Some Historical Threads of the Community Arts Story (and why they are important).

I am going to tell you a few stories, and introduce you to some spiritual ancestors who can guide us and ground us along the way.

For me, "community arts" is about employing creative and artistic means to further humankind’s search for a society that is meaningful and inclusive. So, to write a "history of community arts" simply isn’t possible

Whatever perspective you are coming from, you will probably notice major omissions. Here are some particular historical trends, for instance, that I only allude to because they have been more fully addressed by others, both in this CAN series and elsewhere:

The first is the work by artists who have enabled people of particular cultural groups to investigate, affirm, express and reshape their cultures through the arts. A comprehensive first attempt to centralize this information was compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts under the leadership of A. B. Spellman in 1992, and the reader is referred to the report, "Cultural Centers of Color," as a starting place.

The second is the work by artists who have made art and stimulated art making to further important political movements. Read Jan Cohen-Cruz’ article "Motion of the Ocean: The Shifting Face of U.S. Theater for Social Change since the 1960s" to better understand the relationship of the San Francisco Mime Troupe to the Free Speech Movement, or El Teatro Campesino to the United Farm Workers’ Movement, or the Free Southern Theater to the Black Arts Movement within the Civil Rights Movement. Or turn to books such as "Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change" or "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development."

Third is the role of the artist in public life, as supported by the government at all levels, which of course is explicitly or implicitly a discussion of cultural policy or policies through the decades. Again, I refer the reader to "Creative Community;" to the wealth of information available on the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal; to descriptions of the CETA program of the Department of Labor (well-described by Arlene Goldbard in "Postscript to the Past" on this Community Arts Network site); and to information on the National Endowment for the Arts — for instance, "Reluctant Bureaucrats: The Struggle to Establish the National Endowment for the Arts."

And then there is the vast amount of information from across the world, and the story of "socio-cultural animation," and …. Enough! In this short article, I’ll limit myself to the United States, and to the identification of just a few of the stories and people whom most of us don’t know, but should claim as ancestors.

Dudley Cocke said that stories enable people to evaluate how far they have come, to attribute significance to what has happened, and to enable people to then define a course for the future. [Workshop, c 1991]. Each of us engaged in community arts can probably describe a deep personal drive that simply demands that we do this work. It’s a commitment. A calling. A mission. It’s the vision for society that keeps us awake at night. What are some of the big ideas about the way that human society can be? Who were some of the people that articulated them?

This story is grounded in the belief that the physical community is important to the physical, emotional and spiritual well-being of the people who live there. Community artists work with planners, help citizens create powerful visual symbols of their identity (the deepest form of "public art"), work as architects or landscape designers, collaborate on public works projects, and work as activists on issues ranging from safe streets to public gathering places. If a physical place reflects a clear identity to residents and visitors, if it includes places for people to come together and celebrate, mourn and discuss common concerns, if it is beautiful as well as safe and interesting, then its residents will experience a deeper sense of their own humanity.

Perhaps the prototype for this story lies in the Village Improvement movement, which started in Massachusetts in 1853. It addressed issues of ugly billboards, the need for trees throughout the community, paving the roads and building good public spaces for recreation. By 1900, there were about 3,000 such groups in the United States. This in turn led to the City Beautiful movement, exemplified by the architectural ideas showcased at the Chicago World’s Fair at the end of the 19th century. City Beautiful emphasized a return to grand, classical architecture for public buildings and spaces (if you have visited Chicago, consider the Museum of Science and Industry, the Aquarium, the Midway). At about this time, Frederick Law Olmstead was stressing the importance of parks in cities, and a few public art commissions were created in urban areas. A bit later in the century, Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned "Usonia" — a society in which people lived in harmony with the land, and his "organic architecture" reflected this. Indeed, his designs were not only architectural; he also designed furniture, clothing, even wallpaper, intending that they should be mass-produced and marketed inexpensively so that all Americans could achieve harmony through design.

But efficiency was on the rise as an important American public value, and the original idea that civic buildings and other public amenities should be beautiful and grand — appropriate reflections of the democratic ideal — gave way through the 20th century to the idea that public funds should not be wasted, and that beauty was personal, to be purchased to satisfy one’s own taste. Public buildings reflected this idea, becoming plainer, more functional. The comprehensiveness of the Village Improvement — which considered trees, pavement, billboards, public spaces, and more — gave way to a host of specialist organizations. The big idea of public aesthetics, grounded in a philosophical idea about human beings, dwindled.

This story addresses the idea that, for people to be fulfilled, especially in a democracy, they must have the opportunity to freely and deeply investigate ideas and share these ideas. Community-arts workers create settings in which this free interchange occurs, and create techniques that blur — or erase altogether — the line between creator and consumer.

In the early 1800s, Josiah Holbrook of Massachusetts would invite his neighbors to his home for discussions of books. Gradually, he started inviting professors and the discussions were expanded to encompass new ideas. This led eventually to the founding of the American Lyceum Association in 1831; by 1850 there were about 3,000 of these groups. But then someone had the idea that discussion leaders should be paid honoraria and the discussions should become lectures. The next logical step was to put lecturers on "the circuit," and James Redpath started a management organization to do exactly that. He valued efficiency, so naturally favored lectures in communities that could afford the fee and that were on the railroad line. The grassroots movement — begun as discussions by ordinary folks in people’s homes — began to wither as this more "professional" movement grew.

Now, cut to Chautauqua, New York, where in 1874 Rev. John Vincent was experimenting with the use of the arts to teach the Bible. This approach proved very popular, and pretty soon, Rev. Vincent’s study packages were being shipped to scores of local Chautauqua Circles. Cut back to the Redpath agency, where now-manager Keith Vawter had a big idea. He had lecturers. The Chautauqua Circles were a network of potential presenters. So, he brought the two together and if the lecturer was popular enough but the town was too small, he even provided tents for the lecture. And the Chautauquas evolved to include artists and "pop" entertainers as well as lecturers.

Touring artists isn’t a new idea; there were reports of a professional theater company touring rural Kentucky as early as 1797 [Gard & Semmes, "America’s Players," p. 12]. But few people remember that much of "presenting" had its roots in discussion groups in people’s homes. A truly participatory process evolved to a one-way consumer activity.

In this story, we recognize the urgent need for intercultural investigation, for the understanding and prizing of cultures different from our own. On a grand scale, this is important in the United States, a society developed through the immigration and migration of vast numbers of cultural groups, as well as the violent dislocation of the original peoples. But it is also important in any society or community in which there are distinct groups of people, whether ethnic, "newcomers" and "old-timers," an especially large percentage of people in a particular age group, part-timers and year-rounders, gay people and straight people.

One of our many ancestors in this story was Rachel Davis-Dubois (no relation to W.E.B. Dubois, though she worked with him and was a close friend). She was an educator in New York working in the 1930s-50s. Her lifelong devotion was to multicultural education, K-12. Even more than this, she articulated the notion of "cultural democracy" as the third leg of the American stool, along with political and economic democracy — but the leg that had not yet been attended to. She believed that the American dream could not be realized without equal emphasis on cultural democracy. In 1943 she said:

Much of her work was about enabling groups to study, understand and value their own cultures, and to equally value, and delight in, the cultures of others. She advocated, for instance, the intercultural, neighborhood festival as a preliminary step to intercultural understanding, a first step on the road to cultural democracy.

I wonder if Rachel Davis-Dubois ever met Frederick Koch. He "was" the theater department at the University of North Carolina, from 1917 to 1945. He believed that, because of the nature of the American ideal, America’s culture could only be recorded by ordinary people. So, he required his students to write and present "folk plays" — plays about their background, about people in their communities. He recruited students so that classes would be a mix of old and young, rich and poor, sharecropper and landowner, black and white, so that they represented the range of cultures that made up North Carolina. He insisted that their plays address real issues. Plays included "Job’s Kinfolks" by Loretto Carroll Bailey about urban mill life, and another also by Loretto Bailey about the experience of black factory workers during a textile strike. They included an anti-lynching play, "Country Sunday," commended by the Southern Interracial Commission, and another, "According to Law," about an innocent black man caught in a white man’s court. They included a play about Durham slum life. They included "The Return of Buck Gavin" by Thomas Wolfe, drawn from his mountain roots. More than a thousand such folk plays were written by his students during Koch’s time on the faculty, and the plays were toured extensively to encourage discussion and understanding of the scope of American life.

Both Davis-Dubois and Koch believed that the stories of Americans must be told first by people of a community, for that community; and then shared. People hearing the stories approach listening with openness, in the desire to learn, to perhaps be changed, by what they hear, in order for American culture to be stronger for the exchange. Davis-Dubois and Koch considered the neighborhood festival and the folk play but a first step on the road to genuine democracy. Yet, consider the word "outreach" as it is used today. It is a term that generally means, "I will present my music, or my story, or my food, or my customs, to you;" it does not connotes mutuality of exchange and it is too often seen as the "end," important for audience development perhaps. Rarely do I hear "outreach" used to mean a first step on an explicit path to larger, human, philosophically-based end...

Robert LaFollette was governor of Wisconsin early in the 20th century. His friend Charles Van Hise was president of the University of Wisconsin at the same time. Together, they strove to create a public university that truly belonged to all of the people. "The boundaries of the campus are the boundaries of the state," was the slogan of the "Wisconsin Idea." No Wisconsinite should be denied access to a university education in any course of study because she lived too far from Madison, or because he farmed and could not leave the farm most months. WHA radio, "oldest station in the nation," was created to enable people to study at home. Correspondence courses were pioneered by the university in 1906. By 1912, nearly 100 additional faculty members were hired just to keep up with the number of correspondence students — and to conduct on-site classes for these students in various regions of the state throughout the year. LaFollette and Van Hise linked the idea of a well-educated citizenry to strong, participatory grassroots involvement in self-government. This was the culture of the University for some 60 years: that whatever a person’s talent, the University could help. Of the arts Van Hise said, "I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state; I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him … ." [Howe, p. 142] Later, in 1925, President Glenn Frank said, "There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama. … The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast, complex and swiftly moving technical civilization." [Gard, "Grassroots Theater," p. 95]

In the 1920s, "Pop" Gordon crisscrossed Wisconsin by train on behalf of the University, encouraging people in communities to sing together. Wisconsin had the first artist-in-residence at a University: John Steuart Curry was hired by the College of Agriculture, in 1936. A young playwright named Robert Gard was moving on from his graduate education; he wrote his mentor, David Stevens, at the Rockefeller Foundation, seeking job-hunting advice. Stevens advised him to visit Madison and mentioned Curry; he told Gard that some of the most interesting ideas in the arts in America at the time, 1945, were happening at the University of Wisconsin — but in the agricultural, not the arts, departments. [Rockefeller Archives] In 1972 I was told by Emmitt Sarig of the Extension division that the Pro Arte Quartet was originally on the faculty of Extension. Gordon, Curry, Gard, the Pro Arte — all were mandated to travel the state, helping people develop their talents. By 1972, when I worked for Arts Extension, there was a staff of 28 artists: playwrights, children’s drama specialists, choreographers, Norwegian fiddling specialists, church-organ specialists and many more. By then, Robert Gard had become chair of the department.

Gard’s career at the University of Wisconsin lasted 40 years. He furthered the Wisconsin Idea by encouraging and enabling people to write. In "Grassroots Theater" (1955) he remembers a writing student telling him that "There must be a great, free expression. If the people of Wisconsin knew that someone would encourage them to express themselves in any way they chose … if they knew that someone would back them and help them when they wanted help, it was her opinion that there would be such a rising of creative expression as is yet unheard of in Wisconsin … for the whole expression would be of and about ourselves." [Gard, "Grassroots Theater," p. 217]

The power of the Wisconsin Idea was the linking of creative expression to grassroots self-government. "The Wisconsin Idea involves the full scope of popular self-government; but popular self-government without indigenous art forms is incapable of civilized expression. After scientific agriculture, biology and engineering, then the next practical step — indeed the simultaneous step — is popular aesthetics." [Patten, quoting MacKaye, in "The Arts Workshop of Rural America," p. 25] Today, countless classes are offered through neighborhood centers, recreation departments, community colleges, arts councils, arts centers, to enable people of all ages to learn skills in the arts. Is there still a "big idea" that relates this learning to democratic society?

This is the story of scale and wholeness, of people whose ideas tie the fulfillment, even the very survival of humankind, to the interrelatedness of life and its many functions.

In the first half of the 20th century, Alfred Arvold, who worked for both the Drama and Extension departments at North Dakota State University, was passionate that a community is an organic whole, and that the arts must not be broken off from the ongoing life of the community. To this end, he promulgated the notion of the community center where there would be a wonderful jumble of activity — it would be a recreation center, science center, arts center, government center, where sometimes you couldn’t tell where one began and the other left off. In 1917 he wrote,

In the early 1950s, Baker Brownell (journalist, philosopher at Northwestern University, community developer most notably in Montana), said that a human community must be of a scale small enough that people can know one another as whole persons, not as performers of single roles. People who know one another as whole persons will trust one another with their ideas, and will be able to listen to the ideas of others. Brownell advocated the creation of community dramas as part of the community planning process — dramas written collectively, whose script is based on what residents have learned of the community’s several histories, and which use that history to pose crucial questions about the future.

But more important, Brownell saw a commitment to wholeness, a commitment to the arts, as the way to reclaim a society’s soul. He believed "art" to be a verb — everyone is latently creative, but the art system, too often, reinforces passivity, and the way of passivity is the way of death.

Today, I see a tension between strongly held world views — those that, like Arvold’s and Brownell’s, are based on the blurring of lines between sectors, institutions, functions and roles, and those that advocate their even stronger segregation.

In urban areas, in the late 19th century, we recall the Settlement House movement. Perhaps the best-known individual was Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago to provide entry points, orientation points, for new immigrants to the United States, and to provide basic social services for them. She was adamant that poverty, that not speaking English, should not mean disenfranchisement from one’s culture. Her comprehensive social-service program included meals and helping to locate housing; but it also included a gym, men’s and women’s clubs, programs in native languages as well as English, a library, art classes and an art gallery, a drama group. The National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, whose membership must pledge that no one will be turned away for lack of ability to pay for lessons or lack of so-called "talent," traces its roots directly to Hull House.

And how can I possibly relate the story of the Civil Rights Movement in a way that can do it justice? It cannot be summarized in a few paragraphs. Suffice it to say that the well-known heroes of the Civil Rights Movement — those who would not give up their seat on the bus, those seeking justice for farm workers, those willing to die for their beliefs — as well as the unknown people who act with faith and conviction that justice is worth everything — these are our ancestors and partners.

Today I am horrified that foundational American ideas such as justice are too frequently dismissed as left-wing, retro, obsolete and socially dysfunctional. I recall an editorial in a newspaper some years ago whose headline, I believe, was "Social Justice Is Good Business." The call to action is urgent.

This is the story of community-based arts organizations, and the inclusion of arts organizations into the quality-of-life index, however informal, of a community.

There were theater companies in the United States almost from the beginning, especially in the urban areas. There were performances on showboats and there were Mexican vaudeville companies traveling throughout the southwest. It was said that in the Rocky Mountain West, the first building built after the assayer’s office and the saloon was the opera house, and in many places that was probably true. Artists like Edwin Booth and Sarah Bernhardt were seen in many small towns. Redpath’s idea of traveling lecturers spawned groups like Columbia Artists Management and suddenly there were Community Concert Series growing throughout the country. Community-based arts were growing, too, in small towns. Fargo, N.D., had an art league well established by 1911. Quincy, Ill., had an orchestra with a paid conductor by 1947. In 1944, the Junior League of America took it one step further, offering consulting services to communities wanting to expand the number of arts activities and to coordinate existing arts activities. Interestingly, Virginia Lee Comer, the woman behind this idea, was insistent that, when she visited a community, she should talk to all groups of people — not just arts groups — about creative activity in the community; she saw churches, union halls and housing projects as obvious places for arts activity because people gathered there. Ms. Comer’s manual on assessing, coordinating and stimulating arts activities in small communities, and her work in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1946-7, probably led directly to the institution of community arts councils — one branch of the community arts tree.

Meanwhile, in 1965, Lyndon Johnson created the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the Great Society. Since the legislation specified that 20% of the program funds for the NEA must be passed through to entities in states prepared to receive these funds, there was a frenzy of creating state arts agencies. The corollary, of course, was that there should be local arts agencies, funded by their state arts agency. The number of community arts councils grew, and Americans for the Arts now estimates their number at 4,000. Their activities include granting to arts groups and artists, cultural planning, coordination, social-action work, presenting the arts, offering services to artists and arts groups and more.

Today, however, I think a lot about institutions and about the big ideas that spawned them. But funders and others in the nonprofit business world have created an image of what a nonprofit should look like, and have rewarded those organizations which have boards of a certain structure, steady budget growth — in other words, which have "organizational stability." In an economy so challenging to nonprofit arts groups, how do we balance survival and mission?

This is the story of civic responsibility. What is civic dialogue? What are public values? What does it mean to be a citizen?

From the first years of the 20th century, we hear from Percy MacKaye, an actor from a long line of theater people. He articulated the responsibility of the artist to explicitly think of himself or herself as building civic infrastructure:

MacKaye was one of the first to articulate the role that pageants could play in what we now call "community-building." In 1909, for instance, Boston instituted the "Boston-1915 Committee," which convened task forces to consider such issues as immigration, housing, transportation, education, political corruption and public health. As part of the reflecting/planning process, "Cave Life to City Life" was performed, involving thousands of citizens; its intent was to help Bostonians understand the "Boston state of mind" as an essential context to reform and planning. [Prevots, p. 31] In "The Masque of St. Louis," 7,500 citizen-actors attempted to capture the meaning of that city. The largest city in every state was asked to send envoys who "represent the best things in the progress and development" of that city; these individuals both participated in the pageant and the subsequence Conference of Cities, which addressed such issues as "Municipal Recreation: A School of Democracy" and "Humanizing City Government." [Prevots, p. 21] Participants included Jane Addams of Hull House, Frederick Law Olmstead, sculptor Lorado Taft, playwright George Pierce Baker — artists and social reformers.

The pageant movement dwindled after 1917, both as a result of World War I and of the new emphases in American "progress." But the American Pageant Association split internally, too, around the definition of a "valid" pageant. MacKaye’s idea was that a pageant would be a representation of a community, an attempt to capture its uniqueness, its "personality," its meaning. Others felt that a "valid" pageant could be about any topic (the life of a great individual, a labor issue) so long as scores of community people were involved. Over this disagreement about definition, the pageant movement, as such, began to falter. With the coming of World War I, it was expedient to use the pageant format to raise patriotic consciousness, and it was convenient to use generic scripts, only changing a few names here and there to "localize" the performances.

The Works Progress Administration (the WPA) of the New Deal resonates with MacKaye’s ideas, though MacKaye was far more holistic in articulating the role of artists in society. The New Deal is far too complex, too multifaceted and too rich for me to even consider tackling here; but suffice it to say that the Roosevelt Administration considered artists to be a public good. The Federal Writers Project that led to a guidebook for each state, the artists’ projects leading to murals we have all probably seen, the Federal Theater — I can’t describe it. Let me simply recommend that, as one place to start, you rent and watch "Cradle Will Rock," a recent and wonderful film directed by Tim Robbins that poses all the provocative and great questions. (It is also a fabulous film.)

And the projects being undertaken through "Animating Democracy," described elsewhere in these reports by Barbara Schaffer-Bacon and Pam Korza are wonderful contemporary responses to these complex issues. Ideas from such artists as Augusto Boal are generating artistic techniques to deal with questions of participation — who participates? How?

Today, we struggle with public entities to recognize the arts, and artists, as a public good. We ask the question: What can my community do for me? Yet, more and more, community-based artists are asking, in the tradition of Percy MacKaye, What can I do for my community?

Each of these stories is thrilling to me. Thrilling, because they began as a big idea, grounded in a belief about human beings, possibility, and life on earth.

But each of these stories concerns me, because they evolved to become dusty trickles of once-grand ideas. Discussions by neighbors eventually became art consumption. Visionary pageants intended to link creativity and social reform became convenient platforms for generic propaganda. And — though I didn’t mention it earlier — both Koch and Arvold were replaced by an individual with a mandate from the dean to "professionalize" their theater departments. As we look around us today, we see many groups that formed in response to a creative urge spending more time on organizational maintenance than on art-making.

But at the same time, I am also seeing a strong community-based creative response to the conditions that sadden or horrify me. More and more, I believe that the impulse to make community-based art will be crucial in addressing a meaningful and inclusive society for everyone Ideas cycle around, and many of the articles in this series of Community Arts Network articles are indeed in the traditions of great people who have gone before — and will be important for those who will come next. Perhaps, as much as anything, these stories remind us how essential it is to remain grounded in the big ideas, to remain constantly vigilant so that the big ideas do not evolve into mere programs or administrative procedures.

These are stories we can take with us. We can conjure up the spirit of Koch and Arvold, Gard and Davis-DuBois, Holbrook and Comer, Brownell and MacKaye. They can travel with us on our road. They can keep asking us those difficult questions.

Community art, I think, is about the meaning of citizenship in a democracy, whether you approach this meaning through a vision of a good physical community, a multicultural community, a community of empowered individuals. As community arts workers, we are challenged to wrestle with the biggest possible questions about human beings, communities, life. We are challenged to find a unique vocabulary that — unlike other arts movements — integrates rather than isolates.

But, it seems, community arts workers aren’t afraid to address the big questions. We have carried the torches of our ancestors, some of whom, I hope, we know a little better now. May their work and words guide us to do our work always better, with courage.

Maryo Ewell is associate director of the Colorado Council on the Arts, with a specialty in community development and the arts. She is the founder of the neighborhood Cultures of Denver, which pairs artists with community organizations in low-income areas of the city; the Arts Education Equity Network, increasing the prominence of the arts in local schools; and a regional folk-arts program in which the state’s four folklorists work in a community-development capacity. She has won several national awards for her work in community arts. Ewell is the daughter of grassroots-theater pioneer Robert Gard.

Adams, Don and Arlene Goldbard, "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development," Rockefeller Foundation, 2001.

Blandy, Doug and Kristin G. Congdon, Art in a Democracy, Teachers College Press, 1987.

Cocke, Dudley, Harry Newman and Janet Salmons-Rue, "From The Ground Up: Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective," Cornell University, 1993.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan, "Motion of the Ocean: The Shifting Face of U.S. Theater for Social Change since the 1960s, " Theater Magazine, vol 31 no 1, 2001.

O’Brien, Mark and Craig Little, "Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change," New Society Publishers, 1990.

The Rockefeller Archives in Pocatonico Hills, N.Y., contains valuable source information on Koch (grants to the University of North Carolina), Brownell (grants to the University of Montana) and Gard (grants to Cornell University, University of Alberta and the University of Wisconsin) and much of my information comes from letters, grant proposals, grant reports and staff notes from Rockefeller Foundation staff members. Additionally, I have interviewed individuals who knew these people.

Rowles, Elinor, "Cultural Centers of Color," National Endowment for the Arts, 1992.

Dreeszen, Craig and Pam Korza, "Fundamentals of Local Arts Management" (second edition), Arts Extension Service, University of Massachusetts, 1994.

Johnson, Donald, "Frank Lloyd Wright versus America: The 1930s," MIT Press, 1990.

Harrison, Harry P., and Karl Detzer, "Culture Under Canvas: The Story of Tent Chautauqua," Hastings House, 1958.

Overton, Patrick, "Rebuilding the Front Porch of America: Essays on the Art of Community Making," Columbia College, 1997.

Davis-Dubois, Rachel, "Get Together Americans: Friendly Approaches to Racial and Cultural Conflicts through the Neighborhood-Home Festival," Harper and Bros,1943.

Koch, Frederick, "Carolina Folk Plays, v. 1, 2 and 3," Henry Holt, 1922, 1926, 1928.

Niggli, Josephina; F. Koch, ed., "Mexican Folk Plays," University of North Carolina Press, 1938.

Spearman, Walter, "The Carolina Playmakers: The First Fifty Years," University of North Carolina Press, 1970.

Gard, Robert, "Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America," originally published by University of Wisconsin Press; reprinted by Greenwood Press, c. 1970, reprinted by University of Wisconsin Press 1999.

Gard, Robert, "Prairie Visions: A Personal Search for the Springs of Regional Art and Folklife," Heartland Press, 1987.

Gard, Robert, Moderator, "A Man, An Idea, A Movement," interview with Dean Chris Christensen, UW College of Agriculture, WHA-TV, c. 1952.

Howe, Frederick, "Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy," Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912.

Schmeckebier, Laurence, "John Steuart Curry’s Pageant of America," American Artists’ Group, 1943.

Somersian, Ayse, "Distinguished Service: UniverisityUniversity of Wisconsin Faculty and Staff Helping to Build Organizations in the State," New Past Press, 1997

Arvold, Alfred, "The Community Center Movement," North Dakota A.C. (?), vol. 1, no.3, May-June, 1917.

Brownell, Baker, "Art Is Action," originally published 1939; reprinted Books for Libraries Press, 1969.

Poston, Richard, "Small Town Renaissance," Harper and Bros., 1950; reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1971.

Gibans, Nina Freedlander, "The Community Arts Council Movement: History, Opinions, Issues," Praeger, 1982.

Graham-Wheeler, Dorothy, "Forty Years in the Cultural Lane: the Winston-Salem Arts Council, Inc., Winston-Salem, North Carolina," Internship Report (Arts Management) for Salem College, 1989.

Kanellos, Nicolas, "The History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940," University of Texas Press, 1990.

Mark, Charles Christopher, "Reluctant Bureaucrats: The Struggle to Establish the National Endowment for the Arts," Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1991.

MacKaye, Percy, "The Civic Theater in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure: A Book of Suggestions," J.J. Little & Ives, 1912.

Patten, Marjorie, "The Arts Workshop of Rural America: A Study of the Rural Arts Program of the Agricultural Extension Service," Columbia University Press, 1937; reprinted by Greenwood Press, c. 1970.

Prevots, Naima, "American Pageantry: A Movement for Art and Democracy," U.M.I. RResearch Press, 1990.

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Some Historical Threads of the Community Arts Story (and why they are important).

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