Communal Spaces for A Diverse Populace

Where People Go to Be Themselves in Public

Cities are composed of diverse communities. The makeup of these communities is determined by everything from ethnicity, culture, economics, patterns of migration and more than a little bit of overt and covert social engineering. As much as social engineering (often under the guise of social planning) can create communities it can just as easily destroy them. The creation of Lincoln Center was, of course, the result of the decimation of the community that once stood on its site. The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, which cut a wide and gaping wound through several Bronx communities created a destabilization of huge swaths of  that borough that persists to this day. Not surprising since the multi-lane highway literally cut through what had once been a physically joined neighborhood. Through the aggressive use of the imminent domain laws (which allows for governmental seizure of privately held property) the late city planner Robert Moses was able to exert his will (and love of the automobile and highways) on the city. This is not news of course, and much has been written about Moses--who in spite of holding no publicly elected office--was allowed to simultaneously build and pillage throughout New York. 

In Chicago the late mayor Richard Daley was an almost single handed purveyor of the city's social planning during his long reign. Under his watch public housing rose in isolated areas of the city, clustered far from the usual amenities and support services, beginning the process of vertically warehousing (and segregating) large numbers of largely black Chicagoans. Like many cities Chicago has numerous ethnic neighborhoods, including those comprised of largely Mexican, Greek, Italian, Polish, Ukranian, Chinese and numerous other groups. Unlike many major cities where the social dividing lines between these various communities are often fluid and porous,  the instances in which these communities actually intermingle are few and far between here in the Windy City, described by the Chicago Tribune as "the most segregated large city in America." In spite of this social engineering, all cities need spaces where its populace can spontaneously congregate, to join with their neighbors in moments of grief, celebration or relaxation. 

The recent death of pop star Michael Jackson brought spontaneous crowds to Union Square, Times Square and Harlem's 125th Street in New York among other spaces all across the country. And the national grief immediately following the attack on 9/11 also brought an outpouring of spontaneous assembly in parks and public spaces throughout the country as grief stricken citizens sought solace and connection. Clearly these public spaces are an integral aspect of who we are, particularly in those large urban spaces where a sense of isolation (in spite of being physically overcrowded) is more likely than in smaller tight knit communities. When they are seeking various forms of release people need to know almost instinctively, where they can go to not be alone.

This is what makes the Crown Fountain, located downtown in Millennium Park, such a singular kind of communal social space and an absolutely vital piece of public art. When the weather is warm, as it has been lately, the fountain attracts a diverse group of both Chicagoans of every conceivable stripe as well as tourists, all drawn to this location. Completed in 2004, the fountain--conceived by artist Jaume Plensa--consists of two forty foot glass brick towers encasing video LED images of the faces of nearly one thousand Chicagoans. The people populating these almost still video images come from every conceivable racial, ethnic and cultural population in Chicago. As such they directly mirror the diverse population that is drawn to the fountain itself. Surrounded by black granite and containing a shallow wading pool in between each tower the fountain attracts a bathing suit clad array of people from Chicago's various neighborhoods who seldom if ever congregate socially in this segregated city. They are joined by hordes of tourists from around the country and the globe. All fountains must have spouting water of course, and this one does too, with the cooling water periodically spouting from the mouths of the subjects, drawing screaming children to its cascading coolness. 

Crown Fountain raises the bar for public art in an almost singular way. Most public art consists of objects sited within a particular space or environment for public contemplation. The degree to which the public actually interacts with this work is largely cerebral. Jaume Plensa's fountain poses a more visceral approach to public art, blurring the line between the object and the public. That a broad cross section of people rich and poor, resident and visitor can all claim ownership of it suggests what public art can be at its best. Considering those battles in the past in which various publics took offense at some of the public art that suddenly sprouted in their midst, Crown Fountain suggests that forward looking art can indeed be broadly embraced by a diverse and appreciative public of all stripes. As such it becomes a comforting place, a kind of granite beach to which people are attracted and allowed to be themselves freely in the company of others. One can't ask more of public art than that.

(Photographs: Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain; Dearborn Homes public housing; crowd gathered at the Apollo celebrating Michael Jackson; Crown Fountain)

Landscape and Memory

Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago. Gohlke had been one of my professors in grad school as a visiting faculty in Yale's photo program years ago, and I had fond memories of the man as well as a long standing interest in his work, which is absolutely seminal in the contemporary landscape tradition. So after a bit of back and forth in setting a date, I had finally been able to arrange for him to come and meet with our students and to give a public lecture. Self interest was also involved, as I wanted to revisit his work in his presence and to have the opportunity to ask him some questions that I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him all those years ago. The landscape, quite frankly, has never been a favored genre of mine, which may have accounted for my failure to engage him more deeply when I was in his midst as a student. But having followed his work closely since then, I was by now more steeped in his work, though no more steeped in the genre itself than I had ever been. His visit--and events since--have nudged me ever more forcefully into a deeper consideration of the idea and tradition of the landscape.

Gohlke arrived at Columbia lugging a portfolio of large and beautifully printed black and white photographs that he shared with the Thursday class of students. Among the works he had brought along were photographs from a project that he and Joel Sternfeld had been commissioned to do by Queens College in 2003 and 2004 for installation in the college's new Powdermaker Hall. Working in tandem and alone, the two had gone out into the borough to respond photographically to what they saw, seeking to set down their own subjective responses--as outsiders--to the diverse communities that make up this populous area. There are more languages spoken in this borough than in any other American city, and the diversity of its inhabitants has increased tenfold from when I lived there. I was born and raised in Queeens, and spent a good part of my life traversing the borough by school bus, going up and down Hillside Avenue and the steep hill leading away from it, to first elementary then junior high, high school and then Queensborough Community College. I had also drifted far and wide by foot, bike, bus, train, and the back seat of my parent's car in the course of a wide range of activities. My Aunt Louise lived right next door to us in Jamaica, Queens and my Aunt Delcie and Uncle Ted lived in Corona-East Elmhurst, a half hour drive or so on the Van Wyck and Grand Central Expressways. Between visiting them and engaging in a host of everyday activities over many years of growing up, I had come to know Queens in the way that one only comes to know the place that they are truly from. Viewing Gohlke's photographs reminded me of that fact. Speaking recently with the manager of Columbia College's bookstore, who it turned out was also from Jamaica, I mentioned the illuminated brown painted Santa Claus figure that annually appeared above the doorway to the singer James Brown's house every Christmas season. It's a memory that could only elicit deep laughs from someone who knows that neighborhood and Brown's former house on Linden Boulevard intimately. 

As Gohlke showed the students these photographs, my own memories about the place where I grew up were continually jogged. Here a picture of a street with a sign for the Q65 bus visible in the myriad details. There a photograph of a driveway, much like the driveway connecting our house to my aunt's. Looking at the Q65 bus stop picture, I told Gohlke I knew almost the whole route that the bus traversed along Parsons Boulvard from the then almost exclusively white neighborhood of Hillcrest where I seldom ventured to it descent down the hill to Hillside Avenue and on to Jamaica and Shoutheast Queens. The stop on Parsons Boulverad was adjacent to the E and F subway stop where we often waited to pick up my aunt when she came from work. We often met my dad here too, waiting in the car with my mother until he came up from out of the subway. It passes what used to be the Gertz Department store as it continues down New York (now Guy Brewer) Boulevard, eventually passing the Rochdale Village  apartments where my brother Ken moved when he left home for the first time upon getting married. My friend Gerry--who passed his brother's unused enlarger and darkroom equipment on to me so I could set up my first darkroom--eventually lived there too, with his wife and children. Gohlke's photograph of the driveway also provoked a rush of memories, inviting me into a space so eerily familiar as to recall the feeling of that narrow drive leading to the backyards of our homes which also provided a bridge between our house and my aunt's, where the back door was always left unlocked. My brother and I staged many a cookie raid through that back door.

Seeing Gohlke's photographs also reminded me of an aborted project I had attempted many years ago, the only proposed project that I never completed. In the mid 1980s, as part of a 

fellowship awarded by the New York State Council on the Arts, I had planned to make a group of pictures in the Queens neighborhoods where I had grown up. Starting in South Jamaica at 115th Road and Sutphin Boulevard then moving 

to the area around 119th Avenue and 168th Street and finally to Hollis/Queens Village around Hollis Avenue, I wanted to photographically revisit the places where I had been shaped. Looking at old family photographs also prompted this desire to return for a "second" look. What I experienced instead was a rush of conflicting emotions and motivations that lead me to not make a single photograph. Looking for the past, as it were, and confronted by an entirely unfamiliar present, I couldn't exactly figure out a way to reconcile the two. Of course everything looked smaller than I remembered...it always does. And in spite of the address on the house being the same address of the house I had once lived in--168-26 119th Avenue--nothing else about the house looked or felt familiar. How do you photograph a memory I wondered. I was still wondering as I walked to the bus stop to get to the subway and then out to Brooklyn and home. Maybe, as they say, you can't go home again. And yet, through the photographs of an outsider--Frank Gohlke--I had momentarily gone back home.

This encounter with Gohlke's Queens pictures led me that evening to Google Maps, where I typed in my old address and then went to "Street View." Sure enough, there it was: my old home looking even less familiar than when I had ventured out to Queens over twenty years ago hoping to photograph it. With Google's 3D Stret View I then preceded to drift through the neighborhood, looking for my aunt's home next door (still one of the most attractive houses on the block) and then to the homes of various friends and neighbors...all still there, though recognizable only by certain details held in memory. The flagpole is still in front of the Outlaw's house, as it had been since the early 1960s or earlier. My brother and I would wait at their house to be picked up by my mother after school. It was there one afternoon that we learned from a distraught Mrs. Outlaw that President Kennedy had been shot and killed earlier that day. Other places had either disappeared or been transformed into unrecognizable places: the corner candystore was gone, a barbershop now stood where Curt's Bakery--home of the finest sweet potato pies--had once stood. I continued this cyber walk, roaming freely throughout the neighborhood as memory after memory was shaken freee. Here again in this very different but highly mediated arena I was having a visceral experience very unlike what I had experienced in actually being there on the block. 

Oscar Palacio's American History Lesson

With Gohlke and Google Map's Street View providing food for thought about two mediated ways into the experience of landscape and memory, I left Chicago that weekend to meet up with friends in Massachusetts. One, Oscar Palacio, was exhibiting photographs  in an exhibition at Boston's new FP3 Gallery titled Re-represented. The large scale color photographs from his larger project History Re-visited depict places in the American landscape where significant history has occurred or is invoked. This Colombian born photographer is in the midst of a provocative project that casts a questioning and critical eye on American history, and questions how this history is remembered...or not. What is provocative about the project, among other things, is the degree to which memory functions as the critical perceptual device or trigger, since in a number of cases the photographs are rather ambiguous as far as exactly what they describe and in the absence of text or title could easily be anywhere. His photograph "Gettysburg Gate" could well be any weathered wooden fence and posts in the outback, but for the significance of that historical place.

Which is to say that the meaning embedded within the photographs is a received and subjective one, and its appearance is often at odds with the heroic "official" version of history that was enacted or memorialized there. Palacio approaches these sites with an eye that is in equal measure caustic, restrained and unflinching. Much the way that Robert Frank appeared on the American shores from Switzerland turning a jaundiced eye on the American social landscape, so is Palacio making clear the ambivalence and quiet horror at the root of so much of American history. From the locale of the infamous Salem "witch" hunts to the mangy gated Plymouth Rock, he locates the dissonances and unsightly runs in the fabric of American history. In doing so he also questions photography's ability to adequately deconstruct that history or point the way to an affirmative resolution of it. 

Landscapes and the Mediated View

Oscar's photographs were fresh in my mind as we set off  early the next morning with friends to go to North Adams to visit MassMoCA and the exhibitions there, particularly the massive Sol LeWitt wall drawing projects which are installed over three floors in one of MassMoCA's newly refurbished buildings. Driving through the landscape of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts provided wonderful and fresh food for thought regarding the landscape. As we traversed the winding roads leading to North Adams, evidence of the recent harsh ice storms were apparent from the many sharply bent trunks and snapped branches of small trees and growth along the way. Periodically one comes to one of the expansive and majestic vistas of this mountainous region and catches a glimpse of what much of America must have looked like at its dawn. It's hard to miss these locations of course, since they are usually encountered through the clearing of a viewing platform upon which have been mounted at least two large and unsightly mechanical binoculars, which for a quarter allow you to peer through the lens at the then shaped and mediated experience otherwise unfolding directly in front of you. I've never quite understood the need for these devices at these locations, since the drama lies in the vastness of the landscape laid out before you, and it is the physical sensation of standing alone facing this great expansiveness that seems to be central to the very experience. The binocular visually "bites off" only a small piece of this grandeur, putting a device in between you and the experience. It strikes me as somewhat akin to the tourists who in their travels spend more time picturing the experience than actually experiencing it physically and viscerally. You may not touch, feel or remember much, but you'll remember and have the photographs. And so it is as I contemplate this past week in the presence of so many images that seek to help us remember where "we" have been and to provide a sense of connectedness to the world through optical and mechanical--if not physical-- means.

Guggenheim Fellowship Congrats

The recent fellowship announcement from the Guggenheim Foundation brought the good news that fellow Chicagoans Brian Ulrich (left) and Anna Shteynshleyger were awarded Fellowships in Photography. Both are adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago, where Ulrich graduated from the MFA photography program some four years ago. Ulrich has been hard at work on a project examining consumerism in America in all of its varied states, and has been creating a whirlwind of professional activity the past few years, with shows at Rhona Hoffman, Robert  Koch and Julie Saul Galleries among others and attendant interest from a range of museums as well. Shteynshleyger, a graduate of Yale's MFA photography program,  has been flying lower on the radar, but making no less interesting work photographing in Siberia examining the sites of Russian labor camps under the former Communist regime and continuing her more recent project City of Destiny." She's soloed previously at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in a 12X12 exhibition of her work and at New York's Motti Hasson Gallery. A show of her work is slated for the Renaissance Society here in Chicago early next year. Both photographers reaffirm the vibrancy of photographic practice here in the Windy City and make clear the Guggenheim Foundation's alertness to work of significance and depth wherever it may be found.

Dennis Gallagher - In Memoriam

A friend of mine, the sculptor Dennis Gallagher, passed away last Monday after complications from a sudden illness. The husband of Trish Bransten, father of Rena and Sam, and son-in law of Rena Bransten, Dennis was a gregarious and gifted man with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. His large scale abstract ceramic sculptors had garnered recognition for him over the years with many museum and gallery shows. I last sat with him over drinks in O'Reilly's Bar in his Russian Hill neighborhood in San Francisco, one of those notorious watering holes where numerous stories (and more) have surely passed across the bar. A reunion with Dennis and the rest of the Gallagher-Bransten clan was something I always looked forward to. It's been a bit too long since my last stay in San Francisco. The lights of that wonderful city will shine a little less brightly and defiantly in Dennis' absence. He made the corner of the city wherever he stood, lived and worked a much brighter and interesting place.

Photographs (from top): Frank Gohlke, Queens, NY 2003; Frank Gohlke, Queens, NY 2003; Joel Sternfeld, Queens, NY 2003; Oscar Palacio, "Gettysburg Gate," 2008; Photograph by Scott Speck; Brian Ulrich photograph by Dawoud Bey; Dennis Gallagher photograph by Scott Stohler

The Twenty-first Century Museum

When Artists Rock the [Art] House

I was asked to give a presentation for the Education Committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago. The committee is comprised of educational and curatorial staff, along with a few trustees and patrons. I had worked with Jackie Terrassa, MCA's recently appointed Assistant Director of Public Programs, when she was the education head at the Smart Museum of Art a few years back, and had actually known her before that through her work in Columbia College Chicago's Photography Department. So when she invited me to 

give a presentation at MCA I readily accepted, though I wasn't exactly sure what the exact context was. I did know that Jackie was familiar with the project based work I have done at various museums since the early 1990s, and this work was consistent with her own interest in museum education and the museum as an inclusive and dialogical space of participation. I also knew that I have definite ideas about how institutions like MCA can use the current moment of economic and social turmoil as a moment of opportunity, a moment to embrace an expanded paradigm of what and how a museum can exist as a part of the socio-cultural fabric of society. In the past I have only done these kinds of presentations at museums where I am already slated to do a project or, at the least where the institution is consideration extending an invitation to me to do a project and wants to do a presentational "meet and greet" with the staff before committing. I didn't know exactly what MCA or Jackie was thinking, but I was game, having a work in the museum's collection which has been shown there on previous occasions, and being a fairly regular attendee, not to mention perpetual member. Indeed MCA is one of the few museums, through its ongoing 12X12 exhibition program of emerging Chicago artists, to have shown itself to be genuinely responsive to artists in its immediate orbit while also maintaining a meaningful diversity in its other programming as well. It's given the institution an even greater vibrancy while affirming its commitment to talent at its own doorsteps. The question of how to maintain national and global relevance and stature while being responsive to one's local community is one that most museums have simply shied away from entirely, or responded to in a token way when they have responded at all.

My private  presentation was preceded by two public events at the museum that took place in the immediately preceding weeks that I thought signaled a significant shift for the museum; both of these were fostered by Theaster Gates, a dynamic young artist from Chicago's South Side, who is himself devising an evolving art practice that directly engages public ritual and social structures, seeking to use his practice to satisfy both his own expansive sensibilities, but also his need to bring together diverse social communities to bridge prevailing social structures. To that end Gates created a series of performances and events in venues across Chicago that included Shine King, a far west side shoeshine stand, the MCA, Little Black Pearl, an arts center in the Kenwood-Hyde Park neighborhood, and Sonotheque,  a club on the north side. At the opening performance in his 12X12 installation Temple Exercises (with his ever evolving cast of cohorts The Black Monks of Mississippi) at MCA Gates--much to the surprise of the museum I'm sure--brought his whole merry overflowing band of enthusiasts to the museum for his performance. Spilling out of the small 12X12 gallery space and out in the MCA lobby, and winding its way up the grand stairway, the capacity audience was a grand celebration of the kind of diverse crowd one would hope to find populating a contemporary institution but all too often don't.

Along with his scatter site performances and events, Gates 

facilitated a dialogue with Project Row Houses' Rick Lowe and Kyong Park, founder of New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture. Both Lowe and Park have also devised institutions and practices that are broadly and socially engaging, so their presence at MCA during Gates' exhibition project suggested a interesting confluence of sensibilities. This program too was well attended, suggesting a real desire for these kinds of programs, which the museum again must have noted. So I was looking forward to following up on this with my presentation for the education committee, giving my own take on the museum as an active social and aesthetic space. 

I had also been thinking about a few other recent projects that tilted the museum experience in a provocatively engaging way, such as Vik Muniz's recent curatorial project at New York's Museum of Modern Art, "Rebus." The show, which garnered much critical and public praise--friends called it a "must see" show--was the result of handing over the curatorial reins to an artist, who then brought a keen and sometimes humorous sensibility to bear on the selection and arrangement of a wide range of fine and design objects from the museum's collection, mixing mediums along with the high/low function of the objects in a way that created an entirely new and out of the box context for considering the work. This is, in fact, the ninth in MoMA's artists curated projects, "Artists' Choice."  The exhibition was revealing and refreshing for what it said about how a new and meaningful museum experience could be fostered by being willing to reconsider the artist's role, allowing their "work" as such to be the shaping of an exhibition. Muniz's unconventional selection and presentation, with its own quizzically challenging logic, revealed a conceptually refreshing approach to curatorial practice that suggest one way that museums can shake things up by loosening the conventional reins and seeing what results. It was also a way to create a very different kind of conversation around the collection and around the presumed role of an artist. 

As I can hear my more conservative curator friends starting to huff and puff quietly, there is one caveat I'll offer here: not all artists--even interesting ones--make interesting curators. But there have been enough effective ones to give one pause as to what other such opportunities would reveal. (Artist Mickalene Thomas' recent curated exhibition at Collette Blanchard Gallery, "The Brand New Heavies," suggests a similar sense of an astute artist-curator at work, albeit within a commercial gallery context, and provides strong evidence that artists are not only good at presenting their own work.)

For the most part the kinds of conversations that take place within the museum are private ones: the viewer engages with the objects and has a private, often unspoken response to them, and then moves on to other objects, and so on. The transformative experience as such is one which only the individual is privileged to, and there are few (if any) ways for that response to then enter into the actual experiential framework of the museum. If there were such an opportunity for response, the museum space could become a more conversational one. One of the ways I think museums can transforms themselves into more dynamic spaces is to allow for a space where this usually private conversation can somehow become a public one, one which is then embraced and folded into the fabric of the institution. This conversation need not be restricted solely to artists, and can--with a degree of programmatic finesse--be extended to a number of different constituencies. Muniz's engagement with the collection and the resultant exhibition was an example of this kind of conversation, one in which an artists' individual response was shaped into an exhibition. Of course, within the hierarchical environment of most museums, there exists a rather fixed notion of just who is allowed to shape the viewing experience.

The role of curator has long been defined as the kind of position that comes attached to a whole set of assumptions about professional expertise and training, with this training then being subjectively  deployed in the shaping of the experience and perception of the work within the museum going experience. As such, curators have a significant hand in also shaping the larger art historical experience, since museums do make decisions about which works of a given historical moment will be elevated and perhaps canonized by their very display. And while this is certainly one very legitimate way to think about the scholarship and display of art objects within a museum, when assigned instead to an artist or--in the case of my recent project in Baltimore at the Walters Art Museum, assigned to twelve high school age students working with an artist--the results can often bring an even more expansive and certainly unanticipated reading and response to those same objects. Muniz's brilliant and irreverent Rebus at MoMA revealed a selection and arrangements of objects that crossed all boundaries of mediums, notions of high and low, and historical period that is hard to imagine anyone trained in the specificities of any of those single areas doing. My own project at the Walters uncovered works in the collection that were exhibited for the very first time, and in a way that also exploded conservative historical museum notions about how such objects should be displayed and thus experienced. Both projects suggest that artworks need not be solely framed by notions connoisseurship to be with meaningfully engaged with.

One of the things I have noticed about institutions that purport to want to make systemic changes in their programming is that by temperament, training and tradition, a lot of individuals at those institutions are often not  capable of out of the box thinking; they might want to, but they just don't know how, and their academic and institutional on the job training certainly didn't prepare them for this. For an institution to do so requires the kind of power sharing that goes against the grain of the aura of institutional authoritative power. But the results--my collaborative curatorial project in Baltimore received a sustained and positive critical response unlike anything the museum had experienced recently, the Vik Muniz show at MoMA received laudatory press and public response, and Theaster Gates' performance and installation at MCA and Little Black Pearl revealed a largely untapped audience--shows that when museums do open themselves up to new paradigms it's a win-win situation for everyone. What is needed now is for even more institutions to step up to the plate and be part of the inclusive conversation that defines the moment that we are in. The current economic and social crisis that we are experiencing should make it clear that we are indeed interconnected in profound ways, and that we urgently need to be thinking out of the box and having a whole new set of conversations in response to this degree of interdependence. That goes for institutions, and that goes for us as individuals as well. Our collective growth and survival depends on it.

A Museum Quality Cafe - Tweet

I'm probably the last person in Chicago to eat there, so I probably shouldn't even let on, and act like I've been in on the deal all along, but I finally got up to Michelle Fire's restaurant Tweet, located in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood on North Sheridan Road. I'd heard that on Sunday the lines and the wait to get in were completely off the chain, so on Saturday morning with my hungry son and nephew in tow we found our way to what various friends and reviewers  had  described as "the absolute best brunch spot in Chicago." I'd also heard that Fire had an impressive collection of photographs displayed on the restaurant's walls. Having recently met her when she acquired one of my prints of president Barack Obama, I had made it a point to pay her a visit. It turned out to be well worth the trip from Hyde Park and then some. The food was as impressive as I'd heard, with a wonderfully dizzying array of freshly made selections (organic ingredients all), and the photographs on display--salon style--are an absolute treat. It doesn't get much better than having a museum quality viewing experience while downing fabulous food. Among other pictures I recognized on the walls (both in Tweet and the adjacent Fire owned bar Big Chicks) were those by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Flor Garduño, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus and Bob Thall along with works by Tony Fitzpatrick and the late Ed Paschke, along with other luminaries and emerging talent, hanging side by side. My Barack Obama print gazes down from on high at the front entrance. Can't say I've ever seen anything quite like this place in all my years in New York! Michelle Fire is truly a Chicago treasure. I think I may have found a new hangout.

Photographs: (from top) Theaster Gates' "Temple Exercises" (Sarah Pooley photograph); Crowd at Gates' 12X12 "Temple Exercises" performance (courtesy MCA Chicago); Kyong Park and Rick Lowe (courtesy MCA Chicago); Vik Muniz, "Rebus" (Hiroko Masuike/New York Times); "Art Institute of Chicago 2" by Thomas Struth; Installation view, "Portraits Re/Examined: A Dawoud Bey Project"; Interior view of Tweet

Young People and Art - The Kids are Alright

Art and Youth - A Powerful Combination

One day when I was in grade school, my class took a field trip to Carnegie Hall, then the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. It had all the makings of yet another "Get Out of School Free" pass, and my mother had outfitted me for the day in my pressed white shirt. Come to think of it, white shirts and ties were mandatory for assembly day too, so we were periodically pressed. (The Principal's office even kept extra ties in a drawer for wayward souls who showed up at school on assembly day in less than proper attire.) As I recall the field trips seemed to always end up in Manhattan, either at the Museum of Natural History or the Hayden Planetarium, two different institutions that are in fact part of one museum, located at Central Park West and 79th Street. The range of field trip options seemed strangely limited, as I spent year after grade school year alternately in these two institutions on outings. Not that they were uninteresting, it just seemed that there must be some place else we could go. On this day, instead of pulling up to the all too familiar group entrance at the lower level of the museum, the school bus turned onto 57th Street, disgorging us kids from Queens, NY in front of Carnegie Hall, one school group among numerous others. Filing into the magnificent huge and ornate hall, which I had never been in before, our class managed to get seats down front not too far from the stage. We didn't have long to wait before the musicians  filed out, followed by a very pleasant man with no instrument who took his place at the head of the orchestra and turned his attention to us. I don't exactly remember him introducing himself, but it was Leonard Bernstein, the Philharmonic's young conductor.

Bernstein had joined the Philharmonic in 1957. One year later, believing (against prevailing opinion) that classical music could be enjoyed and understood by children, he implemented the "Young People's Concerts," in which he and the full orchestra performed while he explained the music, its form, structure, and history to young people in the audience. The program continued for fifteen years, running through 1973, building an even larger audience when it aired on CBS television for some fifty-three episodes, making Bernstein famous as both performer, composer, and lecturer to America's children. It remains the longest running series devoted to classical music to have aired on commercial television, bringing classical music into the homes and lives of millions of children and families on a weekly basis. Sort of hard to imagine in the current climate of increasingly dumbed down "reality" shows!

That day I had managed to get an aisle seat, which was fortunate, since it afforded me an unobstructed view of the stage and the man. In addition to explaining the music and then performing it, Bernstein would asked good natured questions, finding a way to wed the ordinary experiences of childhood knowledge and the complexity of classical music, making it fun and enjoyable in the process. Taking the music apart, and rebuilding it instrument by instrument, we were given a sense of how the music was both composed and assembled: what melody and time signature meant, how tempo and dynamics gave expressive shape to the music being performed, and the role of the conductor in making the music come to life. All the while he had an ebullient smile on his face, taking obvious delight and deep pleasure from the work he was doing. And clearly it was his choice to be engaged in this work; the work of teaching and thus developing future audiences for the music he so loved. While I never became a connoisseur of classical music, I do nonetheless listen to it on occasion, and in so doing pay silent tribute to Leonard Bernstein and that formative experience years ago.

When I was young, growing up in Queens, NY my older cousin Teddy, Jr. used to come by my parent's house after work or on his lunch breaks to relax, unwind, and listen to my dad's recently acquired hi fidelity stereo. My Cuban uncle Roland, a confirmed deep audiophile, had gotten my dad hooked on the new audio sensation of really listening to music, with a finely tuned turntable, amplifier, receiver, and some powerful speakers. My brother and I would accompany my father on these visits to Uncle Roland's, where inevitably he would unveil yet another new and more advanced piece of audio equipment, and proceed to demonstrate its superior audio qualities by putting on a recently acquired album, usually jazz (organists Jimmy Smith and Richard "Groove" Holmes were favorites). Sitting in the living room with the lights dimmed (the right mood seemed important to listening, too), he would enthuse over the undistorted bass, the clear mid range, and sparkling high ends in the sound. My dad, being an engineer, certainly appreciated the science of it all, and had acquired a turntable (a Thorens) and speakers, but built his own amplifier and receiver from Dynaco Audio's Dynakit. With the equipment in place, and few choice albums added to his now growing collection, the set up (and a comfortable arm chair)  attracted my grown cousin, who took to spending his free time periodically hanging out in our living room listening to music.

One of the albums I began to hear during this time was Miles Davis in Europe. Recorded in 1963, it was probably but a few years old at the time my dad acquired it. My cousin used to fall into what appeared to be a deep trance listening to this album, sitting still with his eyes closed, concentrating deeply, smiling occasionally, and then opening his eyes at the end as if he'd seen the Rapture itself. I was too young and unschooled at the time to understand my cousin's reactions. But upon getting my first set of drums at the age of fourteen, I began to give the album a listen. What struck me first and foremost was the robust and invigorating drumming that accompanied the improvisations of Miles Davis and the other band members. In the company of young veterans like Davis, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and George Coleman, Williams made his presence aggressively felt. Throughout the album Williams plays with an authority and unbridled audacity that simply redefined and expanded the role of the drummer in the small jazz ensemble, musically responding, pushing, and brashly commenting on the music at hand, often pushing it in unexpected directions through his inventive sense of time. What I didn't know at the time was that Tony Williams was all of eighteen years old when he was playing on that album! Indeed, by the tender age of eleven he had already been playing in clubs, and at fifteen had shared the bandstand with Max Roach and Art Blakey, not to mention playing in the bands of reed men Sam Rivers and Jackie McLean among others. Davis called Williams, "the fire, the creative spark in the band. Man, just hearing that little motherf*cker made me excited all over again. Like I said earlier, trumpet players love to play with great drummers, and I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherf*ckers who had ever played a set of drums."

In 1997, when my survey exhibition from the Walker Art Center was traveling to various museums, I told the curator of the exhibition Kellie Jones that when the exhibition opened at the Newark Museum, I wanted to talk about Tony Williams during our public dialogue that evening, since Williams was one of my earliest and strongest creative inspirations. Williams had just passed away quite recently, and he was very much on my mind. That night I didn't want to only talk about "art," I wanted to talk about how a creative spark was lit for me upon hearing Williams for the first time, and how such a creative spark can then go on to inform and inspire a range of creative work. Later that same month I was at the opening for another exhibition of mine at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Standing in the gallery where my work hung, an older black woman walked straight up to me without so much as glancing at the work on the walls, and asked me, "Did you know Tony Williams?" My face went flush for a minute, and I then told her that while I didn't know him personally he had made a big impression on me as a young musician. I further told her that I just spoke about Williams a few nights before. I asked her if she has been to the Addison before, and she responded that she hadn't; someone she knew thought she might want to see the shows. When I finally asked her who she was, she said, "I'm Tony's aunt, and I'm just coming back from his funeral in Japan. I wanted to talk to someone about him, and thought that someone here might have known him." You can imagine the look on my face at that point, since the likelihood that someone on the campus of Phillips Andover knew Williams would not have been my first impulse. As it turned out she lived on the Cape, not too far from my mother, and I dropped her a letter some time later, telling her about my early encounter years all those years ago with Tony and his music. 

I recently visited the Milwaukee Art Museum to meet with the photography curator Lisa Hostetler and other curatorial and education staff in preparation for the opening of my exhibition Class Pictures there at the museum in April. Entering the museum's dramatic lobby, I spotted the special exhibitions gallery, where various exhibition graphics and signage announced the presence of an exhibition of work by Jan Lievens, a 17th century Dutch painter whose works were unknown to me. Being a long time admirer of Rembrandt van Rijn's paintings (another early and lasting influence of mine), and recognizing some affinity in Lievens' work, both stylistic and thematic, I made a mental note to take a sustained look at the show after my meeting.

As it turns out, Lievens was indeed not only a contemporary of Rembrandt, but a close friend, and the two artists shared a close and long symbiotic relationship and conversation about their respective work. Lievens appears as the subject in several of Rembrandt's work and vice versa. While theirs was a relationship of mutual engagement and respect, ultimately Rembrandt achieved a more sustained success and notoriety that soon eclipsed Lievens, though Lievens had actually begun his career some years before Rembrandt. The title of the current exhibition Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered is intended to finally bring him out of Rembrandt's very large shadow. Lievens considerable talent is apparent from the first piece one encounters on entering the gallery. Believed to be the artist's grandmother, this painting, with its wildly expressive brush work, dramatic lighting, and heightened psychological presentation was made when the artist was all of fourteen years old. He was highly sought for his commissioned portraits while still a teenager, and by the age of twenty-five was in even greater demand as a portraitist.

Lievens and Rembrandt  were born in Lieden just over a year apart, studied with the same master teacher, and lived near one another. So close was their association, that some of Lievens best work ended up being falsely attributed to Rembrandt. The exhibition contains room after room of stunning paintings as well as various drawings and etchings that Lievens made over his long career. Like Tony Williams, Lievens' work suggests that across a broad historical span of centuries, young people have always been capable of far more rigorous creative utterances than they are often given credit for if one provides them with the necessary tools of expression. 

Photographs: (top) Leonard Bernstein with a group of young children; Tony Williams, © Francis Wolff; Album Cover, "Miles Davis in Europe;" Jan Lievens "Self Portrait," circa 1629-1630 (private collection) Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Other Shoe Drops

University Moves to Close Rose Art Museum

That sound you may have heard the past two days rippling through the art world was the sound of a collective shudder, as Brandeis University's trustees unexpectedly announced that it would sell off some 6,000 modern and contemporary artworks in the museum's collection and then shutter the venerable Rose Art Museum. So unexpected was the announcement that the Rose's director Michael Rush didn't have a clue that it was coming when he was summoned to the office of provost  Marty Krauss and told that in light of the university's increasing fiscal difficulties (its initial endowment has shrunk by an estimated 20-25%). "I didn't know anything about this,"  Rush is quoted as saying. Not incidentally at least one university trustees--and major Rose benfactor--was taken in (and cleaned out) by the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scam, losing an estimated $145 million. These same benefactors are patrons of other cultural institutions as well, so there is almost certain to be a ripple effect.

What is particularly chilling, of course, is that the university's art institution and objects seemed to be the most expedient place the trustees looked to for quickly raising much needed funds. Jehuda Reinharz, the university's president, said, "The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it's a hidden jewel. It does not get a lot of foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice." Such pithy resignation bespeaks a serious breach of faith. Further comments suggsted that the university would now turn to fulfilling its "core academic mission." An academic mission bereft of art and culture is not a good harbinger for the future; don't build the audience and further even engage students, close the museum! The response from both those blind sided at Brandeis and those in the field has been loud, immediate, and appalled. Says Yale School of Art Dean and art historian Rob Storr, " This sets a terrible precedent. The Rose Art Museum has been known for four decades as a hospitable place to show serious and challenging art in an academic context. They are throwing away one of their prime assets." This certainly goes far beyond the proposed sale of individual pieces that other beleaguered institutions have attempted. Indeed the sale of one of the Rose's Warhols, Lichtensteins, or Johns would quickly close the budget gap...at least temporarily. This proposed closing constitutes a wholesale dismissal of the entire institution and its larger mission. As Rose director Rush points out in a recent interview (see second link below) the Rose itself is fiscally sound; indeed, aside from covering the expenses of the physical plant, i.e. heat and electric, the university does not even fund the museum. It is the university that is in a fiscal crisis, not the Rose. And so the university administration hopes to raid (and close) the museum as an answer to their own monetary problems.

Brandeis students are staging a sit-in at the museum today, a petition is circulating (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/3/in-opposiition-to-the-closing-of-the-rose-art-museum), and no doubt a court challenge looms on the horizon, given the level of outrage among donors, benefactors, and the public. But in the current climate this is no doubt yet another loud and clear wake up call to all institutions as they struggle with continuing dire economic forecasts and their relationships to their various constituencies.

You can read more about this debacle here:

http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2009/01/26/brandeis_to_sell_art_collection

and here: http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2009/01/qa_with_rose_art_museum-direct._html

Updates: 

• Roberta Smith wrote an incisive article about the proposed Rose closing in todays (2/2/09) New York Times. Read it here: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/arts/design/02rose.html

• A Statement to the public from Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush: 

http://www.brandeis.edu/rose/rushstatement.pdf

Towards A New Inclusiveness in the Arts (or "How Will It Be Different This Time Around?")

Barack Obama's historic ascendency as the 44th president of the United States certainly signal a huge paradigm shift, one that has numerous national and global implications. But what exactly will be its implications for the arts community and for the relationship between art/culture and the larger social community? This question is one that I believe needs some serious and sustained attention, particularly in light of how this moment of greater inclusiveness in the social fabric might translate in the arena of  art and culture. I think we need to take a look back in order to make sure we take full advantage of this opportunity to shape a new set of relationships and paradigms, and not just try to recreate some aspects of the "good old days," however you define that from your respective side of the street. It is a new day indeed.

I have been spending a bit of time in Baltimore recently, since I currently have two exhibitions there. I was there most recently to do a public dialogue with my long time friend artist Carrie Mae Weems on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, which was also the eve of Obama's inauguration. I can't imagine a more potent moment in which to have a conversation about ones practice as an artist and the role of institutions in the promulgation of art and culture.

This question of how the arts--and by extension art institutions--can extend this moment of inclusiveness is worth looking at, since I believe it is going to be the essential issue of the moment as the economic crisis impacts everyone: artists, museums, cultural institutions, and others in the larger social community. Clearly no one will escape the need to come to grips with the changed socioeconomic landscape. Indeed, the first week I was in Baltimore happened to coincide with the announced closing of the Baltimore Opera, a turn of event that shook the arts community there, as the Opera is a venerable and long standing anchor in the cultural community of that city, having first appeared in 1930 and then incorporated in 1950.

My own exhibition at the Walters Art Museum was a curatorial project undertaken with twelve Baltimore area teens; I had conceived this residency project and exhibition to address the issue of institutional inclusiveness head on. It was designed to stretch the institutional paradigm of this historical museum, while also addressing the issue of how to bring yet another audience to the museum through a conceptually engaging process and project. For it to work required the museum to do something it had never quite done before: to open itself up to intimate participation on the part of a group of people one normally doesn't see as being deeply engaged in the institution, and to trust that something meaningful would result for everyone, artist, institution, teens, and museum goers old and new. I actually believe that institutions that fail to engage in this paradigmatic reexamination are slated for eventual obsolescence. Which, of course, brings us back to the fate of the Baltimore Opera, where the institution has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy law protection; season subscribers and other ticket holders will not receive refunds on purchased tickets, and performers have had their contracts terminated.  It is, of course, enough to send chills through other institutions, which are now or soon may be be facing their own perils due to this period of financial instability and the resulting diminishing patronage. Not that the Baltimore Opera is alone in this profound dilemma. Hardly.

While I don't know all of the specifics of the Baltimore Opera's closing, it's dwindling ticket sales and contributions suggest that its audience was 1) either dying off (and a new one to replace it not being developed) or 2) that it had outlived its institutional usefulness. How else does a once vital institution go belly up? Fiscal mismanagement can often play a role, as it did in Los Angeles with the recent crisis at the Contemporary Art Museum, where the director (with the complicity of the board) depleted its considerable endowment by using it as operating capitol, without bringing in funds to shore up the disappearing endowment. But fiscal crisis or no, I believe we are at a moment of extraordinary possibility that behooves us to closely and critically examine the role of cultural institutions in this country, and how those institutions do or do not go about engaging in a conversation with its various constituents. Indeed the question of just who constitute the audiences for museums and cultural institutions is one that is now more pertinent than ever. In the current climate I don't know that there is any safe or enduring place to hide. Over dinner after my opening, one friend lamented whether institutions like the Baltimore Opera had to fundamentally change their programming, or whether the issue was how to sow appreciation for opera as it exists among a newer audience. I don't think there is, in fact, any easy answer. But I do know that institutions need to be seriously asking themselves these questions and coming up with the answers, wherever those answers may lead them. 

It is interesting to contrast this moment with the moment of the early 1980s. Then as now the country was deep in a recession. Business bankruptcies in 1982 had risen 50% over the previous year. Upon being sworn in as president Ronald Reagan began slashing spending for a wide range of social programs, under the belief that government should not attempt to be the answer to all social problems. Along with this, there was the attendant cutbacks in public funding for museums. During the Reagan presidency such funding dropped by 15%, with private funding increasing exponentially.  Until the current economic crisis, half of American museums had shown a growth in their endowments, while museums running at a deficit actually increased by one third. That was then. Along with the decrease in public funding came a creeping social dissension which when it finally blew up came to be called "The Culture Wars."

"The Culture Wars" were, to my mind, the culmination of increasing cultural and fiscal conservatism on the one hand, and the increasing sense of insularity with which arts institutions began (or continued) to function on the other. The two combined created a kind of social "perfect storm." And sadly a whole lot more people than those on the immediate radar paid the price. This struggle between civic discourse and engagement (or lack of same) and a kind of absolute aestheticism was embodied by public art projects like Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc," a 120 foot long and 12 feet high length of Corten steel that effectively bissected the Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. Complaints arose almost immediately from those who worked in the building and now had to take a long detour around the piece to get both in and out of the building (not to mention causing them to lose precious minutes doing so during their lunch break). 

Commissioned by the Arts-In-Architecture program of the U.S. General Services Administration. The sculpture was immediately controversial, and generated an effective letter writing campaign  which led, after a divisive court hearing, to its being dismantled and removed to a scrap heap in 1989. Serra maintained that as a site specific work it could not be relocated to any other location but that one. Throughout the long and heated controversy advocates from the arts community framed the issue as strictly a first amendment one, dismissing those who objected to its placement as no more than a group of philistines, uniformly and foolishly unappreciative of the hulking rusted steel object gracing their midst. (And I am being something of a devil's advocate here; in other contexts I deeply appreciate Serra's work.)

But things were just getting heated up. The same year that "Titled Arc" was dismantled, "Robert Mapplethorpe - The Perfect Moment" opened at the WPA, an alternative art space in Washington, DC. Upon arriving in Cincinnati the following year at the Contemporary Art Center, the same exhibition was shut down for being "criminally obscene," and the institutions's director Dennis Barrie was placed under arrest, precipitating a major crisis for CAC's board. Mapplethorpe's survey exhibition contained a wide range of subjects, most provocatively his photographs of male homo-eroticism and sadomasochism. This exhibition begged the question of how these institutions were serving both their respective communities and artists at large. And what, if any, was the relationship between them? How had those larger communities been engaged prior to these controversies that Jesse Helms and Robert Byrd, then chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee so expertly exploited? How did the institutions (and there were more than a few during this tumultuous period) engage and establish a dialogue with their constituents prior to the moment of inflamed crisis? Obviously the opportune time for a getting to know you--"how do you do?"--is not while the building, so to speak, is burning down.

These are, of course, only two example and two artists whose works were caught in the various crossfires of cultural and social outrage on the one hand, and an art community that seemed caught off guard and relegated to a knee jerk first amendment response on the other, without looking at any of the broader social implications and nuances. Is that art world any different today than it was twenty years ago? Are institutions engaging in the work of forging meaningful dialogues with their communities and various constituencies in ways that they previously hadn't? Are they ready to rethinking the notion of institutional prerogative, privilege, and exclusivity, or is the current institutional climate as insular as ever? I have a strong feeling that how museums and cultural institutions answer these questions will determine whether they remain viable or end up in a state of crisis, or worse yet, shuttered.

From Cliff Huxtable to Barack Hussein Obama

Much has been written attempting to discern the various social and cultural shifts and changing racial attitudes that made Barack Obama's candidacy and then election possible. Some, like author Jabari Asim, assert that it was the cinematic and televised presidential personages of actors Morgan Freeman in "Deep Impact" and Denise Haysbert in "24" who were the psychic precursors to Obama, while others point to Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice as real time black presences in the Washington, DC loop of power that prepared the reassuring way for the current president. You could probably throw in Tiger Woods for good measure. My son says Eminem was a major influence in allowing white Americans to blur the color line and comfortably inhabit the black persona. Harvard psychologist Dr. Alvin Poussaint lays the laurel at the feet of Bill Cosby as Clifford Huxtable as being the breakthrough image that began to comfortably lay to rest racial stereotypes about black social and class norms. To each his or her own analysis. The fact is however it happened, we did it!

Photographs: (from top) Barack Obama on the cover of Rolling Stone, AP Photo/Rolling Stone; Baltimore Opera; "Portraits Re/Examined: A Dawoud Bey Project," Courtesy Walters Art Museum; Contemporary Art Museum, LA,  Photograph © Monica Almeida/NYT; Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981, Photograph © David Aschkenas; Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1978

Obama and the Arts - Looking Back to Look Forward

With Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's forty-fourth president a scant five days away, excitement and anticipation are building as we enter a moment of profound change and potential paradigm shifts. Just as the Obama campaign was the country's first truly 21st century campaign, utilizing both technology and the lessons gleaned from Obama's years as a community organizer, so is there the hope that his presidency will usher in a new moment of cultural renaissance and revival.  As much a public intellectual and publicly introspective individual and memoirist as he is a politician, Barack Obama has single handedly reclaimed the high ground of intellectual engagement for a country starved for such over the past eight years. One can only imagine the depths to which we have plunged in a McCain/Palin administration. Indeed, if you caught "Joe the [unlicensed] Plumber" recently holding forth as an inept on camera journalist a few days ago, reporting from Israel in the midst of the current conflict with Gaza, while adding nothing but uninformed incompetence to the mix, you got a sense of what the future might have looked like. 

Certainly Obama's inclusion of poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander in the inaugural ceremony signals a heartening respect for art and culture not much in evidence for the past eight years. There's been much talk throughout the recent campaign about the Kennedy years, with parallels being drawn between the two young presidents, Obama and Kennedy. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline, of course, were the last president and first lady to turn the White House into a cultural as well as political space, with performances there early on in the administration by the young African American mezzo-soprano Grace Brumby, and later master cellist Pablo Casals, and Paul Winter's jazz sextet. The actor Frederick March did a reading of works by Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, and performance of Shakespeare and ballet were given by notable American companies, among other events. It was the the Kennedys' intention that the White House be seen as promoting the best of American culture to the various visiting dignitaries and others. I am sure we can expect to see a continuation of this kind of cultural ambassadorship, appreciation, and advocacy as well from the Obamas once they are settled into the White House.

In anticipation of this political and likely cultural sea change, a number of individuals have been wasting no time in vying to get Obama's attention, hoping to have an early influence on his administration's policies regarding the arts. The Obama-Biden team early in the campaign did in fact release a fact sheet, Barack Obama and Joe Biden: Champions of Arts and Culture, in which they announced, "Barack Obama appreciates the role and value of creative expression...The arts embody the American spirit of self-definition...," and goes on to outline "A Platform in Support of the Arts. It is a deeply affirmative document. Among those hoping to influence the incoming administration is producer/musician/bandleader/cultural impressario Quincy Jones, who called on Obama to create a Secretary of Arts position in his administration that parallels the Ministry of Culture in other countries. Said Jones, "...next conversation I have with President Obama is to beg for Secretary of Arts..." Jones has been promoting this idea for some ten years now. One individual, Jaime Austria, took Jones' sentiment as an opening to create an online petition calling on Obama to create just such a position. The "Petition for A Secretary of the Arts' currently has some 119,000 signatures at this writing. Sign it.

(http://www.petitiononline.com/esnyc/petition.html)

Additional indications of Obama's intent to focus on the arts in his administration can be gleaned in his formation in 2007 of the Obama National Arts Policy Committee. The committee consists of a vast range of arts related individuals, from musician Wynton Marsalis, to Yale Art School dean Robert Storr, NYU Tisch School of the Arts dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, arts patron and MoMA chair emeritus Agnes Gund, artist Chuck Close, director Harold Prince, Chicago arts patron Joan Harris, painter Moe Brooker, and others. Presumably this distinguished body will indeed have the ear of the incoming president, and speak for the broad set of needs and concern facing artists in the current moment.

(http://www.artsactionfund.org/pdf/artsvote/Obamaarts4.pdf)

Now if you're an artist you might be excused for saying to yourself, "What exactly does this have to do with me where I am? How does Wynton Marsalis performing in the White House change my situation? Is this a trickle down kind of deal, where attention paid to the cultural cognoscenti is supposed to then reflect onto the hoi polloi ?" Reading the names of what might be considered some of the  art and cultural elite probably does little to reassure your own sense of wellbeing as you struggle to pay your bills, hope you don't get sick because you don't have health coverage, buy supplies when you can afford them, pay your rent, keep your small dance company together, and engage in the day to day struggle of being creatively productive in a climate of increasingly diminishing returns. And you would be right. A recent article in Art in America indicated that some of the members of the Arts Policy Committee were focused on reviving the individual artists fellowships program of the National Endowment for the Arts. That would indeed benefit a few artists, but certainly not the many. The advisors themselves would certainly inform the selection of panelists for this process, which certainly would also influence the ultimate recipients of this largesse.  The much more inclusive--and only recently implemented--Unites States Artists fellowship program (which awards $50,000 fellowships to fifty artists annually) seems to be a fine model for this kind of program, rewarding both recognized as well as unsung and under recognized  artists of a very broad stripe .

(http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/Public2/Home/index.cfm)

Others have focused on art education, which is also a very important and much needed piece of the picture. But something much more ambitious that casts a much broader net--while putting money into artists pockets and providing support for institutions, and fostering arts education and civic engagement--is called for if the Obama administration is to have a serious impact on the lives of artists in this country. I think we need something along the lines of the Works Project Administration of the 1930s, or even more recently, the CETA Artists Project. Both of these Federal programs were a response to a set of economic circumstances that echo our current national dilemma. To focus on simply cherry picking a handful of artists for NEA fellowships in this drastic climate seems, frankly, demoralizing. These times call for a different focus entirely, one that is as inclusive in its impact as possible. There is a way to think about this that could actually benefit everyone, individual artists, institutions, and the larger social community. And the answer lies in plain view with at least two successful efforts from the past that were designed to address the very issues we are currently faced with.

The PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) and

WPA (Works Progress Administration) 

While the arts community works to define its current needs and expectations from its government, a look back to two previous federal projects designed to address artists (and institutions) in need would seem prudent, if for no other reason than to glean the lessons that generally lurk within history. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the Public Works of Art Project was brought into being by president Franklin Roosevelt. Conceived as a program to employ artists, it ran from December 1933 - June 1924, at which point it was folded into the WPA program, which was more broadly inclusive, employing some 8 million people. These included artists as well as a wide range of workers employed on a range of federal projects including construction of public buildings and roads, in addition to large programs in the arts, drama, media, and literacy efforts. Indeed, no American community was left untouched by the efforts of the WPA, which continued from 1935 - 1943. Artists as different as painter Alice Neel and actor Orson Welles found much needed work through the Federal Artists' Project of the WPA.

WPA Redux: CETA Artists Project

Created in 1973 as a means of organizing under a singular governmental umbrella the vast web of manpower programs created in the 1960s, CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act) was brought into being during the administration of president Gerald Ford. Originally under the direction of the Department of Labor, when CETA was formally launched in 1974 control was given to state and localities to determine how they would distribute the budget, which started at just under $2 billion, growing to $12 billion in five years. The first CETA artists' project was the brainchild of John Kreidler, a former administrator for the Department of Labor and Office of Management and Budget before going to the San Francisco Art Commission. Kreidler had a clear vision of how the creation of public murals, art classes, and public performances, for example, fit into the legislation's definition of public service. The requirement for a public service component to CETA employment created an opening to incorporate the arts into this framework. He received support from the local manpower (employment) office. With this support, Kreidler crafted a proposal for a CETA artists' project that employed 113 artists. More than 3,500 had applied. This initial project became the national model. When Jimmy Carter became president in 1976, he significantly increased the allocation for the program, which by then was firmly entrenched in numerous cities.

In New York, where I am from, this resulted in the formation of the Cultural Council Foundation CETA Artists Project, which officially began in 1978 under the direction of banker/businesswoman turned arts consultant Sarah Garretson, who then hired Rochelle Slovin to run the project while she helmed the organization. Subcontracting out positions to a wide range of cultural organizations, as diverse as the Black Theater Alliance, Association of Hispanic Arts, and the Brooklyn Philharmonia Orchestra, the CCF CETA Artists Project ultimately employed 138 visual artists,  134 performing artists, twenty-two literary artists, five artists-coordinators, and one archivist in service to a broad range of institutions. The salary was $10,000 per year plus benefits. Uniquely, the NY project also contained a stipulation that the artists were to spend one day a week as studio time. So not only did the artists get to practice their craft and provide much needed labor to the institutions (which didn't have to foot the bill for instructors, performers, directors, muralists, etc.) they were also encouraged to continue to pursue their own independent work. The artists ranged from the very experienced such as painters Joseph Delaney, Vincent Smith, and Herman Cherry, to master West African drummer Ladji Camara, as well as younger artists such as dancers Jane Goldberg and Blondell Cummings, painters Willie Birch, Candida Alvarez, and McArthur Binion, sculptor Ursuala von Rydingsvard, poets Bob Holman,  Pedro Pietri, and Rose Lesniak, photographers Daniel Dawson, Louis Faurer, and yours truly. It's hard to imagine now that $10,000 a year was a princely sum, but it was. I remember my rent then was $175 a month for an eight room apartment in Brooklyn! So you have to figure we were doing alright. And all of us were given a reprieve from the instability that comes with being perpetual freelance labor. Additionally, because we all had to come to one central location to pick up our checks each week, and to receive project updates from the administrators, a community was formed that endures to this day.

The CCF CETA Artists Project continued for two years in cities throughout the country, and proved to be a pivotal experience for both artists and cash strapped institutions. In these days when more and more cultural institutions are feeling the pinch, cutting back on staff or public hours, or even ultimately closing their doors in response to increasing economic pressures, and artists of all types remain vastly underemployed, President Barack Obama need look no further than the recent past for a model to put artists back to work and cultural institutions on surer economic footing. A contemporary version of the CETA Artists Project, complete with much needed health coverage, seems to fit the bill to a "t."

Photographs: (from top) Shepard Fairey's Barack Obama posters; poet Elizabeth Alexander; Quincy Jones; artists gathered in front of the Harlem Art Center, a WPA project)