicked off 2016 with a bang. In late 2015 the core team of the Field Office came together to discuss our priority projects and issues we wanted to work on.  Given the success of our June Imagining and October #DareToImagine events that were mainly focused on anti-gentrification and anti-displacement creative organizing strategies in NYC, we decided we would continue along that trajectory so we can deepen our partnerships and relationships with community activists and organizations. One of our main criteria and principles we feel strongly about is: "We should prioritize local cultural organizing activities, art/media projects and other creative social justice efforts that support the self-determination of communities to tell their own stories of identity, struggle, and collective liberation."

On January 2nd, USDAC-NYC animated and transformed the Brooklyn Museum's 3rd floor Beaux Arts Court space into the "City of Justice." We invited participants to an evening where we imagined 2016 and a future where social justice is realized through 10 participatory art-making stations that included poetry, letter-writing, theater, body movement, Story Circles, and story mapping. The planning team had some hesitations about organizing this when it was revealed that Brooklyn Museum had leased the space out to the Real Estate Summit for their annual gathering (a major convening of the real estate giants that are the #1 gentrifying force). USDAC-NYC supported the community protests against the museum. And because of grassroots activism the museum welcomed open dialogue and criticism. We then decided to use the "City of Justice" event as an open space for creative imagination and forward-thinking solutions for housing justice!

Finally, February has been a busy month so far. The Field Office helped host two Story Circles for the People's State of the Union, co-presented our Anti-Gentrification Story Mapping Activity at VIRAL an interactive performance addressing issues of police violence in Staten Island, and co-facilitated an Anti-Gentrification-themed "Community Imagining" as a part of "Speak Out" an art and activism exhibit on police brutality at BronxArt Space.

City of Justice at the Brooklyn Museum

City of Justice at the Brooklyn Museum