Indigenous Music
Hentoff, Nat
VIEWS ART WHERE YOU ARE REV I E W S BY DON ADAMS AND ARLENE GOLDBARD Don Adams was a musician who started out to be a psychologist. "But I began to realize," he says, "that in South...
...In the arts establishment, such activity by "non-artists" is scornfully assigned the status of amateurism...
...Each of the panelists expressed bitterness toward the Government for failing to transform the project into a lasting national theater...
...Already, some neighborhood arts groups have formed ties to other community groups with more explicit political goals...
...In this basket—the idea that the success of the Federal Theatre Project would lead to establishment of a permanent, public, national theater—these veterans of the Depression had placed their eggs...
...The San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program went from 123 employes to nineteen...
...That, Cocke says, is the way the Appalshop people want their work as artists to be useful to their neighbors...
...While the establishment arts world sends New York ballet companies to tour the boondocks, and the giant entertainment industries spread Hollywood across America, neighborhood arts groups like the Baltimore Theater Project are pioneering a different approach: They make art that is rooted in place...
...They were unorganized, without a base of support, unconnected to the communities in which they worked...
...The increasing centralization of cultural decisions pleases no one except the corporations and institutions that benefit from it...
...I tried to bring in all the touring events and artists I could...
...Still, the neighborhood arts movement has formidable assets...
...But that cost a lot of money, and it really didn 't do much but reinforce the idea that anything worthwhile—any sounds, images, ideas worth bothering with—came from outside the state...
...The result can only be dilution, confusion, and chaos...
...In New York City, to cite just one example, the Community Media Project helps grass-roots groups use film, video, and slides in their work...
...It was created out of real stories, collected by historians and then turned into drama...
...But our real task was to help people to locate their own voices...
...1 realized then that we were dealing with entrenched power and entrenched thinking...
...Many of the leading neighborhood arts programs were begun by low-income and minority people to serve their own communities...
...They are practicing the "regionalism" and "localism" that progressives in this country are beginning to see as the clearest path to social justice...
...Who wouldn't prefer watching a videotape of a CETA-funded circus to reading statistics about mail-room personnel in city agencies...
...They work every day, just like their neighbors, and haven't the contacts, money, or inclinations for a Hollywood-style life...
...The key to the financial success of the consumer entertainment industries is mass production and distribution...
...I realized that we'd have to work with what we had...
...There were great recriminations across the country about putting so many eggs in one basket, but for many neighborhood arts groups, only one basket had been handy...
...The attitude of Martin Friedman, member of the Presi-dentially appointed National Council on the Arts, is representative of the establishment's view of neighborhood arts: "Are we really in the business of supporting amateurism...
...1 was shocked by the way that public cultural institutions—San Francisco's taxpayer-supported Fine Arts Museums, for example—were run like private clubs rather than public agencies...
...Together, Adams and Goldbard work for the Neighborhood Arts Program National Organizing Commitee (NAPNOC), based in Baltimore, Maryland, serving the cause of what they call "cultural democracy...
...But there's another way of looking at the Right's decision to make hay out of the country's cultural uneasiness, and this is to suppose that most people know control of cultural phenomena is out of their hands...
...The neighborhood arts movement is committed to cultural democracy, a challenge to the notion that the United States has one superior national culture—whether it be the mass culture of the entertainment industries or the high culture dominated by European forms in ballet, symphonic music, opera, museums...
...To work with the cultural fabric was more important than labeling and 'treating' people who didn't conform to it...
...In fact, their projects often ended up in the CETA spotlight...
...Along with the demise of CETA under President Reagan, other public sources have also been threatened...
...That has happened in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where Appalshop was started in the late 1960s with Federal anti-poverty money...
...And they don't like it...
...Gaining strength during the late 1960s, people in the neighborhood arts movement saw that the task of helping their own cultures recover from their degradation by official policy was as pressing as the task of desegregating schools or stopping the war in Indochina...
...With the streets...
...The neighborhood arts movement, in contrast, is based on the idea that ordinary men and women can help build their own cultures—that their contributions have value, that their experiences can be the basis for art...
...The huge infusions of public money that keep alive the star system in opera, enabling rich New Yorkers to see Pavarotti in the flesh, make no better sense...
...They believe the test of their work is neither critical acclaim nor the size of the box office (Voices has almost always played for free...
...And so, the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco's mostly Latino Mission District trades exhibitions with cultural groups in Latin America—but it is just as likely to present a show of "low-rider" artwork by the young people who decorate their automobiles for that West Coast ritual on wheels...
...Then, between January 1 and June 1 of last year, every CETA-funded neighborhood arts group we know of lost its allocation—some with no notice at all...
...their chance of success...
...The worlds of "high art" and mass consumer culture are buyers' markets: They depend on keeping many unemployed or underemployed artists always hungry for work or sales...
...But I was also involved in movement politics— anti-war and anti-draft and community organizing...
...The Right took power in the 1980 election on a platform of cultural issues—religious practice, the quality of life, the nature and control of public education and the mass media...
...The play Baltimore Voices tells the story of six working-class neighborhoods in Baltimore and the people who live in them...
...In more progressive circles, one mainly hears a cynical interpretation of what happened in November 1980: that most people who voted for candidates on the Right did so out of a sentimental nostalgia for a country that never was—a mythical land of white, Christian, wholesome, and prosperous people—and out of a desire to put those who don't fit into this picture in their proper, subordinate places...
...But in the middle of the central Appalachian coal fields, there wasn't much demand for camera operators or technicians or, for that matter, media professionals of any kind...
...The Neighborhood Arts Program National Organizing Committee can be reached at P.O...
...It has artists who are willing to forsake the fantasy of fame and fortune for the possibility of decent and dignified work and a real impact on our country's cultural life...
...Those who want to make art their main work, in turn, ought to be able to do so without heading for Broadway or Hollywood...
...The neighborhood arts movement, with its commitment to cultural democracy, could provide the nucleus of a progressive alternative to Reaganism...
...The images manufactured in Hollywood and beamed to virtually every household in the nation have as little to do with life in Vermillion, South Dakota, as they do with life in the heart of the South Bronx...
...Instead, they count success in the numbers of Baltimore old-timers who come backstage to reminisce after a performance...
...They want their work to mean something to their neighbors, to be of some use to them...
...The local focus of neighborhood arts is the movement's strength and, at the same time, its weakness...
...Box 11440, Baltimore, MD 21239, (301)323-5006...
...The Great Wall" is the product of collaboration between people trained as artists and youth gang members referred by juvenile justice agencies...
...Many present-day neighborhood arts workers are finding themselves in the same position...
...It has, too, a large potential base of support, as Americans grow increasingly dissatisfied with consumer culture and become more aware of the need to find their own voices and tell their own stories...
...They aren't about to hit the road for New York...
...It can provide a means of getting information across and stirring imaginations...
...Its chief use, in establishment eyes, is to bring into being an "educated" audience for professional performances...
...We asked them to report on the neighborhood arts movement—what the people in it are doing, what they hope to do...
...The biggest source of government money was the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA...
...Every indication is that the Reagan Administration's cultural policy has followed the right-wing Heritage Foundation's recommendation that the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities be "redeployed" away from "social welfare in the arts" and toward "professional excellence...
...The members of Appalshop created their own demand: With the help of foundation and government grants, they stayed right where they were, making records, films, theater, and books about the region and its people...
...We could put pressure on officials to clean up the cultural agencies till the cows came home...
...Most of the movement's support has come in roundabout ways...
...In neighborhood arts, on the other hand, people in each community must find the time and resources for their work...
...The director of Appalshop's Roadside Theater, Dudley Cocke, likes to tell about the time a woman living in a nearby town telephoned to ask that a funeral hymn she'd heard as part of a Roadside production be sung for her mother's funeral...
...As 1 learned more about the art world I saw that all the social and economic relationships that troubled me in the larger society also characterized the way our society deals with culture...
...They've honed their grants-writing skills to knock the socks off jaded foundation executives and hard-to-please CETA administrators...
...the Baltimore Theater Project lost half of its forty-eight-person staff...
...Some time ago we attended a panel discussion by veterans of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project...
...They spend much of their time traveling, meeting with community groups, passing on ideas...
...They must struggle for sympathy, let alone money, from the arts establishment that controls the public arts purse...
...The neighborhoods...
...Neighborhood arts can be an instrument of change...
...In Venice, California, the Social and Public Arts Resource Center has worked for years on a mural, now nearly half a mile long, that looks at California's history decade by decade, emphasizing the contributions of minority people in the state...
...Because CETA was a job-creation scheme, neighborhood arts groups that couldn't get past the establishment bias of arts agencies were able to get CETA funds...
...The project has assembled advisory boards of public library representatives and neighborhood activists and has contacted some 200 community organizations...
...Millions of people can buy the same record, see the same film or television program, hear the same day-long preprogrammed radio (with local commercials inserted), and read the same national magazine, whether they live in the Kentucky mountains or New York City...
...One goal of the neighborhood arts movement is to make a useful and decent place for artists in their own communities...
...But more important, by helping to decentralize culture and strengthen an appreciation of the equality and coexistence of cultures, neighborhood arts can help build a popular progressive movement in the United States...
...Atfirst 1 started in the traditional way...
...Except for small showcase programs funded by the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, little Government spending has been granted directly to the neighborhood arts...
...Where does it all end...
...Arlene Goldbard was a painter...
...The people who staged Baltimore Voices live in the city themselves...
...Like other young California artists in the early 1970s," she remembers, "I had gotten involved in the push for artists' rights...
...The idea then was to open media training centers around the country, to give young people the skills that would make them employable in the growing media industries...
...But if all the grants funds were suddenly removed, most would be hard-pressed to survive on the contributions of their neighbors and community institutions...
...And when the WPA arts projects ended abruptly, they were unprepared...
...But I began to realize," he says, "that in South Dakota, my home state, somebody who felt troubled by life and was consequently 'making trouble' was simply having a healthy reaction to the barren cultural landscape...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
