Art & Upheaval:
Artists at Work on the World’s Front Lines

Project Summary

This prospectus describes a book. project to document the efforts of artists working to help resolve conflict, promote peace, and rebuild civil society in communities in upheaval around the world. The activities of artists in global hot spots like Northern Ireland, Eritrea, Cambodia, and Bosnia are largely unknown, indeed surprising, even to those who regard themselves as knowledgeable about the arts and international affairs. Considered separately, their stories are compelling and inspiring. Taken together, they constitute an important and growing body of work from which we can learn much about how human creativity can help us heal the deepest and most destructive of our self-inflicted wounds. To date research has been conducted in Northern Ireland, Cuba, and Littleton, Colorado (Columbine High School).

We are currently soliciting financial support for the documentation of the efforts of artists in Brazil, Eritrea, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Argentina, Australia, South Africa, India, and Oakland, California. We are also interested in learning about other such programs around the world. Anyone with information relevant to this project can contact us.

Project Background

These artists working in the forgotten corners of our society had found or forged new ways of making significant change. They were addressing and helping to solve some of our country's most pressing problems. Most of them had been doing it for years, and yet, nobody knew.

From the Introduction to Art in Other Places: Artists at
Work in America’s Community and Social Institutions

This quote is taken from the book of landmark research conducted by William Cleveland on artists working in U.S. community and social institutions. In 1992, when Art in Other Places was published, the extraordinary legacy of the artists who pioneered the post-sixties arts and community movement in America was largely unacknowledged. Since that time, the phenomenal growth of programs and resources devoted to making art a part of American community life at all levels has been truly astounding. Americans for the Arts estimates that more than 80 percent of the 3800 local arts organizations in the country now support programming in community and/or social institutions. National and regional arts and non-arts funders and have followed suit with an increasing number of initiatives aimed at integrating the arts as a critical component of healthy communities.

As the community arts movement was making its presence felt in America, similar efforts were taking root around the world. Artists in Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe, often from cultures with much a deeper history of community-based arts, developed their own unique approaches to linking art and community. Many of these artists and arts organizations were responding to communities grappling with some of the most devastating political and social upheavals of the twentieth century. Artists working in such places as Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Jerusalem, South Africa, Cambodia, and the former East Germany have taken on some of the most disturbing and difficult issues facing the world today. Some have succeeded in ways that appear almost impossible in a world dominated by the seeming intransigence of hatred and violence and fear. Given the odds, some have failed. But most have contributed in some significant way to remaking the fabric of their communities.

The variety of conditions and situations addressed by these artists has valuable implications for communities throughout the world confronting upheaval and change. Artists working and succeeding in these desperate places have helped to mediate conflicts, rebuild public infrastructure, heal unspeakable physical and psychic trauma, and give new voice to the forgotten and disappeared.

This prospectus seeks support for field research to document the history and practices of twenty to twenty-five of these unique and courageous creative efforts. The proposed research will provide an enlightening view of how the creative processes are being used to mitigate violence, destruction, dislocation, and despair around the world. The resulting book will include the program histories, research, and descriptions of the wide variety of artistic, educational, and healing approaches utilized by the various initiatives and programs. It will also recount many of the financial, social, and political strategies employed to build and sustain support for these unlikely endeavors.

The stories of these artists and their community partners are both compelling and immensely instructive. The following are brief summaries of five of the more than twenty programs that have been identified thus far in the preliminary research conducted for this effort.

• Northern Ireland: Art & Reconciliation: The Community Arts Forum in Belfast is an artist-run, community-based organization has been using the arts for twenty-five years to mitigate the violence and mistrust that has dominated community life in Northern Ireland for decades. During this time, hundreds of CAF artists have worked to provide a creative voice for communities caught in the crossfire and trauma of "troubles." These have included dozens of community originated theater productions like The Wedding; mural programs; community festivals; and work with prisoners, people with disabilities, and patients in hospitals and mental health facilities.
  
  
• Eritrea: Culture Rebuilds Community: For thirty years, Eritrea fought Ethiopia to obtain its independence. It did so without the support of foreign aid, often against a government backed by different superpowers at different times. It learned to be very self-sufficient during the process, fighting at night and sustaining every aspect of its culture by day, running schools, health services, cultural activities, etc., often literally underground to avoid detection by air fighters. With the coming of peace through victory in 1991, the impoverished country recognized that, like all countries, its real wealth was the indomitable strength of its four million people of nine different ethnic origins and languages, living in environmental conditions ranging from arid mountains to tropical swamps to coastal deserts to fertile highlands. Unlike most countries, it lacked all economic and capitalized resources, from computers to pencils, from transport infrastructures to artificial limbs.
  
  Eritrea sustained a vision of national self-sufficiency, a desire to avoid any reliance on international aid and the will to synthesize national identity with the preservation, development, and celebration of its extraordinary cultural diversity. It quickly recognized the potential of theatre as a tool to achieve its aim by providing a medium of celebration, debate, and information and as the foundation for the rebuilding of its educational infrastructure. The project sought to build upon the strength of existing Eritrean forms of theatre and use the best examples of good practices abroad. Leeds University, with its international reputation for studies in African theatre and theatre for development, offered a two-pronged development instrument: 1) community theatre, and 2) theatre in education.
  
  In 1996, Leeds based theater educator Gail McIntyre, assisted by Eritrean educator Nike Imoru, delivered a five week training program for teachers drawn from around the country. Many worked in very isolated communities. Some had to walk miles to reach transport points to bring them to the capital, Asmara. The process involved the use of a variety of drama and theatre teaching techniques that the individual teachers could apply in their own schools. While Western expertise is of value, all sides recognize that the idea is to transfer the skills to the local workers and let them assimilate, adapt, augment, or reject as their own needs dictate.



• Vigário Geral: Art and the Architecture of Poverty: Vigário Geral is a large favela at the edge of Rio. It is a world of cramped quarters, extreme poverty, and crime bounded by train tracks, a throughway, and a high wall. Artists Maricio Diaz and Walter Riedweg reach the favela by way of a bridge, which is the only access route, as well as the scene of frequent shootouts between the police and traficantes, the armed representatives of the drug trade. Diaz and Riedweg believe that all art is social action and can manifest social change if focused with respect, authenticity, and skill. Their work in Vigário Geral is with the youth of the favela. Through it, hundreds of marginalized young people explore and share their lives, their symbols, their stories. Using sculptural and video installations, these children and teenagers exercise their capacities as "creative people and as the carriers of social skills." They also learn about the world beyond the bridge. And, through Devotionalia, the traveling exhibition of their work, the world learns about reality inside the favela.
  
  
• East Bay Center for the Performing Arts: From Ashes to Art: In 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, America was burning. In Oakland, amid the turmoil, five artists came together in an inner-city church in Richmond, California, to forge a creative response to the devastation. Their dream: to counter the rage and destruction by making the creative processes a powerful and persistent force in the lives of East Bay children. Their goal: to build a community arts center for the express purpose of using the arts as a vehicle for social reconciliation and social change.
  
  Thirty-one years later, their dream is alive and kicking at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts. The Center offers thousands of children and young adults rigorous, sequential training in traditional and contemporary art forms. Through their programs young people learn to play steel drums or classical guitar; study ballet or the huapango dance repertoire; write plays; produce dramatic and documentary films; tell folk tales; or participate in Laotian New Year celebrations, ancestral Ghanaian festivals, or traditional rural Mexican fandangos.
  
  The Center’s commitment to the cultural and artistic life of the community is exemplified in a variety of ways: in its forty-some, collectively driven original theater and film works; in its work with adolescents caught up in the justice system; in its collaboration with group homes, homeless shelters, and other youth centered programs. By linking personal motivation with artistic programs that enhance young people’s ability to engage with their environment, the Center encourages them to imaginatively transform it.
  
  
• Cambodia: Reconstructing a Devastated Culture: The practitioners of Khmer classic dance music and theater were among the first to go in the cultural genocide that took place in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror from 1975 to 1979. During this time, "Pol Pot succeeded in eradicating almost 800 years of artistic endeavor in just three and a half years in a purge of the intelligentsia far more brutal than anything contemplated by Stalin or Mao." Given the country’s economic and social devastation, very little was done during the ’80s and early ’90s to resurrect the country’s cultural life. In 1996, Fred Frumberg left his job as the director of the Paris Opera to begin working with such artists as puppet master Ta Tien and the classical dancer Em Tiay to begin the long task of rebuilding both Cambodia’s cultural memory and contemporary artistic practice. The result was a two-part program that addressed "contemporary problems with contemporary arts, while making an effort to revive classical arts." With support from UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other funders, this continuing effort is seen by both artists and the country’s Ministry of Culture as critical to Cambodia’s ability to regain its social and cultural identity.