The Process of Collaborative Creative Intervention

Creating a project between an artist and City staff member is challenging in part because of sometimes very different life experiences and working styles. This partnership requires a commitment to presence and the emotional and uneven labor of teaching, translating, and protecting one another.

Maggie Owens: Would you say you’ve had to do a lot of labor to educate me on everything, from dance to culture to what it means to be an artist? From my perspective, it seems like I’ve required a lot of assistance to bring me … a little closer to understanding.

Ashton Lites: [And] vice versa. We have to break down every meeting and you got to decode the language because the people around [within my business and the people I work with], we don’t talk in codes. … You say what you got to do. ‘We need to do [this].How we need to do this thing?’

MO.: … I think that’s an interesting contrast—the labor to understand the arts, to better understand Black culture, to understand resident experience, like all the different layers of identity. That is a worthy endeavor. The labor to understand government and all of its functions is something that I feel conflicted on. There is some value … but how much should community members really have to know about the dirty details in order to be successful?

In that first year [2015], … we could shadow any department … [so] I spent a lot of time in the Police Department, in the Family Unit, in the Gang Unit. … I found that time to be the highlight of what could be: allow[ing] people from different departments to come around, sit with artists of multiple disciplines, and just have the time to process and discover and understand each other from different points of view. …

We were reading things together, we were discussing things together. There’s an actual dialogical effort to try and make it.

Rashin Fahandej

The place where I see a lot of opportunity is actually internal to the [department], because I’m here, I’m embedded in the organization, I’m not being paid by them. …

[I feel like] there’s a lot of room for us to be disruptive and try to shake up … how people are thinking about stuff and ask uncomfortable questions and spark uncomfortable moments.

Artist-in-Residence adrienne maree brown describes moving at the speed of trust with communities, especially with groups who have experienced collective trauma. This pace and way of moving invite tension in the environment of City government, which so often prioritizes efficiency, predictability, protecting against liabilities, and deliverables.

There have been times with [my AIR partner] where I’ve had to reevaluate. … At one point, I was getting hooked on the deliverables aspect of this project. … That was at the same time when I was trying to reevaluate the way I express power and control… And yet, I still was doing things like that.

Maggie Owens

I was very intentional about building leadership in the young people, so I would do everything at the beginning and then bit-by-bit, week-by-week, they would take on more and more of my responsibilities, until I was kind of in the background, more or less. …

I think part of it is when you really, really trust people, and you set them up for success, and you expect a lot out of them. It’s so rare for people in general to be treated that way, and they rise up to the occasion.

Victor Yang