You know I am a sucker for fun and interesting ideas for arts organization so I read Danielle Jackson’s recent piece on Artsy, Art Spaces Can Bridge Social Divides—But First You Need to Know Your Neighbor, with some interest.
Jackson makes a good observation about the appearance of involving and engaging diverse members of a community vs. the practice of engaging those diverse members. (my emphasis)
However, just as sitting in a diverse crowd at a baseball game doesn’t necessarily create social bridges, merely standing around at an art opening together isn’t social bridging, either. For these bridges to truly form, an exchange of conversation and ideas is vital. Most importantly, it cannot happen successfully when one group is thought of as irrelevant. And though bridging may entail making resources available to those who need it, it is not the same as charity. You give and you take; it is not one-directional.
We claim credit on grant reports for counting new and different faces entering our venues, but we may not have created any sort of new, authentic connection with those people.
Jackson writes about an event she attended at Bronx River Art Center where people got to smack away at pinatas created by over 20 artists. Tell me you don’t want to steal this idea or adapt it to your own purposes.
The organizers, artists Blanka Amezkua and Ronny Quevedo, made sure the event took place later in the evening so that local people with jobs could attend. Not only were there artists of different races present at a time when so many openings were attended by self-segregating crowds, but the room was alive with cousins and uncles and grandparents from the neighborhood, who came despite it being in the dead of winter, just after New Year’s Day. I marvelled as everyone took turns handing off the bats to one another, joyously breaking open the piñatas together.
Jackson also relates some steps her organization, Bronx Documentary Center, has taken to solicit gain insight and act as a connector in their local community,
For example, during an exhibition on Mexican photographers chronicling American life, the gallery created a working group of “community curators” culled from local Mexican-American organizations, who provided context and feedback on how the photographs might be presented.
And during an installation of an exhibition examining the war in Iraq, it came to the BDC’s attention that one of the soldiers who discovered Saddam Hussein in hiding lived within walking distance from the gallery. This might have presented an opportunity to organize a public program highlighting how global issues hit close to home. However, since he struggled with anxiety related to PTSD, we invited him to participate in a way that would feel most comfortable to him: by having a quiet meeting in the gallery with the Marine and the journalists behind the exhibition, all of whom had also spent significant time in Iraq.
I appreciated her use of the Iraq veteran as an illustration regarding how an initial instinct about the way an installation ties to the local community may not be sensitive to the needs of the community members. While the quiet meeting she described may not have had as wide reaching an influence in the community as a public program, it sounds like it was probably a meaningful experience for those that were involved.
There are other examples in her article about ways to ford social divides, some as simple as lending snow shovels and folding chairs and it worth a full read for those ideas.
"Though while the author wishes they could buy it in Walmart..." Who is "they"? The kids? The author? Something else?…