The CAN Report

The State of the Field of Community Cultural Development: Something New Emerges

A Report from the CAN Gathering, May 2004

By Linda Frye Burnham, Steven Durland and Maryo Gard Ewell

Published by Art in the Public Interest July, 2004

Table of Contents Summary The Charge of the Gathering, Its Methodology and Terms Comparing the Field: 2001 to 2004 Emergence of a New Energy What Must Happen for This Field to Develop? Appendices

Appendix VI: CAN Gathering Transcripts

This is the transcript of the group sessions from the Community Arts Network (CAN) Gathering, May 26-28, 2004, at Lutheridge Conference Center in Arden, N.C., produced by Art in the Public Interest.

The appendix is available as a 78-page downloadable PDF document (280k).

Download Appendix VI

Following are a sampling of comments from various participants taken from the transcript:

What is it going to take in this country that all people be respected — including Arabs — and be appreciated for who they are?

—Anan Ameri

How do we move from the satisfying encounter to the sustainable practice?

—Arnold Aprill

There are people who want to work in the systems that exist. And there are people who have totally lost any belief in those systems. That shouldn’t keep us from working together.

—Andrea Assaf

We’re not making change alone, we're making it in a context of other change agents. The trick of measuring that is to not isolate the art but to look at it as a whole, and say how do you make a difference together.

—Caron Atlas

How do we build a field, and sustain that field, and train leadership to be able to take it over?

—Judy Baca

The bigger vision has to be values-based. It can’t be based in trying to figure out theater, trying to figure out dance, trying to figure out museums.

—Tom Borrup

It’s so daunting, how interwoven the power structure is.

—Norma Bowles

Even grasping ‘shared vocabulary’ is difficult because it cuts across a number of disciplines, and I’m not sure I understand even my own discipline, let alone folks who are in some parallel universes.

—Ron Chew

How do we not become — and take on the characteristics of — the dragon as we enter into the toxicity of the oppositional force?

What is the legacy of this work, and how does it connect to the theme of sustained transformation, not momentary or episodic transformation?

—Bill Cleveland

The field is littered with our successes.

—Dudley Cocke

I want economic development so that more people have the means to engage on the policy level.

—Jan Cohen-Cruz

I'm interested in culturally grounded social-change strategies. I am interested in talking about what works, what doesn't.

—Dee Davis

Artists have gotten increasingly removed from that matrix of community support, and have distanced ourselves increasingly from what really matters to people. We need to tell the American public that we’re really sorry for the last 30 years, and we’ll do better at it.

—Kathie deNobriga

How do we help to bring about a great awakening? How do we use our work to draw people out of the common trends that just seem to have us in their grip?

I notice that even the die-hards among us have downsized our vision for the moment, and that very often we’re in a place now of ‘please can we just survive

—Arlene Goldbard

I’m calling for acknowledgment of all the individuals that practice the way we do.

—Lonnie Graham

The thing that I burn with is to allow evolution and growth while being true to a mission.

—Sterling Houston

For me the burning issue is the level of [President Bush's] mendacity. It is so clearly bankrupt, literally unresponsive to the actual situation that is contradicting everything he’s saying. What we can do is really speak to this devastating situation that is causing suffering all over the world.

—John Malpede

I use performance to break silences around things that people don’t talk about.

—Robbie McCauley

I really do see the need for an American community arts development. But there are many, many other countries in which this has been going on for a very, very long time. Issues and art have been going hand-in-hand. I think learning from other countries is important.

—Meena Natarajan

It’s not our greatness, but the brilliance of the people whose interests we try to serve.

—John O'Neal

The burning issue is how do we stand up — because there’s a lot of pressure for us to lay down.

—Linda Parris-Bailey

Our mission is to honor the stories of all the people, and to transform them into living history so that the stories are given back to the community to dance to the music, write the poetry, make the visual art – that has always been my work.

—Susan Perlstein

Art, to me, is the goal, and it’s a sacred goal. And this conversation is what informs my work. But I cannot make it about the conversation. It’s about the work.

—Rosalba Rolón

This gathering could be a discussion of evolution, revelation or revolution.

—Barbara Schaffer Bacon

I know that the sense of community is different for everyone.

—Shirley Sneve

My burning issue is next generation leadership development and how the work that has been accomplished so far is not lost.

—MK Wegmann

I always defined myself as an artist. I never defined myself as an activist. But I’m always with the activist group.        

—Lily Yeh

The burning issue is how all of us can build on and extend the democratic arts and democratic ways of understanding who we are in an environment that tends not to favor that sort of an approach.

—Morris Vogel

If we could communicate what we can bring, a way of thinking and creativity and a power of culture that we can bring to the table…I think that’s the struggle.

—Tomás Ybarra-Frausto

Systems aesthetics was a hot conceptual idea in the visual arts back in the '60's, and to some people it gave permission for an artist to go out and work with people, work with communities, work with social structures, and call it art, not activism.

—Steven Durland

I'm really concerned about the next generation of leaders, and what are we going to be passing on to them, but more important what settings are we creating for them in order for them to discover their own truths.

—Maryo Gard Ewell

The issues of democratic, true participatory democratic behavior, social practice and understanding are in front of us.

—Robert Leonard

Download Appendix VI

[Table of Contents]