We are brought together today to celebrate our learning, our collective and individual
Sunflower Quilting Bee at UMD (2008): voices and papers, performed 13 May, 90 or so people. From the Series: Women, Art and Culture, Part Quadrillion (State of Maryland)
STARTING FROM THE BACK OF THE CLASS, IN TURN EVERYONE WILL SPEAK. Each person will offer a piece for the quilt -- make it as uniquely yours as you can. Imagine yourself in our Women, Art and Culture knowledge quilting society, coming together to share our arts knowledges and meanings as we have pieced them together in our class.
Look over your paper and makes notes of the following. You will speak from something you've put down in these notes:
Find your favorite paragraph in the paper. Put a star next to it.
Write down what you are most proud of in this paper.
Put an arrow next to the place you best describe the argument of the course.
Write down your favorite reading and be prepared to say what made it special for you.
Add one of these:
Write down the moment in the course when things started to come together for you.
Write down a note about a moment outside the course when you found yourself using what you had learned.
Write down a note about how you found yourself included in the argument of the course
When it is your turn to speak, pick out one of these pieces to share in our quilt of the class. We will try to get everyone in, so be brief, but make sure your piece is special and unique.
And may we all keep running into each other, over and over, in friendship, connection, intellectual community, and joyful living!
=== MUSIC: Alice Coltrane, from the Album "Translinear Light"
The Tavis Smiley Show,September 23, 2004 - If jazz legend John Coltrane has disciples — musical or otherwise — chief among them would be his widow, Alice Coltrane.
Alice Coltrane, now 67, met her husband when they were both touring jazz musicians — she was a noted bebop jazz pianist and classically trained musician. She shared with her husband a passion for both music and the spiritual side of human experience. At one point, she joined her husband's famed quartet on piano, replacing jazz great McCoy Tyner.
When her famous husband died of liver cancer in 1967, Alice Coltrane became a fierce guardian of his vast musical estate. She was also left with the task of raising their four children. She continued with a string of well-received albums, but quit the jazz world in 1978.
Now, after a 26-year hiatus, Alice Coltrane is back with a new CD, Translinear Light. The title is a play on the Coltrane name, and also a nod to Alice Coltrane's deep spirituality.
"Look at what trance means," she tells The Tavis Smiley Show producer Roy Hurst. "It means to transcend... it means to become transcendental! So if we get a singular transcendental path of light, that could lead to such great dimensions of consciousness, of revelation, of spirituality, of spiritual power."
Perez, p. 306:"The arts have the potential, in the Nahuatl expression, to create integrity between 'the face and soul' of their beholders, as well as in their makers. Likewise, they do indeed mirror the superficial, visionary, or conflicted soul of the societies we live in. As we understand them, and as they largely still function today, the arts optimally embody and facilitate the critical, truth-seeking, and daring consciousness that is necessary to both social and spiritual well-being."
p. 257: "...a difrasismo, that yokes together the Nahua concept of 'face' to that of 'divinized heart,' to express personhood as the attunement between inner and outer being, the person and the community, the earthly and the divine."
7: Conclusion: Self, Other
p. 298: "In the Chicana art studied here, what is explored, articulated, or deployed is a notion of spirituality whose effects matter socially and politically. In the work of these women, it is the day-to-day practices of spiritual consciousness and its material effects, rather than identification with the dogma and practices of religious organizations, that are brought to our attention as mattering individually, socially, and globally." BLOWING THE STEREOTYPES OF EXPECTED BEHAVIORS WE KNOW DON'T FIT US
"Chicano nationalist activists and Roman Catholic clergy demanded the removal from the Cyber Arte show at the New Mexico International Museum of Folk Art in Santa Fe, because the artist had placed a defiant-looking woman clad in flowers within a mandorla and had bared the breasts of an equally amused female cherub.... In the artist's written response...Lopez astutely wondered what it is about women's nude bodies that seems inappropriate and sacrilegious to the men leading the protest to censor her image.... 'And what of it?' Lopez' Lady seems to ask. Perhaps the focus in male-dominant culture has remained on which bodies we are ostensibly permitted to love--or degrade--rather than how we should love them.... As patroness of the Chicana/o movement, and the symbol of the righteousness of other radical struggles for social justice, the Virgin has been promoted to goddess, queen, and super-heroine by the Chicana feminist movement."
Lopez Website (includes Lopez' responses to critics of this work in section "Our Lady of Controversy")
• Self-Portraits and Representations of the Body
"Must see! Alma Lopez's film is an unusually intimate portrayal of butch identity. On the surface, it's all about the hair - how to cut it, how to style it, how to stroke it - but, really, it's about gender, race, and the daily lives of those who push against the norms." -- Dr. Luz Calvo, Ohio State University
"González invokes the spirit of Kahlo's The Two Fridas. But in González, rather than conveying The Two Fridas's painful sense of being torn psychologically, the duality of the physical and spiritual sense is conveyed as a resource of strength, as the ghostly spirit embraces and comforts the living self, though it communicates precisely through the heart as the hummingbird which represents it, because it itself is the spiritual life blood of the heart."
Perez p. 296:"Chicana feminist artists reconnect spirituality and social justice, spreading the message of hope for human dignity and integrity--for 'face, heart'--wherever their work appears.
"And where, finally does their work appear? Do we buy it, do we exhibit it, do we attend and support it if it is performative? Do we review it? Cite it? Allow it to transform us? Do we support its presence and dissemination in our schools, professional journals, mainstream art magazines, established museums, cutting-edge galleries, bank vaults, and living room walls? Do we study it in its differences and allow it to create a difference, an altar-like offering toward the greater good?"
===
=== Generation Mex: YouTube: Chicle Atomico was an obscure '90s Chicana riot grrl band from Montebello CA that only put out 1 song ever, "Generation Mex," which you can find on this rock/metal compilation CD called Spanglish 101. In English I guess their name means "Nuclear Bubblegum," which I took to mean that they felt like they were expected to be cute as an all-girl band, but they really intended to blow your mind with their radical politics. Here are the lyrics in Spanish, followed by my English translation:
Siempre escucho lo mismo en la pinche radio -- ¿Quien fregados es? ¿Qué es esto? ¡Chicle Atomico! ¿Chicle Atomico? -- ¡No mames! A ver...
En Agosto 13 de 1521 Tlatelolco A pesar de haber sido defendido por Cuahtemoc Cayo vencido bajo las fuerzas de Hernan Cortes No fue triunfo ni derrota Pero resulto en el nacimiento doloroso de la gente mestiza de hoy No solamente estan presente en el Mexico de hoy Pero tambien dentro del corazon de los Estados Unidos En el un rincon conocido como Aztlan...
Mi abuela fue violada por los diablos de Cortés Ahora soy mestiza Rebelde esta vez No quiero ser tu criada Ni correarte los zapatos Ni sudar en tu cocina Lavándote los platos
Violada por Cortés - ¡Rebelde esta vez! We're Generation Mex!
No permito que nos traten Como una clase de bandidos Ni que nos maten con la agonía De ser seres oprimidos No soporto que me beses Con tus labios agresivos Ni me gusta que me vistan De tacones y vestidos.
No quiero ser víctima De los malditos arpíos Nos quitan la dignidad Nuestro dinero es bienvenido Mis manos han dado fruto A gran parte de esta nación Pero los sueldos miserables No me alcanzan ni para un calzón ¡CABRON!
No permito que nos traten Como una clase de bandidos Ni que nos maten con la agonía De ser seres oprimidos Soy una dama de primera Con mis botas y bastón No me trates como perra ¡Yo soy la madre de esta pinche nación!
No permito que nos traten Como una clase de bandidos Ni que nos maten con la agonía De ser seres oprimidos Recuerda que mi abuela fue Violada por esos diablos de Cortés Y ahora soy mestiza ¡Pero rebelde esta vez! Rebelde esta vez...
It's always the same thing on the goddamn radio -- Who the hell is this? What is it? Chicle Atomico! Chicle Atomico? Don't screw around with me! Let's see...
On August 13 of 1521 Tlatelolco Despite having been defended by Cuahtemoc Fell to the forces of Hernan Cortes It was neither a triumph nor a defeat But it resulted in the painful birth of today's mestiza [mixed-blood] people They are present not only in today's Mexico But also in the heart of the United States In a corner known as Aztlan...
My grandmother was raped By Cortés' devils Now I belong to the mestiza race - But this time I'm a rebel! I don't wanna be your maid Don't wanna shine your shoes Won't sweat in your kitchen, poorly-paid Washing dishes that you use
Violated in Cortés' attack - This time I'm fighting back! We're Generation Mex!
I can't take how they fill us With shame like outlaws to be run out of town I won't stand for how they kill us With the agony of living constantly beaten down I won't let you mess with me Stealing kisses by force Don't you try to dress me In a dress, high heels, and a purse
Victim is a part I refuse to play For those goddamn vultures Who rob us of our dignity We sweat for our paycheck in my culture It's my hands that built a lot of this country But I earn pathetic wages for working so hard The boss must think the clothes on my back came free - Bastard!
I can't take how they fill us With shame like outlaws to be run out of town I won't stand for how they kill us With the agony of living constantly beaten down I'm a first-class lady Boots, cane, and all, brother! I'm not your dog so don't treat me that way I gave birth to this nation - I'm your goddamn mother!
I can't take how they fill us With shame like outlaws to be run out of town I won't stand for how they kill us With the agony of living constantly beaten down Remember that my grandma Was raped by those devils And now I'm mestiza But this time I'm a rebel! ===
pp. 224-6: IMAGINE THIS "What would life be like if cultural considerations, broadly defined, were as much a part of local and regional planning as are economic concerns?...
"If culture were given due consideration, the libraries would be open long hours every day, of course, with plenty of readings and storytelling hours and book group.... The computer room would be full of people who'd taken one of the city's frequent digital storytelling workshops, adding their own tales to the every-growning archive of ...stories. Our community centers would be thriving, with classes, workshops and exhibits for all ages, inviting everyone to appreciate...rich cultural diversity....
"When people gathered for holidays and specail events or at ongoing programs like the farmer's market, they would also have the chance to hear music, to learn about community events that might interest them and to sign up for classes....
"...town artists would have public service jobs helping people with whatever their communities need: designing a community garden, creating a mural or monument, turning public housing into someplace attractive, safe and distinct, creating a neighborhood newsletter or a holiday pageant.
"Our public high schools would have good working relationships with some of the cultural industries based in this region, so that local young people could get a head start on careers as engineers, sound recordists, animators and the like.... And if the state education department were to back funds for art and music classes, the entire community would mobilize, collecting signatures for an initiative campaign... "Creative shame would prove so effective (and so conducive to TV and newspaper coverage) the the ...Cultural Coalition would start a trend. Then, when anti-immigrant forces tried to promote a ballot proposition to eliminate multilingual information at state offices...folks would spearhead statewide opposition...."
pp. 233-4: "a few examples of planning elements I might include:
• Offering people temporary use of digital or disposable still cameras or digital video to collect images of their own community...the resulting images to be edited into media that can be shared as part of the planning process.
• Using Forum Theater to enact situations brought forward from the community...and devise possible responses.
• Convening story circles to share thematic tales relevant to planning needs....
• Sending a video team to a local shopping street to interview people about community cultural life; transcribing and editing what's learned into an oral-history-based skit about what works and what needs work."
,FREEWRITE: p. 226: "Every community is different. What is your vision of the transformation of your own community?"
10: Conclusion, Time to Rise and Shine
p. 239: "The effort to counter the effects of globalization is not an equal fight. The forces of globalization have virtually unlimited capital and influence on their side. Yet on the other side we have the relentless resilience of spirit that characterizes human cultures...."
p. 240: "How we live depends to an astounding degree on the narratives we create to contextualize and interpret raw experience. People make art even under the most extreme conditions of deprivation and oppression: in refugee camps, prison wards, homeless shelters. Even without material resources, with only their bodies as tools, humans demonstrate wonder, agency, strength and creative power, giving meaning to the past and present, reimagining the future."
=== Sitar Arts Center is an innovative community arts education and performance center founded on the belief that arts education coupled with high expectations can positively change the direction of young people's lives, particularly those from inner-city communities.
Serving over 500 inner-city Washington, DC residents a year, the Center offers affordable after-school, weekend and summer classes in visual art, music, drama, dance, creative writing, and digital arts to young people primarily from the Adams Morgan, Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights neighborhoods. Partnerships with leading arts organizations along with a network of more than 100 local artists and community volunteers provide first-rate teachers and programs.
The Center makes arts education accessible and affordable by subsidizing the tuition of its students, with most paying $15 per semester for unlimited classes. Named after beloved community activist Patricia M. Sitar and founded in 1998 by Rhonda Buckley, Sitar Arts Center serves as a successful model for like-minded organizations. ===
=== How do strangers become neighbours? by G. Attili and L. Sandercock for more information see: www.mongrel-stories.com
What you see here is a 3 minutes trailer from a 50 minutes documentary which received an Honorable Mention at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival (Oct 2006) and a Special Mention at the International Federation of Housing and Planning film competition (Geneva Sept 2006)
SYNOPSIS: Collingwood, a Vancouver neighborhood that, just 20 years ago was living important inter-ethnic conflicts, is now a welcoming place for everyone. How did this happen? How do strangers become neighbours?
Migration has always been an important feature of human history, but never more so than the past two decades. But what happens when increasing numbers of strangers move into a neighbourhood, bringing with them different histories and cultures, religions and social practices, and often, urgent needs for housing, language training, schools and jobs? How do newcomers, as well as members of the 'host' society, develop an everyday capacity to live alongside those perceived as different, strange?
Our story explores this contemporary global social issue by looking at one neighbourhood -- Collingwood -- in the City of Vancouver. 38% of metropolitan Vancouver, and 51% of the City's residents are foreign born. Collingwood, a predominantly Anglo-European community until the 1980s, has been transformed since then by the arrival of large numbers of East, South, and South East Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans. A neighborhood that, just 20 years ago was locking its doors, afraid of change, and telling immigrants to go back where they came from, is now a welcoming place for everyone.
How did this happen? How do strangers become neighbours?
This is the story of the transformation of one neighbourhood, over a twenty year period, from fear and hostility towards immigrants to a remarkably integrated and welcoming community. It is the story of how an integrated community was created, through the work of the Collingwood Neighbourhood House (CNH). The story is told primarily through the voices, and lives, of immigrant women (from Nigeria, Chile, Colombia, Taiwan, and India), who describe their feelings of isolation and invisibility on arriving in Canada and not being able to speak the language. 'You feel invisible. You are nobody.' These women first came to the CNH to use its language or childcare programs, and then became involved as volunteers, received training, and went on to find jobs in the city. Now their teenage children, who were once in the childcare programs, are volunteers at CNH in the Youth Buddy Program, for example, or youth counseling other youth about drugs, bullying, and so on.
The film begins with a portrait of this low income neighbourhood twenty years ago, a neighbourhood fearful of and antagonistic towards the newcomers. We then tell the story of the birth of the CNH in 1985, with its mission of diversity, of creating a place for everyone, and we follow the development of the CNH and of the community through a series of innovative social and community development programs such as the Arts Pow WoW (a community cultural development program in which thousands of local residents participated), MultiWeek, and the Community Leadership Institute.
This is now a very respectful community, but it wasn't always like that. A longtime Collingwood resident tells the story of the effort to build a Native housing coop in the neighbourhood, and the initial resistance to that, the stereotypes about 'Indians' and reservations, that had to be dispelled before the community could see that the Native population brought real assets to this neighbourhood, as well as needs. Various residents, newcomers as well as oldtimers, discuss the various forms of racism that have existed, and how the CNH works to combat this.
One of the most remarkable stories involves the reclamation of a local park that had been taken over by gang members and drug dealers. Through the local leadership of an environmental artist and a native elder, thousands of residents worked together to come up with a plan for making the park more attractive and hospitable to people from all cultures. Chinese seniors from a tai chi group worked side by side with African drummers and Native carvers to create, with their own sweat and artistic abilities, a place that everyone is proud of. During this lengthy participatory process, people worked together, had fun together, celebrated together, and got to know each other. Strangers became neighbours.
Our immigrant women interviewees describe the CNH as a 'blessed place' a place where everyone feels 'at home' and learns about other cultures. We explore what is so special about this place, how 'the Collingwood spirit' emerged, and what struggles it still faces. ===
Running south on the map is a man pursued by a patrol car. The south and the west are the targets of a large red arrow, appropriately labeled 'Manifest Destiny.' Directly in the path of that trajectory of imperialist expansion is an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe standing over the date of annexation of the Mexican territories, 1848.
The Virgin may be appearing to the pursued undocumented laborer because, like the recently canonized Jan Diego to whom she originally appeared, he is un inocente, innocent, though he is pursued like a criminal for not having proper immigration papers. The man, like the seamstresses, symbolizes the oppressive conditions of many undocumented workers in the United States, publicly reviled yet desired by agribusiness, factories, sweatshops, hotels, and homes needing gardeners, servants, and nannies, though their 'illegal' status makes them more exploitable, that is 'affordable.'
An homage to her mother, who is a steamstress, and to other garment workers, Lopez's work juxtaposes the spectral seamstresses against the mute Los Angeles skyline, which hides garment industry sweatshops...."
p. 157: "Rodriguez's simple yet stunning observation -- that there is coherent continuity of the indigenous in mundane practices inherited from ancestors -- and her historical search for the traces of her own particular Native American ancestors lead her, for example, to place a nail surrounded by four grains of corn upon her altar during the performance. The nail, she explains, is sacred to her because it may have been made by one of her ancestors, relations, or neighbors in the mines of Durango, Mexico, where native peoples were virtually enslaved, forced to extract ore and other materials in order to provide the raw material for the fabrication of such things as nails, which in turn helped make possible the material foundations of modernity and the present."
p. 161: "Her lithographs act as memory chips, recording past and present histories from a spiritual vantage point that renders the ethnically hostile claims of ownership of newer inhabitants of Indigenous ancestral lands as what they are: colonizing, partial, and absurd from a historical perspective documenting and predicting the ubiquity among most peoples of some form of migration, or as the artist put it, 'the timelessness of movement.'"
p. 164: "Underwood's most unforgettable signature has been the visually stunning and poignant weaving of barbed and other wire into her meditations upon the U.S.-Mexico border adn its dangers for those crossing from Mexico into a militarized, vigilante-atrracting, racially polarized U.S. 'frontier' culture."
p. 178: "...a project that closely explores the relations between the gendered and racialized garment inustry, the fashion industry that ideologically sustains it, and women's, particularly poor and racialized women's, lack of safety or 'homeland' within a so-called benevolent paternalistic, male-centered culture that, in the case of the young disappeared women of Juárez, shows itself capable of preying upon its 'daughters'...."
p. 181: "...Alvarez's D.A.S. project nonetheless brings attention to the ways in which the social space of the home is inhabited, gendered, and racialized, form the perspective of the domestic servant. Fashioned around the central figure of a double agent posing as a domestic servant, it is at once a fantasy about social empowerment and an allegory of the artist as a provocateur within hegemonic culture's own 'home.'"
p. 187: "Executed as part of the protest exhibitions during the quincentenary of the Spanish invasion, these box-constructions are conceptually built around the tension between Western scientific discourses and the truths, emotions, and beliefs that exceed these."
p. 192: "The concern with how we occupy public space and the social location of gendered and racialized bodies appears in a number of her most striking paintings, drawings, and prints as well. Her concern with reflection the emotional and spritual as part of the public landscape is conveyed through a distinctive technique and yellow-dominant palette that colors the visualized flow of energy and identity between people and objects."
p. 196: "...the links that she makes between the hidden and exilic cultures of Jewish marranos, or secret Jews, and the recently dispossessed Indigenous peoples. The histories and the religious beliefs of both Jews and Native Americans, like those of their descendants, the Jewish mexicanos and Mexican Americans of the novel's plot, reflect the author's belief that literature tells the same archetypal stories, cross-culturally and ceaselessly, though it does so in specific ways...."
pp. 203-4: "We are unwittingly dehumanized in the processes of consciously or unconsciously reproducing sexual, gender, ethnic, and class privileges. In Moraga's important play, Aztlán, mythical homeland of the Mexica and symbol of Chicana/o nationalism, is remapped beyond the territories of a patriarchal and homophobic imagination in a war of visions that goes to the heart of the vital political and spiritual function of what we are capable of imagining."
=== THE FENCE: homeland, security?
p. 149: "...the idea that 'the border crossed us' literally, in the case of the borderlands-dwelling families divided by the newly imposed border after the U.S.-Mexico War...."
=== MUSIC: Laura Alvarez: http://www.lauraalvarez.net/music.html "Double Agent Sirventa" Album. Produced by Evan Hartzell. Songs are by Laura Alvarez and (Sidro Music/BMI) and Thank you Chloe Jones and Dave Jones (SebastianO Music/BMI) ===
6: Theory from Practice: elements of a theory of community cultural development
• comprehending internalization of the oppressor• live, active social experience• expansion of dialogue• self-determination• expand liberty• redress inequalities
7: The State of the Field
Beyond the US community cultural development often receives reliable public funding, while in the US the trend to "privatization" has reduced the kind of public funding available in the 60s and 70s.
"From Generation to Generation" makes two points: • the importance of transmitting knowledge from the Baby Boomer arts activists to today's younger artists and organizers • the different funding environments created by political changes over the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s: neo-conservative government and privatization, the culture wars
For other ways to conceptualize Feminist Generations, see: Feminist Generations: the persistence of the radical women's movement Nancy Whittier, Temple University Press, 1995
• Entry into activism: Whittier's 1995 model with micro-cohorts: Whittier's model challenges age-stratification or stage in life cycle as definitions of generations, rather initial politicization during the same era define generations, which are internally volatile and divergent in micro-cohorts. Two large generations: the Second Wave and the Third Wave. Second Wave micro-cohorts: =initiators (1969-1971) [years refer esp. to study in Columbus OH] =founders (1972-1973) =joiners (1974-1978) =sustainers (1979-1984) Third Wave micro-cohorts (don't have names just descriptions): (AKA post feminist); understood by Whittier to redefine meanings of "feminism" by conflict with Second Wave building new collective identities (mid 1980s and later): = micro-cohort 1: reluctant to use term "feminist" because of media associations and initial belief that feminism had completed its political tasks; rethinks these assumptions over next ten years and becomes outspoken and pro-feminist = micro-cohort 2: establishes earlier continuity with Second Wave & esp. with radical forms, disruptive social and cultural action.
In both Goldbard and Whittier the funding climate for activism plays a pivotal role in the experiences of feminist and other activist generations:
Wikipedia on "privatization": "privatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of business from the public sector (government) to the private sector (business). In a broader sense, privatization refers to transfer of any government function to the private sector including governmental functions like revenue collection and law enforcement."
Goldberg contrasts the countercultural generations of the sixties and seventies: "was nourished by steadily rising hopes and expectations. In the very real achievements of the civil rights and anti-war struggles of that period, activists acquired a heady sense of their own agency.... The feeling that social arrangements were ripe for remaking was pervasive...." (167)
with the shock of change during the Reagan years and after: "It is difficult now to grasp what a shock the election of Ronald Reagan was to this system of believe. The resulting demoralization was profound and has persisted.... (167)
and now with a shift from just surviving to sustenance: "community cultural development...has increasingly been seen as addressing the new for greater social equity, dialogue and participation in shaping community life, some...groups have been quite successful in attracting support and expanding their programs." "AS the old arts orthodoxies fray at the edges and the right's grip on cultural politics begins to loosen, as social activism in other fields expands, we once again begin to hear harbingers of resurgent activism and interest in community cultural development." (168)
from Cynthia Koch, the NEH and NEA funding crisis: "The 1966 appropriation to the NEA was nearly $2.9 and $5.9 million went to the NEH. Funding and programming at the endowments grew throughout the 1970s, expanding to new audiences and dramatically increasing the arts and humanities presence in local communities and national institutions....
"...in late 1980, the criticism suddenly took a more ominous turn... the anxieties of cultural advocates.... Michael Joyce, executive director of the James M. Olin Foundation, had prepared a report for the Heritage Foundation that was called "highly critical" of both agencies. As part of a larger study of the federal government prepared as a 'blueprint for a conservative American Government,' the report found in both endowments 'a tendency to emphasize politically inspired social policies at the expense of the independence of the arts and the humanities' and called for 'redirecting the endowments toward the highest purposes for which they were intended.'"
"In the end both agencies did sustain cuts, which appeared at the time to be minor. In fact, the 1982 cuts were severe. The arts appropriation dropped from $158.8 million in fiscal 1981 to $143.5 million the next year. The NEH lost close to 14 percent of its $151.3 million budget in 1982 and would not regain its 1981 level of funding until 1989. In an era of double-digit inflation this represented a real dollar cut of approximately 50 percent over the course of the 1980s -- an amount consistent in the end with the Reagan administration's original objective. The NEA, which had a more effective lobbying network in well-known performing arts advocates and a large and dedicated institutional base of arts organizations, did return to (and exceed) its 1981 appropriation by 1984; however, even that did not keep pace with inflation."
Goldberg examines "The New Hybridity" in the US, required without public funds: "in partnerships with social service agencies, schools, community development organizations, activist groups and other non-arts groups, even, less often, in specific initiatives undertaken by conventional arts organizations and institutions..." "The result has been a number of vigorous, popular projects attractive to funders particularly because they straddle so many fields, the work's hybrid character earning it attention and legitimacy in better-resourced, more visible arenas, arenas less accessibel to creators of smaller scale, locally focused community cultural development work."
How do you put this generational story into your own sense of yourself as a historical subject? What time frames for politics do you know from your own experience? What stories can you tell about art in public meanings? What do you remember or know about congress and arts funding? What sort of arts have you taken for granted as part of your own histories?
Turn to a person sitting near you and come up with a story of art in your life, how these histories make any sense of what art you have come in contact with; for example what sort of arts learning did you have in school? Have you had any experiences yourself with what Goldberg calls community cultural development?
A community cultural development project by a friend of mine, Rusten Hogness; it just got its grant from the California Council for the Humanities:
The Gleaners of Salinas Valley: Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change (project website):
Summary: We will collect the stories of those involved in gleaning post-harvest produce from the fields of the Salinas Valley and providing it to the needy. This is a multi-media project that will create audio archives, produce radio stories, and make written and audio stories available on the Web.
The Gleaners and Their Stories
We will collect the personal stories of the gleaners, who spend long hours gleaning fruits and vegetables in the fields to help fight hunger.... We will attend organized gleaning sessions and meet the gleaners. We will follow the gleaners and the food they harvest from the fields through the cleaning and bundling processes to the distribution of the food to the hungry. We will collect as diverse a selection of their stories as we can. We want to know their backgrounds; how and why they became gleaners; whether gleaning has changed their relationship to food, agriculture, and the hungry; and what gleaning means to them.
There are several hundred gleaners participating in organized gleaning programs in the Salinas Valley. While we will talk to many, we will collect extended stories from 12 to 15 of the gleaners whose stories highlight different motivation, different backgrounds, and different parts of our community. For each of these, we will present excerpts of their stories (in text and audio), along with their pictures, on our website. We will turn at least 6 of the stories into full audio portraits for airing on public radio and streaming broadcast on our website. If time allows, we will produce more audio portraits....
The practices of gleaning, broadly conceived, have achieved a particular salience recently. As a model for sustainability, gleaning has inspired all sorts of collection and re-use projects. As a practice, from dumpster diving to other sorts of scavenging, it has become a contentious element in local politics around the homeless, youth culture, and anti-authoritarian street action. Gleaning has also inspired local art, both as a subject and as a practice – in found-art and junk-art assemblages. Recent showings of the French documentary The Gleaners and I provided a particularly delightful and poignant example of gleaning as both the subject and the practice of documentary art. This new salience of gleaning practices generally increases the salience of our gleaners’ stories.
===
=== 25 Docs You Must See Before You Die Shot entirely on hand-held digital camera, legendary 72-year-old director Agnès Varda observes the historic custom of gleaning in an eye-opening journey. This magically inspiring documentary provides a unique social critique of human behaviour. ===
=== Trecho do filme "Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse" (2004) de Agnes Varda === From the Wikipedia: "The Gleaners and I is a French documentary by Agnès Varda that features the practice of Gleaning. It was released as Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse in France in 2000.
The film tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection. Varda travels French countryside and city to find and film not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners. The film spends time capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive. It touches on things such as the teacher named Alain who is an urban gleaner who has a master's degree. He teaches immigrants. Varda's other subjects include artists who incorporate recycled materials into their work, symbols she discovers during her filming (including a clock without hands and a heart-shaped potato), and the French law regarding gleaning. Varda also spends time with Louis Pons, who explains how junk is a 'cluster of possibilities.'"
Women's art, art by women, feminist art, and art activism have been ways women have analyzed and changed everyday life. Art is one of the forms of passionate politics feminists have mobilized to make life better, for themselves and others. In this course we will investigate how artists and activists have asked sometimes hard, sometimes joyful questions about power, gender and sexuality, practices of racialization, nations and languages, abilities and disabilities, religion and meaning and more. We will examine assumptions we and others make about women, art, culture and feminism. We will especially consider how art can reshape possibilities and actualities for everybody. What counts as art? What do we do with public art? What is art activism?
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Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1991)
