communiqué #2 What public good are the Arts?
What good are community arts?
Niall Crowley recalled a discussion at We Are Family showcase event in Limerick in 2011. a showcase event of Family Centres in Limerick and Clare. He recalled: “Arts and culture were seen as ‘high-falutin’. The term was rejected as excluding and as having little to offer the realities faced by most participants. In one telling exchange the RTE arts programme ‘The View’ was criticised as highbrow and out of touch with ordinary people, whereas RTE’s Nationwide was celebrated as being the best arts programme.”
Blue Drum attended the Rustbelt to Artist Belt Conference in St. Louis in April 2012. During that conference, American cultural theorist, Arlene Goldbard, defined cultural inclusion as a form of community-artist collaboration in order to explore concerns and express identity in ways that build the capacity of local communities and lead to positive social change.
Witness statements to the 2012 Dáil Committee on Arts and Disadvantage also raise questions. Mary Nash, of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, commented: “There are people who are almost proud to say they have nothing to do with the arts.” Liz Meaney, of the Cork City Council Arts Office, suggested: “Large swathes of our society do not engage because they do not believe that they have a right to the State’s resources.” Orlaith McBride, Director of the Arts Council, reported: “Significant groups of people remain excluded from arts and cultural life.” During the same public session, Senator Fiach Mac Conghail, from The National Theatre questioned the Arts Council about one of its recommendations for social inclusion to encompass the arts. He asked: Is that really its position? Is it really something it should be doing?
Blue Drum’s work is solely focused on the role of community art in family support. In Framework for Family Support (2011), the Family Support Agency highlights the importance of developmental outcomes for vulnerable families. Kieran McKeown argues, ‘What is good for children can also be good for families and parents’. Family Resource Centres annual input to SPEAK (Strategic Planning and Self-evaluation System) reported (2011) that community arts groups are tactically unsurpassed as ways to engage and work with vulnerable families, especially hard-to-reach ones. The benefit of community art and its duration in time is valuable at many levels and enables the rest of society to hear an otherwise unarticulated voice. By translating national and international research and practices, Blue Drum has tried to create a framework to map out community arts pathways for vulnerable parents.
communiquĂŠ #2 PATHWAYS: Community Art and Parent
communiqué #2 What is the impact?
Who are the families?
We have identified five reasons to to value community arts in family support:
Blue Drum’s primary context is within family resource and community centres in urban and rural disadvantaged areas. The estimated income of a household of four on social welfare is currently €80 a week below the poverty line.
(1) Engaging with forms of creative and local cultural expression is central to encouraging engagement of hard-to-reach groups, developing capacities and skills, facilitating risk-taking among individuals and simply having fun. (2) Community arts practices impact personally and practically in the following domains: cultural well-being by activating the right to be co-creators of culture health well-being (both physical and mental) by helping people feel better active well-being through learning (education/training) and doing (working). Seeds new skills, capacities and co-productions personal well-being by being humanly connected to family, friends, neighbours and community social well-being by enhancing participation in society. (3) Contributing to social change and the struggle to make poverty impossible and establishing frameworks for equality, solidarity and social justice. (4) Valuing collectiveness, locality, creativity, communality, collegiality and spirituality. (5) Advocating for systems to take account of the human person, especially for voices neither seen nor heard in our society.
The radical idea we proffer is that the state has a duty to find ways to make poverty impossible in Ireland. This means ending homelessness, household poverty, unemployment traps, poverty traps and child poverty because it tears our social cohesion asunder. This work is about real people in real situations: Homeless including those living on illegal halting sites. Poor housing quality including dampness and structural problems. Mental health and addiction problems. Unemployment including some for more than two generations. High levels of debt and indebtedness. Contact with social, justice and court services. Asylum seekers and migrant workers.
communiqué #2 How to measure the value of good community arts? Community arts are not a tool for engaging vulnerable families and parents. They are about much more than that. Much of the rhetoric of research signifies urban and rural disadvantaged families and communities as damaged and deficient. This approach is inherently limiting because it implies that the system only needs to be tweaked. Damage cannot be the only way or best way that we talk about ourselves. The community arts work of Blue Drum’s and Family Resource Centres operates far beyond the horizon of damage limitation. Family Resource Centres from Tacú in Ballinrobe to Fatima Mansions in Dublin report that community arts groups are tactically unsurpassed as ways to engage and work with families experiencing exclusion. Projects, programmes and classes operating in Family Resource Centres engage people that would otherwise not get involved. For example, take Seamus McGuinness in his ‘Lived Lives Project’ with families who have lost loved ones to suicide. Or Ailbhe Murphy in her ‘Tower Songs Project’ about the collective memory and experience Fatima Mansions as they made the transition from tower block living. In its essence, community arts is about representations, oral traditions, performing and visual arts practices, social practices, rituals and events. Community arts include instruments, objects, artefacts, and cultural spaces that communities mark as their own. There is a need for a cultural rights
framework. This would have a capacity to foster many positive outcomes: selfexpression, self-esteem, creativity, empathy, civic participation and a whole raft of other vital and necessary human responses that lead to real citizenship, participation and change in a society. We need to know: What has worked in the area of community art and family support? What has failed, as we can learn from such experiences? How can we be more critical and make improvements? Community arts take the courage of specific communities and artists who work against the odds of what is validated, popular or profitable. That is why such practices appear on the radar of the official culture long after their culturing in communities, if at all. There is a need for a cultural rights framework. This would have a capacity to foster many positive outcomes: selfexpression, self-esteem, creativity, empathy, civic participation and a whole raft of other vital and necessary human responses that lead to real citizenship, participation and change in a society. A cultural rights framework would advocate for systems to take account of the fact that they are not good enough. Such a framework might dare to imagine that this State will make homelessness, household poverty, long term unemployment, and child poverty impossible.
communiqué #2 Select Bibliography A. Goldbard (2006) The Art of Cultural Development, New Village Press: Oakland CA. B. Naius (2009) Art for Change – Teaching outside the Frame. New Village Press. Oakland CA. G.H. Kester (2011) The One and the Many. Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Duke University Press. G.H. Kester (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press. J.B. Graves (2004) Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose. Univ.of Illinois Press. J. Holden. (2010) Culture and Class, UK: Counterpoint. K. Knight, M. Schwarzman et al (2006) Beginner's Guide to Community-Based Arts (Paperback) Oakland, CA. NESF (2006) The Arts, Cultural Inclusion and Social Cohesion. NESF: Dublin. P. Lunn and E.Kelly (2008) In the Frame or Out of the Picture? Joint NESF/ESRI Publication, Dublin: 2008. T. Borrup (2006) Creative Community Builder’s Handbook. New Village Press, Oakland. W. Cleveland (2009) Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World's Frontier. New Village Press. Oakland CA.