Originality in the 21st century

When I began to work as an artist I wanted to be completely original, wholly singular. I housed a strong disdain for art history; I didn't want to learn from others or to be influenced by anything. To be influenced at all negated my idea of originality. I wanted to believe that I created in a vacuum, that my thoughts were completely my own. For the same reason I avoided, and still avoid, drugs of any kind, even caffeine for the most part. I didn't want to have to question whether it was my imagination and ingenuity or the influence of some outside factor that created my art.

This was before I took my first art history class, before I worked in a studio with fellow artists and had boundless creative conversations, before I read art criticism and educational theory. In Freire's words, I was ignoring the "tension between the individual and the social practice." In regards to my Enneagram type, which is a 7 for anyone who knows what that means, I was emphasizing my narcissism. I was distrustful, viciously independent, and felt like I needed to prove my artistic integrity.

I vividly remember the day I realized that I had already been influenced, that my culture had already formed and informed me. My associations, my choices, my very ideas had been influenced by the world around me since I first opened my eyes and learned what it meant to scream. After that realization, I opened the floodgates. I had always read anything and everything, unconsciously absorbing the thoughts of my favorite authors, artists, and teachers. But at that point I started to do so consciously, recognizing the connections and revelations that other people could already provide. I learned that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, or the bicycle, or the car. Those were already done and I could use those ideas to move onto something new and wonderful; something completely my own and yet indebted to the rich history of the world.

My eyes opened to the power of having people agree with you and the joy of reading what you already thought. When I talked about this with my sister, she paraphrased for me what she believes is a George Orwell quote: "The greatest books are the ones that tell us what we already know." Because in this large and lonely world, its always nice to realize that you aren't alone in your thoughts.

When I studied and read for art history, psychology, music, and my many other classes or talked endlessly with about anything and everything anyone who would talk back, I found a ready-made support system, a vibrant creative community that has existed for millennia and that to become part of all I had to do was acknowledge its existence. Suddenly, I was much less lonely.

Now when I read something new, the page is covered with exclamation points and stars. I veer away from drawing hearts around passages to preserve some semblance of dignity, and because hearts don't encircle paragraphs well. When I read, look at art, or find some wonderfully exciting person to talk to, I can barely keep myself contained. I can never keep myself still. My hands fly wider and faster the more enthusiastic I get and I edge forward in my seat until I fly back only to edge forward again. Journals, scraps of paper, and texts to myself contain the ideas that I simply could not keep in my head anymore because I wanted to remember them, to share them as others have shared their ideas with me.

I've always hated when people say that there is no such thing as originality, that everything has already been done. If that were true we would cease to move forward, to make progress, to create. Simply because something has already been written, has already been painted, doesn't mean that when I do it again it isn't original. It is through our unique lenses of the world that we create our originality. Degas's sketch of Botticeli's Birth of Venus may have been a copy of that painting, but it is the original of his sketch. If I were to sketch my own version of Degas's sketch, it would be a copy of a copy. But it would also be a copy of an original, and an original in its own right.

With this in mind, I embrace the ready-made creativity, ingenuity, community of my predecessors and my contemporaries. I put my ideas out into the world and wait to see what new connections will come back.

The Start of the next Story

I do any art form I can get my hands on; my artistic curiosity is something that I both enjoy and take pride in. There are, of course, art forms that I am more closely connected to right now, oil painting, creative writing, knitting, song writing, and pottery to name a few, but give me anything and I'll try it.

This mentality is why I chose electives in poetry and storytelling rather than my more comfortable music and visual art for grad school this spring. And, so far, what a good choice! This past weekend I spent my Saturday and Sunday from 8 am to 5 pm in a rather ugly, sparse classroom. Oh, the horror, right?

Wrong.

The best thing about going to an art/education school is that the teachers know how to teach and they know their art form. Abigail Jefferson, the instructor for my weekend course, isn't only a wonderful and engaging teacher, she's an inspiring storyteller. With her we learned about storytelling through storytelling. Throughout the long weekend I don't think we sat down for more than an hour at a time. This comes from Abigail's experience with middle schoolers, but also speakers to her knowledge as a performer and teacher about attention spans and how to best engage people.

While preparing and excitedly waiting for this class, I found myself noticing the stories I was already telling everyday and remembering the stories that I had been told throughout my life. There are stories that I forgot that I knew and stories that I forget how I know, ones through which I hear my mother's voice and Jim Weiss's on cassette. Yes, even I am old enough to remember cassettes.

Through the class I also realized that stories are, and always have been, how I learn. I've been blessed by whatever combination of nature, nurture, or spiritual force you personally prefer with a sharp memory. I can hear things once and teach about the material later in the day. (That has happened. More than once. Bad planning, I know). But during the weekend I realized that stories and discovery aren't just good tools for teaching and learning, they are the best.

Give me facts, numbers, and names and I can read them over three times and know them for the test tomorrow. But then I promptly forget them because I just don't care about those specifics. There are people whose life work is based off of such specifics and facts, but I am thankfully not one of them. I could describe the entire catalogue of an artist's work, the stories behind each piece, and the artist's biography, but forget their name until something reminds me of it hours later.

But to tell stories you don't need verbatim, memorized facts. Indeed, memorization often impedes a good story. You need to absorb and understand the story itself. Then, when you go back to tell it, the details can be formed in the moment, based on the connection and the energy you are experiencing. Storytelling is a trust exercise between you and your brain, one that I need to practice. I often lose what I know because I over-think and second guess myself rather than trusting not what I've memorized, but what I've learned, what I know. In psychology, that's called psuedostupidity. (A random fact I remember from my second year of college not because it was the most important, but because I could directly connect it to my life... and it made me laugh.)

From my reading for another class, I can see that I'm far from the only person who believes in storytelling as an incredible vehicle for teaching. In Literacy: Reading the Word and the World, Paulo Freire, the father of current educational thought and the archangel of Lesley schooling, describes how he teaches writing. Rather than reducing reading to rules of grammar and structure he taught these rules as "objects to be discovered within the body of the texts." He goes on to say that "the students did not have to memorize the description mechanically, but rather learn its underlying significance." Freire was on the forefront of changing teachers from the fountain of information to the leaders of discussion and discovery, or the storytellers.

As soon as I read Freire's words, my brain clicked into gear. I wasn't thinking of something that I remembered from my days of rote memorization, but something that I knew from listening to Abigail, taking part in her stories, and making my own stories; that human connection is the best way to teach and to be taught.

Are they getting anything?

Like any good artist/thinker, every once in a while I have an existential crisis. Is there any point? Does looking at pretty pictures ever actually matter? Am I making any difference? Why should we do anything when in the end we all die and the earth gets blown up by the sun? That sort of thing.

In the past two years or so, and even more intensely in the past six months, I haven't found these questions repeating themselves in my head. At this point in time, my life direction is clearer than it has ever been. I love what I learn, what I do at work, the people in my life, where I live, pretty much everything. It's a little surreal to tell the truth, but that train of thought is for another time.

Despite the current absence of my existential crises, I am constantly shoring up arguments for my rational self to use when they reappear in my life once again. At work yesterday a perfect example presented itself to me. I had a good chunk of time in the afternoon between two classes I was teaching at the MFA and it turns out that my co-worker and friend was in the same predicament. She suggested that we go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum since it is literally right up the street and I'd never been there (or so I thought).

I eagerly accepted and we made our way through the strangely warm January day to our neighbor museum, wearing our IDs on our red MFA lanyards. As we entered the new wing of the Gardner, which architecturally looks very much like the new wing at the MFA, we were kindly greeted by museum workers with bright yellow Gardner lanyards and I had to wonder if our separate museum superiors hadn't planned the obvious contrast.

Walking through the new wing was lovely. Looking at art and places where art is displayed and talked about is always interesting, particularly when you have good company. But my new found weapon against future existential crises came when my friend and I walked through the glass tunnel connecting the new wing to the original Gardner museum. As I entered the stone and brick mansion, I had the strangest feeling of deja vu. I shook it off, knowing that sometimes that just happens, and followed my friend in the main hallway of the museum that circles around the famous courtyard.

Finally, a memory that had tickled my mind for years snapped into place as I stared at the small hallway on my right.

There are some memories which are so specific that I can see bits of them in my mind as clearly as if I am looking at a video or a photograph. The hallway I saw yesterday belonged to one such memory. For years it had floated around my mind and every once in a while I would try to place it. Could it be the New York cloisters which I went to on a 2nd grade field trip? Or some scene from a medieval movie? Maybe it was from one of the cathedrals I saw in Italy that for some reason felt like it had happened a long time along?

Actually, it was the first floor hallway on the right side of the courtyard in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. Despite the fact that last time I saw it I was about a foot and a half lower, I recognized it instantly.

In fifth grade my class took an overnight field trip to Boston. We did all the usual historical and tourist routes, which is what I remember. However, apparently, we also went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the image of the cloister-like hallway in a building that had once been a woman's home engrained itself on my ten-year-old mind.

So how does this argue against my future existential crises?

Something that can be hard to tell as a teacher is whether you've really gotten through to your students or not. Of course there are the obvious responses, the glowing eyes, bright smiles, and exclamations of joy. But what about the kids who aren't as overt with their responses? Are they still getting anything?

I still don't have a definite answer. However, I can now say from personal experience, sometimes people are absorbing information even when they don't realize it. Ideas you were taught in your youth could be recalled from your memory banks at any point. And no, not everything will stick for every child. But there's still hope that at some point in their lives your students will have a moment of eye-opening memory that brings back some dormant lesson you taught them. Maybe they'll feel a deep connection to an art piece or a museum that you brought them to. Or maybe that's just me. Either way, existential crisis: averted.

New Year's Resolutions

It took me a while to decide on a New Year’s resolution this year. I had little plans, making sure I was doing things on time and keeping my life organized, but nothing more than I do all the time. Those mental reminders that you always tell yourself and hope that this time you’ll actually stay on point with them. But this past Saturday I finally decided on what I wanted to keep myself doing for the rest of 2012.

My resolution came to me after I realized that the show I wanted to see at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston was closing in three days. With the work schedule I had there was only one morning left open for me to see the art that had been open on a tab on my Google browser for the past two months. So, dragging myself out of bed unnecessarily early on a Saturday when I wasn’t working until the afternoon, I made my way through the chill of a January morning down to the ICA.

The exhibit I went to see, Dance/Draw, deserves its own post that I may or may not actually write. In my current line of thought, the important part was what it made me realize. Despite the fact that I work with art everyday, I surround myself with it in my school, my jobs, and even the type of people in my life, I found that I missed going to see art.

I’ve been living in Boston for over half a year now and until this past Saturday I hadn’t been to a single museum except the one where I work. Even there, I’ve only gone to actually look at the art for my own enjoyment and artistic development once or twice. There’s always next weekend, when I don’t have to work or go to class, or that friend who said they would go with me, just not today.

But there’s no excuse.

With the free entrance I get to the many museums in the Boston area, the easy T ride to all of them and the amount of holes I have in my schedule I can’t even pretend to have one. Art is my life. After three hours in the museum walking at a pace that a snail would laugh at so that I could read the writing on each of the pieces as well as absorb the visual effect, I was reminded just what that statement means. I walked out of that museum with my mind whirring so fast that it felt like I wasn’t actually thinking, I was just living the ideas of my art. Each breath I took, step I made, piece of trash I saw, was a possible inspiration for a piece of art, for my next creation.

And so we come to my New Year’s resolution. Once a month, without fail, I am going to dedicate a day to viewing art. Not to making it, not to thinking about it, researching it, or talking about it, but to actually standing in front of new art pieces. If all goes well, I’ll go to more than one a month. If all goes really well, every time I go I will be inspired to actually write on this blog. It’s a new year and art is as strong a part of my life as ever. I plan to keep it that way.

At the Source

My first intensive weekend class at Lesley University perfectly exemplified the source of my passion and of community art: the sheer amount of creative energy that can accumulate from a group of inspired and inspirational individuals. This energy can be created within any group, but over the course of the weekend I experienced the powerful potential of a group of people who have already chosen to dedicate at least part of themselves to Community Art, and it left me breathless.

Everyday I left the class with an extra spring in my step, hoping that the ridiculous grin on my face didn't make me look like I was jumped up on something and yet not caring if it did. Isn't that just the most wonderful? When you can't help but smiling, when even thinking about what happened involuntarily curves your lips, turns your cheeks into red apples and your eyes into what would be described in a children's book as twinkling stars? That. That is the power of Community Art.

We watched videos from RAW Art Works, made by teenagers not much younger than myself, which left me silent and serene, tearful and disturbed, generally moved in any numbers of directions. They made me rethink my relationship with the little sister I rarely get the chance to see, the father I've only recently started growing close to, the homeless man on the street who I didn't step to listen to, and the shy child who I didn't have to time to reach out to. I heard stories of transformation that brought tears to my eyes and the heavy weight of empathetic sympathy across my brows. I laughed, connected, and created with the people around me, helping to develop a potentially life-altering educational festival with only my companions and the city we were in as inspiration.

Even the moments of theoretical and practical conversation opened my eyes to what already exists and what can exist. By acknowledging the difficult realities of our dreams, we connected the blind, bubbly passion of conception with the intense, driven necessities of implementation. This underlying theme both named our course, Ideas into Action, and grounded us, showing us what can be done when we leave the mental drawing board and reach out to grab what life has to offer.

Now I am, obviously, an inspired romantic optimist, but that doesn't mean that all of this isn't true. Community Art connects people at all levels, from their most superficial projections of themselves to the inexplicable depths they may not be conscious of having; being around creative, supportive, and open people inspires the huge amount of intrinsic motivation necessary to enter into the world of creating Community Art; passion doesn't need to be checked and tempered to join reality, only directed and funneled through the correct channels. With these truths in mind, I know that, though they may change form along the way, my ideas will become my actions.

The Term Itself

As I began my foray into the actual theory and thought of the existing community art world, I encountered a discrepancy at the very entrance: no one knows exactly what to call this field. Arlene Goldbard sticks with Community Cultural Development while Tom Borrup chooses Creative Community Building. These are just two examples of the rampant terms that exist within the field.

At first, deep in the sway of the incredible writing done by each of these practiced community artists, I was simply agreeing with whoever's pages I was devouring at the moment. At the very beginning of her book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Goldbard addresses this issue in a section titled "Naming the Practice." She identifies five current terms: community arts, community animation, community-based arts, cultural work, and participatory arts projects. (Her term, Community Cultural Development, she files under this last heading.)

Goldbard chooses not to use Community Art as her key term because it can be, and has been, also "used to describe conventional arts activity based in a municipality" pg 21. Personally, although unlike Goldbard I have barely dipped a toe into this fantastic arena, this association doesn't bother me. This may be because I am approaching the field from the background of visual art and willingly associate myself with "conventional arts activity," or it could just be because I am unseasoned. I'd prefer to think that my conclusions are based on the former, but only time will tell.

Whatever the reason, despite my early infatuation with these authors terms, the more I read the more I feel that sticking with Community Art is most appropriate for me. There's something to be said about simplicity. Even though it may not be as encompassing or accurate, Community Art is a more accessible term than something like creative community building. While the term still needs to be explained, its more immediate. What is community Art? It's art that takes place within and around the community.

For overly intellectual, abstract and theoretical thinkers (or for people pursuing graduate studies) this definition isn't enough - that premise indeed is the base of this blog. Defining a term with its components? That's not deep thinking! But for work within a community, its the right amount of thinking. (Not to say that general community members aren't or wouldn't be interested in the wonderful thinking put into the other terms). Anyone interested can delve into the more specific terms, but Community Art allows the people to take the term, field, and all that goes along with it at face value.

This is all, of course, personal opinion and interpretation coming from someone who considers herself an artist. Going from an artist to a community artist seems much more manageable than becoming a creative community builder or a community cultural developer. It also keeps the person more accepting, accessible and approachable. I'd be much more interested in talking to a Community Artist than a Community Cultural Developer, wouldn't you?

The First Step

It's about time for me to mention the woman who first introduced me to the world of Community Art: Claudia Bernardi. I've already alluded to her once or twice because, as the woman who opened this world to me, she often comes to mind when I think about it.

I first met Claudia in my sophomore year of college. She was designing a ten day spring break trip to El Salvador to do art. Being an artist, mildly fluent in Spanish, and country-bound since the time I was five, this idea naturally appealed to me. In the months leading up to our trip I, along with the rest of my fellow travelers, read books about the history of El Salvador and its neighboring countries, particularly about the many civil wars and the massacre of El Mozote. This heavy material was interspersed with language studying and descriptions of the projects that we were going to do.

For the actual trip we went out into the mountains of Morazon, El Salvador to a little town called Perquin. Claudia had already been there several times, starting an art school that then grew into its own self-supported organization. The telephone poles of the town, which in the rest of El Salvador were constantly changing between the colors of the two strongly divided political parties, were decorated with landscape scenes painted by the local children. Murals turned up around every corner, as colorful, frequent, and pleasing as spring flowers. The town center held a spectacular double sided mural on a stage-like area were children and town members would sit throughout the day.

During our stay, we went to a local community called 10 de enero (10th of January) and had the honor of adding to this beautiful collection of murals, painting on the wall of the cinder-block, one-room library which housed a single bookcase. The content was decided by the community members, the design approved by them, and the artwork partially created by them. Our role was that of artistically trained tools, coming to show our support, interest in, and willingness to help the community that already existed there. Children came to paint a mural on canvas inside and the telephone poles outside while their parents and grandparents came to help or watch us paint. Despite the language and cultural barriers, the members of the community were conversing with us as we all collaborated to create what turned into a beautiful mural.

Our time in El Salavdor also found us visiting neighboring towns, going to El Mozote, and to museums which held artifacts from the civil war that had ended only sixteen years previously. Everywhere we went there was art. Colorful, vibrant murals paved our path through the mountains of Morazon and back to San Salvador, the capital, enlivening the communities with their constant, cheerful presence.

When we returned to the States, I immediately noticed the absence of these colors and the lively community that they embodied. Having already seen the possibilities, power, and uses of communally made art in El Salvador, I knew that creating the same sense of connection was something I could dedicate my life to as I finished my degree and moved into life beyond.