Essays

This series of short essays was written by Doug Roysdon as part of the year-long cultural placemaking interview process.  Though the essays do not directly represent the views of any particular interviewee, they have been greatly inspired by that process.

Table of Contents

The World of Art: Just Like Downtown

Offered here are twenty-two very short notes on The World of Art…that very local world of art that kicks and shouts outside my front door. It is a rare place –  a classic blend of home-grown and provincial arts, more gritty than quaint. 

Yet, in one way, “our place” is clearly progressive. For our resident arts community makes a generally honest effort to pursue one specific best practice. I call it the aesthetic of native assets.  This is a basic assertion that genuine cultural places emerge from the native soil – drawing on local history, civic involvement, demographics, institutions, and the resident artist community. Further, investing in “what we are” establishes a singularity of place, a unique destination.  In short, an advanced step toward an original and authentic cultural community.  Progressive.

The embrace of all things native marks a huge distinction in creative placemaking.  It is the difference between making a cultural place and making our cultural place.  For those who work in the local arts, this is a critical differentiation. The role of cultural placemaker is the primary business of resident artists.  Their artistic dedication to place itself is their first argument for support and funding.

These notes are not meant to be mindlessly purist about who takes the local stage. I would not miss the chance to see Taj Mahal again, if he came to town. The notes are, in fact, a response to a larger national picture –-that tragically homogenized American landscape offered by James Howard Kunstler in his classic, The Geography of Nowhere. Their message is clear enough. Our job is to raise and support strong arts communities—communities based on the kind of partnerships and civic energy that make our cities and towns culturally whole. It is our job to rediscover Somewhere.

The Muse on Main: The Artist of Place

Every place can realize its own identity –  its own song and imagery.  The call to celebrate, preserve, and capture the uniqueness of that locale falls first to the people who know and appreciate their city best –  the people who live there.   And, in the fussy business of cultural placemaking, the task lies before a very specialized group of local residents, the artists. Call them the artists of place. 

With a direct and abiding investment in the town square –  its theaters, schools, and cafes, the artist of place faces a steep learning curve.   He must know his town’s history, its issues, and demographics.  A dedicated walker, he must explore its buildings and parks.  Aside from the city itself, she must master a dozen skills, large and small, from theater tech to educational practices, from poster design to floor sanding.  And, even as she writes her great novel, she must learn to network: to flit between arts organizations, the chamber of commerce, pre-school classes, and concert venues.   Just as important, the artist of place must learn to deal with the really hard stuff…with people.  Rarely with those from New York and London; more often, with the folks downtown—Mrs. Wilson, Tom Courtney, and the guy who does the painted shoes. 

But, of all things, the artist of place must learn to give it up…..trade his college ambitions for a more modest, collective approach to personal success. Her creative culmination, like a medieval cathedral, is a collaboration of many hands over many generations. Her artistic accomplishment is the on-going creation of place itself.

 The Small Arts: In Praise of Small Arts Organizations

Great places are cultural warrens, full of surprises. Leaps of city life that draw you up and down the streets and alleys.  And, although larger arts institutions – the symphonies, museums, and theaters – may command the cultural field, the charm and eccentricity of a cultural place is the province of special cultural group…… the small arts.   For, it is the historical society, the blues club, the children’s theater, and the local folk venue that so often impart the lasting image of a town or city.

And, it is among the small arts that many of the conceptual and artistic risks of a city’s cultural life occur.   On the front lines of human and social issues, small progressive theaters, new music groups, and edgy art galleries)take on the gender-based, racial, and educational concerns that many larger institutions don't address.  Meanwhile, just as the small arts provide a forum for social exchange, they are often the sole locus for new, original, and daring works of art.  In short, no one sector of city life fuels the singularity and originality of a true cultural place like the resident arts community and its network of small arts organizations.      

Yet, for all they bring to urban life, small arts organizations face increasingly perilous competition. To their right, the larger arts institutions demand all the attention that ticket sales, hotel rooms, and money can buy. And to the left, commercial Gomorrah bears down on Broad Street, eager to repackage the town and make it more popular, lovable, salable—and generic. Small is beautiful; small is precarious.

 The Deep Money: Civilization as an Economic Engine

With the rise and blessing of financial analytics, the arts of entertainment have come to dominate the field of creative placemaking.  It is a fervor based on a largely unquestioned belief that the real money to be derived from our creative community is in musicals, rock tribute concerts, and nightclub acts — a blithe assertion that filling seats is the one and only bottom line.

Yet, unperturbed by the star dust, a very different economic force is pulsing down Walnut Street and through the center of town. It persists in the library, the small theater, the historical society, and the local cafe.  Here, in these modest settings, the everyday work of civilization takes place. And, among the mission-based organizations and small businesses of the resident arts community, the deep money of our town is being made.

That is, the financial health of our town; our long-standing reputation as a sane and vital place to live.  These are the dollars drawn from a genuine quality of life, secure land values, and reliable business investment – the economic returns on our history, diversity, and the local arts.

Community prosperity is not the product of a really great night out, a chance to see Foghat live.   Real prosperity is foundational. It begins with the work of civilization, the labor-intensive exercise of a living cultural community.  For in so many ways, popular venues are beneficiaries of great places.  They owe their success not to a florid stage set but to a prime location, a location made possible by an active arts community.

 Mission: For Real or for the Moment

When a cultural place is wound and ticking, paths cross; galleries, cafes, and historical societies click into partnerships and collaborations. The museum people eat lunch with the symphony people.  Poets conspire with librarians, and folk dancers invade Mr. Humphrey’s sixth-grade classroom.  Over in town square, doors open between small businesses and the small arts, between age groups, ethnic organizations, and social justice advocates. A kind of unity takes place, and small city America, bound and enabled by shared goals and missions, joins Planet Earth.

 Until times get tough.  Times when the cultural community falls into financial confusion, a victim of the economy.  Board rooms light up all over town. Financial analysts take the stage and explain, assert, and ratify the only possible solution –  the need for just a few more dollars.  Overnight, missions dissolve into galas, aesthetic values into fundraisers, callings into raffle tickets.  Suddenly, a cold wind drifts down River Street. Arts organizations act alone or in competition. Partnerships become token relationships.  And, too often, that need for a few more dollars becomes an on-going institutional reason for being.

There will always be times when money will, in fact, be the answer to present woes. But money is an inconstant partner in a fickle marketplace. For, however macho, money is only one component of real cultural sustainability. 

 It is collective mission that truly bonds a cultural community, and it is mission that makes us whole -- a part of the world.  How easy it is for missions to become window dressings for cultural communities to become balloon festivals.  How easy, dollar by dollar, for the local arts community to drift off among the stars.

 The Arts of the Local Culture: Amazing Place

The arts, however ethereal or abstract, fall inevitably into aesthetic categories.  Based on who pays the bills and who the work is for, the arts assume reasonable classifications. The commercial arts are focused on the will of their clients, on tennis shoes and sports car sales.  The fine arts embrace the gallery, the arts patron, and Art History.  The managerial arts of creative placemaking are ever beholden to the local economy.   

Likewise, the arts of the local culture have their own specific worldly responsibilities.  These community arts are defined by their allegiance to a given place; its history, demographics, and social issues.  They are committed by mission and tradition to the institutions, landscape, and community values  of their place of origin.  Financially, the arts of the local culture are responsible, through grants and sponsorships, to the shared community interests of their local benefactors: the city, the state, and regional foundations, and individual donors.]

In particularly lucky cities and towns, the work of the resident arts community expands from organization to organization. A critical mass of artists' organizations, small businesses, and creative individuals are drawn together around the civic needs and services of their communities. Common venues, imaginative businesses, and collaborative theater companies combine and share their talents. And over time, a collective sense of community ownership takes hold among them, a categorically distinct collective is formed-–the resident arts community. And with it comes a quiet economic and social force— the means to create, preserve, and nurture an amazing place.

 The Artist Community: Getting Good  

A good job …..being a local artist.

She is off to the schools on Friday morning, meeting with the tech people on Wednesday afternoon, and addressing city council on Tuesday night.  She is busy, engaged in making place—making our place in real time.  And unlike the troop that just flew in from San Francisco, she is here year-round.

 A good job being a local artist,  but—not an easy one.

Because the band from Chicago was amazing.  And the show from Pittsburgh was better than ours. And the Cirque Trombone Extravaganza was just unbelievable.  It can be very hard to beat the marketplace.  Harder still now that the dollars have flown off to Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Buenos Aires!

And sometimes it is not easy to get off work at Starbucks on Thursday night—and as to the saxophone—hard to get good.

When do we learn that “getting good” –  getting competitive with Chicago – is a two-way street?  What exactly don’t we understand about the need, the advantage, and the cost savings involved in creating and supporting a great community of local artists?  When do we finally understand that producing, attracting, and financing an artist community that does the creative work of our town is not a laissez-faire proposition—it is our job, our major project as cultural placemakers. 

May the gang from Buenos Aires come back to our town. But let’s not forget that it is the excellence of our native artist community, not the extravaganza, that actually makes this a bona fide cultural place. We must pass the word down to our regional foundations, government agencies, and presenting venues. Artists make place—and places make artists.

 Cultural Soil:  Foundation of the Local Arts       

In lieu of a Medici or a corporate heiress, a humbler group of arts patrons must suffice to support the resident arts community. Among them are newspaper reporters, teachers, ministers, parents, librarians, scout leaders and the city workers of Mayberry and Altoona.  Collectively, they keep and tend a very fertile stretch of urban landscape – the cultural soil.

The cultural soil may be described as a form of social will— a foundation of civic values, attitudes, and opinions that underpins cultural sustainability.  At its core is a collective belief in the importance of the arts, education, and the heritage of town or city.  Deeply influencing civic decision-making in PTA meetings, community forums, and city council sessions –  the cultural soil asserts its strong civic voice:  artists should be paid, historic buildings must be preserved, and the arts should be a part of every child’s education.   Beyond money, political influence, and blazing talent, a rich cultural soil provides the basic social condition for a rich cultural place to evolve. 

Within the resident arts community the cultural soil is always in formation.  In the shops, the parks, the schools, and churches, the everyday stewards of the cultural soil work the fields.  They form that legion of audiences, volunteers, and fundraisers that makes the local arts work.  They listen to the life of the city and prescribe its needs.  They imagine the city’s future and find ways preserve its past.   Always ahead of business and political interests, the stewards of the cultural soil continually remind us of our most important investments: our history, our artists, and our schools.

 What Is Local?: What is Art? 

Those of us who have long wandered the back streets and alleys of this town understand the “curse of the local.” Applied to the hometown arts community, the word is code for semi-professional, amateur, marginal, and “him again?” / “her again?”  Meanwhile, we are told, the real world of art shimmers out there somewhere beyond route 78 on weird islands and in gilded halls. 

But, lately, the word has experienced a rebirth, particularly among younger, less jaundiced, brothers and sisters of the arts.  They are the ones who have recognized that local is too good and useful a word to cast out of our lexicons. It seems past time to take the “local” out of exile, reclaim it, polish it up, and take new ownership of it.

Rather than simply redefine the word, it will be much better to follow it.  Let it lead us back into our schools and parks and small arts establishments—back into our history and our demographics—our social issues and our neighborhoods.  For there we will find truer understanding of the local, and for those in the arts community, a superior reason for doing art.

But, it will not do to simply bask in the familiar. We must demand that the local arts grow and develop— take risks and serve the community.  For the local comes with a collective responsibility to a given place. It is a responsibility to conceive of place as a whole and make our towns and cities important through the arts.

It is often assumed, that great art puts a mirror up to nature---a finger on the pulse of daily life… often believed that great art is a response to the present, the here and now….local.

 TheArts of the Local Culture: Somewhere in Duluth 

Somewhere in Duluth an artist is writing a set of definitions that resemble the ones I offer here. Perhaps in Tulsa or Hazelton or Fort Worth, someone struggles, like me,  to map out their local arts community;  to name it, describe it, and make it visible to all.   This common effort to define the community-based cultural workplace marks an ongoing crisis of words shared by artists everywhere. 

Over and again, we have failed to create the terminology that truly defines our artistic work in the community and establishes our independence from economically oriented categories of the arts.  These are serious failures.  Lacking the words to make our case insures that our deeply integrated community work  will never be properly recognized or funded. 

Joining my fellow wordsmiths, I have come to frame and define a hallowed ground I refer to simply as the local culture.  That is, that realm of community life that houses, for example, our local history, cultural institutions, and creative businesses. In this, it is important to understand the arts of the local culture as a wholly separate community force existing within  three major approaches to creative placemaking:

1. Commercial Placemaking: A market-driven arts enterprise responsible to its stakeholders.

2. Non-profit Entertainment Venues: A business-arts undertaking responsible to the advancement of the local economy.

3. Cultural Placemaking: The activities of the local cultural community in service to and expressive of the native assets of the community.

Central to the work of the local culture is a collective of local artists and small arts organizations that specialize in the work of cultural place. I refer to this group as the resident arts community.  Steeped in the demographics, social issues, and values of the city, the resident arts community is a moving force in the development of the local culture.

 Beer, Cheese, Theater: Regional Arts

To understand the resident arts community is to understand the dramatic nature of cooperative farming, native plants, and even more artisan concerns.  Say, for example, cheese-making.  That is, how a place on earth called, perhaps, Cheddar, evolves from its very own Cheddar cows and its uniquely Cheddar grass, air, and water.  And how all these assets are transformed by its Cheddar People and their centuries of investment in a cheese that tastes and looks and feels exclusively—Cheddar.

The lesson is clear.  This thing called cheese –  real cheese –  is a creative partnership between people and place.  And just as Cheddar happens to be about cheese, other places may be about beer or bread or pasta. And still other places about song or dance or even—theater.

Far from the starry lights of Chicago and New York, the theater of place is alive in our town. There, if Rodney cannot play piano but can play the violin, we will not call a casting agent. Our play will be transformed by his violin. And if the room can only seat 100 people, we will not be staging The Music Man.  Rather, a smart little piece about infidelity. If the budget is minuscule, we will reuse the old drops and make them reflect the deepest meaning of our next play. 

Like the dictates of the Cheddar hillsides, we make art out of what we have and what we are.  Among our assets, so often, are our limitations.  For it is the limitations, the givens, and the hometown realities that make us inventive and original. And though the work may range from ragged to ethereal, it is from the Earth up.

 Whose Numbers?:  A Note on Cultural Metrics

Every year, the Art World calls in its numbers.  Our town generally has a decent harvest:  a commendable flow of tickets, hotel rooms, and performances— flower sales and employment for ushers and valets. Numbers – all rendered into dollars and cents –  the impact of the Arts! 

As a team player, I annually submit my organizational numbers to the digital pool.  But one day, after a particularly depressing session of number crunching, I came to a sudden, surprising, and liberating realization. These numbers— the ones on this financial survey before me—the numbers revealing all the hotel rooms I didn’t fill, all the flowers I didn’t sell, and the valets I put out of work—are —wait a minute—-

Not my numbers!

My numbers?—- a second new and marvelous concept  flashed before my eyes—My Numbers!  As in numerical survey that counts the things that I actually do as an arts organization!  My partnerships, collaborations, new works, the local artists I hire—all those easily countable things that actually express and support my mission.  Those numbers!

With the help of my fellow arts groups, I soon undertook an exercise in grassroots academics.  We compiled an alternative index— a separate numerical list of the non-financial contributions we make to the community at large.  Even in their greenest form, My Numbers looked great as an independent numerical statement.

It is an age of metrics, and it is impossible to compete without pertinent numbers.  If smaller non-profits are to survive, they must insist on using the numbers that genuinely represent their work.  And those numbers must be allowed to stand alone, separate from financial metrics. No narrative, not an addendum to a financial survey, no apologies.

 The Cultural Heartbeat: Incidence

Behold the mighty turnstile!  The Arts pass here under a generally uncontested belief that the success of this cultural community can be measured, click by click, in dollars, tickets, and attendance figures.  Thus, it is the galas, festivals, and popular events, purveyors of the Big Numbers, that claim the field of arts funding and community influence.

Grant the turnstile and ticket sales their due.  But let us recognize that the Big Numbers come in other forms as well.  Like the numbers present in the flood of voices coming and going in  cafes, on rail trails, and in small theaters. And numbers represented by books leaving libraries and patrons entering museums and folk clubs.  These are the numbers at the pulse of the resident arts community—the cultural heartbeat drumming out one small event at a time the whole year round.

The lasting payoff in placemaking is incidence –-the collective, everyday flow of small events that characterize the vitality of a genuine cultural place.  And behind those many shows and programs are another set of numbers, the endless meetings, collaborations, and exchanges among citizen participants that make them possible. For it is in the buzz and push of the street that a culturally rich town develops and grows.

A resident arts community is an abiding, on-going phenomenon. It does not depend on sudden crowds and showstoppers or semis full of light and sound.  More often, the numbers in the local arts community come thirty and forty people at a time.  These numbers, the product of cultural incidence, mount every day, every week of the year – into a life force.     

 Creative Placemaking: A Crisis of Words?

Full of promise and possibility, the term creative placemaking has become a commonly used expression for an arts-intensive approach to civic life.  But I fear it is a term that is widely misused and regrettably misunderstood. In our enthusiasm to map out the streets and avenues of Creative Place, it seems we have missed a dangerous split in the road—a full battery of stop signs and red flags.  In reality, this new urban world of creative placemaking is not so simple.  Its three most creative components, the cultural, commercial, and managerial arts, are not the happy blend of arts partnerships the term creative placemaking has been used to imply. Yes, all depend on imaginative and creative work, but all for very different ends.

 The Commercial Arts are dedicated solely to the financial profit of its stakeholders.  The Managerial Arts are expressly responsible to the local economy and the business community.  Both categories are at the beck and call of the marketplace; both have little use for history, diverse artistic media, new works, social issues, or an eclectic artist community.  These things do not sell. 

Likewise, there is no mystery about the role of the cultural arts.  Responsible to legally binding missions and values-based traditions, the cultural arts are charged with doing the work of civilization.  Their task within the resident arts community is to promote a sane and moral society.  Yes—all those things that are not for sale.

By thoughtlessly embracing the term creative placemaking, we have mistakenly represented very different artistic forces as interchangeable cultural assets, all members of the same team.  This is not a linguistic quibble. There is no natural partnership here.  We have turned cultural stewardship into a maze of poorly-defined functions. The ideal of co-existence among the commercial, managerial, and cultural facets of creative placemaking require inspired stewardship—-not a bond of imagined unity.

 The Cultural Frontier: Small City America

America never tires of frontiers.  Wild ones, Industrial ones, galactic ones.  And no less committed to futurity are the Arts.  Technology seeps into almost every crevice of the contemporary arts –- in labs, on stage, and on screens. Yet, not all is computers and light.  There is more than one artistic frontier on the horizon. Imagine, for example, an artistic revolution in small city America. 

Art schools, universities, and conservatories have made the establishment of vibrant arts communities in modest cities ever more possible.  Never have there been so many young artists.  Film, lighting, and sound technology has never been so affordable, professional quality graphic arts never so easy to produce.  And new marketing techniques are more accessible than ever.   The tools and talents for shaping rich cultural places are here in abundance. 

It is a great time to be a young artist.

That is, a great time for those willing to pack their gear and  disappear into the forest, into the frontier.   For the true Meccas for young artists are not coolly competitive Portland and Brooklyn.  They are  in American cities striving to reinvent themselves.  And the tools are not from Dance 304.  They are grant-writing and partnering, working in local schools and making new works for small places.  And they are in the creation of relationships with people of all types and talents.  This is the brave new world of the local arts. 

The work of cultural placemaking is a new and evolving branch of the arts. Like any frontier it is uncharted territory. But artists are learning how to persist, how build their own resident arts communities, audiences, and living wages. Their own cultural places.

 The Resident Arts Community: The Creative Audience

Often lost in the conversation on creative placemaking is a more meaningful approach to the most important cultural asset of all –-  audience.  To be sure, attendance, tickets, and group sales are the subject of interminable discussion.   However, an inspired appreciation of audience as artistic partners is a rarer topic in most quarters.  Nevertheless, a smart and active local audience is a primary force in cultural placemaking, a crucial element in the development of the resident arts community.        

As a children’s theater artist and producer, I have had long experience in the powerful influence an audience can exert on a stage production.  Children provide an amazing example of how a great audience can dominate a play, both in the intense vibe they bring to it or in their deadly rejection  of it.  The same elements are more subtle but ever-present in adult productions. That a play, a poem, or a concert lives and breathes at the will of an engaged and committed audience underscores an important reality of cultural life. Great performances are collaborative acts.

Just as audience helps create the play, the long-term loyalty of an audience to a particular arts group, gallery, or institution is vital. The resulting personal friendships, financial support, and volunteerism can shape, support, and sustain arts groups that might otherwise fail.  

Great community audiences are not born, and they are not shipped in from Brooklyn. Like professional local musicians, painters, and actors, inspired audiences are nurtured by area schools and energized by the local arts –- not as bystanders, but as full partners in the work of cultural place-making.

 Native Plants: Spiders, Trees, Artists

For as long as I can remember, my appreciation of native plants, like contra dancing and banjo lessons, represented a pleasant link to a better world.  Recently, however, that rather light-weight perception of the natural order has changed.  It has grown up, transitioned into a deeper respect for the humble chokeberry, the blue wild indigo, and good old joe-pye weed.  I have become ever more mindful that these are not trendy visitors to our town.  We are, in fact, the visitors, and they are the locals who come from a time that made gorgeous environmental sense. 

Like other artists I know, my recent awaking to the importance of indigenous species has been no intellectual accident.  I find that it parallels and perfectly informs my current obsessions with the local arts and cultural placemaking.   For the more one pursues the nature of and function of a cultural place, the more completely it comes to resemble the world of native plants.   Just as the bee exists to pollinate the flower and the flower exists to feed a dozen species of birds, so must the native artists take on the localized tasks of interpreting regional  history or singing the song specific to this particular town.  Both worlds, the wooded and worded, exist in their own balance and integration. 

Today the morning paper spilled over with exotics –- California-Fest in the park, Trog-Zombie Land at the Bijou, and the Procol Haram Tribute Concert at the Colonial. Do not be surprised if you sense the woods receding another ten yards, the light growing dim, and our native sons and daughters–- flowers, bees, and artists –-“leaving for the coast.”

 Mission: Ten Old Men

About a hundred years ago, ten or maybe twenty old men, each one looking]whiter, maler, and more patrician than the other, walked into a distant board room. There, against all probability, they raised a triumphal flag to all things liberal, left-wing, and progressive.  They turned the Grand Canyon and Yosemite into parks and made the arts in America possible.    They invented tax-exempt status for charitable organizations.

Behind their support of the arts was a basic concern. An America where only the rich could experience the arts would not do.  Recognizing that the marketplace was never going to pay for the arts and that America was destined to become a cultural backwater, this august body laid out a social contract: if cultural organizations were to receive tax advantages (non-profit status) and therefore new avenues for raising  funds, they must adhere to specific  social and legal missions. That is, to faithfully, doggedly, do the work of civilization.  

Somehow this simple story has become lost in the telling.  This effective means for nurturing new and profound forms of artistic  expression has shifted off track.  It has been re-translated into entertainment –- making people laugh and have a great time –-things that the marketplace already does very well.

Making recreation and entertainment available to all through non-profit organizations was never the intent of charitable giving. A great night out is not somehow a taxpayer's right. Making the arts, that is, the serious pursuit of ideas, values, and social justice, available to all Americans is the actual intent of non-profit status. We must believe that the ten or twenty old men still have it right. They are still in the avant grade.

 Cultural Stewardship: A Fresh Vision

Current trends in urban and regional arts communities are not encouraging.

Larger arts institutions and venues are ever more committed to a strict business model of creative placemaking.  Smaller arts organizations scramble to keep pace in a competitive business setting. Few organizations are actually thriving in the realm of the business arts.  Most small arts organizations are barely hanging on financially.  Larger cultural institutions must address a pounding schedule of fund-raisers, galas, and pledge drives—activities that steadily intrude upon their administrative energy, staff time, and artistic missions. 

Still, even among smaller organizations, there is a general acceptance of the business model as the ”real world” approach to cultural placemaking. This is a profoundly questionable assumption.

The search for new ways of sustaining the cultural life in American cities is in full swing.   We are acquiring an increasingly deep knowledge of how cultural places actually work  and may be financed. And there is a growing perception of cultural life as an organic network of community exchange, a system of sharing, collaborating, and more effectively spending cultural capital.

The survival of the resident arts community is absolutely dependent on the development of new approaches to cultural stewardship based on  more organic models  of cultural life.  Systemic change in the local arts, however, will not come at the hands of well-intentioned artists and presenters alone.   Only the creative leadership of foundations, corporate funders, and government agencies can create these new and more relevant standards of cultural stewardship.   Nothing short of a fresh vision of how arts communities actually function can redirect our current seriously limited approach to creative placemaking.

 The Academic Arts: Beyond the Gates

Cultural placemaking and the development of resident arts communities are more than economic initiatives.  They are an aesthetic movement. Fueled by more affordable technology, media innovation, and a rich flow of young artists, the ability to develop authentic cultural communities in small town America has never been greater.

A great deal of the credit for the emergence of strong arts communities goes to the work of colleges and universities. As a source of ideas, social perspectives, and the guidance of artistic talent, academia is a true cradle of the local arts.   As such, one might expect that a grand new union of town and gown has taken place, an exciting, more academically integrated arts community. But, sad to say, lasting artistic partnerships between academia and the community most often end, semester by semester,  at the university gate.

An immense artistic opportunity is lost for those on both sides of the campus wall.  Lost is the growth of more sophisticated arts communities based on  academic/civic partnerships, shared audiences, and collaborative projects.  And missing in the academic community is the development of cultural placemaking as an organized field of learning, a discipline based on networking, collaborative techniques, and best practices in cultural placemaking.

Local arts communities need  contemporary ideas, techniques, and insights to attain real cultural advancement.   Clearly, these are the tools higher education can so amply provide.   On the other hand, the resident arts community has endless lessons of its own to impart upon student artists.  The “real world” of the local community is more than a source of  theme and  artistic content for the young artist. It is also the place where she learns how to network, partner, and  exchange on a civic level.

The creation of symbiotic relationships between the academic and arts communities should be a natural, fundamental element of cultural placemaking. It is an opportunity for the deepest educational interchange—reason enough to keep the university gates wide open.

 The Arts of the Local Culture: The Lost City 

Not long ago, our town was buzzing with the promise of creative placemaking.  We heard charming accounts of distant places where artists were local heroes and cultural organizations worked selflessly to develop their urban culture and reinvent their towns.  As a dedicated member of my own small arts community, I was more than ready to sail off to Creative Place- El Dorado.

But I soon learned that Creative Place, like the City of Gold, came in a full cloud of illusions.  I found myself on a glittering landscape of blank street signs, random boundaries, and decorative cul de sacs. Hockey, rock concerts, and Broadway musicals blended seamlessly with museum exhibits and poetry readings.  All Creative! All good!  A great time!  All together now.

Still, barely perceptible underfoot— a less imposing culture stirred.  A lost city? A new city?  Perhaps  that small place where people went to tell the history of their town.  The quiet place where artists taught in the schools, addressed community issues, celebrated local diversity, and collaborated on new works.  A very unassuming place –- a resident arts community –- the cultural heart of town.

Over the past few years, we have come to imagine that we can design and manage our cultural future through well— financed venues and business plans.  We are busy replacing our organic local networks of arts and small businesses with media promotions and imported programming, replacing the intimate with the loud.

In truth, cities, cultural places, are not so much lost— they are simply crowded out. 

 The Local Culture: A Small Place

It is a small place -- with a small audience, modest venues and an eccentric group of local participants—teachers, painters, poets, advocates, presenters and ghosts….lots of ghosts.  That is, the ghosts of all the teachers, painters, poets, advocates and presenters who came before.  It is a small place that is handed down, generation after generation to create a humble but remarkable social entity called the local culture.

It is place where things wildly matter -- things of all descriptions: history, art, books, buildings and ideas.  Ideas like equity, diversity and inclusion, all stitched together in a single network -- a bio-system of human interactions and partnerships, growling and thumping and cheering each other on.   And everyone involved, in their own way, is committed to this single place on earth -- our town. 

Yet, for all its virtues the local culture can be an elusive realm.   It is easy to drive by …..easy to lose among the same old streets, same old buildings, same old history.   And, in fact, not difficult to dismiss altogether among the Broadway reviews and touring bands.  It is not hard to lose touch with a local culture. 

Fortunately, given the right amount of neglect, underfunding, and marginalization, the local culture will make itself known in a hurry.  For a place without a local culture….without a history, its own artists, and its own community activities has a name…..it is called a cultural dead zone.  And, there is nothing so prominent, so civically devastating, as a dead zone.

All the creative placemaking, funding, and special projects in the world cannot fill a dead zone.  The local culture is, in fact, a vital economic entity dependent on local artists, small businesses, and public institutions -- in partnership with the ghosts….especially the ghosts.

 A Cultural Place: Epilogue

There is a place— a small place—

Just about in the center of town

Where we go to tell the story of our town

Or write a story about our town

Or a poem about the people who live here—

A novel about ourselves—

It is called a cultural place—  

A place about us

It is not about vampires or fashion queens or fashion kings or —women vampires—

It is not popular like that.

It is called our cultural place because it all about us and all the variations and permutations of us

Gay us and Black us, White us— Women, Men, and Kids us

All very different from the media us: George Clooney and Debbie Reynolds and Ted Mack us who has been dead forever

And it is called cultural place because it is where we go

To teach our history and our values and our kids

Or paint the walls on our restaurants and cafes

Or dance our local dances

Or sing the very particular songs of this town

This is an actual cultural place

A local arts community

And the moment you enter into it

It grows and lives and becomes—