Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

Art On The Farm

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It has been a few years since I posted anything about the Wormfarm Institute  so I was happy to read a Hyperallergic post via Artsjournal.com about Wormfarm’s annual Farm/Art D’tour which occurred a couple weeks ago.

People can drive around the farm land of Wisconsin to see various art installations and performances staged in the fields. The whole circuit is about 50 miles. Among the performances this year were the Hay Rake Ballet choreographing the movements of three tractors. There is video in the Hyperallergic article. It appears there may have been a line dancing component involved as well based on a call for participants on the Wormfarm site.

According to the choreographer Sarah Butler,

“It’s not every day that these farmers are driving and doing pirouettes with the tractors,” said Butler in an interview with Hyperallergic. “But nothing I was asking them to do was something they don’t do every day. It was really cool to see these three guys who are total masters of their craft being celebrated by their own community, as well as people visiting who are coming to see the DTour … for things they do every day that are oftentimes not really recognized as art.”

The concept behind Farm/Art D’tour is to raise awareness of the process by which food reaches people’s table and diminish perceptions that farmers and farming are disconnected from art. Based on the experience of one of the farmers participating in Hay Rake Ballet, he and some of his friends and neighbors are beginning to see that connection:

While some farmers refused to take part and one even backed out during rehearsals, Enge said he and his two fellow performers were exhilarated. “Seeing the joy in the other drivers and in the crowd … it really touched me.” On the drive home one of the other farmers told Enge, “Hey, if they’re going to do it again, count me in.”

There are some good images of some of the other projects in the Hyperallergic piece and on Wormfarm’s Facebook page.

Now May Be The Best Time For A Story Circle

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At one of my previous positions, I had started a conversation with a local storytelling group about partnering on a curated storytelling series. This conversation happened a month before the outbreak of the pandemic. The series went on more or less as planned, albeit in a much larger space that allowed for social distancing. I credit that series with helping to breakdown perceptual barriers about our venue and who it as for and contributing to the further development of a relationship between under served segments of our community.

A couple weeks ago, Arts Midwest posted a piece about facilitating story circles by Ben Fink. I have written about Fink and the work he did at Appalshop in Whitesburg, KY a few years back. The Arts Midwest piece contains a guide for hosting a story circle, including a link to download the materials. In my former position, we hadn’t used the story circle format, but according to Fink the community can experience similar outcomes.

There are a number of rules for participation he outlines, but one of those appears to be key to the experience is:

And finally (this is important) everyone is asked not to share the story they think of when they hear the initial prompt (more on prompts below), but to listen carefully to the stories that come before theirs, and then to share a story that complements, complicates, contradicts, or otherwise responds to the stories they’ve heard so far.

Near the end Fink provides the following insight from his decade experience participating in story circles:

In a story circle, people who tend to dominate discussions learn to listen, knowing they’ll have their turn to speak and be heard; and people who tend to hold back find themselves speaking up, knowing that no one will interrupt or talk over them. At the end, when the group reflects together about the stories they’ve just heard, they inevitably discover elements of a “story in the center of the circle”–a story that they find, to their surprise, they all somehow share.

The rules and guidelines – and the facilitation guide makes a distinction between the two – are designed to achieve this sort of result where the garrulous listen and the introverted are allowed the space to speak.

90 Years Of Cultivating Community Around Flowers

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Last month, the Bloemencorso Zundert, caught my attention. It is the largest flower parade in the world held in Zundert, Netherlands. Twenty hamlets compete to have their parade float judged as the best. Apparently, they only use dahlias are used in the Zundert parade and six of the nearly eight million flowers are cultivated in Zundert. The parade started in 1936 with 17 hamlets. The other three have joined more recently.

The entire effort appears to be volunteer run from the cultivation of the flowers, to the design, to the assembly of the flowers just days before the parade. Not to mention the movement – the floats tend to be human powered. If you look closely at some of the videos below, you can see the feet of the people acting as the internal engines. The webpage for the event translates relatively well into English.

Being a Tolkien fan, a video of the Khazad-Dum float is what had initially caught my attention and led me to do some further investigation of the event.

However, that wasn’t the winner. It appears it didn’t rank well with the official judges, but took 2nd place in a vote for audience favorite.

This is the one that won:

Here are a few more that caught my eye.

Kickstarter CEO Say More Needs To Be Done To Support Participation In Arts

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The National Endowment for the Arts asked a number of different people to respond to the 2022 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

One of those asked to respond was Everette Taylor, CEO of Kickstarter, a site that has essentially become the alternative to foundations, governments, and institutional funders as a funding source for creative projects.

He says a partnership with Skoll Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Creative Capital to provide $700,000 in funding to 600 BIPOC creators helping them raise $11.7 million.

“In recent research, still unpublished, Kickstarter creators report earning $5.15 in additional revenue from each dollar raised on Kickstarter. That places the total estimated economic impact of the $700,000 fund at close to $70,000,000, a 100x return on that cultural investment.”

That data comes from one of his recommendations about making funding to creatives more accessible, especially for smaller scale projects. Part of that includes making it easier for people to apply with fewer strings and follow up reporting burden attached.

His second recommendation is about strengthening community among art makers by providing some infrastructure for creating networks and sharing work, and encouraging cross-pollination and collaboration.

His third recommendation referenced changing the definition of art making, including who gets to participate in making art. He lists all the projects that have been funded by Kickstarter highlighting the expansive storytelling techniques facilitated by books, tabletop games, roleplaying games receiving support. He points to these games as something of an underdeveloped framework for allowing more people to participate in a creative process.

He warns that AI is in a position to marginalize and supplant many of the burgeoning creatives who have only just begun to realize success through opportunities for funding that platforms like Kickstarter provides. There is something of an implication that as much as Kickstarter has done to help these artists, their capacity is still comparatively too narrow to provide the support and resources the creative community needs to succeed.