A publication of Mass Humanities
Fall Symposium Our Created Equal series culminated in a special forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on November 9th. The event marked our 40th anniversary, as well as the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Boston schools. Watch the forum proceedings online at masshumanities.org/40th
In This Issue Freedom and Equality page 2
Governor’s Awards page 3
Welcome to Our New Board Members page 4
Created Equal page 5
Recent Grants page 6
Ron Hertel, Humanist page 8
Fall 2014
The Art of Change Our 2014 Public Squared Challenge Grant recipient, the James Baldwin Transmedia Project, will host a series of public conversations focused on Baldwin’s message and call for equality beginning in early 2015. The award-winning re-mastered documentary film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989) will mix with live performances and conversations moderated by community leaders and humanities scholars in an extensive and collaborative project. Award-winning writer and filmmaker Karen Thorsen is the lead organizer of the James Baldwin Transmedia Project and directed the original film. She connected with Mass Humanities by phone to discuss how the arts and humanities can affect social change. MH: The James Baldwin Transmedia Project begins with your documentary film on the eponymous writer but extends in many directions to include digital components and live performances. Tell us about the scope of the project and its goals.
about outreach and engagement, which led us to create “Conversations with Jimmy.” This initiative is community-based. First, we have to be invited; the town leaders have to want this to happen. Then, within each host community, we work with programming partners: libraries, schools, cultural organizations. We show screenings in high schools, we get students involved in outreach; they reach out to other members of the community, people of differing ages and interests, from students to senior citizens, and persuade them to see the film and other Baldwin-related performances: music, theater,
KT: It’s all about Jimmy Baldwin, his message, his call for equality and message of brotherhood that he explored throughout his life and his writings. I first read him in college, began working with him on a film about his next book in 1986, and then, after his death in 1987, completed a very different film than expected in 1989. That was my first film: James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. I became a I’m actually astounded: conduit for something much bigger than I was. somehow, I’ve become a
But then, fast forward 25 years: community organizer… we discovered to our astonishment and I’m just a filmmaker! that our feature-length film, originally made on 16mm, had started to deteriorate, there was actual damage. Our first Baldwin visits goal was to get this film restored, which Hyde Park, London, we have done. Our second was to get it converted dance, readings. Then, once everyin 1969. to a digital master, which we have done. Now we one is primed by that exposure, Photo by Allan Warren are busy converting it to a 16x9 Hi-Def master we invite them all to participate and restoring the original sound track in time to in a series of public forums, with coincide with James Baldwin’s 90th birthday— moderated discussions about which would have been August 2nd, 2015—along their own local issues: prejudice, social injustice, with the 50th anniversary of many key civil rights discrimination, the meaning of brotherhood. events. It seemed appropriate that we re-master the film and re-release it—but we also wanted Looking at what Jimmy had to say, listening to the to do something beyond getting a film out there many archival recordings of him telling us what he for people to react to in the privacy of a theater thought, is a great way to trigger discussion. It’s or their living rooms. We wanted people to take thought-provoking to say the least, and I hope it is Jimmy’s message and use it, so we began thinking change-provoking. Continued on page 7
Letter from the Director
Freedom and Equality
MASS HUMANITIES 66 Bridge Street Northampton, MA 01060 tel (413) 584-8440 fax (413) 584-8454 www.masshumanities.org STAFF
By David Tebaldi
David Tebaldi EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
It has often been observed that there is a tension at the heart of our democracy between two fundamental American values—freedom and equality—and that the essential difference between the two political parties comes down to which of these basic values each party considers more important. Republicans, it is said, tend to value freedom over equality, while Democrats value equality over freedom. In her brilliant line-by-line and phrase-by-phrase exegesis of the Declaration of Independence (Our Declaration, W.W. Norton, 2014), the political theorist Danielle Allen challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that a close reading of our founding document reveals the Founders’ belief that we cannot have freedom as individuals without equality among us as a people. Rather than being in opposition with equality, freedom presupposes equality.
affluent as opposed to those of the middle class or the poor—when economic inequality leads to political inequality. A third type of equality has to do with the development of collective knowledge. The authors of the Declaration believed that expertise is most valuable when it is augmented by useful social knowledge provided by an educated citizenry. The fourth facet of equality concerns reciprocity or mutual responsiveness to the conditions required for freedom. The last kind of equality has to do with taking equal responsibility for creating and sustaining civic life itself and the political institutions that comprise it. We all have an equal ownership stake in what we make together. When the signers of the Declaration pledged “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor,” they were declaring an equal (and very large—they knew they could very well be hanged for treason) stake in the creation of a new political order.
What are our obligations to the common good? What is the basis of these obligations? What am I willing to risk in the pursuit of equality?
To see this, we need to understand what the authors of the Declaration meant by “equality.” Equality is a multi-faceted ideal, according to Allen, with at least five different meanings or dimensions—but they all lead us toward the same conclusion: it is our shared commitment to equality that defines us as a people—“We, the people”—with a common set of political institutions that both define and defend our freedoms. There is the kind of equality that exists when neither of two groups or individuals may dominate the other. There is the kind of equality that exists when all members of a society have the same access to “the tool of government,” the most important instrument each of us has for securing our futures, according to Allen. This is the type of equality that is threatened when policy outcomes routinely reflect the interests of the 2
Mass Humanities recently hosted a series of public conversations on the topic “Created Equal: Negotiating the American Social Contract” in which dozens of ordinary citizens in Brockton, Lawrence, Pittsfield and Worcester wrestled with many of the ideas examined in Allen’s book and explored their contemporary relevance: Who are the “We” in “We, the people?” What does it mean to say that “all men are created equal?” What are our obligations to the common good? What is the basis of these obligations? What am I willing to risk in the pursuit of equality? No definitive answers to these questions were reached, and that was not the purpose of these programs. Rather our purpose was to encourage and provide occasions for the thoughtful exchange of ideas and opinions about these fundamental underpinnings of our democracy. These are important conversations. With the launch of Mass Humanities’ newest theme, “Negotiating the Social Contract,” we will make sure that they will happen more often.
dtebaldi@masshumanities.org Pleun Bouricius DIRECTOR OF PROGRAMS AND GRANTS
pbouricius@masshumanities.org Carolyn Cushing ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT
ccushing@masshumanities.org Deepika Fernandes FISCAL OFFICER
dfernandes@masshumanities.org Anne Rogers SYSTEMS MANAGER
arogers@masshumanities.org Rose Sackey-Milligan PROGRAM OFFICER
rsackey-milligan@masshumanities.org David Morgan COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER EDITOR OF MASS HUMANITIES
dmorgan@masshumanities.org John Sieracki DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS
jsieracki@masshumanities.org Jeannemarie Tobin DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANT
jtobin@masshumanities.org Melissa Wheaton ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT AND GRANTS ADMINISTRATOR
mwheaton@masshumanities.org Hayley Wood SENIOR PROGRAM OFFICER
hwood@masshumanities.org Mass Humanities promotes the use of history, literature, philosophy, and the other humanities disciplines to deepen our understanding of the issues of the day, strengthen our sense of common purpose, and enrich individual and community life. We take the humanities out of the classroom and into the community. Mass Humanities, a private, nonprofit, educational organization, receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency; and private sources.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHAIR
Nancy Netzer
The 2014 Massachusetts Governor’s Awards in the Humanities
BOSTON COLLEGE VICE CHAIR
James R. Burke
HINCKLEY, ALLEN & SNYDER LLP TREASURER
Jeffrey Musman
SEYFARTH SHAW, LLP CLERK
Ellen Berkman
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
jessie little doe baird
WÙPAN‚AK LANGUAGE RECLAMATION PROJECT
Glynda Benham
MEGAWAVE CORPORATION
Lauren Cohen
PURE COMMUNICATIONS
Javier Corrales
AMHERST COLLEGE
Elliot Bostwick Davis MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
Alice DeLana
CAMBRIDGE
Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello SALEM STATE UNIVERSITY
Alfred L. Griggs NORTHAMPTON
Andrew Helene
RBS CITIZENS, N.A.
Ronald B. Hertel
WELLS FARGO ADVISORS, LLC
Lindsey Kiang BROOKLINE
Mass Humanities furthers a mission that aligns with our nation’s founding principles, and which has been fostered for nearly 250 years. The pursuits of history, literature, philosophy, and the other humanities disciplines have been central to our national identity and ethic. We work to ensure that the contributions the humanities make to civic life are available to all, and that the lessons we glean from them continue to inform our self-governance. The recipients of the 2014 Massachusetts Governor’s Awards in the Humanities share these ideals and have championed them through their various careers. Their substantial contributions to the humanities share a common thread. All have worked to increase access—indeed, to democratize—the humanities. We bestow this honor on leaders whose actions and decision-making are grounded in an understanding of the humanities, and who are dedicated to improving civic life in Massachusetts. It is in keeping with our mission to recognize the awardees as we aim to not only highlight the value of the public humanities, but also to inspire all of our leaders to advance the values these four demonstrate through their work.
James Lopes
SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW
Marisa Parham
AMHERST COLLEGE
Thomas Putnam
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM
Lisa Simmons
MA OFFICE OF TRAVEL & TOURISM
Ron Slate
MILTON
John Stauffer
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Kathleen Stone
ATTORNEY AT LAW
Ken Vacovec
VACOVEC, MAYOTTE & SINGER, LLP
Bianca Sigh Ward
NYSTROM BECKMAN & PARIS, LLP
G. Perry Wu STAPLES, INC.
Inspire Campaign
Jill Ker Conway opened the doors of Smith College to older women and launched the Ada Comstock Scholars program during her time as the school’s first female president. Her distinguished career includes scholarly investigations of feminism and the role of women in history, autobiographies and memoirs of notable women from around the world, as well as her own memoirs and the children’s book, Felipe the Flamingo. An Australian by birth, she won the respect of our nation’s highest honor in our field when she was awarded the 2012 National Medal in the Humanities from President Barack Obama.
Our continued efforts to further the centuriesold tradition of the humanities in Massachusetts are encapsulated in the Inspire Campaign to Endow the Fund for New Communities. With your support, we will share the inspiration of the humanities with those who have limited access Hubie Jones led to their vital gifts. We have made significant investigations into progress. The Clemente Course has provided exclusion in the hundreds with tuition-free, college-level instruction Boston public school in the humanities. The new site in Worcester is system in the late fully staffed, fully enrolled, and supported by local 1960s, which resulted organizations—ready to touch many more lives. in our country’s Our popular Family Adventures in Reading (FAIR) first ever special program, which pairs children and caregivers with education and biprofessional storytellers to explore important themes lingual education together through reading, is also breaking ground laws. His moral on new developments. Two libraries will pilot FAIR compass was guided by the humanities for Pre-teens this year, and one of our grantees will and he has spent his career in their adopt the model as a way to better involve male service, forming, rebuilding, and leading caregivers in their students’ educations. And, as dozens of organizations. From his time always, our grant program will reach new audiences, as dean of the Boston University School and will continue to encourage connection, reflection, of Social Work to his most recent and engagement. commitment to beginning the Boston Children’s Chorus, Jones has facilitated We thank you for supporting these initiatives and the growth and expansion of the thereby helping us improve civic life in Massachusetts. humanities in our Commonwealth, including a two-year term on the board of Mass Humanities.
Continued on page 4
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Governer’s Awards, continued from page 3 J. Donald Monan, S.J., served on the National Endowment for the Humanities committee that led to the establishment of the organization we know today as Mass Humanities. His leadership in higher education moved Boston College into its current prestigious position and his passion for Aristotelian ethics has informed his many contributions to the common good in Massachusetts and beyond. Fr. Monan’s pursuits of diplomacy, jurisprudence, and racial justice have succeeded in changing public policy and bettering lives.
Malcolm Rogers broadened public engagement with the arts through his twenty-year tenure as the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has expanded the museum’s reach through growing its collections— perhaps most notably opening the Art of the Americas Wing— presenting innovative exhibitions, and enhancing its educational programs. The MFA’s hours changed to heighten attendance under his watch and he famously renovated the entrances to the buildings to welcome more museum-goers. Now, more than 1 million visitors each year experience the MFA’s internationally renowned collections and programming.
For these and their many other accomplishments and qualities, Mass Humanities recognizes the recipients of the Governor’s Awards.
Board Member Salutations Glynda Benham is the President and one of the owners, founders, and directors of MegaWave Corporation, a 20 year-old small business located in Devens, MA, that specializes in antenna design and development for military applications. She is a founding member of the Ensemble FloraMusica, a group dedicated to presenting medieval, renaissance, baroque and contemporary music on recorders and other historical instruments. Benham is also an experienced mosaic artist. Alice DeLana is an experienced and enthusiastic lecturer who was most recently a docent at the Harvard Art Museums for fifteen years. DeLana began her teaching career as an art history, English, and computer science instructor at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, CT, where she spent 39 years. After becoming a docent at Harvard in 1998, she lectured on Harvard Alumni trips abroad, including to such destinations as Cuba, Morocco, Provence, Burgundy, and the Netherlands. Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello teaches at Salem State University as an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies. Her varied career has included time spent as a social worker, a museum educator, and a scholar-in-residence for Bostonarea museums. In all aspects of her work, she brings together social justice concerns and humanistic and social scientific inquiry. She continues to pursue the public interest through service learning projects and her involvement with Mass Humanities.
Marisa Parham teaches as an associate professor of English at Amherst College, where she has taught since 2001. She has developed a blend of literary analysis and cultural studies which she uses to write and teach about minority life in the twentieth century. She is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture and frequently makes use of the digital humanities in her teaching and other scholarly work. Ronald Slate is a retired public relations professional who served for seven years as vice president of global communications for EMC Corporation. He is also a published poet whose works have been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle poetry prize and the Lenore Marshall Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Slate will bring these complementary skill sets to bear on his work with Mass Humanities. Nancy Netzer replaces Ben Birnbaum as chair. Netzer was appointed to the foundation board by Governor Mitt Romney in 2003 and reappointed by Governor Deval Patrick in 2008 and again in 2010. She is the longest serving member in the foundation’s 40-year history.
And a Fond Farewell Several longtime members of our board retire this year as we welcome five new and notable humanists. With heartfelt gratitude for their service, we recognize the following departing members: Ben Birnbaum, elected to the Mass Humanities board in 2008, served as Chair during his tenure; Kathryn Bloom, elected to the board in 2008; Leila Kinney elected to the board in 2011; Lucia Knoles, elected to the board in 2008; Bob Pura, elected to the board in 2012. Suzanne Frazier-Wilkins, appointed to the board by Governor Patrick in 2008.
Mass Humanities welcomes nominations for board membership, including self-nominations, at any time. Members serve once-renewable three-year terms. Nominees must live or work in Massachusetts and share a deep commitment to the public value of the humanities. Anyone interested in knowing more about the responsibilities and rewards of board service may contact Mass Humanities Executive Director David Tebaldi. 4
Casting My Whole Vote: Created Equal in Worcester By Hayley Wood, Senior Program Officer
This fall Mass Humanities presented a series of public conversations to introduce our new thematic initiative, “Negotiating the Social Contract.” We used a set of documentary films that revisited some dramatic moments in 20th century civil rights history and posed urgent questions about personal responsibility for the betterment of conditions for all people. I’d seen the documentaries, I’d talked about the format of the program, I’d gotten posters to libraries, I’d booked the public rooms at the Worcester Public Library, and I’d ordered the food—one thing I had not expected was to be engrossed by the program itself. I was on the job, after all. This wasn’t really meant for me, right? Wrong. When I took my seat with the other guests—diverse in age, gender, ethnicity, and income—I became a participant like everyone else—not “staff,” but part of a new “we.” I wondered how the scholar-moderator Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello would coax an understanding of the phrase “the social contract,” the theme of the program, which was new to many there. Indeed, one walk-in attendee asked me where the phrase came from, and I didn’t know. (For the curious who don’t know, it is from the title of a 1762 treatise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.) But our scholar did not define the phrase. She invited people to approach it as complex, overlapping, and contestable. She invited people to see the social contract as something more amorphous and difficult to define than the set of laws that we live by. She asked us to think about the different “we’s” that were present in the films: the community of black and white people living in rural Tennessee where two people had grown up and fallen in love, defying law by marrying because one was black and the other white. Another was the group of enraged Alabama white men who torched a bus carrying the Freedom Riders in 1961. Another was the Nixon Administration that referred to the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, as “the most dangerous man in America.” You see the problem: we all inhabit and feel loyalty to more than one community; different sets of rules (many unofficial) and laws govern them all. After every film excerpt, participants were asked to break into small groups and discuss questions put forth by our moderator: What do we owe each other? Can we recognize injustice in our current circumstances? Is it always clear? When is action called for? How can we make effective change
Created Equal and work with people with participants in Pittsfield engaged in whom we don’t agree? These discussions are challenging questions, of injustice, equality, and reciprocity. coming on the heels of gripping film excerpts that highlighted more obvious (now) examples of injustice and violence. I felt resistance to contemplating them with my small and diverse group of adults.
But we did it—we talked about possible ways to define the American social contract, and how it works or fails to work in our own lives. We talked about recognizing injustice, we talked about right action. We talked about people who are not seen as fully human in our own society. Quite simply, we talked about things that mattered with strangers bringing different worlds,
We all inhabit and feel loyalty to more than one community; different sets of rules (many unofficial) and laws govern them all.
different “we’s” to the table. We used stunning examples from history to analyze our own now. It was the work of interacting with people unlike ourselves. 5
Recent Grants
Out of State $25,000 to the Maysles Institute to produce the James Baldwin Transmedia Project, a series of events combining film, live performances, and conversations with community leaders and humanities scholars on Baldwin’s life, work, and message of equality
Southeast $5,000 to the Fall River Historical Society to document the oral histories of women textile industry workers and/or their descendants during the 1910-1940 period $3,160 to the Foxborough Regional Charter School for a reading and discussion series for fathers and their five-to-nine year
Several of the grants fall under special categories: Crisis, Community, and Civic Culture
olds using picture books from the syllabus of our Family Adventures in Reading program
Greater Boston $10,000 to the Pluralism Project for Religion Refocused, a partnership with upwards of ten faith-based groups of diverse traditions uniting to host five film-anddiscussion events on civics and religion $3,970 to In Good Company for performances of The Golden Door, a new musical play on the immigration history of Boston, and honoraria for a humanities scholar and panelists for postperformance talk-backs in three communities
Engaging New Audiences
Public Squared
$10,000 to the American Repertory Theater for The A.R.T. of Human Rights, an extensive collaborative program exploring art and human rights, to be held as interactive seminars, theatrical productions, and public conversations at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge and participating schools and organizations
Central $10,000 to the Worcester Historical Museum to mount an original play and a county-wide reenactment of the events of September, 1774, when the local British government was overthrown by weaponless militiamen
$1,500 to the Appalachian Mountain Club to scan and inventory 1,000 photographic prints of New Englanders enjoying the outdoors between 1930-1950
Metrowest Boston $5,000 to Gore Place Society to finalize improvements to their accessibility measures for sightimpaired visitors, including experiential interpretation, and for a workshop sharing best practices learned from this project
Connecticut Valley $5,000 to Old Deerfield Productions for the production of two performances of an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with performances at Springfield Historical Museum and including an educational outreach component to include Springfield youth participants and play development workshops in Greenfield $4,334 to the Sons & Daughters of Hawley to host the Sanford Tavern Archaeology Field Training Program, a summer camp for budding archaeologists from underserved area high schools $9,248 to the Committee for Northampton to bring 75 Commonwealth Academy students to Sojourner Truth’s Florence abolition and slavery walking tour, which will be adapted with ageappropriate educational materials and online resources
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Research Inventory Grant
Above: The Golden Door explores immigration through the goings-on of an Armenian grocery store in Boston Left: Exhibition plans for Work + House in Pittsfield show the Housatonic Street mill proposal
$1,500 to the Westminster Historical Society to inventory negatives and photographs taken at Gardener’s Colony for the Insane during the 1950s and 1960s and reproduce them in print for researchers and online for the public $1,500 to Northborough Historical Society to inventory 12 boxes of artifacts and records from the Proctor Comb and Button Manufacturing Company, a significant industry in the town from the mid1800s into the early 1900s
Berkshire $5,000 to the City of Pittsfield to research, design, and install Work + House an exhibit focused on workers’ housing in the city’s industrial past that began with the paper and textile mills
The Art of Change, continued from page 1 MH: Your history with Baldwin’s work goes back to your college days. What about his work drew you to him, and what makes his message an enduring one? KT: James Baldwin’s message was important then, and it’s important now, painfully so, unfortunately. As a thinker and as a writer, he is not only eloquent and thought-provoking, but is also completely and entirely relevant to what is going on in today’s society—not just in Ferguson, Missouri, but all over the country. Yes, we’ve made some progress, but we need to make a lot more. MH: We see increasing economic and racial segregation making headlines these days. Our state’s major cities rank among the worst in the nation on these counts. The Public Squared grant is our reaction to trends like these; it aims to encourage exchange with people who are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse. Can you speak to how and why you selected the sites for this project? KT: It first took shape because of work I was doing with PeaceJam, an international organization where works with Nobel laureates serve as youth mentors. They have high school chapters throughout the US, where teenage activists embrace various causes. Because diversity and social justice are among their calls to action, I thought that PeaceJam students would be interested in seeing the Baldwin film – and that simple idea grew into reaching out to include an entire community. We now have six communities across the state of Massachusetts, plus dozens more in other states. It has been an incredible learning curve, learning about each community and their reasons for being interested in hosting a “Conversation with Jimmy.” Every community has their own local issues, some more dramatic than others. Some communities are actually divided, where certain groups rarely interact. Take the city of Holyoke: my colleagues at PeaceJam suggested I meet with the cultural development officer there. I found out the town history, that the black and Latino communities live in the flats, the white folks out in the hills. I learned that they deal with ethnic slurs, racial profiling, economic disparities. Out in Martha’s Vineyard, meanwhile, the issue is in the service community, all the people who come from Brazil and the Caribbean, immigrants who hope to make money in the service sector. These families live on the island, their kids
go to the schools—but despite the island’s progressive thinking, they feel like outsiders. There’s actually a lot of discrimination. But there’s also a desire to improve things—so within each community, we’ve been able to enlist a lot of Programming Partners who will host different events, all culminating in public discussions. I can’t salute the people who are collaborating on this project more strongly—but personally, I’m actually astounded: somehow, I’ve become a community organizer…and I’m just a filmmaker!
the capacity of the arts and humanities to be an agent of social change. In what ways do you find documentary work aligns with or departs from his vision? KT: My inspiration definitely comes from the intersection of art and social justice. My personal heroes are the game changers, the ones who shape history, those who start as artists and wind up as activists. There is a great moment in the James Baldwin film where a CBS interviewer asks him—this is when his play, Blues for Mr. Charlie, is about to open on Broadway—“Do you think you’ll ever write a
MH: I’d like to talk about the style of the film. James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, is at the heart of the Transmedia Project. It is a premiere example of
Baldwin’s message was important then, and it’s important now, painfully so, unfortunately. cinéma vérité. There is no narrator and yet the story is gripping. What value do you think this style adds to the telling of Baldwin’s story? Was your aim to make a statement about the telling of history? KT: I’ve never been partial to documentaries where narrators tell you what to think. And once I found all that archival material—over 100 sources from 15 different countries—I thought what could be better than having James Baldwin put his thoughts out there and let people come to their own conclusions about what he had to say. I think that all of us who have studied the humanities, we’ve learned that the way history is told—the context of how it is told, who tells it, where they tell it, why they tell it—is as important as the words that are stated. Witnessing James Baldwin telling the story in the context of his own life gives us intimate insight into what it was like to be him and to live the life he was living, even when we don’t come from his particular social or economic background. Personally, I feel closer to history when someone is speaking to me directly and telling me their personal story. MH: James Baldwin spoke eloquently and often about the role of the artist in society. Specifically, he was interested in
Filming The Price of the Ticket with Karen Thorsen and crew
line without a message?” He laughs and says “I don’t think you can have a line without a message.” I guess you can say I don’t think you can make a film without a message. But then he elaborates on that and says “I think what you’re trying to ask is am I a propagandist, am I deciding to use my writing to push agendas,” and then adds that he’d be happy to spend his time cultivating his talent, but society has forced him write about social injustice. I admire him for that. I’d like to be an artist who has something to do with shaping history. It’s not entirely selfless, it’s fun to buck tradition and try and chart new ground and make discoveries. If you get to inspire yourself and follow your passion, or as Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss, then what could be better? MH: It seems you’ve been able to do that and it will be furthered by this project as it it’s taking on new life in all these different states across the country. KT: Without funding of the arts it is a very tough thing to do. It’s a challenge for all of us in filmmaking today, so thanks to Mass Humanities for believing in “Conversations with Jimmy!” It takes an organization with faith and foresight. I think they are risk takers, too. 7
IN spire
Being involved with Mass Humanities over the past three years has enlightened me to the enormous value of critical thinking in the areas of history, literature, philosophy, and the arts. It has been a joy to watch participants engage in informed, intelligent dialogue in our programs. Mass Humanities has challenged and enriched my own understanding of our past and present culture, and I am committed to the Inspire Campaign’s goal of ensuring the long-term existence of these programs. —Ron Hertel
Ron Hertel
Join the Inspire Campaign to ensure the humanities are available to underserved communities in perpetuity. We are more than three-quarters of the way toward meeting our National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge grant. Your donation will be matched by the NEH and become part of a permanent endowment to support Mass Humanities’ programs such as Clemente Course in the Humanities, Family Adventures in Reading, and Literature & Medicine. Mass Humanities accepts donations of stock. Giving appreciated securities can be especially prudent—consult your financial advisor.
Learn more at
http://masshumanities.org/inspire or be in touch with John Sieracki, Director of Development and Communications, at 413-584-8440, ext. 103 with your questions.
Managing Director - Investments, Hertel & Konish Wealth Management Group Mass Humanities Board Member Chair of the Inspire Campaign Committee