Guinea Baboon Brain by J. Sayuri, part of the “Animal Brains” series. Prints available on Etsy.

The way we live our lives is based on memories and stories that we tell each other as part of our day‑to‑day interactions. And the way memories and stories are made is a complicated, highly personal process sparked from experiences, from learning, and from the artifice that surrounds us. Experiences of arts and culture play a fundamental role in the way a person is, and functions, and is part of a community. This reality stretches across the spectrum from the neurological to the biological, from the more ephemeral aspects of the individual experience in the moment and on outward to their partner, their family, and the entirety of their community, over time and forever.

Sometimes, that experience in the moment goes by the name “intrinsic impact,” which is set up as the intellectual, emotional, social, and empathetic impact of a piece of art on an individual person—and is placed in a sort of opposition to “extrinsic” or “instrumental impact,” which is the interaction of the arts with other things, other sectors, and its functional role in producing other outcomes. While this dichotomy, and certainly this opposition, is a false one, it formally or informally articulates a lot of the tension those in the arts carry about their role and place in American society. Does art exist for the impulse of the arts? For the experience of the individual? For the benefit of the community? The answer, in all cases, is, “Yes.” That said, teasing out why get in arguments about the “right” role for the arts clarifies both the necessity of the arts and the challenges placed upon that necessity by our unique, practical, instrumental American-ness.

Close your eyes. Think about some arts experience, far back. Something that stuck with you from five or ten years ago. An arts experience that you had.

Start thinking with your sense of sight. See what you saw then. What were the colors that were there? What was the focal point of your attention? If you force your brain off of that focal point, what else was happening in your field of vision when you were experiencing that piece of art?

Add in your sense of hearing. When you were in that space, can you remember anything about the noise in that moment? If it’s a theatrical experience, can you remember, either specifically or abstractly, the sounds that were happening? If it’s a visual arts experience, what was the space like?

Add in smell. Can you remember any smells from that? What did the seats smell like? Was there dust in the air? Was there someone wearing perfume nearby?

What about touch? Can you remember any tactile sensations? Did your fingers brush against a jacket? Can you feel what it was like to have your feet on the floor? Can you feel air moving past you?

And the hardest one, taste. Is there any specific kind of taste or twinge?

Just sit with that for just a minute. OK. Open your eyes. What happened there?

Whatever story is in your head now is only part of the whole story, but it’s the most essential part, and if you think about the different aspects of what you’ve conjured, it’s phenomenal. These are the residue of a whole experience; your memory is not made up of everything that happens in a moment. Your memory is made up of a selected set of things that you were paying enough attention to that they stuck with you. Everything about you, every memory you have, every belief you hold, every decision that you make—every one comes from a set of interactions between the external world and one of your five senses by way of the over 100 billion nerve cells in your body, 80 billion of which are in your brain.

Nerves are these fascinating cells. They don’t act like any other cells in the body. A normal cell’s sort of like a globule, with a nucleus and mitochondria and all the parts you learned in grade school. A nerve cell, however, is flexible. It’s as if you took that standard grade school globule and you spread it out like a sun canopy, the nucleus still in the middle, and the mitochondria, and all the things that make a nerve be a nerve, but now, at the ends, all of these really long tendrils. These can be huge—a single nerve cell runs down your whole leg—and they’re called axons. And at the ends and along the length of the axon, you have these little hairs called dendrites, which reach out and touch other dendrites. And it’s in these moments, at these connections, which are called synapses, that your memories happen.

There are 100 billion little tiny things in your body, and the things that happen to them and the ways that they interact with each other are literally everything that makes you you from the moment you’re born until the moment you die. Everything you know and feel and hope and dream and mourn—they’re all tied up in the way tiny dendrites touch each other and fire.

In your brain, there are between 250 and 500 distinct areas. One analogy for the brain is as the most disorganized, crisscrossed pile of wires you can possible imagine, miraculously all densely packed and brain shaped, touching each other and working relatively flawlessly and with this dense interconnectivity: any part of your brain has a 50 percent chance of being connected to any other part of your brain. It is the most improbable of things.

The premise of learning and of memory is that something that starts as a physical interaction is translated to a neurological impulse. Something touches the skin on your arm, setting off impulses in the nerves in your arm, which runs up to your brain, which interprets it, and if it’s something that’s worth keeping as a memory (a hot iron, say), then a lot of other processes happen at different parts of your brain that solidify it. A hot burner gets logged, a piece of lint gets discarded. Short term memory—that lint—is like having a bunch of slippery stones, and trying to put them into a stack, and they’re constantly trying to fall apart, and so you keep having to put them back into the stack. If you stop paying attention to stacking the stones, they fall, disappear and everything goes back to the way that it was. Long term memory—the iron—creates physical change in your body, both chemical and genetic. The neurons that are associated with a specific memory can genetically change; they get more robust if used more often. The more nutrition they get, through influxes of spinal fluid, the thicker the walls become, and the more resilient. Myelin sheaths, which are basically natural insulation tubes to protect the neuron, grow and thicken, protecting these neurons from damage.

This description, perhaps, makes that neuron sound like a precious photograph slotted into a protective folder and nestled in a filing cabinet.  That’s not the case. Instead, think of it more as a million photographs, all torn up into little tiny pieces, all spread across the floor of your room, and when something happens that draws your attention to a single small fragment of the image, all the other parts of that photo fly to it, Harry Potter Accio-style, and it’s suddenly up in front of your face.

Take, for example, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can be thought of, in this context, as a person losing his or her ability to voluntarily stop a memory from being recalled. A loud noise involuntarily sets off a cascade of events that makes your memory come together in front of your face without you realizing it’s going to happen. It’s part of why it’s such a distressing condition; we view this lack of control as unnatural and unnerving, catching us off-guard, driving all sorts of adrenaline and other chemicals into production before we’re even particularly aware of what is happening to us.

PTSD highlights that our brain has, as we have, evolved at a steady but evolutionary pace. Starting about 50,000 years ago with the dawn of agriculture and everything that’s happened since then, our habits and our practices have been evolving at an incredibly fast pace, and our brain, truthfully, has not kept up. The casing and the operating system of our brain are both ancient, but the exercises we put it through are decidedly not. In that context, it’s amazing that we are doing as well as we are. But even as we do well, relatively speaking, we have vestiges of things that probably are not the best things for us to have anymore—for example, there was a natural need, 50,000 years ago, for you to be able to immediately call up the last time you were attacked by a wild animal and understand that that was something you didn’t want to have happened to you again. It’s a biological evolutionary response inside a modern frame, with challenging results.

So why bring up PTSD? Because the moments that have the strongest potential to create long‑term memories—the things that you learn the best, which become the memories that form your world view and drive your understanding of others—are the things that are the most compelling. They are the imperatives, the things that received your close attention, the things that you want to know the resolution of, or that are so powerful in the moment that you can’t ignore them and they get imprinted on you.

You see, memory is a constant competition. It’s true that dendrites increase in size and insulation when activated, and that those dendrites grow from branches of frequently activated neurons. But the opposite is also true, because the brain grows like a tree, and like a tree it has a natural, self-preserving process of pruning. This is not a metaphor—this is a physical process. Over time, neurons accumulate calcium build up, which is usually flushed away in the influx of spinal fluid delivered when a neuron is activated. If the neuron doesn’t activate often enough, the calcium builds up to certain amount, at which point the neuron releases an enzyme that tells itself to implode, and then it implodes, and the waste is drawn out of the body. And the memory is gone.

The more ways that you learn something, the more pathways are built between all of these neurons, the more dendrites are touching dendrites are touching dendrites. If you have a neuron that activates 20 other neurons, that suddenly means that you’ve got 21 neurons that are getting blood flow, which then activate neurons and so, the network itself reinforces itself. As different interconnected structures are strengthened, they form values systems, and ways of viewing and understanding the world, and a system of reinforcement.

The arts, in general, always traffics in multiple senses. That makes what’s happening stickier. Singular delivery, particularly of things that challenge a person’s values systems (which is to say, that run counter to the strong network of neurons ready to ignite and secure a new memory a place in the brain), is challenging—but the arts, complex and multisensory, can break through. We traffic in beautiful, complex, meaning-laden memories. We build directed representations of concrete or abstract parts of the world, pushed from artist to audience with the express goal of having them tumble around and stick inside a person’s head.

The memory of an arts experience starts from the moment a person first discovers that that experience is possible and it extends forever. We aren’t, therefore, talking about two hours’ traffic on a stage; we’re talking about a lifetime opportunity to experience and re‑experience those hours forever.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and a behavioral economist, has this concept of the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self.” The experiencing self is the one that experiences things in real time that logs the actual moments of the experience. The remembering self is the one that reorganizes all of those things into the packages of memory that you carry with you—which is to say the neurons that activate at any given time. The remembering self is the one that makes all the decisions and the experiencing self doesn’t have anything to do with it at all.

He says, essentially, that we don’t actually choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Further, he says that even when we’re thinking about the future, we aren’t thinking about future experiences, we’re thinking about anticipated future memories. Everything is structured around the things we’re going to keep and the things that are going to inform the way that we move in the world.

Memories are powerful things and they are modulated by what you attend to at any given time. You remembered the seating, you remembered the food, you remembered the colors. In my case, I have a very clear memory of going to see Les Miserables when I was eight years old. I have this deep visceral experience of the closeness to my family that I felt in that moment. I can remember the deep red of the seats and how they contrasted with the burgundy of my mom’s trench coat. I can remember the feel of her trench coat under my fingers when I squeezed her leg because I was crying, and the smell of this woman a few rows behind us who had this perfume on that my dad commented on. I can remember this brilliant white light, this stretch of white fabric falling down, and this beautiful noise. I didn’t understand what was happening.

When I got older and I went and saw Les Mis again, I was, “Oh, my God. This was totally about a war.” I was like, “Whoa, there was a rebellion going on.” I definitely didn’t get any of that—it’s like when I watched Dirty Dancing and didn’t understand there was a whole abortion subplot, and another whole subplot about a pickpocketing couple.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because what I remembered had little to do with the specifics of the arts experience and everything to do with feelings of love, and companionship, and family. And then it’s there, in your brain, and it comes back at all sorts of odd moments. Crazy, amazing ways. They impact behavior forever. Sometimes, it’s totally visible to people. Most times, it’s not.

Do you listen to the podcast The Memory Palace? In one episode, they tell this story of an opera singer named Jenny Lind that speaks to art and memory. In 1850, a guy named George Upton, who would become a music critic, basically snuck into a Boston concert hall because he was so obsessed with hearing this woman sing. She was a British woman and an opera singer who has been brought to the U.S. on a 96-stop tour by P.T. Barnum, all up and down the Eastern seaboard over the course of a year. It was a sensation. Tickets were sold for astronomical sums. Some places, they oversold and people rioted. She was basically the Lady Gaga of her time, and she was considered the best singer of the 19th century by certain people. And fifty-eight years later, Upton, when he was a much older critic, wrote in great detail about his experience of that time. He talked about her gliding down the stage with constant grace. He talked about her voice which he claimed was full volume and extraordinary range. That peculiar, penetrating quality that made the faintest tones, clearly audible.

He talked about her voice being like a lark’s, rich and sonorous. He said, “I have borne in my heart and memory across two generations this woman. She remains for me still the one peerless singer I’ve heard on the concert stage.”

But here’s the thing: Jenny Lind’s entire career occurred before audio recording, so now, 150 years later, there is literally no physical memory left of her—and there wasn’t for him when he was remembering her, either. He could not turn on a song and say, “Yeah, I totally remember that. That’s exactly what it sounded like.” There was nothing.

The only thing that he had, after 60 years, was this repeated memory in his head that had lodged there and had driven him into a career and into a life of music criticism and had become one of the most dominant parts of his life.

And so—the nature of memories is not that they are, generally speaking, made up of the initial experiences we’ve had. Unless you’re gifted with a photographic memory, most of your experiences are strong flashes and general feeling.

In the arts, we can aid in the creation of those flashes and that feeling, because representation in art is not random. Every brush stroke, every arm movement, every scripted line is particular—representations of real life, but curated, abstracted, narrowed, honed to increase impact. If you are representing a living room, you might do it very photo realistically, but you still have lighting that is specifically highlighting a book, or you have Chekhov’s gun on the table, or a particular shadow on the window. You dictate focus. And that drives not only the specificity of the memory, but the specificity of the feelings and emotions around the memory. They therefore, in a very real way, drive empathy.

There are these cells in your brain called mirror neurons, which are these specific types of nerve cells in all different areas of your brain. These curious cells act like a mirror; when a speaker is telling story, a listener’s brain is going through a ghost version of the actions, neurological actions mimicking the hooks of the story—neurologically imagining picking up a cup of coffee, smelling it, tasting it, and so on, even though the body’s not doing it. The speaker and the listener couple, neurologically.

Researchers have watched this happen using fMRI. They record the brain activation patterns of a speaker recording a story—what lights up when telling a story about walking a dog—and then they play that story back to a listener in the fMRI, and watch that listener’s brain go through the same sequence, almost like the listener is practicing what it’s like to be the speaker—which is to say, walking in the speaker’s shoes.

That’s the physical manifestation of empathy—the living of another person’s experience. And if you cross this concept of mirroring through memory with the idea that multisensory memories are stickier and easier to re-access and retain, then you can understand that empathy is created more strongly if you have a mirroring experience that is multi‑sensory, that is complex, that ignites different, supplemental senses along the way. So, if you experience another person’s life, however briefly, however outwardly passively, then you’ve opened an avenue to a shifted perspective.

Researchers have started studying things like goose bumps, shivers down the spine. Those actually are the result of physical changes in the brain. They’re the result of neurons reacting and growing and changing, based on moments of high arousal in all sort of senses.

One thing that one researcher noted is that the arts are interesting because they act like something that they’re not. What the researcher says is, “Music recruits neural systems of reward and emotion that are similar to those known to respond to specific biologically relevant stimuli.” What does that mean? It means that things like food or sex—base concerns of ours—and those that are artificially activated by things, like drugs—and the arts all work similarly. Which is odd, because the arts are neither strict biological imperatives nor are they a pharmaceutical enhancement. Your body reacts to it with as much urgency as it would food if you were hungry. This means that, for a largely passive-looking group of people (like an audience in a theater), there’s actually a tremendous amount going on. It takes a lot of work to be an audience member in the theater.

To close, sensory experiences are how we learn everything we do. It’s how we learn to ride a bike and to walk and to live with other people. It’s how we learn empathy and how we learn prejudice.

In theater, we can bottle up the basic moral and intellectual lessons of life and to remove all of the extraneous bits that can cloud those in real life interactions. Theater and all the arts are like an incredibly concentrated perfume. You put in it all the most valuable things that we hold with ourselves as human beings, and you place it out there and hope that people suck it in.

Theater artists may say, “Well, that’s why I do what I do.” Of course, that’s true, but when we say we are reflecting back the human experience on the audience, we’re not just blowing smoke. At its best, live theater is literally causing brains to hum in tune. It is actually physically transforming people in real time.

I’m fascinated with this idea of myth. Myth gets a bad rap these days, but theater is the telling of myths in this true, grand sense. Theater is an opportunity for heroes to go on a journey. It’s an opportunity for people to dance with death. It’s an opportunity for people to experience magical moments and impossible things and navigate a world that is not their own.

There’s a book called A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong that I was re‑reading recently. Basically, what Armstrong argues is that myth is another word for the way that human beings have, over our history, made sense of the world. Back in ancient Greek times, ancient Roman times, the way that they made sense of things that didn’t make sense to them is they created a story about it. They vested that story with the faith that in believing that story they would be able to move through their lives.

Then, the age of reason happened. Everything that came after that and the Puritan impulse and everything that says the art is superfluous. Things like mythology or religion have a very important but also marginalized part of life.

Today, the word myth is used to describe something that’s not true. When we hear that gods walked on earth or dead men strode out of tombs or seas miraculously parted or an entire nation sank into the ocean, we think of those as incredible and demonstrably untrue stories—and in doing that we miss the point. We have developed a scientific view of history, and we’re concerned above all about what actually happened, which Kahneman would call focusing on the experience instead of the memory.

“Myths,” Armstrong says, “show us how to behave.” The best theater is real and surreal all at once. When I experience a great piece of art, all of my synapses start firing, including ones that are steps and steps and steps removed from the initial sensory input of that moment.

I get a little more clarity about the things that are going on in me—and also the things that are going on out there in the world. I get clarity about the things I’m worried about, and I get clarity about the things that are rising up in this community in which I exist. I get worried, and I get clarity about things that are confusing to me or exciting to me.

I learn about other people’s points of view and how they relate to mine, what grief looks like, what love looks like, what hope looks like. When I experience a great piece of art, it’s useless to try and explain it to someone who wasn’t there because very often when you do that, you end up describing the experience instead of the memory. Or as Seamus Heaney says:

Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

Because if you try explain it, you’re explaining what happened, not what happened to you. You’re talking about the plot instead of the myth.

And so, one more myth for you. In the southern rain forests of India, there’s a sect of Brahmins who have been singing the same songs for thousands and thousands of years. They pass the songs downward through the generations, taking care that the exact length, tonality, order and speed of sounds are maintained.

It’s a very, very careful process, and it’s painstaking and entirely inefficient, but it is also absolutely necessary—because these songs that they sing are so old that they’ve lost comprehension of the language inside the songs. The music has literally outlived the knowledge of the words, which makes the singing a true act of faith. They’re passing down the non‑literal attributes of that experience. Within this art is the only remnant of a society whispering forward from generations ago. It is the strong bone latticework on which to arrange all the fragments of time happening now and yet to come—a way to understand their experience in this moment amidst generations and generations of their people.

There’s something precious about this ability so clearly and so specifically see the after image of life and to understand your role in a larger place in time. You can understand the before and the after, and you can understand the wonder of being in this moment.

As school children were, at one point or another, asked to stare at an American flag. You stare at it and you stare at it and you stare at it, and then you look at a blank wall, and you see the after image of that flag. It requires you to hold your eyes open until they swell up with tears. Then, close them and see what has been imprinted in your brain. So should it be with all our heart.

This is not to say that everything needs to be deep or brooding or steeped in sadness or significance, but it’s to say that the best art, which is to say the best of what we do, is memorable and that that memorableness is not a side effect—it is the goal. The transformation is not a side effect—it is the goal. Forward movement, the pursuit of dreams and visions for a better and different way of living. That should be the goal of great art and great arts organizations.

When we make a difference with our stories to other people—when we make a difference in the way that other people see the world—we must celebrate. In her last line of her book, Armstrong give this call of arms. She says, “If professional religious leaders can no longer instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight into our lost and damaged world.”

I don’t know about you, but to me, it feels pretty lost and damaged right now. And so we have our charge. Let us not be disheartened. Let us celebrate our ability to bring fresh insight, and heal, and challenge, and go forth and tell the stories that we can tell, bring the hope that we can bring, make synapses sizzle, and transform all of the people that we touch into the best people that they can be.

Thank you.

Based on a speech given at Southwestern University in December 2016. This speech draws in part from previously published writing.

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But back before that, on a cool day in June 1962, a patrician looking man, not terribly tall, dressed in a dark suit with bowtie and pocket square, took his place behind the podium in the main ballroom of the Sheraton-Park Hotel in Washington, DC. August Heckscher (in photo, being sworn in as Special Consultant for the Arts), the grandson of a wealthy capitalist and philanthropist from whom he inherited both wealth and his name, had a rounded nose and chin that gave him a vaguely Midwestern look, which, paired with a ready smile, the three-button suit and bowtie, and his carefully coiffed white-gray hair, painstakingly parted over his left eye, gave him a combined air of gentile approachability and quiet authority. Both an academic and a frequent politico of various stripes, he looked at his notes, and then out at the gathered crowd—over 1,500 women drawn from throughout the country, there to participate in the 71^st annual Convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and to caucus around issues of community improvement and development—took a breath, and began to speak.

“The arts,” he said, “have received in these years an attention, and have been employed with an enthusiasm, never before known in this country…It is impossible to go into the cities across our land without being convinced of the significance men attach to the cultural institutions in their midst.”

The women sat at their tables and listened. The previous day, they had heard from Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy-by-marriage and the shepherd of a new government program, just over a year old, called the Peace Corps, about which he had spoken forcefully and at some length. He had articulated a new, peaceful view of what citizenship in America could mean. In so doing he had, in a way, primed the crowd for the speech Heckscher was now embarking upon, for Mr. Heckscher was the newly-minted Special Consultant for the Arts to President Kennedy, the first person to hold such a post, and he had been asked to speak about the federal government’s role in the arts, and the role of the arts in the betterment of American communities—a role that he felt was nothing short of vital to the future success of the nation.

“Why this emphasis should have occurred,” he went on, “the historian of the future will tell us better than we can perceive or guess. I suspect that the reason lies deep in the national life.”

Reflecting back on his work years later, Heckscher would run this history line in the other direction, as well, not towards the future, but instead towards the past:

We must always remember our previous generations. If Kennedy had Robert Frost as the poet of the White House, Theodore Roosevelt of course had brought national attention to Edwin Arlington Robinson. Go back to the early days of the Republic and Jefferson is the outstanding example. And Adams used to say that his generation had to build the continent and do the work with their hands, but a generation would come along which would devote itself fully to the arts and literature. And in the twentieth century that time has certainly come.

The start of the 1960s was a time of incredible promise and optimism for the nation. Even in the glimmerings of the new, simmering social consciousness that would eventually erupt into the civil rights movement, even in the shadow of a looming and terrifying Russia, the close of the monotonous, post-World War II 1950’s brought with it a celebration of a sort of possibility—not least possibility for the widespread communities of ever-more-diverse people who called the United States home. This was a particular view, of course, and one that, with the eye of the historian Heckscher yielded clarity to on that day, seems overly rosy and simplistic. But as he went on to outline, to him, speaking in a ballroom in 1962, the nation seemed poised on the edge of an era where fact-based knowledge was to be no longer either enough or fulfilling, where the relative prosperity of the majority of the country’s citizens had created a unique opportunity to look up and past the base of Maslow’s pyramid to the higher needs that existed above, and where technology and health improvements had, for many, freed up copious amounts of time from doing work and allowed for longer lifespans. To Heckscher, such a convergence created a void most ideally filled with culture—or else dangerous and an opening to decline.

“We do not intend that our people should decline,” said Heckscher, defiantly. “We intend great days for ourselves and for our descendants. And so the cultivation of the arts attracts us. There is thus in all parts of our country, and at all levels of the population, a new emphasis upon the life of the arts.”

Heckscher would eventually author the report that crystallized a movement long in the making to create a federal government body to support and nurture America’s arts and culture—and which would lead to the founding, in 1966, of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. His life, ultimately stretching from his birth in 1914 to his death, at age 83, in 1997, would allow him to witness a tremendous progression in America—a shift from industrialization to an idea economy, a rising awareness of the multitude of voices that had before been a background drone to a single dominant culture, and, perhaps foremost, the ongoing transformation and re-transformation of America’s communities in cycles of boom and bust through war and peace, recession and prosperity, generations and generations again.

But on that day in 1962, smack in the middle of his life and the life of a very particular movement, Heckscher called out a truth that has echoed across at least the last 115 years, in various forms and functions, and that now, in the late dawn of a new century, leads the creative sector forward: “Where the cultural life flowers,” he said, “the community as a whole prospers and grows.”

Due in large part to ubiquitous access to new types of arts and culture, in which there were in turn more and more representations of the extant poverty in American cities, the late 1950s and early 1960’s were a time in which the general U.S. population “rediscovered” income inequality in the country. A special edition of Fortune magazine in 1957 was filled with essays on the negative effects urban policy, and also featured the debut of Jane Jacobs’ extremely influential excoriations of such policies and their failure to revive American downtowns. Films like The Blackboard Jungle and West Side Story served as vanguards of a general influx of pop culture representations of the urban plight. Photography, journalism, and music started opening previously closed doors between white middle- and upper-class populations and the African-American and Hispanic populations who were beginning to organize for equal representation.

The dawning awareness of poverty and inequality made it a political pressure point as well as a social one. A wide range of efforts cropped up to fight both urban and rural social problems, particularly after the 1962 publication of The Other America, a scathing portrayal of various classes of “invisible” poor people that caught the attention of many national political leaders including President Kennedy. Internationally, a slowly chilling Cold War provided another argument for the government’s role in nurturing arts and culture—cultural might. Said Roy Johnson, the head of the Advance Research Projects Agency:

If we’re going to survive in the struggle with Russia, this is our only hope for victory. Outright war is unlikely, so the battle of winning men to one camp or the other becomes the strategy of appealing to men’s spiritual needs, to their hunger for fulfillment, to their cultural sides. This country is on the verge of an explosion in culture. The traditional barriers between artists and businessmen are breaking down. So are the barriers between art and life. Cultural leadership is there for the taking. If we work hard and with understanding, we can take it.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of President Kennedy’s senior advisors and a behind-the-scenes architect of the process that ultimately led to the creation of the NEA, framed it more grandly:

We will win the world to an understanding of our policy and purposes not through the force of our arms or the array of our wealth but through the splendor of our ideals. Let us never forget the wise reminder of the President’s Committee on National Goals: “In the eyes of posterity, the success of the United States as a civilized society will be largely judged by the creative activities of its citizens in art, architecture, literature, music, and the sciences.”

The Rockefeller Foundation turned its attention to philanthropic support of social interventions, including a variety of cultural measures—among them community-based arts activity, and a variety of proposals for a more coordinated role of government in arts-based community development emerged from Congress, who had ironically killed the Arts Projects of the WPA a few decades before. In 1958, Congressman Jim Wright, in a statement so baldly honest as to be practically unimaginable today, said on the House floor:

It is always kind of easy to ridicule and poke fun at things of a cultural nature. I plead guilty to having done my share of it, but I think, Mr. Speaker, that we have reached a state of maturity in this nation where that kind of attitude no longer becomes us. Sooner or later we have to grow up and stop poking fun at things intellectual and cultural.

By the beginning of the 1960s, Wright and others—the majority of Congress—had come to see the value of, and government role in, cultivating the arts as a way of promoting general community health. So prevalent was political support on both sides of the aisle for federal support of the arts in one form or another that poet Karl Shapiro, skeptical of the intervention of government into private artistic practice, derisively said, “We are in a period of cultural kissing games…every politician is taking on the arts as part of his constituency!”

The number of disconnected local arts agencies continued to grow, as did the theory and practice around arts-based community development and cultural planning. For the second time in American history, the federal government had aligned behind a more formal and pervasive role of art in civic life—even as a rising spirit of resistance to dominant white cultural norms and top-down policy creation threatened to destabilize the whole country.

In 1960, the loose collection of local arts agencies that existed in the United States, nurtured under the wing of the American Symphony Orchestra League, coalesced into Community Arts Councils, Inc. (CACI, the precursor to Americans for the Arts). At the same moment, due in large part to increasing civil unrest and the rising voices of dissent from the disenfranchised, as well as increased support from both government and private philanthropy, a complex national community development system emerged.

As a new awareness of how power was shifting from the grasstops to the grassroots took hold, there was, as predicted by Roy Johnson, an explosion of cultural activity. The cultural hegemony that had been the norm basically since the founding of the country was being challenged nationwide, particularly through the large lens of the Civil Rights movement and cultural leaders within it like Luis Valdez of Teatro Campesino and John O’Neal of the Free Southern Theater. Much of the power of the civil rights movement, particularly the coordinated and unified efforts of black civil rights leaders in the South, emerged from the use of cultural assets ranging from songs to propaganda art that catalyzed action and gave the movement identity.

As early as 1955, there had been federal-level interest in the creation of a national Advisory Commission on the Arts. In March 1962, President Kennedy appointed Heckscher as the first ever Special Consultant on the Arts, and Heckscher, over the course of 15 months (with an interlude one day in June to speak to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs) wrote The Arts and the National Government, a report that recommended both a Federal Advisory Council and a funded Federal Arts Foundation to provide subsidies. Kennedy issued an executive order in 1963 that founded the first Advisory Commission on the Arts inside the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, but never had the chance to populate it. In November, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated two days after announcing Heckscher’s successor, leaving the creation of a federal arts body in the hands of his successor, President Johnson.

Following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson launched the War on Poverty with a mandate to “strike at poverty’s roots [through] remedial education, job training, health and employment counseling, and neighborhood improvement.” He later added mandates around preschool education, food stamps, college preparation and child nutrition. His noble efforts, like the iterations that had come before, felt to those on the ground like a top-down approach that minimized and marginalized the opinions of those most impacted by the work. Buoyed by a feeling of new agency drawn in part from increased awareness and general support of the public, grassroots groups and individuals started rising up against top-down urban renewal efforts, stopping the construction of highway projects and the tearing down of homes.

Race riots occurred in Los Angeles and Chicago, the civil rights marches laced through the South, protests began around the Vietnam War, and the various protest activities of the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez in the Southwest forced a reckoning of sorts among the population. These movements focused on extending agency to those impacted—bridging up from local-level community development efforts first pursued in the aftermath of the WPA projects to encourage national-level policy that involved input from those who would be impacted by it.

To some degree, through these efforts, the anti-poverty and community development policies of the 1960s bucked the tide set in motion through City Beautiful, public housing, urban renewal, and the creation of transit systems and instead incorporated at least some degree of input from the bottom up. This is perhaps the reason that arts-based community development often situates the “founding” of the movement to the 1960’s—not just because of the incorporation of the National Endowment for the Arts and CACI in this decade, but also, fundamentally, because the War on Poverty was a watershed moment in how governments at all levels interacted with the communities they were trying to help, shifting from a dictatorial approach to a collaborative one, and thereby opening the door for the transition of community-based art to art-based community activation.

With continued pressure being exerted nationally for the formation of what would become the National Endowment for the Arts, legislation authorizing its creation was passed in September 1965 and signed shortly thereafter, and the National Endowment for the Arts was born in 1966.

This essay is adapted in part from the longer essay “Arts & America: 1780-2015,” which originally appeared in Arts & America: Arts, Culture, and the Future of America’s Communities. The linked-to edition includes full citations.

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“This is the time when artists go to work. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal.”

This is a quote from Toni Morrison. It has stuck with me. This is our power, and it is immense. But what will we do with it?

Since the election, a week ago, I have been in three different cities. I go from here to another one and, then, another one, and another one. I have had so many conversations about what the election means. Not the partisan conversations—the panicked conversations from people who are on the liberal end of the spectrum, the impatient conversations from people on the conservative end of the spectrum. I mean conversations about what the election showed us about who we are right now and what we need to become in order to be the best citizens and communities we can be.

I was raised in a town in Connecticut where, in my entire high school, there were three people of color. I was raised in a town where the average household income was around half a million dollars a year. I was raised in a bubble and didn’t realize that I was in a bubble.

I was raised in a town where a well-meaning teacher took a Korean girl who was adopted and stood her up in front of the class and, as a lesson cultural diversity, asked us to point out all the ways she was different, and I did nothing. I was raised in a place that allowed me to feel appropriate responding to a homeless person on a school trip that I couldn’t help him because “I only had large bills.” I was so well‑insulated that I look back on some of the ways that I acted and the things that I did and thought and I am ashamed. I live in and with my privilege, and while I don’t let them weigh on me to the point of inaction, it feels important to acknowledge them, and push past them.

Over time, and in large part because of our experience adopting and raising our bi-racial daughter, Cici, I found myself on a personal journey that also then intersected with a professional journey. I became deeply interested in issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and particularly issues of white privilege and bias. I didn’t quite understand how I could have moved to through the world for nearly 30 years without understanding the clumsy, privileged damage I was inadvertently doing at certain points in my life.

I found myself, after that experience, working at Americans for the Arts, which is 56-year-old organization that has been dedicated since its founding to the role of arts and culture in healthy, vibrant, equitable community development. It also, as a 56‑year‑old organization, has gone through all of the stages of what that conversation has meant: all of the fits and starts of conversations that were first about diversity, then this idea of inclusion, and then conversations about equity—which have, in one way or another, gone on in our field for the last 50 years or more.

I was asked, among many other things, to lead a department that was charged with talking about the relevance of arts and culture in local communities—which is a conversation you can’t have without talking about equity. It is the thing we hear, over and over, as we have gone into communities across the country and had conversations about what people in those communities see as the role of arts and culture in their lives.

Particularly, at this moment, as we as a country are confronting a tremendous amount of division and trying to understand how we can feel so diametrically opposed to one another, the arts have an integral role to play in helping people find their common ground. We are in a moment where people think they have nothing in common with other people, and that’s not good. That’s why I go from city to city to city and have conversations with folks like you. Because at Americans for the Arts, we believe in the ripple effect of arts and culture. We believe that the arts are an agent for community development. We believe that the arts impact a single person and that single person impacts a group of people, a group of people impacts the community and so on, out in to the world over space and over time. We believe that all the arts should be for all the people. We believe, like Morrison, that the arts heal civilizations and make them whole. That’s our philosophy around arts and culture.

***

But how do civilizations heal? It’s a beautiful sentiment—and it’s certainly necessary—but what does it mean? For me, I think of it happening in nine ways—nine things that are necessary for a community to begin to heal in moments of division. All nine of these are deeply, truly what we, in the arts, do every day. We are the caretakers of culture, heritage, community and creative life. These are our work, and our work is crucial.

• First: the creation of empathy. One thing we know for sure is that arts and cultural experiences actually increase the physical connection between different parts of your brain. That is part of giving people the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. The more connections you have to an experience, the more ways that you can find some commonality and then walk down that narrow bridge of commonality to an understanding of where they might be coming from.
• Second: the strengthening of social bridges and bonds. When you are in a physical space with another group of people and you were laughing, you were crying or you were experiencing epiphanies, you become closer to the people who you came with. When you were experiencing those epiphanies about someone else’s culture, you become closer to those other people and can understand them more deeply.
• Third: the encouragement of critical thinking. Arts and culture helps people to understand the steps that they need to take to make an opinion for themselves. Arts participation improves how likely they are to go all the way through high school, to go to college, to further their education, which may allow them opportunity to explore a broader view of the world and then assess anew.
• Fourth: the sparking of innovation. Arts and culture are integral not only to bringing innovative organizations into communities, but to keeping those innovators inside organizations happy, engaged and participating in community life. The arts are also feeding innovation itself through the integration of creative practice, the encouragement out‑of‑the‑box thinking, the ability to play.
• Fifth: the creation of a sense of belonging. You need a strong sense of belonging among people. If they don’t feel like they belong then they feel like they are alienated. That loneliness reinforces itself, and leads to hopelessness, and division, and the casting about to figure out who or what has brought someone to this moment. The arts have the ability to provide a sense of belonging. They create a home, as any dorky, lonesome kid (cough me cough) who found his tribe in a theater knows. Our forms and venues also can surface that loneliness to others, and make people more aware of groups and individuals that are feeling disenfranchised.
• Sixth: the illumination of pathways to potential. For certain parts of the population, it is very hard to imagine a world that is different from the world they’re living in. Whether you’re talking about a third‑generation blue collar worker in West Virginia who can’t imagine a life without coal or an inner‑city family from El Salvador who can’t figure out how to step up that ladder and who is met by barriers at every, turn the ability to engage in a creative life, to think about alternative paths through creativity—whether that means actually becoming creative workers or not—is crucial to how we collectively reimagine our paths forward in this country.

These last three are more systematic.

• Seventh: the increasing of participation in civic dialogue. The arts gravitate toward multiple voices. They shine in those moments of messy work, of bringing people together and celebrating difference, of bringing everyone in under the tent, of making new tents. Of dancing together out under the stars when the tent feels too stifling.
• Eighth: the transformation of systems. The arts allow for more opportunities to transform the systems, and boy do we need that right now. We have created a variety of inequitable systems in this country—whether you’re talking about government or public sector, in the arts or outside the arts—and we have to, before we can make any real forward momentum, assess the systems we have and discard or adapt the systems that are disadvantaging the people were trying to serve.
• Ninth: the impacting of impacts. Sometimes, the arts, at the right moment, can help make a situation that would have been inequitable slightly more equitable. Sometimes, at the right moment, the arts can be part of making a good outcome into a great one.

Nine things we need to heal. Nine rudiments of empathy, respect, critical thought, caring, innovation, hope, and opportunity. The arts—that is to say, the artists, which is to say, you—have the ability to make those conversations, and that transformation, happen. These are our responsibility. These are what we need to think about.

Whether you are actively working in arts and culture or you are one of the many people in the public or private sector who is helping to support arts and culture, this is what our business is now. This is what we have to be doing.

Over time, this work coalesced, for us at Americans for the Arts, around cultural equity—a broad umbrella that is inclusive of, and also moves beyond, race, ethnicity, age or educational background. Identity is incredibly complicated, and has many different ways of manifesting and changing over time. As a national service organization, we can’t and shouldn’t try to directly serve everyone at the same time in the same way. In supporting a framework of cultural equity, we look to support you in determining your community’s priorities, and to provide you with the resources and services you need to understand and impact the inequities in your own community.

As election results rolled in and pundits started talking about the great divide between voting pools, I found myself understanding even more deeply why a broad embrace of cultural equity is so crucial right now.

***

A couple of weeks before the election, Saturday Night Live did a skit called “Black Jeopardy,” which featured Tom Hanks, the guest host, as a Trump voter competing against two African American women. In particular, Hanks is playing the trope of a rural, economically disadvantaged, and undereducated Trump voter.

Over the series of questions it becomes clear that in almost all areas, he and the two African American women share a tremendous number of beliefs, desires and challenges. It is not until the button on the skit, when a category comes up called “What lives matter?” that they diverge.

When I saw that skit—which was both so funny and so on point—I marveled, because there, in 3 minutes on a sketch comedy show, was a pretty crystallized illustration of what cultural equity means, at least to me. We have many places of commonality and relatively few places of difference.

All inequities are interconnected. Any work is making progress for all of the work. Some work I did in 2013 called the Arts Diversity Index proved this. We looked at 750,000 arts attendees in the San Francisco Bay Area and cross-referenced a variety of different demographic categories appended to sales records in order to understand, among other things, how those demographies were related to each other.

What we found was that they’re related all over the place. Any of those red arrows are positive correlations. Anything that looks blue is a negative correlation. To explain, look at the thicker red arrows. Those arrows indicate that, in terms of correlation, if your audience has a broader spectrum of age, then it is also statistically likely that it has a broader spectrum of racial diversity. If your audience has a broader spectrum of racial diversity, then it is also statistically likely that it will have a broader spectrum of household income. And of course vice versa.

If you think about it, that really isn’t surprising. We know that younger people in The United States are more diverse than older people. We know that a broad demographic set in terms of race and ethnicity probably brings in people who are higher and lower house hold incomes if only because some of them are younger, they have less disposable income, and so the story goes.

But there it is, statistics and data, and this supports an intersectional way of thinking that directly impacts the way that we think about what we’re doing. Any act to address inequity is an act to address all inequity.

Each community is incredibly different. Jane Chu, the chairman of the NEA, likes to say, “If you visited one community, you visited one community,” and that is very, very true.

As a national service organization it is not within our ability to know what is going on in your community. You’re much equipped to do that. We want to resource you and help you in identifying and tackling the pressing needs of your community in that moment.

Multiple efforts, pursued aggressively, make more progress possible, in part because that freedom to choose what to tackle brings more people into the fight. It takes a lot of different directions, attacks from a lot of different directions to tackle this. This has been a systemic and ongoing thing for 200 plus years. If we are to collaborate and do our part to try and mitigate and take down some of the systems and to address and redress some of the inequities that have happened over time, it’s going to take a lot of different people doing a lot of different things.

In this intersectional context, I want to touch on the concept of social location and identity. This diagram, based on work by Carmen Morgan of ArtEquity, calls out ten different areas of inequity, and then, in a two-part exercise, helps articulate our areas of empowerment and disempowerment.

The idea is that, for each of the ten areas, you first start out by brainstorming in whatever group you’re doing the exercise with about which group of people is the dominant group in that category, based on access to power. In the context of race/ethnicity, that usually is white people, in the case of gender, it’s usually males, etc. And so on around the wheel. When we did this exercise as an organization, the basic answers we got to were as follows.

Once you have identified these areas, you then begin the process of cross-referencing yourself in all of these spaces. This is what mine looks like:

It tells me that I have a tremendous amount of power and I have the ability to use that power to impact the way that other people who might have less power in this context at least go through the world. The reason that that’s particularly personally important to me is that this is what we know about Cici’s pinwheel so far:

Of course, she’s five. She doesn’t know whether she’s cisgender or transgender yet. She doesn’t necessarily know who she’s attracted to. We don’t necessarily know whether she has or will have a disability. It’s potentially possible that many of these pie slices will disappear for her.

It’s an important thing to try and figure out and grapple with as someone who is incredibly privileged. And that microcosm of me-and-my-daughter again can be magnified to a larger conversation. If your organization is extremely privileged, and you’re in a space where there’re people who have less of that power available to them, what are you doing to share that power? How are you doing so with humility and an understanding that you, by and large, are not directly responsible for the privilege you have—your gender, sexual orientation, age, race are all things beyond your control, and any power you gain from them is incidental and unearned. Privileges are privileges—things given, not necessarily earned. How are you using your social location to carry forward an intersectional conversation and create space?

Everyone deserves a full and vibrant creative life, but it is not up to us to tell you what that means. It is up to us to resource you or to resource the local partners that we work with so that they can help make that full and vibrant creative life. Whatever you want it to be.

And so to our responsibility as a field. Our responsibility did not start on 11/9, but it certainly crystallized on 11/9.

One of the reasons that it crystallized on this day is that we saw a map that looked like this:

And we thought to ourselves, “God, we are such a divided people.”

But the truth is that if you break it down to counties, the map looks more like this:

And if you actually take those counties, and you look at every single vote, and you shade them accordingly, then the map begins to look pretty darn purple:

It’s important to remember this: the red/blue divide is not actually the full truth of where we are as a country. That map, and our constructs around it, of division and a lack of common ground and common respect, doesn’t illustrate how close or far apart any two individuals are.

But it’s hard to remember that when you see things like this:

or like this:

or like this:

These images, and the stories of intolerance and hate, give me, as I’m sure they give you, deep pain. They make me want to rage at those people, to run from those people, to reinforce our divide and give up on them. But I can’t, and you can’t.

We have a lot of work to do as a country, and it’s up to us to do a lot of it. We are not so different that we have nothing in common, and we have to dig past the anger to get to common ground–which, just to say it, is not to ignore affronts to basic morals or values.

For me, I come back to Cici, because a few weeks before the election, she said something that has rung through my hyper-liberal household, even on election night as her two parents melted down…

She said, “If Donald Trump wins, it’ll be OK, because we’ll take care of each other.” Then she said, “We’ll even take care of the people who voted for him,” which I thought was very generous.

The lessons our children teach us. The lessons we learn together.

Cici loves superheroes. She loves Spiderman and Captain America and Iron Man. As I traveled in the days after the election, moving from city to city and missing her terribly, I kept coming back to a string of recent nights where she had chosen as her bedtime book a compendium of short Marvel superhero stories. Which are, of course, our modern myths—as fantastical and allegorical as the Greek and Roman tales of the gods. And like all myths, they teach us things we need desperately to learn, if we listen to them. So I listened, in my tiny airplane seat, and here’s what I heard:

• Villains and heroes aren’t born, they’re made by experience. Which is another way of saying that alienation takes a lot of forms. Judgment and blame do, as well.
• Villainy and heroism are strongly in the eye of the beholder. We view the world through our own experience and that’s the limitation of being human.
• Most everyone believes that they act for good, it’s just the definition and parameters of “good” that shifts. Most people, even people whose rationale you can’t being to understand, can probably articulate a path to their version of goodness. And there’s much to be learned in understanding that journey, even if you can never agree.
• Moving into the light (or the darkness) can sometimes happen so slowly you don’t even notice it until you’re there. Transformations take time, but they can also go both ways—we must be vigilant, and patient, and impatient, and strong, and flexible.
• With great power comes great responsibility. The arts are not inherently good or bad, but they are powerful. I’d even go so far as to say they’re a superpower. You can use the arts to do great things, or you can use them, as has happened over the last 50 years and beyond, to reinforce all sorts of terrible systems that disadvantage people and make certain small groups’ lives better. We are at a moment of deciding that.

For us, as a family, and then also as an organization, and as a community, it comes down to, “What are we going to do with that power, and what are we going to do with that responsibility?” And when my faith fails, I think of Cici in a superhero pose, and I recommit to doing good, to building bridges, to leaning into love, compassion, and the good intentions of most people—and in my ability, with humility and patience, to be part of navigating towards that healed civilization Toni Morrison was talking about.

One of the ways that my boss at Americans for the Arts, Bob Lynch, sometimes ends his speeches is by quoting “The Oath of the Athenian Citizen,” which I thought was good, so I totally stole it. This is what it says:

“We commit this city to be, not as good as but better than, not as beautiful as but more beautiful than what it was when it was committed to us.”

That’s something I try and emulate every day, every community that I’m in, with the humbleness and humility that is necessary, and the understanding at the same time that I have a tremendous power to give. May you do that as well—we need your power now more than ever.

Thank you for all you do.

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I have previously referenced a set of essays by Eula Biss compiled into the amazing collection Notes from No Man’s Land, but I’m now going to do it again, this time a different essay.  In it, Biss examines the time before “white” was all whites (if it is today)—in particular, the time when immigrant populations of Italians and Irish were viewed hierarchically as lower than other white folks, and were each treated as a minority.  In her essay, Biss explores how those two populations eventually integrated into white society on the backs of African-Americans, but in the process, she also nods toward the appropriation and integration of Irish and Italian traditions, cultural experiences, food, etc, into the overarching culture.  With an appropriate asterisk that that particular story relies on the disadvantaging of another group, which I hope need not always be the case, I have found myself continually fascinated by what that particular story of assimilation (as opposed to integration—and here, we should be having a discussion about whether “assimilation” is the pursuit, but let’s table that for a second) says about the necessity of allowing your cultural identity to become, essentially, open source.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, the celebration of the arrival of Christianity to Ireland, a staunchly Irish holiday.  It is, arguably, one of the most beloved holidays in the United States, raucous and butch, and is viewed, even as it is quintessentially Irish, as also quintessentially American.  Anyone and everyone is encouraged to wear green, to celebrate.  Mardi Gras, a historically French Christian celebration (of which there are a variety of other variants in other cultures) has migrated far from its roots and been embraced as a larger cultural indicator.

The privileged culture that we are all currently so preoccupied with, the one wrapped up in the short phrase “white, rich, educated,” is an amalgam of a vast set of cultures, many of which came to that single signifier of “white” through a long, argumentative, and bigoted set of treatments following immigration.  Appropriation (and many, many other factors) led to a broadening of the boundaries of that singular group.  Which I find fascinating.

This is not, of course, to say that such is the same (or the goal) for the cultural traditions of folks who currently sit outside of the “white privilege” sphere.  And in that statement, I mean to bundle up a whole lot of caveats, and to recognize that this is extraordinarily complex and touchy.  But while my initial reaction to the Native American Cry, Trojans and the Asian Julius Caesar was similarly annoyed to Hillman’s and others, I find myself more and more preoccupied with the idea that bluntly stating that one culture’s traditions should not be appropriated by another set of people is a difficult and slippery slope.

When Hillman posted about Tiger Lily (on Facebook, in case you go hunting on her blog), one commenter posited that perhaps there was some sort of logic in the choice—that Wendy, being upper-class British, might naturally gravitate towards, and populate her fantasies with, the type of white women with whom she surely had more engagement.  This theory was dismissed, the railing against the Hollywood machine commenced, and the truth is that that nuanced and interesting dissection of cultural appropriation through cultural appropriation is probably not the reason—the reason is likely that Rooney Mara, the girl with the dragon tattoo herself, has a bigger name than someone else who is Native American.  Johnny Depp certainly wasn’t cast as Tonto to make any larger or more complex argument about cultural appropriation.  And I take all of that—and yet I’d like to leave the gate open just a bit for the moment when someone does want to engage that type of nuance, that there be room for that.  That people judge things, at least a bit, after and not before.

To the connected, but different, issue of arts experiences appropriating other cultural traditions utilizing scripts, people, etc of inappropriate cultural backgrounds, I really have to say I’m worried about the lack of nuance with which many in the field are approaching the conversation.  Importantly, I am not saying that either Wooster Group or Lantern’s productions were not racially insensitive—I’m saying that the simple sampling of other cultural traditions alone cannot make them so.  Paula Vogel has done that.  Cirque du Soleil has done that.  Lion King did that.  Jose Rivera does that.  Jay Z does that.  Kurosawa did that.  Ai Weiwei does that.

In his open letter to the Lantern staff and production team, artist Makoto Hirano lists many issues that he feels devalue the actual Japanese cultural touchstones that the Lantern production appropriated.  He calls them out for having a fully non-Japanese cast, and then for having those non-Japanese people perform traditional Japanese things including bowing to each other, traditional kneeling, utilize Japanese instruments, etc.  He closes out with an admonition to consult an expert when doing something like this—a very important, and I think correct, admonition, although he says it more in the spirit of “so they can tell you you shouldn’t do it” and less in the spirit of “so they can work with you to do such appropriation with respect.”

He calls them out for having Brutus use a Chinese sword while everyone else has Japanese swords.

He calls them out for having all the white folks attack and kill the “only black person on stage.”

And in those two bullets, when I first read the letter, I paused.  Because I sensed, in them, a whole lot of assumptions on Hirano’s part that might or might not be true.  Perhaps the directors and designers didn’t understand the significance of giving Brutus a Chinese sword.  Perhaps they did—perhaps they were making a statement about his status as the betrayer of Julius Caesar, an uncomfortable man in a play of characters who, by and large, pick an angle and pursue it to its logical conclusion, someone who instead acts differently, doesn’t quite understand all that is going on around him, is a bit of an alien in the landscape.  Indeed, if you read Hillman’s post on the Lantern production, she both highlights the artistic leads’ more complex comments on why they chose to do what they did, and dismisses them because they, in her words, “see these cultures as visual art available for their use, not as an inextricable part of the heritage of real, living people”–a statement that I think reads a whole lot of motivation into a few quotes, but again, I haven’t seen  the show.

Perhaps the directors weren’t cognizant of the image they would be making on stage, of everyone white ganging up on and murdering the only black man on stage.  Given, however, that that black man was the guy playing Julius Caesar and that Philadelphia is an extremely black/white racially charged environment, I would instead guess that that image was meant to be uncomfortable, to make people question, in that moment, the unjustness of murdering a man who you don’t understand, who is different than  you.  Again, having not seen it, the set up reminds me of nothing so much as Amiri Baraka’s The Dutchman, where that exact discomfort was exactly the point.

I think where I get caught up is in the sort of starting assumption that this type of crafting, unless done one very particular way, is immediately and without exception wrong and racist.  Hillman calls out the fact that the use of the signifiers in the Lantern production is “using artifacts of other cultures – both groups currently marginalized in the US – while shutting out the people of those cultures from the artistic process because they believe their artistic vision is MORE IMPORTANT.”  And in  reading those statements, which I’ve seen a whole lot across the web about these and other issues of appropriation, I feel a frustration in me start to rise.

Appropriation comes with all sorts of hang ups.  The sampling of other cultures for the purpose of easy symbolism, exoticism and/or profit (and boy is there a lot of that, and it’s all mortifying) can sit so close to the sampling of other cultures for the purpose of true homage, celebration, and exploration.  To put a blanket embargo on such engagement, without nuance, seems to me to be short-sighted and reactionary—particularly, actually, when I hear such judgment from white people.

My daughter went to a Purim party a few days ago.  She (not a Jew) dressed, as many of the Jewish girls did, as a princess to celebrate Queen Esther, a woman whose heroism she and I both knew nothing about until a week ago.  My host told me the whole tale of Queen Esther and her heroism, of the evil advisor Hamen, of the salvation of the Jews—and then told me that this story was a lot like all of the Jewish stories, starting with the Jews being in peril and ending with them being saved, but that this one, this one was different, was his favorite, because it didn’t involve a miracle.  He told me he liked it because it involved no parting of seas, just simply the intelligence of a woman who wished to save her people, and who was able to explain her culture to someone who was not like her at least enough that he didn’t consider them so different as to warrant persecution anymore.

I have watched a Hispanic male soprano sing the female parts of an Italian opera on the platform of a Metro station after work in a full suit and been brought to tears.  I have seen white sorority sisters step with pride and without irony, and be applauded.  I have watched a black woman perform a sun salutation followed by a set of Tai Chi poses with such exactitude and reverence that there was no doubt in my mind she was celebrating two cultures, not making fun of them.  I just heard two white musicians talking about how their music has been revolutionized because of their incorporation of 808-style drums into their music.  I have seen reverential appropriation and, of course, I have seen a whole lot of facile, racist crap.

I also understand that assimilation, Borg-like, isn’t perhaps the best way for all of this to go down.  But I equally think that fragmentation, the clutching to one’s chest of what is one’s alone, is problematic.

There is a bravery required in giving your culture a bit of a long leash.  There is a trust that is often broken, but that sometimes isn’t.  There is a constant fear that is occasionally met with generosity.  The point, I guess, is that I’ve seen both appreciation and advantage-taking, and so, I would imagine, have you.  And that I think the world gets better when we are able to grapple with our understandings and misunderstandings—that we are better when we are afforded opportunities to experience and engage with new things—that we should allow ourselves to at least start from a place of believing in the intelligent grappling with complex ideas rather than that blind, insensitive taking of something sacred.  We have so many problems to actually tackle, I just want to make sure that, where we can, we also see the light and celebrate it, even when it is clumsy, even when it is not perfect, rather than simply snuff it out, and turn our faces back into the darkness shouting about how we’re better than that person we’ve not bothered to engage.

By way of introduction to this blog, Clay graciously asked me to share some thoughts of my experiences at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference. I appreciate the invitation and hope I have something worthwhile to say.

Portland was my first NAMPC.  I was looking forward to a new experience.  My field is not arts marketing per se.  By trade – I’m a sign language interpreter and have worked as an administrator in the ‘deafness’ field for more than 30 years.  I’m also a arts service provider – running a small nonprofit organization – Hands On, which provides accessibility services to theaters for deaf audiences primarily in NYC.  I’ve long held that audiences with disabilities including deaf audiences would benefit from being considered from a marketing perspective – to understand disability from a multi-cultural standpoint, rather than a strictly legal requirement.  So I was looking forward to an arts marketing conference.  I think too we all need to inter-relate more often – we need to stop ‘preaching to the choir’ by only attending and speaking at conferences of like minded people and start to cross pollinate, for lack of a better phrase.  So for me going to a marketing conference and not a disability or deaf specific conference held the potential of doing some of that cross pollination I thought would help me learn and share disability issues in a non disability specific environment.

I have to first say it was not as easy or as comfortable a time for me as I thought it would be.  I was surprised at how ‘different’ and out of place I felt.  I will admit that this was in no way due to anyone’s comments or looks or anything that overtly made me feel different.  It’s more a statement of fact – I am different.  I am a person with a disability. I walk with a cane and for longer distances I use a scooter.  My diversity, the thing that makes me unique, is my disability – it’s part of who I am and I’m fine with that.  So in looking at the conference schedule, a discussion about diversity (Sunday morning’s 8:00am diversity discussion) was exciting and just the place for me. I assumed it would be representative and reflective of those for whom the discussion was about.  Disability wasn’t mentioned in the blurb about the talk – it was “age, race, ethnicity…and more” – so I thought maybe disability was part of the ‘and more’ section.  I looked to the panel for the diversity I was seeking – other people with disabilities –and while it became a small part of the discussion, it wasn’t discussed by anyone who looked like me or was like me (I thought).

I am very much aware that anyone can have a disability, whether or not it can be seen.  It is always possible (and probable) for anyone on any stage to have a disability – I just didn’t realize how important it was for me to know that whoever was talking about disability was a person with a disability – someone who represented me and understood what I understood, someone with personal experience, someone with a disability.

I commented on some of my thoughts at the panel discussion.  I have to admit, it was scary, I was shaking, and I don’t remember much of what I said, I only knew that saying something was very important to me.  The loneliness of being the ‘only one’ at a place is not something I experience often.  But a diversity panel was a place where I thought my singleness would be lessened – it was not.  I do remember someone mentioning the idea that all people with diverse backgrounds need allies – we need others in the mainstream to work with and speak about issues of diversity. I completely agree.  But more importantly we need to make sure that we include people with these diverse backgrounds to represent the cause.  We, the diverse people, need to be able to see ourselves everywhere.

Diversity is the discussion we all know is important and difficult. It means different things to different people, but for me it’s also an incredibly personal issue.  We all talk about engaging others but until we get our own people to talk about our own issues, we’ll continue to be the ‘other’.  I want to thank Clay for asking me to speak about my thoughts regarding the NAMPC.  I’ve tried to just give a little hint of my experience – I hope that it keeps the discussion going.  I hope we can get people with disabilities more involved in every segment of society.

I’m in the arts, that’s my passion and I’m going to keep going to places where my difference stands out so people with disabilities are seen everywhere.

Thanks for the time.

My relationship to the Mormon Church is at once one of long distance and of great personal confrontation.  For most of my life, Mormonism didn’t register on my radar at all—I grew up in Connecticut and mostly viewed Utah from above as we flew over it on the way to visit my grandparents in California.  When I first began learning about Mormonism, it was through the hearsay of kids talking to other kids about polygamy.

And then in November 2008 my life was quite personally affected by the Mormon Church—a group who had funneled lots and lots of money into California in an ultimately successful attempt to pass Prop 8 and temporarily ban gay marriage.  In that moment, what crystallized for me was a feeling that people who would push so fundamentally against my happiness and my rights could not share my passion for anything—that they must have so tilted a worldview as to be my entire opposite.  And though I didn’t know it, that reaction settled in me, and became rolled into my overall view of what Mormonism—and Salt Lake City—must be like.

Turns out not so much.  In fact, a possible heretical story goes that when the Mormons got to Salt Lake, before building most anything, before building a seat for a government, before even completing the Temple itself, they built a place for the choir.  It turns out this chronology is only sort of true, but what is true is that Mormons have, for the nearly 200 years the religion has been around, embraced art for what one scholar terms “the significant role art plays in enlightening and inspiring Church members.”

There’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which is world-famous, but there is also the Church art museum, the financial underwriting of art projects, the annual sponsored art competition, the admonishment to develop personal practice “so that they can tell the story of the Church in art.”  Art is everywhere in Salt Lake—in the architecture, along the streets, in the rows and rows of galleries, performance venues, restaurants.  According to Caryn and Karen, it pervades the lives of many people in Salt Lake, who cultivate personal practice in a variety of forms.  While in Salt Lake, I was taken to a small public art garden nestled between residential buildings.  The garden was started informally by some of the surrounding residents and has grown to include an incredible array of sculptures, mosaics, poetry, etc.  There’s a whole lot of art in Salt Lake.

But what’s interesting is what that art is…and what it isn’t.  The plethora of art in Salt Lake exists, almost exclusively, inside what might be called a strict PG boundary.  In the galleries I visited, there were landscapes and street scenes and paintings of cute animals, but there were no nudes, no confrontational pieces, no graffiti or street-art inspirations.  Caryn and Karen pointed out to me as we passed the “edgy” theater venue in town, housed on a university campus, which was producing either Spring Awakening or Rent (I can’t remember), and which had been a source of controversy.  In talking with Caryn and Karen, which involved more than a little fumbling through my personal misapprehensions about both Mormons and the amount of Mormon influence in Salt Lake, what became clear was that the vibrancy and strong integration of art in much of Salt Lake—into the daily lives of the mostly-Mormon inhabitants, into the passions and habits of folks who likely would never call themselves artists—is able to exist largely because of how well and deliberately that art sits inside the values system of that community.

I had planned on writing about all of this a while ago and got distracted, but it popped back into my head in a big way when I read Howard Sherman’s two posts about the cancellation of a production of Rent at Trumbull High School in Connecticut.  Trumbull, as it happens, was maybe a half-hour away from Ridgefield, the town where I grew up, and as many of the towns in Fairfield County are, it was, at least then, a highly homogeneous place—mostly white, mostly wealthy, well-educated.  The attitude in Fairfield County, by and large, was not so much conservative in the traditional sense as what I now understand to be a unique combination of libertarianism and WASPish buttoned-upped-ness.  There were rules, things you spoke about, things you didn’t, and somehow those rules pervade—an overarching propriety that was only oppressive in the very end, as I awoke a bit to the world, and in hindsight after I left, and that in the moment felt simply safe, calm, and perhaps slightly boring.

In my senior year in Ridgefield, I was the co-editor of our literary magazine.  I graduated in 1999, the year of Columbine, and at some point prior to the shooting that year, we had as a collective voted into the magazine an angst-ridden first-person fiction piece about a kid shooting up a school.  In the aftermath of Columbine, with our once-a-year publication already designed, laid out, and about to hit the presses, someone higher up in the administration got wind of the piece and we were told to take it out.  We got into an argument with the school board, made our case, lost, and we ran two blank pages and a letter explaining what was supposed to go there instead.  At the time, I felt righteous that someone would have forced me to take down art that we felt had sufficient quality to exist, that someone would have censored us so, and the letter we wrote said basically that.

I’m older now. Littleton had seemed a million miles away in 1999, but Newtown is 30 minutes away from Ridgefield.  I have a kid now.  I have gained empathy.  And I understand that sometimes the righteousness of art, the pushing of boundaries, is not the right response.

In the case of Trumbull and Rent, of course, there is no gross tragedy looming behind the decision to cancel the production.  There are cries of censorship, of the oppression of ideas.  There seems to be a tremendous amount of suspicion that the community, or the players in that community directly involved, might have shut down the piece because of personal values—homophobia, Puritanism, whatever.  And I don’t know whether that’s true or not.  And I should say that Rent had a profound impact on me, and I was lucky enough to see it many times, and it changed how I viewed myself forever—so I’m not knocking the importance to a closeted kid in Connecticut to see that up on a stage.

But perhaps simply because I grew up very near there, very near a place that (having now lived quite a few places) is extremely peculiar in its protection of a sort of Mayberryesque perpetual lull, I actually find what the principal wrote as justification very interesting and perhaps even progressive.  You should read it (bottom of Howard’s post), and I think it’s important to understand that the letter itself may be spin rather than true intention, but taking it at face value, it sounds like the director of the production decided to produce it without really talking to anyone about it, that Trumbull, like Ridgefield, continues to have a faction of people who find some of the themes in the show inappropriate, and that the principal’s reaction was (and I hope I’m reading this right) basically “let’s shut this down now, and let’s figure out how this can be produced later with a lot of context-making activities and conversations to help people understand why it’s being produced then.”

I find very little wrong with that sentiment, assuming it’s accurate.  I don’t, for example, find it censorious – I find it, given the climate, rather liberal.  In a town like Trumbull, I’d imagine that a high school musical Rent without appropriate context would serve a much smaller and more incendiary purpose than it might if placed in a larger conversation, where more people could have more nuanced conversations about what it means, why it’s relevant, and where the artistic desire to push outside of comfort aligns with the community’s desire to adhere to certain values.

Diane Ragsdale recently wrote a(nother) amazing piece about want and need on her Jumper blog.  Reacting to it, Scott Walters wrote, on his Facebook page, about how many of the comments seemed to be knee-jerk reactions against what Diane said—which was, basically, about whether it’s always necessary to be working from what the community “needs” (which is often interpreted as what the artist thinks the community needs) versus what it “wants” (which is often interpreted as safe and within bounds).  What Scott said (and he and I are, it turns out, rarely in agreement, but this is one case) was: “Hint to artists: it’s not about you.”

I think that one of the big, big problems we have today in terms of arguing for the value of art to society is that much of the art that is created is presumed to have value for the fact that it confronts society.  And I should said I don’t have anything against art that confronts me, confronts my beliefs, makes me think and engage, makes me upset.  But I also am a particular kind of person.

We have a conservative problem in the arts.  In the Bay Area, per the research I did for the Arts Diversity Index, 15.5% of the total population identified as Republican and only 2.2% of audiences did.  Daniel Jones has written quite eloquently on Howlround about the lack of conservative voices in theatre.  And before simply writing conservatives off (either political conservatives or something folks who are more conservative in the general sense), we need to understand that both from a service perspective (the desire to serve all) and from the pragmatic perspective of someone who would love a little less political will to be directed against publicly-funded art in America, this population that is not being respected represents a huge chunk of the total people in this country.

Being a censor, like being a bully or being a racist or being a bigot, is a charge that comes with a huge stigma.  It implies malice, intention, and a strong desire to oppress.  I have to believe that there is a gradation between that level of intention and one that says instead, “Did we think about what this community wants from its art?  If we go outside of that context, did we provide a bridge for them to follow?  Did we do our due diligence to help a community with certain values to see our point of view, or did we simply get frustrated when our art wasn’t welcomed?”

What if it hadn’t been Rent?  What if instead it had been a religious play, or a play about gays burning in Hell, or a play celebrating the Nazis or the KKK or whatever group doesn’t represent a hyper-liberal world view?  I mean, for all of its incredible messages and its uplifting structure, Rent is a play about sex, drugs, poverty and death.  I’ll tell you, rightly or wrongly, that those were four things that went on the zip-the-lips list in the years I lived in Connecticut.

How can we say that we’re interested in creating a culture where art is celebrated for what it can be at its best—something that both reflects and stretches a society forward—if we don’t allow that sometimes a piece of art might just not fit into the values, mores, and beliefs of a particular group of people?  What is the point at which it is better to not be invited to the party than to tone down the colors?  What are the consequences of that?

This last Dinnervention post is an experiment in group blogging–I wrote the core piece, and then three of my fellow Dinnerventionists– Margy Waller, Laura Zabel, and Devon Smith–were kind enough to react to it in commentary.  It was really interesting to watch happen–hopefully it is interesting to read as well!  The blogging platform allows limited capability to demonstrate in-text comments, so I’ve color-coded it.  We’ll see if that’s as clear to others as it is to me…

(If you are receiving this as an email, it may not format correctly — please visit the webpage.  If you aren’t (plug!) then you should sign up to get New Beans by email.  See column at right!)

A new movement in the arts must break from the old, and must be flexible and moldable enough to accommodate our inherent decentralization.

• We need to stop over-preferencing the artist over the point of the arts institution (note: the point of the institution, not the institution itself) (second note: the point of the arts institution, not the point of an institution itself).
  • Laura Zabel: Oh man.  This wording is so challenging to me.  I re-read this bullet several times and think I know what you mean (and that I probably agree with you), but I fear that very few institutions preference the artist’s needs.  I would reframe this as a need for increased leadership from artists, diminished separation between artists and arts managers AND a mutual head turn towards the point of the organization.
  • Margy Waller: This bullet points makes me think about the preferencing of the art — as someone at the institution defines the art.  That leads to a great deal of focus on traditional ways of experiencing the art. (More on this in comments later).  And campaigns that plead “our-art-is-so-precious-please-save-it” lead to the kind of Kickstarter campaign the New York City Opera tried this past week–an effort that failed miserably (see: “The Failures of Crowdfunding: No, Kickstarter Cannot Support an Opera Company”).  
    I disagree with the title of the article.  Kickstarter may not be the wrong platform for opera fundraising–but the offer was clearly wrong.
    I’m curious though–what are the classical music and opera leaders doing that has halted the decline in audience–unlike museums and theater which are seeing a decline? (See the new NEA’s  “Survey on Public Participation in the Arts 2012”).
    And hopefully we’ll speak up when there’s a “we’ve always done it this way” attack on a leader who is willing to try new approaches, to focus on social capital, to take risks that might build audience. (A leader who BTW is increasing attendance and membership at her museum, like Dinnerventionist Nina Simon.)
    When stuff like this is published–which sadly the New York Times decided to feature–let’s start reacting in public, and out loud.
• We need to stop creating institutions built to generate social capital that are instead preoccupied with creating actual capital, and we need to understand that such capitalist impulses are not heretical, they’re natural inside institutions of a certain size, scope and responsibility.
  • Devon Smith: That’s hard to reconcile with social good/social entrepreneurship organizations (B-Corps, L3C’s, the Toms/Warby models, etc) whose forms were created for just the opposite reason: capitalist institutions, intent on investing in social capital, who felt they needed protection from shareholders.  I don’t think the problem is being preoccupied with creating capital, it’s misunderstanding how to do so effectively and efficiently.  The idea that corporations’ sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value is a modern urban legend.  It’s not the law.  The idea that a nonprofit can’t or shouldn’t be profitable is another modern urban legend: see hospitals, unions, PACs, etc.
  • Laura Zabel: I agree that those “modern urban legends” are prevalent and counter productive.  But I am a skeptic of the Tom’s model, which I think has demonstrated that there is a difference between mission-driven work and “charity-washing” of for-profit ventures.  Obviously, lots of nuance and gray area on that continuum to think about.
• We need to stop shouting about innovation and new outreach without recognizing either the instability that goes along with that or the length of time necessary to test out new approaches before they should replace the old ones.
  • Laura Zabel: I’m in favor of less shouting and more doing.  I don’t know if the world will wait for incremental change, though.  A huge challenge for our existing infrastructure is that it is not well suited for the pace of change required “these days.”  Epic strategic planning, the need for board approval, funding cycles, multi-layered hierarchical staffing structures: these structural elements really inhibit the kind of iterative, creative thinking needed to move incremental change to systemic change rapidly.  But the world doesn’t care.  We expect change and responsiveness now and we have the tools to demand it.  For example, check out this Tumblr page created with essentially $0 and no institutional support.
• We need to stop encouraging ourselves to swallow the whole issue of relevance at once like the Chinese brother swallowing the sea, which leaves most organizations with nothing to do but keep their head down against the storm and simply try to stay alive.  At the same time, we need to embrace and celebrate the “positive incremental” as acceptable movement.
• We need to stop being so selfish about how much we like our forms, our circumstances, the nuances of ritual that are draped all around them–and to stop being oblivious to how difficult those things together make carrying forward.
  • Devon Smith: Anyone know of a blog post or article that tracks the shape/size/constituents of either arts organizations, or their relationship to audiences, or the audience’s relationship to the stage, across the centuries?  It strikes me that our desire to “preserve the form, and nuances of ritual” are representative of about the past 2% of organized arts’ history.  Prior to that, audiences looked and behaved quite differently, as did arts “organizations.”
  • Clay Lord: Devon, yes, but. I agree that being all misty eyed about the good old days of the non-profit arts institution is a bit silly, given you know, Groundlings talking through (and at the players in) plays, eating, throwing food, standing up, etc.  But I think also (and this may seem schizophrenic since I wrote the first bullet) that there needs to be some understanding that the clinging is happening because all of that was Before, and we are Now–and that that’s not terribly unusual in any environment.

Or maybe we don’t.

• Laura Zabel: I have this feeling, too.  I’m optimistic that this new movement is already taking place and confident that some of our infrastructure will recognize the value of being a part of the movement.  And equally confident that we’ll lose some organizations along the way…and that’s okay.  Rebirth is good.  All we can do is make the work and try to make it better.

One of the most unexpected feelings I had leaving Djerassi was the feeling that maybe all of this consternation is for naught.  Maybe we are like the person cutting to feel the illusion of maximal control, self-flagellating to convince ourselves that we actually have any real say.  Who is the group of twelve that could have actually turned thought to action in a field so decentralized and without a core governing body?  What is our chance for change when our funding models don’t allow for flashpoint innovations, runways, security in the face of risk?  What is our chance for change when even within small communities the stakeholders can’t get on the same page, pulled between short-term and long-term desires, and in which there is no arbiter both strong enough and willing enough to exert strength to make a change?

• Margy Waller: Well, it seems that a large, national, membership, support and advocacy organization is in a position to model long-term thinking.
  Most arts organizations don’t have the time or staff to track national media coverage of the arts or the legislation proposed at the national level.  Moreover, they (mostly) don’t get the calls for interviews on topics that have the potential to change the landscape of public understanding, to build broad support for the arts, etc.
  So most artists and arts staffers (whether they know it or not) are depending on leaders like AFTA and GIA and the NEA to get it right.
  Major shout out to the NEA for Our Town here, because shining a spotlight on the role of arts in community (building social capital, making places special/unique/desirable, bridging communities and people) is a great way to build a sense of shared responsibility for the arts. That’s what we need to generate a sense of the arts as a public good.
  But the way we talk about what we do is only part of what the national megaphones can do…
  Also, as Kimberly made clear in her final comments on the evening, funders can make a huge difference here.  It’s working in Cincinnati, where the major arts funder led the way, changing its mission and funding goals to focus on neighborhood vibrancy and bringing people together.  Is it a painful transition?  Yes.  Is it working? Yes!

Why is it that we feel we are too fragile to attempt and fail—and why is it that sometimes we really are?

I was talking to Alli Houseworth recently and we found ourselves hitting upon the hackathon phenomenon in the tech world.  A bunch of tech geeks of different stripes come together—a set of ideas are thrown out, teams are formed, and they go to town for two days, developing code, creating business plans, crafting whole ideas from thin air over the course of 48 hours.  And then they pitch and someone gets seed funding—the ability to actualize on an idea that hadn’t been articulated a few days before—and there’s the understanding it might not work, or that it might not be the end product, or that it might not completely solve anything.  There is a celebration of creation, of creativity, that we, as a field of creatives, seem to feel shy about embracing.

• Margy Waller: Let’s do it.
  Before dinner, we (with Laura) talked about a two-day (or so) gathering to come up with new action steps.  Will it change the world?  Maybe not.  But what wonderful things might happen if a group of arts lovers is unleashed?  What if they (we, I hope) are given the mandate to come up with something new, take risks, abandon tradition (if they want to)?
  It’s an extended version of the Dinnervention–with seed funding at the end.
  Seriously.
• Clay Lord: I’m up for it.  Funders?  Anyone want to throw that party?

We have created an ecosystem where the slowest to change can stick around essentially indefinitely, where the most obvious organizations are often the ones most mired in the exclusive aspects of our forms, and where the incentive to invite new audiences in is so slim in the short-term as to overshadow the dramatic positivity it would engender in the long-term.

The latest SPPA data shows white audiences dwindling, and dwindling even faster for many of the benchmark disciplines.

So perhaps it all just has to fall apart.

As Ricky Fitts says in American Beauty, “There is so much beauty in the world.”

And there always will be, whether we wrangle ourselves into helping it truly shine for everyone or we don’t.

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“I want to kill them,” Devon Smith says, the klieg lights heating up the tiny dining room where we are eating and intervening. She goes on, arguing that we need to kill the organizations that aren’t relevant, that aren’t trying to be relevant.

The aggression is off-putting, and my gut response, which I act upon, is to soften up the verb, “surely you don’t mean ‘kill’,” but Devon pushes back and tells me that is exactly what she means.  Which of course it is–Devon isn’t one to misspeak. It is a bold thought. It scares me.

I find myself, lately, preoccupied with destabilization.  It is, in a very real way, another moment where I feel too cautious for the conversation.  What Devon is talking about–agency on an aggressive and deterministic scale–is appealing for the fact that I believe part of our issue in the arts, particularly around public value, is that the largest institutions, expert at the ways of non-profit longevity, can grossly outlast relevance without embracing true change. But when I imagine such an occurrence I blanch.  Skip the how, and imagine a major LORT theatre, unwilling or unable to transform itself into a more relevant and accessible institution for the full community, suddenly being divested of sufficient funds and structural support as to be killed dead.  Imagine the collateral damage.  Imagine the administrators, yes, but imagine the artists.  Imagine the community, with a big building suddenly dark, no well-heeled patrons pouring out and into restaurants and bars.

When you are a $30 million non-profit, you are no longer just a social good organ—an extension of the state designed to provide societal service.  At $30 million, you are an economic driver, you are a relatively major employer, and more than that, you are a vested interest of a whole lot of people.  You are large, and to kill you would be to pull a large block from a precarious tour.

This makes me feel so much like I am suddenly protecting the problem. This makes me feel like I am suddenly on the side of “too big to fail.”  Which angers me because I am equally on the side of “change or go.”  But for all of my excitement at the prospect of change, I am ultimately also preoccupied with longevity, with stability–and so I have to wonder what a tenable elaboration on the killing of organizations might look like.

In her essay in Counting New Beans, Diane Ragsdale argues for the arts to embrace “creative destruction” — the taking control of deconstruction that must either be taken control of or occur randomly–essentially, the curation of change.  This is an interesting concept, and is in a clear way the soft-pedaled version of Devon’s death panels for the arts, but it comes up against the same issue of agency that pervaded so much.

How do we get from here to there, when we agree on none of the following in that question: “we,” “here,” “there?”  Who takes the reins when no one knows where the reins are, when the reality is that there are not reins so powerful as to make change happen?

I spoke with a foundation program officer recently who is seeking a way to participate in conversations about diversity, but who is concerned about their funds put towards such a conversation being viewed as an imprimatur that the foundation is advocating for diversification as a universal course.  I understand the problem, and respect the resistance to a possibly activist stance, but I also feel that the reality of that problem means we are essentially doomed to keep having the conversation we have had for fifty years without seeing real directed change.  The only difference I see, and it pains me to be such a pessimist in this, is that the new movement we seek may occur as a simple picking up after we all fall down–that we aren’t having the same conversation as 30, 40, 50 years ago because we are 30, 40, 50 years closer to the tipping point.  We are like the scientists watching the ice caps melt, knowing we are about to be deluged but unable to agree on where to put the levees.

A new movement in the arts must be willing to sacrifice its flailing parts while also understanding the imbalance that such sacrifice will create.  At the same time, a new movement in the arts must be willing to recognize the long march of history, the pace with which we have dug our holes, and the incremental, sustainable, stable progress that is necessary to get out–and must celebrate such effort wherever it may crop up.

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This one’s not going to be very new, I fear.  It seems to have been the core outcome for most of the folks coming out of the Dinnervention, and of course is also a trope that has run its course through the blogosphere for a while.  And yet…

If the core problem facing the arts today really is one of relevance, of public value, of engagement, then the core solution must be one that embraces what America writ large finds relevant, what the public values, and what a new and expansive definition of prospective arts consumers find engaging.  This, to me, seems both obvious and nearly insurmountable in its scope.  Obvious for obvious reasons, I hope, and nearly insurmountable because of the incredible inertia that exists, for reasons both good and bad, around our media, our systems, our institutions, our language, our structures, our criteria for success.

At the dinner, Laura Zabel, Devon Smith, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and others started by framing out the dichotomy of art and the institution.  Art is not dwindling.  Art is not in trouble.  Art has always and will always exist–it is a pervasive force that manifests in every culture; it is the way we tell stories, tell history, teach lessons, show love, grieve, celebrate, honor.  The decline in “arts” participation in the past thirty years, since the advent of the first Survey on Public Participation in the Arts by the NEA, is in fact the decline in participation at the core Eurocentric artistic institutions.  It is a decline that maps exactly against the rise of new populations, the fall of arts education programs throughout the country, the adoption of art-as-code-for-elitism by the right wing.  But it is not a decline in art making or art consumption.  It is a decline in consumption of a particular type of art, narrow in form, time- and place-based, constrained by hundreds of years of rules and mores.

It is also, as it happens, a decline in the institutions that have made full- and part-time employment as artists and arts administrators possible.  Which leads to schizophrenia in the core question–because “art,” arguably, has never been more relevant, more valued, more engaging, even as “arts institutions,” in particular those that hold strongly to the trappings of traditional arts, dwindle in importance.  They are, for most of the parts of our population that are expanding, not the place where art really lives–they place it distantly, on a hill, obscured by walls and price and vocabulary that doesn’t resonate, down a winding road that is narrow and tight, beautiful, perhaps, but why can’t I just do that at home?

Which may, in a way, be all to the good—at least until you get to the finer points of survivability, the underpinning training required to create free pop songs, the core societal resonances that pervade the chords of homemade music, the subjects of personal paintings, the structure of self-told stories.  Then the room starts echoing the sounds of silence.

A new movement in the arts must be cognizant of the fact that we are moving inside a space that is infinitely larger and more diverse than we ever will be.    At the same time, a new movement must embrace and tout the ways in which the old forms are a required foundation for the new ones.  It must understand the grace that allows us to exist in that space, and must let go of any feelings of entitlement or ownership–we do not make the arts exist, they have existed long before us and will exist long after we and our organizations have gone.

Margy Waller

This is a guest post from Margy Waller, Senior Partner at the Topos Partnership and fellow Dinnerventionist.  Margy has previously guest-posted for New Beans here.

The Invitation

One of the great surprises of my year came in the form of an invitation to dinner received last spring when I awoke to an email titled in part: NOT SPAM PLEASE READ.

The email and invitation to a Dinnervention came from Barry Hessenius of WESTAF (The Western States Art Federation). The dinner is his invention and is designed to bring together an “unheralded group of arts sector leaders…[who] would – as guests at a dinner party – provide for a memorable and meaningfully engaging conversation on critically important arts issues; people with new ideas, who can argue convincingly for those ideas.”

Barry’s democratic approach to developing the invite list allowed for any of the 10,000 or so readers of his blog to nominate guests. He received over 350 names, and then he and his co-producer Shannon Daut, and an advisory group – Ian David Moss, Mitch Menchaca, Richard Evans, Nina Simon, Ron Ragin and Gary Steuer, chose twelve invitees.

The Advance Work

Accepting the invitation meant committing to a fair amount of thinking and writing. But what a sweet requirement, right? We got to nominate topics for the dinner conversation and then write our ‘case’ for addressing the issue in a short briefing paper – arguments which Barry honored us by publishing on his blog, here and here.

The twelve of us had some interaction via conference call and emails in advance of the dinner. Not as much as I’d have liked, especially in retrospect. One of the primary benefits of the Dinnervention experience was spending time with the others – including the WESTAF staff and Shannon who assisted in every way, and Margot Knight who hosted us at the incredibly lovely and sculpture filled – if remotely-located-on-a-scary-one-lane-cliff-adjacent-road – Djerassi, a retreat for resident artists. Some of my dinner partners were already friends, some I’d never met in person – but had talked to or tweeted with, and others I’d never met before and simply Internet-stalked from a distance.

 Margot invited those of us who arrived in time before dinner to join her on a hike to see the sculpture and artwork on the land. The works are mostly temporary; artists are aware that the artwork will change and fade into the landscape over time. The tour was a brilliant appetizer of sorts – it made for some interesting conversation about the value of investing limited resources into “art for arts sake.” After all, few people ever get the chance to see the Djerassi artwork, yet it is created by artists on retreat for a month that is, by design, without any demands or artistic requirements. I will say this: it brought some of us together around questions of arts in community – ideas we’d discuss in different ways for three hours over dinner later that evening.

The Topic

 We were invited to write and talk about what many people think of as the disruption of the same old ways of presenting art, reaching new audiences, and engaging the public in a conversation about the arts as a public good. The topic, in short, was: “Traditional audiences are declining and participation patterns are shifting seismically, which is having a deleterious impact on arts organization’s traditional revenue streams. How can we address this pattern on a macro scale? What would a new movement around the arts look like?”

As the date for the Dinnervention got closer, I began to imagine a disruption of the dinner. I expected that so many super thoughtful people sitting around a table, discussing how to create a new movement in the arts, would have way more to say than time would allow. It made sense to organize the conversation with some ground rules, and our hosts did so, but I was feeling a desire to organize the participants to disrupt the plan in some way – like, whip out a crazy hat mid-meal and play some music for a serendipitous game of musical chairs. After all, we were invited to talk about art, why not interrupt dinner with a minor random act of art or flash mob action?

But, that didn’t happen. Instead, the disruption came when the people around the table felt so passionately about a topic or statement that they broke the ground rules for discussion and jumped the line for talking. (Otherwise, Barry and Shannon maintained order with a list as we each discretely signaled a desire to comment.)

As I think back on the dinner, those disruptions are among the moments that stand out for me.

The Disruption Sticking With Me

 Devon Smith, in her after-dinner-blog, summarized the events in this way:

…the Arts Dinner-vention Party did not reach consensus on how to build a movement for the arts, nor how to save the (institutional) arts (organizations). We did discuss, debate, and disagree on a far range of topics: whether we want to be more like co-ops or soup kitchens, if arts orgs as community centers strays too far from our mission, how to hold arts administrators accountable, who will be our growth hackers, if death panels for the weakest (organizations) among us are really a good idea, and what our minimally viable products will be, among many others. The only thing we agreed on was that the arts are not in trouble, it’s the institutions that are failing.

That’s well put.

One of the disagreements was also a moment of disruption.

Clay and Nina had a bit of back and forth about what Devon describes as the question of whether “arts organizations as community centers stray too far from our mission.”

Nina, of course, leans toward “igniting shared experiences and unexpected connections” in the museum as a thriving, central place in her city.

Clay shared some skepticism about arts organizations serving as community centers.

This was apparently not the first time these two have had this conversation. By the end of dinner, Clay acknowledged that he may be coming around to Nina’s view, as she explained that people are coming to the museum to co-create and otherwise engage in arts events that bring people together. Even if these visitors don’t always come for the art already on the walls, community building occurs through art.

The debate over focus and emphasis at our arts organizations is playing out again as I’m writing this after-dinner-blog of my own. On an artsjournal.com blog post provocatively titled “Trouble in Paradise: Santa Cruz’s Museum Loses Its Way”, Judith H. Dobrzynski extended thoughts she’d written about earlier in the New York Times. As I write this, there are over forty comments on the post.

It’s hard to pull a short quote from Ms. Dobrzynski’s writing to capture the essence of her thinking, but it seems fair to say that she’s unhappy with the trends toward participatory and experiential arts, a focus on visitor engagement – and other things that involve taking the pulse of the “goers” or interfere with simply “standing before the art.”

I added a short note, using the Times platform, when they published Ms. Dobrzynski’s commentary there, reacting to her point that these initiatives will change who goes to museums, and for what. (In short, exactly right and hurrah!)

When she used her own blog to pursue these points via the (apparently under-researched) post of a local blogger who attacked Nina Simon and her leadership of the Santa Cruz Museum of Arts and History, I was compelled to respond more directly. It went something like this:

What Do We Want?

Everything depends on our goals.

Many of us want to live in a place where the arts organizations – museums especially – are of and contribute to community. Buildings that have energy and where people want to be. Places where people come together and get to know each other better, strengthening the bonds of civic infrastructure through art. (Here’s why I say this.)

Everything that I read and see about what’s happening in community engagement at the museum in Santa Cruz is exciting and appealing. It’s no surprise that attendance and membership are up – way up. If we want expanded and bigger audiences for our arts and artists, we should love what’s happening at the Museum of Art and History there, and pay close attention to what they are learning about creating fans and people who want to return – bringing friends and family along.

After watching with enthusiasm from a distance, I had the great fun of visiting the museum with Nina Simon as my guide a few weekends ago. * It was a quiet Saturday afternoon and there was plenty of opportunity for contemplation in the museum – for those what like it like that.

But also, there was a great feeling of energy, and opportunities for me to share my reactions to the art – to feel that I was part of what happened and could contribute to the sense of community there. And these feelings are not unique to me. Every visitor is invited to offer a comment on the museum – right out in the open. Here are two responses I loved enough to photograph:

• “Thanks for trusting us.”
• “I feel happy when I come here.”

What could be better? People who feel this way about a place will tell others, will return, will bring friends. This sort of social capital = success.

When we measure our success by happiness, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History is winning.

Thanks

*One of the terrific serendipitous pleasures of the Dinnervention invitation was the time I got to spend afterward at Nina’s nearby museum. But for the dinner, it might have been years before I made my way there IRL. (Not to mention all the time getting lost on the way there with Laura Zabel, who is doing amazing work creating community through and for the arts at Springboard. Driving on the confusing roads in the hills near Djerassi allowed me more time to hear about art on the streets in Minnesota and Springboard’s health care initiative for artists that is super-smart.)  Thanks Dinnervention! And special thanks to whichever great friends of mine nominated me to be a guest – I don’t know who you are, but I’m most appreciative. And thanks also to Barry, Anthony, WESTAF, Shannon, Margot and all the staff at Djerassi – the food was spectacular.

Let’s Measure our Success by Happiness.

What the Other Dinner Guests Wrote about This Topic

As I set about writing this after-dinner blog, I decided to reread the pre-dinner essays by the guests and pull a related thought from each one.  It turned out to be quite rewarding to review their commentary again, reinforcing my interest in staying in touch with all of them. In the end, these connections may the most important outcome of the dinner for me.

Laura Zabel: I see no possibility for success in this effort without a bigger definition of who is in our movement.

Kimberly Howard: This new movement around art requires that we create a transition period, where we provide these ‘learning’ experiences that feel more like participation and engagement than ‘teachable moments’ for audiences between 18 and 99, by point blank asking them – what are you interested in seeing on the stage, on the wall, on the pedestal, on the Marley floor?  It might mean, for a time, that we shift the paradigm, making work that we are asked to make rather than work that we are inspired to make.  It might mean that while making work that is in dialogue with the audiences we think we need, we open ourselves to the possibility of being inspired in new ways.

Clayton Lord: the decline of the traditional institutional arts audience base is a direct result of the rise of the idea (self-perpetuated) of the arts as (1) not for everyone and (2) not necessary, simply nice…[exacerbated] by a historically reflexive reaction from the art community to its ongoing marginalization—namely a pulling away from art as a driver of community engagement, change, and dialogue and towards art as a means and end in itself.

Tamara Alvarado: We are not beyond race and we still need to work on finding commonalities versus differences and I know the arts play a significant role in establishing neutral ground where that conversation can be had.

Nina Simon: People like to recreate socially, and many industries (restaurants, bars, theme parks) clearly represent themselves as social venues. One of the easiest ways to hook people on a new experience is to invite them to participate with you. While the social nature of an arts experience may be implied, it is rarely explicit. This is most glaring in the case of museums; the majority of visitors attend in social groups, but many perceive museum-going as a “contemplative solo activity.” We need to promote arts institutions for date night, family night, girl time—and help people see our offerings as part of their social lives.

Kristin Thomson:  [Quoting from a survey to make her point.] “The audience has already moved from “arts attendance as an event” to “arts attendance as an experience.”  This desire for a full-range of positive experience from ticket purchase, to travel, to parking, to treatment at the space, to quality of performance, to exit – this will only increase over the next 10 years.”

Salvador Acevado: The days of attracting people to an experience based on our needs are over, and nowadays people want organizations, products, or brands to adapt to their needs, or they will go elsewhere. It is not like there’s a lack of activities or experiences, and the ones that will survive are the ones who cater to the needs and wants of new audiences. It’s called audience-centered missions…audiences are looking for experiences in which they are not passive observers or contemplators of the art form. With the advent of the social web era, in contrast to the TV era, people expect now to be part of and mold the experience.

Devon Smith: …the product itself is doing just fine. It’s the distribution channel that has been forced to change; the amateurs that have subverted power from the professionals.

Lex Leifheit: …how can one respond to a question of traditional audiences and revenue streams without questioning whose traditions these are?

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: …art is not just the object or the outcome, but art is a process and opportunity for community….exponentially broadening its constituent circle…and transforming the audience-arts center paradigm from the transactional into one centered on collaboration.

Meiyin Wang: We should shift from the thinking that art is a commodity we produce to be consumed by the audience – to the practice that art is a relationship between the artist, theater and the audience. We should stop only “telling the story” and really look hard at what the art form has to offer. We should stop being afraid of the audience…. We have to stop pretending that the audience is not there. The focus will turn to the relationship to the viewer, to the relationship of viewership, the experiential, and the changing notion of authorship.

.

At one point during the dinner, Nina Simon and I got into a few sentences of disagreement about where the line was between arts institutions and community centers—and whether there should be one at all.  For me, this is a complicated issue, and it’s an area where I often end up feeling like the most conservative person in the room, especially when the room is filled with 11 other people making their names by questioning everything.

Nina creates interactivity right at the border of the art—it is interesting and inspiring, and I am so on board with the work she is doing to broaden and expand the impact that the pieces in her museum have on the community of Santa Cruz.  And then I sometimes hear (and I should say, much to my chagrin, that I haven’t been to visit Nina in situ, though I should also say my reactions are to speeches that she has given, not to hearsay) things that give me pause—moments of preferencing community gathering so far over the art that I get concerned the premise would work if the art weren’t there at all.  At which point I fear the pendulum has swung too far.

Going middle of the road is so boring, right?  But there I am.  I feel a need to embrace that there is a continuum between art as personal enterprise and institutions as community-oriented on either side of which—all art and no art—we are at odds with the reason this field exists.

I was once at a large one-day convening pulled together as part of the Wallace Foundation activities in San Francisco a few years ago–it was an unusual convening for me to attend in that it had a large contingent of artists, which led to energy in the room that was at once exciting and off-putting for me.  As part of the programming, an artist was asked to come up on stage and demonstrate how he might pitch for funds for a project he was trying to put together.  The artist, who crossed lines between theatre, dance and painting, jumped up, high energy, and he laid out a hypothetical project and then asked the audience, his investors, to ask him questions.

“What justification do you have for why your art deserves to exist?” He was asked.

“Art does not need to justify itself,” he said. “Art simply deserves to exist.”

The crowd roared, and dollar bills rained from the balcony.

I found myself mortified.

In advance of the Dinnervention, I tweeted and messaged out the question that I hear in my mind over and over–“Art for whose sake? Art for what’s sake?”

The predominant answer, which I found sort of frustrating, was a variation on “Art for fuck’s sake” — or, better punctuated (I think), “Art, for fuck’s sake!”  This, I feel, is myopic, because the unintended hubris inherent in it indicates a lack of true understanding of the apathy (as opposed to animosity) that exists in most of American society about the art we think is so obviously good.

Art may not need to justify itself, but art does need to be justified.  Arts institutions need to justify the presentation of art in that they need to explain why that art resonates with the mission, what good it is doing to the community, what role it plays.

In my (short but steep) learning curve at Americans for the Arts, I have been schooled in the nuance of the “arts and…” argument.  It is what Americans for the Arts does, by and large, make this type of argument, and while we sometimes get a knock for an overly large focus on “arts and economic impact,” the fact of the matter is that we reach in all directions to try and explain to people who don’t inherently care about art for art’s sake that they should care about art for other reasons–healthcare, military rehabilitation, idea accessibility, civic dialogue, improved scholastic performance, empathy, brain development, historical context, complex conceptualization, eldercare.  On my wall in my office, like the rest of the people in my department (at my request), I have the top 13 things that local governments think is important as gathered by the National League of Cities.  They are:

1. Business attraction/recruitment
2. Downtown/commercial redevelopment
3. Business retention
4. Infrastructure
5. Small business/entrepreneur support
6. Tourism/entertainment
7. Community/neighborhood development
8. Public safety
9. Environmental sustainability
10. Workforce/job training
11. Affordable housing
12. K-12 education
13. Safety net services

Those are the books of our Bible, because those are the areas where a whole lot of people are searching for solutions–and where often that solution can be found in art.

I have noticed, lately, a bit of mythology being built around the Time Before Nonprofit Status, when art was made and sustained based on true consumer enjoyment, the dollar at the door was what allowed you to continue or not, the audience dictated the content in the same way they dictated who was more popular, Coke or Pepsi.  I used to find this disheartening, this idea that so many were suddenly yearning for a return to a time when so many fewer people could be practicing artists, when the art itself was manufactured, to draw from Henry Ford’s famous quote, much more as horses than cars.  But that lament lacks detail.

The non-profit status is a bargain, and when I hear people talking about abandoning it now, I try to remind myself that that bargain isn’t for everyone.  The nature of the bargain was the ability to accept donations from individuals and to be exempted from most taxation on the assumption that, through art, we were bettering society.  We got the money in exchange for the common good.  We got the freedom to solicit investment in work that we believed would change society for the better–Henry Ford’s cars–and the ability to freely extrapolate what the common public good meant.  And then we forgot that, by and large, and the public whose good we were pursuing moved on–not away from art, but to other art, away from us.

A new movement in the arts must be defined by what we can provide to a society already searching for solutions to ills–one defined by a caring for the community first, not for the artist first, but also by embracing that art is our core strategy for success, not an incidental.  I believe in the power of the art, just as I believe in our power to amplify the art’s impact.

This is part of a larger series of posts about the Arts Dinnervention.  View the previous one here.

“Dialog”, 2004. by Roland Mayer. photo by Todd Holloway.

The Djerassi Artists Retreat sits on the ridge of hills that cascade down to the Pacific Ocean, sloping deep into protected land and accessible only by a harrowing one and a half lane semi-paved road just wide enough that delivery trucks and yuppies in Priuses think they can barrel down it, stop short, and make unsuspecting strangers in difficult German-manufactured rental cars back up gingerly into narrow turnouts nestled between the road and a steep drop-off with no guardrail.  In late summer, it is a landscape turned golden and brittle by the dry season, speckled by dusty gray-green conifers and some tenacious oaks, the sky clear and blue and wide.  It is a landscape I have grown to love in my eight years of living in California, and as I found myself pulling back out of the turnout post-delivery truck run-in, I could feel the joy to be back in this place and away from the humidity of Washington, DC.

I was heading to Djerassi at the invitation of Barry Hessenius and the folks at WESTAF as part of a group of 12 next generation arts leaders pulled together to engage in a “Dinnervention”–a taped dinner conversation designed with the somewhat precocious goal of generating solutions to fix what was ailing the arts (“What would a new movement around the arts look like?”)–in particular, to shake up issues of supply, demand, engagement and public value in the field.

In a way, meeting at Djerassi was a perfect way to encapsulate the issues that the arts currently face.  The ranch and retreat were founded by Carl Djerassi, the creator of the birth control pill, to honor his daughter, who committed suicide a bit down the road from the entrance, in a little house that now serves as the home of the retreat’s executive director, Margot Knight.  Margot is herself indicative of the energy here.  The former executive director of United Arts in Florida, Knight migrated West to take over leadership of the retreat a few years ago, and having met her when she was still in Florida, done up for a party, hair coiffed and dressed in black, it is safe to say her time at the retreat is written all over her.  I found her, when I arrived, inside the octagonal barn that is one of three buildings of any size on the hundreds of acres of land, sitting in front of an expansive panoramic view in an armchair, hair curly and free in the heat, dressed California casual and working from her iPad.  She set me up in my room, one of only twelve for guests on the Ranch, and after lunch, connection with some new friends and reconnection with old friends, Margot took a few of us on a hike through some of the woods and hills of Djerassi to view their large set of open-air art pieces.

The nature of Djerassi is that it exists as a pressure-free zone for artists to converge, converse and create.  Six times each year, twelve artists of all disciplines are brought together to live on the ranch for thirty days with the only real obligation being that they eat dinner together each night.  There is no obligation to create work, there is no obligation to conduct outreach, there is no obligation to leave on day 31 and proselytize about the magic of the place.  It is an indulgent place, designed to unleash creativity in artists in a way that places them far from civilization, to create work that is sometimes carried back to society and is sometimes not, depending on the medium.

Along with the writers and composers and dancers and painters that come, create art, and take it with them there is also a strong contingent of site-specific artists who create temporary art on the ranch itself and leave it there as they go.  Prior to my arrival, one artist had created a faux crop circle in the brown grass on the side of one of the hills that looked like the fast forward button on a VCR.  One had created a faux adobe on the crest of one of the hills, very far away and which looked quite tiny.

The art here is required to be designed with decomposition in mind–the grass will grow, the rains will come, trees and floods will break the landscape.  An artist had crafted a menagerie of what looked like cast concrete woodland creatures, Disney-style, that had probably once been set up in a scene but that had now been redistributed willy-nilly down an embankment because of a storm; another had built a human-sized bird nest that had slowly disintegrated down into the ground along the path.

There are many more pieces, but I, having braved the road and finding myself tired and wary of the strong sun, begged off the comprehensive tour of the collection.  I peeled off with colleagues and fellow Dinnerventionists Laura Zabel and Margy Waller after two final, startling pieces:

The Japanese artist Yusuke Toda came to Djerassi in 2004 an artist who primarily did work in metal.  He came with only a lathe, and over his month of residency he took a dead redwood trunk and honed it down into a pristine pale pillar that was then implanted back into a stump to be happened upon in a grove.  It is called Contemplator, and it is that, quiet and quintessentially Asian, simple and calm.  Further down the path, just as we were to turn away from the rest of the group to head back to the retreat, in a clearing between low hills, two giant gourd-like shapes, skeletal and open, twisted toward each other as though we were catching them in the midst of a whispered conversation or a wrestling match.  This piece, called Dialog, is by a German artist named Roland Mayer, and per our little informational pamphlet, is meant to explore “the duplicity of public vs. private spaces.”

They are, together, indicative of the dichotomy of much of our field: moving, thought-provoking art at a great distance from most people.  Whether that distance is economic or intellectual or physical, this enterprise, the non-profit arts, has receded in the distance over the decades since the founding of the NEA, and now finds itself scrambling back at great effort, and slowly.

As we wandered on our path with Margot and then left her, I kept asking questions, both out loud and to myself, about how Djerassi survived, what case was made for it, who came here and why.  I found myself nagging at something I couldn’t quite figure out until Laura, Margy and I were heading down the path back to the retreat–a feeling that this place, so beautiful, so far from things, so exclusionary not by intention but simply by lack of access and accommodation, where artists came and made art in solitude, engaged in dinner conversation in intimate groups that disappeared into the air and left behind cryptic artworks in the woods and hills and valleys–a feeling that this place itself was indicative of the push-pull that is happening right now with the arts.  Here, in this retreat that is visited by perhaps 1,000 people each year, artists are expressly nurtured with no further agenda and make art with no particular audience readily available.  Which of course they should do–but there was something so retrograde about the model, the cloistering, the displacement of art outside of societal context, which seemed both counter to a successful future for the arts and their public value, and so extraordinarily appropriate to illustrating the reason this Dinnervention thing popped up in the first place.

A new movement in the arts must be one that grapples with the inaccessibility of many of our good intentions, and that recognizes and navigates the barriers that naturally exist or have been built around the art we seek to provide.

“Young Woman with Peonies” by Frederic Bazille, 1870.

My daughter arrives to live with me in eight days, as my bi-coastal family reaches the end of phase one of our West-to-East transition and enters phase 2, aka the phase where Cici lives with me and my husband begins his months of being childless after 5 months of being a single dad.  I am excited and terrified at the upcoming changes, but most of all I am looking forward to having her around, being able to snuggle with her and give her hugs and talk with her when I want—and the logistics of single-parenting a child while my husband, Seth, completes his Fulbright research in Brazil will sort themselves out.

I have been, these past months, more and more preoccupied with how my daughter might end up seeing the world.  I think that not having her here with me has paradoxically allowed me the distance to imagine in more detail some version of her experience in the world, which would have been at least somewhat closed to me had I had to stay caught up (as I will soon) in the minutiae of day-to-day fatherhood.  This preoccupation, as I have written here before, was one of the primary motivators for my new and sustained interest in issues of diversity, access and equity in representation of art (my daughter is bi-racial, and I am not).  My preoccupation has woven back and forth in a variety of directions over these past months, especially on the heels of the publication of the Arts Diversity Index report.  As I continue to work with staff at Americans for the Arts to build out a comprehensive program to help local arts agencies and arts institutions interrogate what it means to diversify, what it means to be engaged in community conversation and development, and how we as an overall arts field can do a better job of representing the viewpoints and histories of our entire nation, how my daughter will see her history in the art of our day-to-day experience has preoccupied me.  All the arts, all the people.

In that spirit, and because when I sit at home on the weekends without my husband and daughter around I often find myself getting either antsy or depressed, I took a trip in mid-May to the National Gallery of Art.  I had been a few weeks before, on the tail of seeing Permanent Collection, about which I have written before, and found myself preoccupied with the (lack of) representation of people of color in the art.  So I headed out to conduct a little survey—I decided to count representations of non-white people in the paintings and sculptures, just to see.

Before going further, I need to lay out the caveats that (1) this was not an exact exercise, and it is entirely possible that my counts will be slightly off both because I missed something and because I was making personal judgments on the race of the people in the paintings and (2) my examination was limited to the permanent galleries of the non-contemporary-art building (the National has 2 buildings, one devoted to classical art and sculpture and the other to contemporary art) and so did not take into account temporary exhibitions.  The Chinese porcelain gallery in the museum was also sectioned off on the day I was there for some reason, so I wasn’t able to visit those pieces, which likely would have increased my count.

But even with that said, as I whisked through the galleries, marking representations in pen on the little paper map they give you at the entrance, I was surprised.

By my count:

• In the permanent galleries (excluding the Chinese porcelain gallery), there are about 1,200 total works.  Of those, I would estimate from spot-counting that about 20% are landscapes without any figures, which I excluded.  This leaves about 960 total works.
• Of those 960 works, 30 works, or about 3.1% of the total permanent collection on display, have representations of people who aren’t white anywhere in the piece (background or foreground).
• Within those 30 works, there were a total of 126 non-white people represented, out of a (very roughly) estimated 2,000 or so total human figures.  This translates to 6.3% of all of the people in the paintings.
• Of those represented, there were African, Polynesian and Native American figures, but I didn’t find any representations of Hispanic, Asian or non-Native American indigenous peoples (though, again, I couldn’t access the Chinese porcelain gallery).

As I said, I did that in May.  Since then, I’ve been trying to sort out what those numbers mean to me.  I was ready to be quite upset; almost all of the representations of people of color, particularly in the paintings, represent them in the background.  There are two beautiful large portraits, one of a black man and one of a black woman, and there are some relatively prominent representations in a small number of other sculptures and paintings, and then a whole lot of what might be termed “bit players.” (Of which there are, of course, also a whole lot of white folks.)

But that initial reaction became muddled for me as I further investigated the National Gallery and discovered that its mission and goals belie its name.  The mission of the National Gallery, I was surprised to learn, is not to represent the artistic history of the nation.  It is instead “to serve the United States of America in a national role by preserving, collecting, exhibiting, and fostering the understanding of works of art at the highest possible museum and scholarly standards.”  Further down, I was surprised to discover that the National Gallery “limits its active art collecting primarily to [works]…originating in Europe and the United States from the late Middle Ages to the present.”

Scrolling even further, I found an explicit recognition of the narrowness of those guidelines: “Because its collecting field is narrow when seen in the context of world art, the Gallery strives to supplement its own works with exhibitions of material from other times and cultures.”

On that same trip down to the National Mall in May, I visited both the Native American museum and the American History museum, which is currently housing an extraordinary exhibition on civil rights created to promote the impending opening of the African American museum.  As I passed through these similarly “narrow” collections—not yet aware of the narrowness of the mission of the National Gallery—I was caught in a moment of confrontation with myself.  Here—and I would argue, despite laudable language in the mission statement, even after understanding the mission of the National Gallery and its attempts to navigate the narrowness—in these three collections I was confronted baldly by the pervasive vocabulary of whiteness.  Our National Gallery displays only Western art, white historic experience as represented in art, while the galleries of non-white cultures, their missions more accurately proclaimed in their names, are left to represent those other parts of the world.  I found that frustrating.

Or was that just my white guilt, suddenly laid bare after some decades of dormancy, rearing up?  There is no question in my mind, having now spent hours and hours in those galleries looking at brush strokes, examining carvings, studying faces, seeing the full span of human emotion, of storytelling and life and death, laid out in the works, that the National Gallery has pursued its particular mission to the fullest.  It is an amazing collection of art.  And I have now had three conversations in the last week that echo Barack Obama’s sentiment that his daughters are “Better than we are” at engaging with race—that say that the rising generation doesn’t understand racial disparity in the same way, that they don’t seek validation in representation, that that type of “special” effort, to ensure equity, is insulting, not welcome.

But still, and despite the good efforts of the National Gallery, the particular vocabulary of the title sticks a bit in my craw.  It is not a national gallery in the sense that it does not represent the artistic history of the whole nation, which, mission aside, is what I had hoped to be able to show my daughter.  The stories told there are not all the stories, and that is a detriment not just to my bi-racial daughter, but to everyone who comes to look at the art.

There’s a placard in one of the French galleries that talks about “Exoticism” and the impact of Northern Africa on French art.  In that gallery, among the 12 paintings, there is only one with a black person in it.  He is in the background, in darkness, draped in muted white almost completely and playing a sitar for a resplendent white woman, lounging in the foreground, porcelain arm crooked above her head and blocking most of the black man’s body, her red hair flowing down a brocade pillow and shimmering in honeyed white light.