“It would be better if art were nameless, and that those of us who write about art in books and the reviews and newspapers, always clacking about art, or Art, or ART, were constrained somehow by good taste or a hickory club either to do art in its appropriate human context, and in doing be it, or keep still. For art suffers more than most activities in being withdrawn from the contexts of living. It is categorized as something special.”

Baker Brownell, The Human Community, 1950 

“Modern art activity can provide a new birth and new creative directions of usefulness for such a community. As art activity is developed, the community is recreated The vital roots of every phase of life are touched As the community is awakened to its opportunity in the arts, it becomes a laboratory through which the vision of the region is reformulated and extended And as the small community discovers its role, as the small community generates freshness of aesthetic response across the changing American scene, American art and life are enhanced.”

Robert Gard, Arts in The Small Communities, 1967 

While there will be many tributes today to the vision and determination of Martin Luther King, from artists and non-artists alike, I think the best thing the arts as a field could do would be to take seriously the Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change report and address the inequities that are built into the non-profit arts infrastructure.

Lately, we have seen the enormously negative effects of Big Money in politics through the creation of Super Pacs and the lifting of limitations on corporate political contributions as a result of Citizens United. Well, this situation has long been in place in the arts. The wealthy and powerful dominate governing boards, and major institutions court major donations from rich individual donors and their foundations. And then we wonder why the money is centralized in elite, white, urban institutions and why those institutions present art that appeals to that demographic.

It is important that CRADLE not fall prey to this pattern. Local CRADLE organizations should have boards comprised not only of town leaders and elites, but of people representative of the population as a whole. This means choosing board members not for their ability to contribute and raise money, but for the value of their viewpoint and wisdom.

In the book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, authors John McKnight and Peter Block call on citizens to create powerful and competent communities based on three “universal properties”:

• The Giving of Gifts – The gifts of the people in our neighborhood are boundless. Our movement calls forth those gifts.
• The Presence of Association – In association we join our gifts together, and they become amplified, magnified, productive, and celebrated.
• The Compassion of Hospitality – We welcome strangers because we value their gifts and need to share our own. Our doors are open. There are no strangers here, just friends we haven’t met.

The latter is particularly important, as it promotes what Block calls a “welcome at the edge.” It isn’t only the rich and powerful who have gifts to offer, but those who have been traditional ignored or marginalized. And those must be actively sought out and celebrated.

We must not continue to waste the talents of our people. We must not continue to ignore the stories of our people. We must celebrate the richness that exists in all people. And we must create an artistic infrastructure that promotes these values.

I am thrilled to announce that, thanks to the generous support of a local donor, CRADLE will begin a new pilot program in Bakersville, NC (pop 357) in the coming year. It is my hope that by the end of this summer we will have an active and sustainable participatory arts program up and running in the historic Mitchell County Courthouse.

Why Bakersville?

One reason was Bakersville’s town motto: “Gateway to the Roan, Home to the Arts.” But it was much more than that.

In January of 1998, Bakersville was the victim of a major flood that damaged much of the town to such an extent that it was declared a disaster. The citizens decided not only to clean up and rebuild, but to make Bakersville better than it had been in the past. One part of that project involved renovating the historic courthouse into an arts and education center. It took over a decade, but the town,

Historic Mitchel County Courthouse

with the invaluable assistance of Handmade In America’s Small Town Revitalization Program, raised over a million dollars for the renovation. In March of 2010, the courthouse was opened. The courtroom had been converted into a beautiful performance space complete with capabilities for livestreaming events over the internet. Other rooms in the building were converted into smart classrooms and offices for local historic and educational organizations.

In 2011, I received a call for proposals from the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant program. I decided to collaborate with HandMade in America, and contacted Judi Jetson to discuss which of the small towns in her program would be best for the project. While there were several towns with renovated performance space, we ultimately8 agreed that Bakersville would be the focus. The “Our Town” grant required a collaboration with town leaders, and Bakersville had an impressive group in place who had spearheaded the courthouse renovation. We had meetings with Bob Hensley, Susan Ledford, Dan Barron, and mayor Charles Vine and all were strongly supportive of the program.

The NEA grant we put together made the final round of proposals but ultimately was not funded, I was determined that Bakersville was the right place for this project. I decided to scale back the size of the request and approach a local foundation whose focus was on Mitchell County and who had demonstrated an interest in the arts. After looking more closely at the budget, I decided to reduce it to $25,000 (the original grant was many times greater than that). While I expect that I could have asked for more, or raised additional money from another foundation, I felt that I wanted to show that it wouldn’t take a huge commitment of funds to get a CRADLE organization going. After all, small towns don’t have a great deal of available cash, and I wanted this process to be replicable in other small towns across the country.

I partnered with the Toe River Arts Council, where Executive Director Denise Cook was an enthusiastic supporter. Together, I believe we will succeed in creating a vibrant, sustainable participatory arts program in Bakersville.

And so I will use this blog to describe the process of creating this pilot over the coming year. I hope you will follow along, asking questions and making suggestions. And if you are a member of a small town and interested in creating a CRADLE organization where you live, please contact me at swalters@cradlearts.org.

Over the weekend, I had my very first Moonpie thanks to Lisa Mount, the producer and director of Headwaters: A Goodly Portion of Our Songs & Stories, and the wonderful people at the Sautee Nacoochee Center in Sautee Nacoochee, GA. I hear that I really needed an RC Cola to make the experience complete, but I think the excellent performance more than made up for the missing drink.

I had been invited down to Georgia (music cue: Charlie Daniels Band The Devil Went Down to Georgia) by Lisa Mount, and it just so happened that my wife needed to attend a meeting just down the road in Cleveland that same weekend, so I was thrilled to make the 2-1/2 hr trip from Asheville.

Sautee Nacoochee is an unincorporated community in northern Georgia. The performance space is a 1930s’era gym that has been converted into a large, open stage surrounded on three sides by 100 seats. On the Center’s campus is also the Center Gallery, devoted to the work of artists who live within 50 miles of Sautee Nacoochee, a conference room, a history musuem, dance and art studios, and an environmental education resource center. The newest addition is a museum devoted to the folk pottery of Northeast Georgia. According to the SNCA website, “Because of the extensive arts programming offered in recent years, Sautee was designated one of the “100 Best Small Art Towns in America” in a book by the same name written by John Villani.” Deservedly so!

Lisa Mount, who was named “one of the 100 Most Influential Georgians” in 2008 by Georgia Trend Magazine, gave me the “nickel tour.” In addition to her work with SNCA, she is very active nationally as a consultant with Artistic Logistics, for whom she has helped such non profit arts organizations as Childsplay, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Cornerstone Theater Company, the Neo Futurists, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, and the Maryland Ensemble Theatre. Her seemingly boundless positive energy made me and everyone else feel welcome.

This was the fifth summer for Headwaters. Every two years, there has been a new version written by well-known playwrights Jo Carson and Jerry Grillo, and this year was a compilation of what might be called the “greatest hits” of the first two productions. Next year there will be a new play called Didja Hear? about “what we can and can’t (and will and won’t) hear.” (Carson’s book Spider Speculations: A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling [published by TCG Publications] is a must-read for anyone interested in this sort of community storytelling.)

I loved the production, which was performed by local performers, including a wonderful band for the numerous songs. There also were shadow puppets and a whimsical framing device about two bears rescued by a local theatre producer from the bear park who have been conscripted to write scenes of the various stories they are provided. They are motivated by Moonpies…  The stories are a mixture of tall tales, local history, and personal remembrances, all very much connected to Sautee Nacoochee. As the Director’s Note said, “Headwaters could only happen here, with these people — it is theater of, by, for, with and about this community.”

I was particularly struck by Nadir Mateen’s powerful story entitled “Honor & Dignity” about an African-American educator with a doctorate in education who, when Georgia desegregated, found himself forced to fire all of his African-American teachers himself (after all, no white person would be willing to be taught by a black teacher) and as a reward remain employed in the system (he was 18 months from retirement), or have the white administrators do it and be out of work. He decided on the former, feeling that it was important for at least one black person to remain in the system, and after he had fired the teachers, he was given a job teaching math at the reform school, which he did for the 18 months until he was able to retire. Mateen, who has an MFA in acting from the University of Florida, delivered the story with understated power and emotional depth.

Other highlights included a hilarious story entitled “Foot,” about a woman whose brother gave her an old prosthetic foot as a joke present, and she decided to put it sticking out from underneath the hood of her car as she drove around town, which lead to unexpected consequences and a wonderful statement about our legacy perhaps being those things that made other people laugh. Lisa Mount’s song “Hold Fast to the Laughter” brought that point home.The ensemble delivered a simple and powerful rendition of Stephen Foster’s haunting song Hard Times, and a Elsie Nelson told the story of a “woods colt” (and illegitimate child) and her travails through life.

The production was beautifully paced, and staged simply and evocatively with just enough spectacle to keep things interesting but not to overwhelm the stories. It wasn’t slick, it was authentic, it felt rooted in place. It is a marvelous example of the kind of production that I hope to encourage people involved in CRADLE to create.

To everyone involved in Headwaters: A Goodly Portion of Our Songs & Stories, thanks you so much for an inspiring evening, and Lisa, thank you so much for the invitation, and for providing another example of how rural and small communities can be places of vibrant, authentic art.

I’m in Ashland WI for meetings with Northland College about a possible rural arts development program on campus. I’ll be attending the Chequamegon Bay Arts Council’s annual meeting tomorrow night, and have an opportunity to meet with Anne Katz of Arts Wisconsin and Noah Siegler of Stage North before heading to Washington DC on Tuesday for the “From Scarcity to Abundance” convening at Arena Stage. Plus I’m here in Wisconsin on the day the Packers won the NFC Championship — Go PACK! This Wisconsin boy couldn’t be more pleased.

Anyway, I plan to do some posting during the week, which I hope will signal the start of more regular posts from now on. My apologies for the radio silence. Suffice to say, things are starting to roll for CRADLE!

Courtesy of the Daily Yonder blog:  Taylor Stuckert, co-founder of Energize Clinton County in Ohio, describes what it will take to revitalize his community’s economy. He says that he and others have decided to take ownership of their county’s future:

“Whether it is expressed through green development, farmers’ markets, buy-local campaigns, or efforts to develop sustainably, there exists an underlying desire for independence, or ownership—ownership of our economy, our environment, and generations of culture and tradition. It cannot be overstated, however, that this ownership comes with a cost and with great responsibility. People must recognize that their presence in a community is more than just “living in another town;” it is a bridge connecting generations of understanding of a particular place.”

I would argue that, while not mentioned directly, the arts are an important part of ownership of “culture and tradition,” passing along the stories that strengthen a sense of place. Seventy years ago, University of North Carolina arts leader Frederick H. Koch addressed the Southern Regional Festival on the subject of “Folk Playmaking,” which focused on the “legends, superstitions, customs, environmental differences, and the vernacular of the common people…The term ‘Folk’ with us applies to that form of drama which is earth-rooted in the life of our common humanity.” He goes on:

We have found that if the writer observes the locality with which he is most familiar and interprets it faithfully, it may show him the way to the universal. If he can see the interestingness of the lives of those about him with understanding and imagination, with wonder, why may he not interpret that life in significant images for others — perhaps for all? It has been so in all lasting art.

And, I would add, with all lasting cultures. We need to get back to telling our own stories, singing our own songs, dancing our own dances, as well as buying our own produce. Self-reliance is not only about goods, but also about presence — our sense of place and how we fit into it. When the only stories we hear are from the mass media, who focus primarily on urban areas and exotic worlds, we begin to lose a sense of our own significance and the importance of daily life, and that makes it much easier to rely on others to fulfill our needs, and to seek out other places to fulfill our dreams. But as Dorothy says when asked near the end of The Wizard of Oz what she’s learned, “if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!”

The dream of self-reliance is as much about the imagination as it is about the economy.

In the course of doing research to find small undergraduate colleges in small or rural communities that might be a good fit for the yet-to-be-developed CRADLE curriculum in arts leadership,  I came across an absolutely fascinating college in Ashland, WI: Northland College. Established in 1906 and with a current enrollment of about 600 students, Northland adopted in 1971 a mission to become “the nation’s leading environmental liberal arts college,” one that is “visionary by nature.” It asks potential students:

Are you independent-minded? Do you view the world differently than your class mates and often find yourself on the road less traveled? Do you stand up for what you believe in? Are you passionate about life and curious about everything? If so, we may be the place for you.

What could be more perfect for a CRADLE leader?

While there are many colleges that claim to focus on the environment, Northland College really seems to live that commitment, and you can see it in their curriculum. Their general education program, for instance, implemented in 2008 and known as the Integrated Core Curriculum, has three tracks, one of which is completed by every student within their first two years: Natural Connections, Growing Connections, and Superior Connections. “Each curriculum includes nine courses, eight of which are taught in integrated block formats and one of which focuses specifically on experiences beyond the classroom.” Natural Connections focuses on courses “organized around themes or questions, such as “Natural Hazards and Environmental Extremes,” “What is Success?” “Earth Keeping: Exploring our Relationships with Nature,” or “What Does Sex have to Do with It?” Growing Connections “focuses on the history, theories, and practices of sustainable agriculture.” And Superior Connections “focus[es] on the Lake Superior watershed. Students who enroll in Superior Connections develop expertise in the natural and human histories of the watershed, and then use these expertise to study and engage a variety of complexly interconnected environmental and cultural issues.” All three of these tracks, but especially the latter two, are highly focused on valuing place, something that is central to CRADLE values. As they say in their statement of values, “We value – as individuals and as a community – the place where we live and work, and we are committed to sustainability and good stewardship, in order to conserve this place for the generations that will follow us.”

Exploration of their majors and minors revealed, to my great excitement, a major in “Sustainable Community Development“! The Major in Sustainable Community Development

is designed for students who are interested in the interdependence of environmental, economic, and social issues and who want to strengthen their abilities to become effective community change agents. Sustainable Community Development offers courses in a wide range of areas including the theory and practice of Sustainable Community Development, community-building, co-operative economies, globalization, and social enterprises and leadership for Sustainable Community Development….Central to this curriculum is the development of the whole person—a process that emphasizes social values, creativity, and the recognition that community involvement is necessary for individual growth and the enrichment of our society.

The rich and fascinating course list includes “Introduction to Social Justice,” “Methods of Sustainable Community Development,” and the “Sociology of Community,” among others in this 49-credit major. But what I didn’t find included were any courses in the arts. No Drama Department, no Dance Department, no Music Department, a traditional Art Department and Writing and English Department. But the connection between the commitment to localism, environmentalism, and the arts hasn’t yet been made. Classical conductor Benjamin Zander, in his outstanding TED talk, opens with a joke about two shoe salesman who go to Africa. One cables back, “Bad news — none of them wear shoes.” The other cables, “Fantastic news — they don’t have shoes yet!” That’s how I feel about Northland College: good news! They don’t have a local arts leadership program yet!

This isn’t at all surprising, by the way, as even the national organizations and thinkers that focus on the development of strong local economies haven’t made this connection as yet, but to me, in order to change our relationship to the environment and to our communities, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves. As George Gerbner, a scholar of mass communications and a leader of the Cultural Environment Movement, has written, “Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and often models of conformity or targets of rebellion. They weave the seemless web of the cultural environment that cultivates most of what we think, what we do, and how we conduct our affairs.” But, he warns, “stories no longer come from families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and often not even from native countries. Increasingly, they come from small groups of distant conglomerates with something to sell.” In other words, “today [stories] are no longer handcrafted, homemade, community inspired.” As David Diamond says, “Today a vast majority of people buy theatre, buy dance, buy paintings, buy books, buy movies; the list goes on and on. We now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we use the symbolic language of theatre, dance, etc., to tell our own stories about our collective selves?” The human consequences of this, Gerbner asserts, are “far-reaching. They include cults of media violence that desensitize, terrorize, brutalize, and paralyze; the promotion of unhealthy practices that pollute, drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; portrayals that dehumanize, stereotype, marginalize and stigmatize women, racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, aging or disabled or physically or mentally ill persons, and others outside the cultural mainstream.” One might add that these stories also encourage the constant moving from place to place that characterizes contemporary American lifestyles, a single-minded focus on the national over the local, and a disconnect from what Patrick Overton, head of the Front Porch Institute, calls the “poetry of place.”

David Diamond, the author of the excellent book Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue, asks “What is the result of the living community’s inability to use primal language to tell its own stories?” His answer: “Alienation, violence, self-destructive behaviour on a global level. Living communities have fallen into a stupor, hypnotized by a steady diet of manufactured culture.” This is how identities are created and commitments are formed.

Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs and Academic Dean Alan Brew, who has a passion for “literature and the natural world,” seems to fully understand the importance of stories to the development of a sense of place. As a teacher of courses that “reflect my special interest in exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world,” courses that take him and his students to “to the canyons of the Southwest, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and the lakes of the Boundary Waters,” Brew says that he is “committed to the preservation and exploration of stories, and I strive to connect individuals with narratives that comfort, challenge, guide, and, ultimately, place them in the rich complexities of the human experience.”

This is where, I would suggest, CRADLE comes in. The focus of a CRADLE arts leadership curriculum would be an interdisciplinary program designed to teach students how to help small and rural communities preserve and explore their own stories, strengthen their identities, and enhance the social cohesion and confidence that allows small communities to thrive instead of wither. We must do something to balance the global corporate stories that reinforce the very behaviors that are destroying our environment. Clay Shirky, in his new book Cognitive Surplus, quotes a 2009 working paper written by Marco Gui and Luca Stanca that says, “television can play a significant role in raising people’s materialism and material aspirations, thus leading individuals to underestimate the relative importance of interpersonal relations for their life satisfaction and, as a consequence, to over-invest in income-producing activities and under-invest in relational activities.”  In other words, we spend less time with friends, family, and neighbors.

A CRADLE arts curriculum would not be about the selling of art to communities, art as commodity, but rather empowering communities to create its own art, to tell its own stories, to sing its own songs, and dance its own dances — to tell stories that are specific to the place, not simply buy the homogenized stories provided by the mass media. It would be as much about localization and import substitution as a farmer’s market or a small-mart.

Northland College’s mission, values, and overall approach to education is an inspiring example of how the liberal arts might be used to change the way we relate to our environment and to our community. Everywhere I looked on their website, I saw teachers, administrators, and students committed to creating a better future based on an understanding and appreciation of the local environment. I came away convinced that Northland College would be the perfect partner in the development of a CRADLE arts leadership curriculum. Even if they were not willing or able to implement such a course of study, I am convinced that the general orientation of the faculty would help release the collaborators from the pre-conceptions that tend to tether us to the current model of education.

That is why I am committing myself to contacting Dr. Brew to propose an exploration of how CRADLE and Northland College might explore a partnership for the development of a rural arts leadership curriculum. Until then, I urge you to spread the word to any future undergraduate students you know who are interested in environmental issues and the humanities to consider Northland College. It is the kind of school that, looking back, I wish I had attended as an undergraduate.

As I noted in the previous post, I think an important part of CRADLE’s mission is getting rural arts education into the colleges, universities, community colleges, and distance education. We need more arts leaders who can (to borrow Robert Sternberg’s triarchic mind) think critically, creatively, and practically; who are committed to a community, and who have an interest in learning entreprenurial skills. That will be a big challenge — the arts in higher education have been focused very narrowly on educating for virtuosity, claiming to “train” young people in the skills necessary to “make it” in their chosen profession. The problem is that there is far more supply than demand, especially when that supply is centralized in a few metropolises. CRADLE seeks to forge new pathways for young people to follow.

The other focus, equally pressing, is to create an on-line reference library of resources for arts leaders in small and rural communities. Over the past year, I have become increasingly aware that there are a great many people who have written blogs, created websites, written articles and books that pertain to the creation and running of arts organizations is the small communities of America. The problem is that they are scattered all over, and have not been reviewed, evaluated, annotated, and organized. In the past, people like Frederick Koch and Robert Gard created repositories for plays and other information. In our time, organizations like Community Arts Network have provided a similar service for the broader field of community arts development. But to my knowledge, nobody has pulled together materials specifically for rural arts.

It is my hope to begin to “build out” this website to do just that. It will be a slow process, one that could be sped up through the work of volunteers interested in exploring a specific subject, and through the freeing up of time through grants and fundraising. I would be grateful to anyone who can contribute to either of those!

A while ago, I promised a series of blog posts concerning forerunners to CRADLE. Since then, I have been far too busy to do it, but it is my hope to begin in the not-too-distant future.

A side note: you may of may not have noticed that I have changed the name back to its original Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education. The broader name (Center for Rooted Arts Development in Local Economies) would have created a “bigger tent,” but ultimately I felt it threatened the unique mission of CRADLE. While I believe deeply in arts “rooted” in a place, I also believe that rural and small communities are seriously underserved by our arts community, and deserve to have an organization focused on them and them alone.

For personal reasons, this blog has been dormant for a while, and it is time to bring it back to full wakefulness again.

The latest news is that CRADLE has recently applied for a grant to bring together a working group of community artists with connections to education to create model curricula to support CRADLE’s commitment to educating people in the skills and knowledge necessary to found and/or operate arts organizations in small and rural communities. I am becoming more and more convinced that this movement will begin to gain speed when colleges and universities begin to acknowledge that running arts organizations in small and rural communities is an exciting career path for their students.

Report after report shows that we are facing a leadership crisis in arts organizations across the country, with a generation of arts leaders wishing to retire but seeing nobody following behind to take their places. I think this is particularly true in small and rural communities, who have received little attention from the mass media, and who are virtually ignored in higher education.

I have a lot of new ideas percolating for CRADLE, and I will begin writing about them soon. I apologize for the extended silence, and wanted you to know that it does not represent a cessation in CRADLE activity, We are alive and well, and ready to start making an impact.