Our State of the Union is a Poem

By Arlene Goldbard, USDAC Chief Policy Wonk

It’s been two weeks since the 2016 Poetic Address to the Nation was performed live at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, filmed by PhillyCAM, and live-streamed by Free Speech TV. You can see the video here.

If you’ve been following the USDAC,  you know that the Poetic Address is the culminating artistic gesture of an annual civic ritual sponsored by the USDAC, the People’s State of the Union—this year, #PSOTU2016 for short. Groups around the U.S.—schools, community centers, faith communities, humanities councils, arts organizations, and many more—downloaded free Toolkits and hosted their own Story Circles. Individuals anywhere uploaded their own stories to the Story Portal, where you can read them now.

If the PSOTU stopped there, it would make a powerful statement that expressed the USDAC’s foundational principles. It says that democracy is a conversation, not a monologue, that all our voices are needed to assess the state of our union, that the lived experience of people in communities counts as much as—perhaps more than—expert opinion or official statement.

But it doesn’t stop there. The next step is to craft the Poetic Address to the Nation. With the guidance of the USDAC’s Chief Rhapsodist of Wherewithal (and newly appointed Philadelphia Poet Laureate) Yolanda Wisher, an incredible group of poets across the U.S. composed sonnets and another wonderful cohort close to Philly wrote poems inspired by stories uploaded to the Portal. These were arranged in sequence to compose this year’s Poetic Address.

Still, it doesn’t stop there. Stories from #PSOTU2015 formed the body of information we used to devise the generative cultural policy proposals in An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research, the publication we issued at the end of September 2016. #PSOTU2016 stories will again tell us what people care about and what they want when we create our first major cultural policy platform, to be released in November.

As Yolanda put it in her introduction to the Poetic Address, #PSOTU2016 “embodied the simple truth that the state of the union is not an annual declaration, but something that we create together everyday. We’ve also embodied the truth that all our lives are the material of art, and all our experience is worthy of being uplifted into poetry. So, what state of union will we choose to create? Democracy for the few or a cultural democracy for everyone?”

Poetic Address to the Nation cast taking a bow after the performance.

As #PSOTU2016 unfolded, someone put this question: So what? So what if we all tell our stories and they become a poem? Why does that matter?

Everyone who is working in the arena of art and social justice gets similar questions all the time. I often respond with another question: so what does matter more?

There’s a conventional attitude that says art is insignificant: entertainment, a frill, a luxury, that we should save our energy and resources for important things. Depending on who is making this assertion, the meaning of important shifts. Our national policymakers have chosen to spend a huge proportion of our commonwealth on war and punishment: I often cite the statistic that we are spending more than three annual National Endowment for the Arts budgets a day on the military, seven days a week. That’s one way to measure importance.

Others think priority ought to go to direct action to protest those same conditions, that anything else is a diversion or self-indulgence. It’s not that any one form of action is definitively proven to be most effective, even though some people will stake that claim. All that can be known is that when many of us choose to use our own gifts and instruments to raise awareness and inspire action—whatever our gifts may be—the wellspring of change is replenished.

The truth—as Citizen Artists everywhere know—is that to change the world, you have to change the story. To shift culture, which shifts behavior, you have to ask the real questions, the ones that are being glossed or ignored. As the late great James Baldwin put it: “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” You have to hold up a mirror so people see themselves truly, as resilient and powerful even while the status quo broadcasts the message that power rests with others and it’s best to come along quietly.

Tell me, what could say it more heartfully, hit home more strongly, than these stanzas from “Seek Shelter” by Trapeta Mayson & Monnette Sudler?

Oh give me shelter in this fractured Union
Give me shelter in this fractured Union
Stitch up these worn bones
Open my mouth
Rip this silence from my foreign tongue
Move this wedge of indifference
Show me a sign that I am home
Take away our boxing ring of conflict
where we bloody each other with pride and prejudice
Put out a welcome mat

Oh give me shelter in this fractured Union
For I too am a sister and a prodigal son
I’ve walked the earth and need to settle
Give me space to be
Let me be
let me be in this United Place of America.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider the way that Sarah Chalmers tells it, why she believes that sharing our stories and singing our poems matters greatly. Sarah is a founding member and Director of Civic Engagement for the Civic Ensemble, a “civic-minded theater company” based in Ithaca, New York. This year was Ithaca’s second experience with convening Story Circles for the People’s State of the Union; read Anne Rhodes’ account in the USDAC blog.

I spoke with Sarah after #PSOTU2016 to learn more about how it had unfolded locally. The Civic Ensemble uses Story Circles to devise issue-based plays, so Sarah has a lot of prior experience with them. Like a great many Citizen Artists, Sarah is super-busy. But when she saw that #PSOTU2016 was coming around, she leapt into action to help organize an event. “I think I was the person this year that was like, ‘Hey this is happening again.’ We do this even though we don’t really have time because we’re always looking for ways to get into a bigger conversation, to get our community thinking ‘What’s the big picture here?’

“The fact that our stories are shared with a national audience, that the people at USDAC are reading those and using an artistic approach to expressing what’s a national conversation that’s really coming from the people—that’s the pedagogy that we live by. To be a part of that is something I just wouldn’t want to miss out on.

“We consider ourselves Citizen Artists ultimately. That’s how we identify and how we talk to people when they work with us. It’s not about just making a play. Making a play is our vehicle and it doesn’t mean it’s not a beautiful thing in itself. We appreciate the art of it. But what’s the question? What’s the challenge? And the challenge is the fact that it brings us together to make something different, that we can create our community.

We don’t have to accept what’s being told to us. We need to recognize our own power.  To me, the Story Circle, it’s unassuming, but it has the potential to help us recognize that.”

The UN Visits Jackson, and A Cultural Agent Testifies

In January, members of the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent visited Washington D.C.; Baltimore; Jackson, Mississippi; Chicago; and New York City as part of its mission of assessing “the situation of African Americans and people of African descent.”

USDAC Cultural Agent Monique Davis was there in Jackson, testifying on issues of food injustice, and Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard had an opportunity afterwards to ask her about the experience. Before saying more about Monique’s testimony, here’s a little of the context for the UN visit.

As the Working Group’s report puts it, members “gathered information on the forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, Afrophobia and related intolerance that they face. We studied the official measures and mechanisms taken to prevent structural racial discrimination and protect victims of racism and hate crimes as well as responses to multiple forms of discrimination. The visit focused on both good practices and challenges faced in realising their human rights.”

After detailing the many positive developments (such as criminal justice reforms and improved healthcare programs) brought to the Working Group’s attention, the report goes on to preface an even longer list of concerns with this statement:

Despite the positive measures referred to above, the Working Group is extremely concerned about the human rights situation of African Americans.

The colonial history, the legacy of enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism, and racial inequality in the US remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent. Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today. The dangerous ideology of white supremacy inhibits social cohesion amongst the US population. Lynching was a form of racial terrorism that has contributed to a legacy of racial inequality that the US must address. Thousands of people of African descent were killed in violent public acts of racial control and domination and the perpetrators were never held accountable.

Contemporary police killings and the trauma it creates are reminiscent of the racial terror lynching of the past. Impunity for state violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency.

The Working Group

Arlene Goldbard: So the UN came to Jackson?

Monique Davis: We were one of five cities, and it was a huge honor for our small, sleepy southern town.

Arlene: You testified before the panel. What did you talk about?

Monique: I talked about my personal experiences of living in a poor community and shopping at a local grocery store, comparing that to my experience of shopping at that same grocery store chain in more affluent neighborhoods. How the quality and variety of produce is different, the lighting is different, even the background music is different, the cleanliness of the store is different. I talked about how our neighborhood is plagued by convenience food stores that don’t offer fresh produce. Many of our families are time-starved: they need something to be quick and easy. We may almost have to go to the drawing board again to teach people how to take advantage of fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables because there’s generations of families that only know how to cook things that come out of a box and the impact on their health means mass re-education that needs to happen.

Arlene: Food is culture too, and what you’re describing is a food culture that puts the seller’s convenience and profit above the well-being of the families who consume the food. Here’s a quote from their report, which sounds like it was influenced by your testimony:

The Working Group learnt that African Americans have limited access to food variety including healthy food as they are concentrated in poor neighbourhoods with food outlets selling unhealthy and even expired food. African Americans have the highest rates of obesity which is linked to “food deserts”. Racial discrimination impedes the ability of Black women to maintain overall good health, control their sexuality and reproduction, survive pregnancy and child birth, and parent their children. Black women in the USA die from pregnancy-related complications at a rate three to four times higher than White women.

Did you hear any of the other testimonies?

Monique: There were powerful stories about mass incarceration. People spoke about a recent trial where a gentleman in Stonewall, Mississippi, was pulled off his horse and buggy and strangled by a police officer. (Note: Here’s a description of the killing of Jonathan Sanders.) People testified how under- and unreported that was because it was rural Mississippi. People spoke of the lack of prosecution of the people that are responsible and that fact that even though time has progressed, some things still haven’t changed as much as we would hope.

I was really impressed by the panel, I think they heard and honored the testimony and they even practiced some of the story circle principles we use—like after people shared just took a deep breath and said “thank you.” I was pleased that they gave people’s stories the honor and attention that they deserved. That was a great experience.

Arlene: It sounds like it. Just the fact of it happening is so interesting. You know how it is, the UN sends election observers to other countries and we feel very smug about our democracy. But in 2012, they sent election observers here. Now the UN is saying people of African descent in the United States are not well treated, as an international body, we have a responsibility to look into that. That recognition is powerful in and of itself.

Monique: Exactly. Just that they felt the need to come here is something kind of monumental.

The Working Group’s report ends with an impressive list of recommendations, the first of which is to “Establish a national human rights commission, in accordance with the Paris Principles. The Government should establish within this body a specific division to monitor the human rights of African Americans.” In a USDAC framework, what they are talking about is the right to culture, a fundamental and indivisible human right reflected in our Statement of Values. Many thanks to Monique for representing this truth to the UN.

Field Office Dispatch: New York and Philadelphia

We are delighted to present these updates from the Philly (Cultural Agent and Chief Rhapsodist of Wherewithal Yolanda Wisher) and New York (Cultural Agent Betty Yu) USDAC Field Offices. To get involved, just drop us a line at hello@usdac.us.

Philly Field Office

In October 2015, the Philly Field Office soft-launched with three successful DareToImagine actions in Chinatown, Germantown, and Hunting Park. The Field Office partnered with Asian Arts Initiative, Germantown Artists Roundtable, and Edison High School to host Imagination Stations that invited passersby to make a #DareToImagine button or a Philly Phriendship Bracelet to give to a stranger, or a papercut flag showing off their neighborhood pride. Local poets and musicians performed re-imaginings of traditional patriotic tunes. And in Germantown, the Germantown Artists Roundtable hosted “Civic School,” where folks waiting for the bus could vote for one of three issues they wanted to see tackled by newly elected Supreme Court judges: full funding for public schools, $15 minimum wage, or gun control. Most found it hard to choose. 

The Philly Field Office plans to continue building its core team and clarifying its focus this spring through spearheading large & small-scale participatory events across the city in collaboration with arts organizations and city institutions. And in the meantime, the Poetic Address to the Nation is coming right up. Learn more about the livecast here. 

Citizen Artists Lenny Belasco, Juliette Quoquoi and Tieshka Smith hold down the Germantown Imagination Station. (Photo by Yolanda Wisher, October 2016)

DareToImagine button maker at Germantown Imagination Station at Greene Street and Chelten Avenue. (Photo by Yolanda Wisher, October 2016)

NYC Field Office

The USDAC NYC Field has kicked off 2016 with a bang. In late 2015 the core team of the Field Office came together to discuss our priority projects and issues we wanted to work on.  Given the success of our June Imagining and October #DareToImagine events that were mainly focused on anti-gentrification and anti-displacement creative organizing strategies in NYC, we decided we would continue along that trajectory so we can deepen our partnerships and relationships with community activists and organizations. One of our main criteria and principles we feel strongly about is: "We should prioritize local cultural organizing activities, art/media projects and other creative social justice efforts that support the self-determination of communities to tell their own stories of identity, struggle, and collective liberation."

On January 2nd, USDAC-NYC animated and transformed the Brooklyn Museum's 3rd floor Beaux Arts Court space into the "City of Justice." We invited participants to an evening where we imagined 2016 and a future where social justice is realized through 10 participatory art-making stations that included poetry, letter-writing, theater, body movement, Story Circles, and story mapping. The planning team had some hesitations about organizing this when it was revealed that Brooklyn Museum had leased the space out to the Real Estate Summit for their annual gathering (a major convening of the real estate giants that are the #1 gentrifying force). USDAC-NYC supported the community protests against the museum. And because of grassroots activism the museum welcomed open dialogue and criticism. We then decided to use the "City of Justice" event as an open space for creative imagination and forward-thinking solutions for housing justice!

Finally, February has been a busy month so far. The Field Office helped host two Story Circles for the People's State of the Union, co-presented our Anti-Gentrification Story Mapping Activity at VIRAL an interactive performance addressing issues of police violence in Staten Island, and co-facilitated an Anti-Gentrification-themed "Community Imagining" as a part of "Speak Out" an art and activism exhibit on police brutality at BronxArt Space.

City of Justice at the Brooklyn Museum

City of Justice at the Brooklyn Museum

Love Letter to Philadelphia: Poet Laureate Yolanda Wisher and the Poetic Address to the Nation

Dear Philly,

Sonia always puts the words a place called before your name. Girl, you’ve been called so many names. Been called out of your name, too. Philly. Illadelph. 215. Killadelphia. You are corner stores and cranes, murals and museums, litter and Love Park. 

Here at USDAC Central, we are over the moon with pride and admiration for Chief Rhapsodist of Wherewithal Yolanda Wisher, who on February 5th was named Philadelphia’s third-ever Poet Laureate, succeeding Frank Sherlock (2014-15) and Sonia Sanchez (2012-13). The lines reproduced here are excerpted from Yolanda’s Poem “A Love Letter to Philadelphia.” You can watch her reading them on WPVI-TV news.

And then I started to really hear you, came to love you beyond pity and promiscuity. Fed you black beans and Jean Toomer’s “Georgia Dusk” at Toviah’s Thrift Store out West. Sat straight-backed in a plastic chair—room M18 in the Bonnell Building of CCP—while you coaxed a soprano out of me, and I sang—yeah, I sang—“Thank You, Lord” with your sinners and your savers. I caught your spirit.

This is doubly thrilling because Yolanda, whose association with the USDAC began two years ago when she was chosen as a founding Cultural Agent, has been curating and coordinating the 2016 Poetic Address to the Nation. This is the culminating gesture of our People’s State of the Union National Action, in which people across the U.S. share stories revealing the state of our union. You can read hundreds of #PSOTU2016 stories right now at the Story Portal.

I was searching for a pyramid in you, Philly. But pyramids don’t grow here, and that’s alright. Poems do.

The Poetic Address is made up of sonnets contributed by a remarkable group of invited poets, and story poems created by Philly-based poets in response to the stories uploaded as part of #PSOTU2016. Accompanied by music and supplemented by youth poetry, it will be performed live at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia beginning at 7:30 pm EST on Saturday, February 20th. If you’re going to be in Philadelphia, be sure to reserve your tickets now. And everywhere else, you can catch the livestream on FreeSpeechTV.

Here are Yolanda’s remarks on being appointed Poet Laureate:

It is a breathtaking honor to be selected to serve as our city’s 3rd Poet Laureate, following in the footsteps of Sonia Sanchez and Frank Sherlock. I’m proud of my city: here we have a post that affirms POETRY as a vehicle for civic engagement and expression.

I walked these Philly streets as a teenager, writing poems on the train down from North Wales and on the steps of Bennett Hall at Penn and UArts. One night in Old City at a poetry reading on 2nd Street, I fell in love with a man who became my muse and my bass player. A few years ago we gave birth to a little boy poem named Thelonious together in Germantown. Philadelphia has been my summer crush, my sister-friend, has become my home.

I step into this position spinning from the love of the unsung poets without laurels who raised me, the teachers who guided my life as much as my lines, and most importantly, my mother, Yvonda, who made countless sacrifices and knocked down more than a few walls so that I could be a writer. Born in Philly, I returned sixteen years ago in search of a poetry community. I found it, and it has shaped and inspired me.

I hope to grow that vibrant and powerful community of poetry and poets during my tenure as Laureate, and I will invite all Philadelphians—poets or not or just wishing to be—to help me write the poems that tell our city’s story. I’m not wasting any time getting started! My first invitation to all of y’all is to join me for the live-cast of the Poetic Address to the Nation, an event I’m hosting at the Painted Bride Art Center on Sat. Feb. 20th. The Poetic Address to the Nation is a State of the Union Address that weaves a multitude of voices across the U.S. into a poem, collaborative composed and performed by some of our nation’s and city’s most talented poets. Please visit psotu.us to learn more.” 

#PSOTU2016 in Ithaca: Reflections by Anne Rhodes

Note: Anne Rhodes is a theater artist, activist, and organizer who took part in a People's State of the Union Story Circle in January 2016. Below, her reflections on the experience are interspersed with excerpts from Ithaca stories uploaded to the Story Portal. 

When do we ever get to talk deeply with strangers about things that trouble us, things that inspire us, things that we wonder about?

Last Thursday at our People’s State of the Union event, 35 Ithacans came together to pause, listen, share, and grapple with issues of belonging, difference, damage and healing, despair and hope. 

Our two story circle prompts were:

1. Share a story you think the next President absolutely needs to hear.
2. Share a story about a moment you felt true belonging—or the opposite—to this nation.

What does it mean to belong to this country? For an African American “belonging to” conjured up slavery. Who “belongs in” this country when we are dealing with so much anti-immigrant ­­­­­­sentiment?  We are all so different, and there is so much history or pain; can we belong with each other? How could we get there?

The story I want to tell is what happened to me when I looked at those prompts. First thing that happened was that I had a very strong reaction to the idea of belonging “to” this country. Because this country has a very interesting perspective about what it means to be a black man, and who belongs to whom. So I had lots of reactions to just that language, and thoughts about the language I would have preferred, about the idea of belonging “in” this country.

People's State of the Union Story Circle in Detroit. Photo by Erin Shawgo. 

The stories we told each other were about uncertainty about the future, seeking solace when something horrible happens, feeling connected to and hugging strangers when something wonderful happens, despair from seeing how children are damaged in their families and cannot trust, recoiling from belonging to or with or in this country, finding connection in unexpected places.

I remember when gay marriage was recognized federally....on that day, there was just this amazement, that starting that day we could freely travel anywhere in this country and say “This is my wife” and there was something backing us up. Whether we felt safe to do that was another question, and still is. But being able to call my spouse “my wife” is amazing still. That word: wife. It means I can’t hide, and I don’t want to. The joy of it, and the ownership of it. My heart was home.

And through it all, the theme of belonging, the loss of belonging, the pervasiveness of the glorification of independence and autonomy. The historical ways of belonging in community—extended family, tribe, village, congregation—are often broken or disappearing.  And we are left wondering what can take their place.  There is so much diversity in our country – of ethnicity, gender, class, political affiliation, sexual orientation, religion.  How can we belong to each other? 

Then one of the women who had been quiet, she spoke up. She said, “I have hard time listening to the news right now. My children are Muslim. They are seven and nine years old. And they listen, they hear when the news is on, they hear what people are saying.” She said that her daughter who is seven asked her the other day, if “that man”—and she was talking about Trump—“if he becomes President, do I have to leave America? Do we have to move away?”

When do we ever get to talk with strangers like this?

The evening opened and closed with music.  As we came in, shared food, and greeted each other, Uncle Joe and the Rosebud Ramblers created a welcoming, friendly atmosphere with fiddle, guitars, and stand-up bass.  And at the end of the evening an improvisational singing group, Ephemera, created an on-the-spot vocal offering that reflected back to us what they had heard in the three story circles.  You can hear it here.

I remember coming to Ithaca to go school; it was about a year and a half ago. We found an apartment built in the 1800s and not updated. It’s downtown, and we can walk to the Commons. We can walk to the park. Sarah and I were walking in this community and the streets were packed. There’s people everywhere—friends, and friends of friends. There was life and people and activity. It was different and it had that sense of belonging. I’m grateful to the people in this community for making that happen in a country where that’s not necessarily the norm.

Ephemera’s offering ended with the question: “What if we all sang the same song?” And we all joined in with them, all kinds of voices.  It was fitting to end with a question.  And a question that contains so many other questions:  What would it take? How will we get there? How can we trust? What can I do?  But in the end it was hopeful, singing together, bringing a vision of possibilities: What if we all sang the same song?

Tell Your Story Now!

It’s simple! Open a blank email, write a story from your experience that illuminates the state of our union, add your name and location, and email it to  psotu2016@ctznapp.com. Read on to learn why.

The People’s State of the Union has another week to go, and we already have some amazing stories to share. All of the quotes below are excerpts from stories that have already been uploaded to the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture’s #PSOTU2016 Story Portal.

For this nine-day National Action, people around the country are forming Story Circles in their homes, schools, workplaces, places of worship, and community groups. They are telling their own stories their own ways, either in response to the #PSOTU2016 questions or questions they choose themselves:

• Share a story you think the next President absolutely needs to hear.
• Share a story about something you have experienced that gave you an insight into the state of our union.
• Share a story about a time you felt a sense of belonging—or the opposite—to this nation.

Even if there’s no Story Circle planned for your own community, you can share any story that helps shine a light on the state of our union. Just type your story into a blank email, add an image if you like, and send it to psotu2016@ctznapp.com. It will automatically become part of the feed that goes to the #PSOTU2016 Story Portal.

If you add your name, location, and email, anyone who is moved by your story or wants to connect with you will be able to find you.

This woman asked me to explain to her how it was possible that Islam justifies killing so many people in the name of religion. She said all she knew of Muslims was what she saw in the media, and she wanted to know more. And I realized I had a huge opportunity to give this woman some insight, to help shift her thinking and to show at least one person some of the beauty in a religion whose capacity for beauty is so rarely discussed in this country, during this short time we had together.

And I thought: what can I do in my life to make these opportunities come up more often? It’s so rare to be able get to a safe space in the conversation where people feel they won't be judged, where they’ll be able to engage in a way that they might otherwise be afraid to, and ask questions that allow for the possibility of growth and understanding instead of unexamined fear. (Mia Bertelli, Santa Fe, NM)

It’s not too late to host your own Story Circle either. You can sign up here to download a free Toolkit and find other resources to host a Story Circle before #PSOTU2016 ends on January 31. A Story Circle event can be a few friends around a kitchen table or a hundred people dividing into circles of folding chairs in a high-school gym. It’s an amazing experience of democratic dialogue where everyone’s story counts and every story deserves attention and respect.

It wasn’t until 1995 that I got involved in Labor organizing in Chinatown. There was a case with a restaurant paying their workers 75 cents an hour. This was 1995. I was 16 years old and thought I’d see a bunch of hippies in Birkenstocks protesting. I had no idea I was going to see people who looked just like me—Chinese immigrants, working class families. I felt, for the first time, a sense of belonging. My family got involved. The workers won that case, winning back $1.1 million for nearly 60 workers in 1997. (Betty Yu, Brooklyn, NY)

Most of us are full of opinions (myself included). When you ask about the state of our union, we quickly tell you it’s solid or in need of repair, who’s helping and who’s not. Of course, our assessments don’t always agree. Sometimes the disagreement is so profound that discussion turns into argument and friends into foes. But when we share actual stories instead of opinions—specific moments we’ve seen or experienced—several things change.

First, each of us is the World’s Foremost Expert on our own experiences. Better than anyone else in the world, I know what I have seen, done, and felt. No single story can say it for everyone. One-by-one, our stories build up layers of truth. Democracy is a conversation, not a monologue.

A couple of years ago, we were up in this tiny village, called Anton Chico, in the valley. It’s very isolated in a big growing area. Farmers used to grow there for Seeds of Change, one of the first organic seed companies. Over the years, it’s kind of declining. We’ve been in a drought here, but there’s more water in Anton Chico.

We were up there, and we kicked off the first annual Anton Chico Seed Exchange. Maybe thirty people showed up, all walks of life, all brought their seeds and exchanged them. While we were doing that, we activated people to tell their stories. It was an exchange of seeds and an exchange of stories.

On Anton Chico there’s a particular kind of corn grown called the Concha Corn. Many people brought their Concha Corn seeds. And this seed provoked deep conversation. It’s been grown for generations. This elderly man stood up, and he held the Concha Corn in his hand, and he said, “If we lose this corn, we lose our culture.” It still gives me shivers, hearing him say that. It deeply rooted in me the absolute importance of the seed here in New Mexico. (Chrissie Orr, Santa Fe, NM)

Second, multiple stories honor the complexity of issues, rather than reducing them to simple pros and cons: immigration, for or against? Gun control, for or against? When we are truly present to each other’s stories, we can discern the feelings and realities that infuse our stories. Deep listening encourages us to consider responses that are truly worthy of all our stories.

Throughout the whole first year of having health insurance in the U.S., I keep thinking “at least I have time, energy, and motivation to spend all this time on phone to investigate matters such as what are my blood tests going to cost me.” If my situation is anything to go by, this thing we call a healthcare system cultivates a great deal of fear and frustration on a daily basis. And many people don’t have the capacity to minimize the damage this complex, incomprehensible system can do to us. Which is why I also keep thinking, "I don’t like it. Not at all. It isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense." (Veena Vasista, Santa Fe, NM)

Third, stories are extremely useful. Artists use Story Circles to gather dialogue and incidents that help to shape scripts or murals. Visitors to the #PSOTU2016 Story Portal can browse stories by theme, searching for those speak to their own situations and opportunities. When the USDAC published An Act of Collective Imagination, a publication that shared some of our generative cultural policy ideas, we grounded each idea in stories uploaded to last year’s PSOTU Story Portal. When you share your story, you contribute to a body of knowledge that can help move the world.

#PSOTU2016 ends on January 31, and we’d love to have all stories uploaded within a week after that. An amazing group of poets will be working to create the 2016 Poetic Address to the Nation, inspired in part by your stories. It will be performed at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, videotaped by PhillyCAM, and live-streamed nationally courtesy of Free Speech TV. So if you upload your story, you just may hear a snippet of it on TV!

Just open a blank email, write a story from your experience that illuminates the state of our union, add your name and location, and email it to  psotu2016@ctznapp.com. 

Welcoming The New Cultural Agents

We are thrilled to announce that a new cohort of 18 USDAC Cultural Agents has been appointed. Once again, it was a serious challenge to choose 18 from among nearly 100 applications from amazing artists and activists. We are so grateful to everyone who applied, and so excited to introduce the new Cultural Agents. They hail from Oregon to Kentucky, from Iowa to Wisconsin, from DC to Mississippi. Hip-hop artists, designers, activists, musicians, and much, much more!

Cultural Agents take part in an online learning community leading to an art-infused organizing project, whether a local campaign or an Imagining which can then prepare the ground for a Field Office, an ongoing presence promote, disseminate, and enact USDAC values.  

Their first assignment is to host a Story Circle for the People’s State of the Union, which takes place 23-31 January. The stories shared in Circles will be uploaded to the #PSOTU2016 story portal, where they can be browsed and shared. They’ll also provide inspiration to an amazing group of poets creating a collaborative Poetic Address to the Nation, to be live-streamed from the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia courtesy of Philly CAM and Free Speech TV!

You can do it too. Hosting is easy: we provide a free Toolkit and training and lots of other help. Sign up today to host a Story Circle in your own home or a community event with multiple Circles!

A Story Circle in the Bronx, NY, January 2015.

Even a glance at the new Cultural Agents’ bios fills us with excitement about what they will do. Here are just a few phrases that popped out on first reading: “community led efforts around media justice, cultural policy and displacement,” “role-play games as pedagogical tools,” “transformative learning programs which integrate the arts and social justice education,” “service and positive change,” “just and equitable cities,” “confluence of media technology, arts and culture work,” “cross-pollinating the grassroots,” “code-switcher and community-builder,” “radical philology, exuberant lexicography, and democratized cruciverbery,” “the tremendous capacity we have as a collective living organism,” and “a culture shift founded on the power of the arts to fuel social and economic renaissance.”

Please join us in welcoming these Cultural Agents and stay tuned for news of their work.

Normalizing The Extraordinary in Medellín, Part Two

Note: This is the second of two parts on Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard’s visit to cultural development projects in Medellín, Colombia, in early December; you’ll find the first here.

Ana Cecilia Restrepo, the director of La Red de Escuelas de Musica de Medellín—that Colombian city’s network of music schools that are much more than schools, as you can read in Part One—was driving me back to my hotel on the last night of my stay. Medellín is widely recognized as a city that has successfully launched its transformation from a place terrorized by drug lords and their gangs, in which going out at night was basically not an option, to one explicitly and assertively aligned with its own remaking. See Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times piece from 2012, for instance, or this account of Medellín being named Innovative City of the Year in 2013, particularly for its new transportation infrastructure.

As she drove, Ana told me one of the city’s famous rejuvenation stories. Below, I share it with you. But first I want to tell you about my visit to an amazing cultural center in Medellín.

When we think “cultural center” in the U.S., often what comes to mind is a special-purpose space: maybe a concert hall and a smaller performance space, some meeting rooms or classrooms. Quite a few of our centers stand empty much of the time, waiting for scheduled events such as concerts to fill them up.

But the Casa de la Cultura I visited a few weeks ago, Los Alcazares, is being used in every possible way. If you click on the link, you’ll see an image of a green wall, where plastic bottles have been repurposed as planters suspended in front of the bricks. One click from there and you’ll see the mobile planting project created by artist Giovanny Sáenz T, who won a municipal competition for an artist residency in the city’s cultural development centers. Another and you’ll come to this project of Resistance Gardens.

If there’s one word for Los Alcazares, it’s integrated. In the space of a morning, I sat in on a weaving workshop and a yoga class, met a bunch of volunteers and program leaders, had a delicious outdoor lunch prepared by neighbors who used produce from the center’s community gardens to make dips for the homemade bread another neighbor brought, and toured several gardens in the neighborhood. Los Alcazares’ director, Javier Burgos—a painter, cyclist, and environmental activist—told me that the driving goal for all this creative and generative activity is to bring people into relationship—in effect, to create the warp and weft of social fabric in the community not as a byproduct of producing or presenting arts and recreational activities, but as a first purpose.

For example, the mode of gardening I saw is organic in two senses—the first being the usual sense of natural, not chemical-intensive. The second sense is a kind of gradualism: they aren’t ripping out vast lots, but pacing themselves. The gardening seems organic to the neighborhood. A little at a time, people have dug up the weeds or shrubs lining nearby sidewalks and planted edible greens and herbs along with flowers. I visited a remarkable garden created and maintained in containers on a bathtub-sized patch of sidewalk a few streets away from Los Alcazares. The inspired and enthusiastic gardener had created one of the most compact and efficient vermiculture composting operations I’ve ever seen, where kitchen and garden scraps pass through a succession of black plastic bags and worm-filled bins to emerge looking and smelling like fine, fresh loam. He said the neighbors were skeptical when he first began digging the beds in front of his house, but they’ve been won over by the results.

Javier Cardona showing visitors his garden, Espacio Vital

Working with people throughout the city, the people I met that day are creating a network of community gardens. There’s a directory listing plants and their uses, and a map keyed to find the public and private gardens springing up across Medellín, 30 so far. Here’s a great account of a bicycle tour of some gardens.

To this visitor, Medellín seems a city of networks, with an impressive willingness to work across lines of public and private that might divide us in the U.S. Ana felt this was a distinct asset to the cultural development process:

“People who had been professional artists and in dance, music, theater, and visual arts looked to go back and forth between being in the public sphere, being in the government, and being in the arts medium. Seeing and knowing that’s possible was important, creating a generative dialogue, an exchange. It creates empathy and understanding on both sides. Giving value to the relationship we create with professional artists working in the territory, it means there’s respect. Before the government was more like the police, sort of antagonistic, but now it really is how can we make things better? Because it’s for the betterment of the programs and the work, the people and not the system, it has to be better for everyone.”

My first day in Medellín, leading a workshop with participants from all four of the city’s arts networks—visual arts, dance, theater, and music, I saw that firsthand.

Now, back to that rejuvenation story: “There used to be a waste dump,” Ana told me as she drove, “and on top of it, Pablo Escobar built a ton of housing. For a long time, people venerated Pablo Escobar because he’d given them a home. In 2005 the initiative comes together where the local government gets funding to build a cultural development center there in Moravia. The designs are donated by the most famous Columbian architect, Rogelio Salmona—it’s the last design that he makes before he dies. (NextCity has an interesting piece about the neighborhood’s rebirth.) An anonymous foundation donates all of the material and all of the manual labor and this amazing center gets built. And on top of that, the principle of this cultural development center is we’re not going to run it ourselves, we’re going to ask allies to come and run it with us.”

A key ally was what Ana called a compensation union (I think credit union would be the closest U.S. translation)—one of many workers’ cooperatives that have historically contributed to social welfare through job training, daycare programs, medical and dental services, and loans. The compensation union issued an open invitation to the neighborhood to program the new cultural development center.

The Zona Norte neighborhood, Ana told me, is predominantly Afro-Colombian, including many coastal people, so the programming included “Afro-Colombian dance, hip hop, a lot of capoeira, a lot of Colombian dance, gastronomic classes, circus skills, and clowning. There’s a lot of intersections around that area, which used to be the end of the city. It’s where the recyclers live. [Note: These basureros or trash prospectors extract usable material from the enormous mountain of rubbish in the El Morro neighborhood and reuse or sell it to live.] They need to make a living doing shows in the traffic, so they learn clowning, juggling and everything.”

At that moment, we stopped at a traffic light. Two young men ran into the crosswalk carrying lit torches. Lickety-split, one jumped on the other’s shoulders and began juggling the torches. This entire show took place with enough time to spare before the light turned green to run between the rows of cars collecting coins.

Since the Moravia center was built, Ana told me, “this whole area has become one of the most important streets. It has the botanical gardens, the planetarium, the park of wishes. All of these things have grown up around it. So the public and private spheres coming together, it was like making a wonderful new dish. Now, years later, I think it’s contagious!”

The identification with and sense of common ownership of the city I experienced in Medellín goes way back, long before the present era of conscious cultural development. People even have an expression for things they consider typical of the northwest region of Colombia, especially Antioquia province, with Medellín at its center: paisa, they say, when a gesture, a dish, or an experience seems essentially local. That sense of identity is nourished now by the willingness of its arts networks and Casas de la Cultura to offer—and make good on—sincere and open invitations to the community to make them their own. What would it take to spread that way of operating here, making it not a rare exception but a daily delight?

Enjoy “Fruta Fresca” by Carlos Vives, a huge music star, actor, and emblematic cultural figure in Colombia.

Normalizing The Extraordinary in Medellín, Part One

This the first of a two-part account by Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard of a visit to Medellín, Colombia, in early December. 

I arrived in Medellín, Colombia a few days after a man who claimed to be acting with divine guidance killed three and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. The very next morning I learned that 14 people had been killed and 22 seriously injured at an attack on a holiday party at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.

A day or so later, “The Daily Show” ran a montage of clips of President Obamaresponding to a series of mass shootings. Watching that, you start to ponder the normalization of terror.

Many people in the U.S. like to think of Americans as civilized. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone righteously condemn the barbarism of another society without noticing the scale of our own. So I can’t imagine a better place than Medellín—whose name evokes in the minds of my fellow citizens images of the narco-terrorism that allowed drug lord Pablo Escobar to hold sway over the city until he was killed in 1993—to explore the question of how to transform a society in the grip of fear and violence into a functioning civil society.

Are you surprised that the answer is art and culture? For decades, I’ve been asking people to envision the commitment to communal creativity fully expressed in public programs, to dream into a future shaped by their largest vision.

Are you surprised when I tell you that in Medellín, I saw this future and felt as if I had walked into a dream, the extraordinary made real? I promise you I am not romanticizing: Medellín is a city of 2.5 million with a significant share of poverty, gangs, and crime. For some of the poorest, Escobar was seen as a Robin Hood and “civil society” doesn’t exactly ring a bell. The challenges of class, race, and gender privilege persist. I am not claiming to have discovered heaven on earth, but something almost as extraordinary for an observer coming from the U.S. circa 2015: a public sector that has embodied and supported the public interest in culture with tremendous forethought, intentionality, and caring; and results to match that intention.

I was invited to Medellín to deliver a keynote at a congress of networks in music, dance, theater, and visual arts supported by a municipal public sector that devotes nearly forty percent of its budget to education and culture. (New York comes close, with nearly one-third of its budget allocated to education, plus a small fraction for culture, but most U.S. cities fall far short.) The largest network is La Red de Escuelas de Musica de Medellín. Here’s a description in the network’s own words:

The Medellín, Colombia music schools network, “la Red,” is a public citywide program created by the Mayor’s Office…as a response to Municipal Council Agreements 03 and 04 of 1996 and 072 of 1998. Its primary purpose is to generate and strengthen processes of coexistence and civic culture in children and youth through the enjoyment and learning of music.

It is one of the five Artistic and Cultural Education Networks of the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and is operated by the Faculty of Arts of the University of Antioquia.

La Red works in five dimensions: Pedagogical, Aesthetic-music, Social-cultural, Communicative and Administrative….

Objectives:

• To encourage dialogue, inclusion, participation, and social integration

• To nurture citizens for life through art and culture

• To ensure the rights of children and youth in the dimensions of being, doing and knowing

• To strengthen and promote a public social and musical program in Medellín.

The network operates 27 music schools, 13 focusing on stringed instruments and 14 on wind instruments and percussion. They are based in repurposed houses and a variety of cultural centers in 14 of the city’s 16 communes, engaging 5,000 students between 7 and 24 years of age, who take music lessons and participate in choirs, bands and orchestras. Visit the network’s YouTube channel to see videos focusing on its programs. You’ll find more details at the website.

In the space of a few days, I met many people involved in La Red and the corresponding networks in dance, drama, and visual arts. Here are just two of the things I saw:

Parents and siblings beaming on folding chairs for an outdoor recital—the last before the school closed for winter holiday break—held in the driveway of a two-story house that serves as the network’s smallest school. The Escuela de Música de Villatina sits high on a hill in Comuna 8 in the eastern part of the city, reached via narrow streets lined with small houses and shops. Advanced students waited patiently as beginners took their turn. The director, Alvaro Acosta, gracefully made space for a longtime student, now in college, to conduct one piece. The stories I heard as I sat and listened are the ones my heart longs to hear: a boy who felt he could never fit in finding ways to connect and and form friendships through music and the community it created; a girl who sustained herself through her mother’s long illness and passing through music and the sense of extended family it enabled.

Under the enthusiastic and loving direction of director Claudia García, we watched a string ensemble at the Escuela La Milagrosa—based in the Casa de la Cultura Avila, perched on a hillside not so far away in Comuna 9—rehearse for its performance in an upcoming civic event. The young members were kind enough to answer a visitor’s questions about how they got involved. One after another, they told similar stories: I love music, but never thought I could learn. One day, I was walking past with my mother and hearing the music, asked if we could go in. We discovered music lessons were free! That was a dozen years ago, and now I am teaching the little ones, and seeing myself in them. As we left, Claudia turned to us: “I think I am going to let them perform without a conductor; they have worked so hard and are doing so well, they don’t need me onstage.”

I want to share some of the words of Ana Cecilia Restrepo, La Red’s director, when—thinking of Paris, Beirut, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino—I asked how it had come to pass that in remaking itself, Medellín understood culture as the crucible in which a civil society would be forged. Ana stressed (as had everyone else I spoke with) that while art is important, one aspect in particular surpassed all others: the ability of people to come together through creative expression in “a real encounter, the encounter that produces joy, pleasure, enjoyment.” It’s not the production of an artwork that generates the desire to connect in this way, but the encounter itself, shaped by art.

Ana explained that in the recent history of Medellín, the atmosphere of terror that reigned until the mid-90s kept people in “a state of isolation, in a state of alienation, we really couldn’t find ways of relating to each other that weren’t constricting. I didn’t live here when the dark days of those violent times were going on,” she told me, “but I remember coming to visit and at 8 o’clock at night, not one single car on the street, not being able to go out after 8 o’clock at night. Any moving thing was a threat. Any moving vehicle—a taxi, a motorcycle, anything—would spark negative thoughts. As soon as I was getting off the airplane coming to Colombia, the lens immediately became a lens of fear and risk, a lens of how exposed we are.

“We weren’t able to go out, we weren’t able to meet, so people began to feel that we have to do something to take back the streets, to get rid of the fear. It starts on that level. Around in December, as you’ve seen, it’s very festive here, very Christmasy. A lot of fireworks are used. At that time when you heard them it was like, “Is this a bomb?” They used the fireworks to cover up the bombs. Now I think being able to celebrate and being able to make noise, that’s an important thing, being able to not fear, being able to talk. It’s still at a turning point, I feel, even 20 years later.”

In the late 90s, Ana explained, Medellín began to look for “places that has gone through this sort of oppression, through this sort of terror. There are a lot of things about Barcelona that people here identify with, not only politically speaking, historically speaking, and culturally speaking, but also geographically. After something had ended, how do these other countries bring back possibility and weave social fabric? One thing that happened a lot in Barcelona is that culture and cultural activities were very easy to get to and engage and have a relationship and having enjoyment around. The whole idea is that the cultural aspect of life is directly linked to citizenship, to a civic culture.

“If you compare Medellín to Bogota, for example, the investment in culture was more towards higher art purposes, high quality productions and and hyperbolized festivals. Where here it’s been linked to this idea of citizenship, how we create, educate, and transform people into citizens. Embedded in that is this whole idea that started even before the late 1990s. We see small organizations and civil society start to gather on a very small scale. But at least we start to dream on paper how culture can be central, and those little dreams are picked up in different ways by the right people at the right time to make an impact.

“Sometimes it comes down to that. For example, the Red was basically a couple of people who were lobbying, a particular Mayor gets elected and listens to them and says okay, it’s going to be a reality. Things start to happen in the early 90s that carry on into the late 90s. The central idea is that you create civil society through participation, and that was getting written down, planned, and carried out. Now we have a cultural participation system with a structure of councils. It’s more sophisticated and elaborate, but it started out in this place where we all have to do something, nobody would do it for us, we were just taking the risk and not knowing that the things we were doing would have these results.”

Think about the U.S. cities in which people fear to walk at night. Can we transform a culture of violence too? In Part Two of this series, I will share more stories from Ana Restrepo, and from Medellín’s neighborhoods—fire jugglers at stoplights!—including the remarkable Casa de la Cultura Los Alcazares in Comuna 12, deeply involved in a network of community gardens Medellín has embraced.

Here’s a spirited performance by La Red’s tango orchestra of a piece that appears on the network’s second CD, Melancolico Medellín.

Become a Founding Co-Conspirator; Get Your Artistic License!

A sample Artistic License. Tape or draw your face in yours!

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is a national action network mobilizing creativity in the service of social justice. Launching this people-powered department has been a labor of love—a grassroots endeavor with an estimated 30,000 volunteer hours contributed so far. Our team has been working to raise grant funds and just learned that a foundation is ready to match new contributions dollar-for-dollar. So, we’re asking Citizen Artists who believe in our work to step up as a Founding Co-Conspirators, with an Artistic License to prove it!  

Some background: More than five years ago, while working with Colombia’s Ministry of Culture, Adam Horowitz (USDAC Chief Instigator) commissioned a few hundred posters from a printmaker in Bogotá for an imagined entity known as the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. What began as an imported poetic gesture became a set of big, burning questions for the intergenerational, intercultural, multi-disciplinary team we've formed here in the States: How might we shift art and culture from the margins to the center of civil society, given their true value and support as catalysts for social transformation? What would it look like to barnraise a people-powered department as both a playful work of collaborative art and as a serious vehicle for community-building, field-building, and movement-building? How might we perform the work of a U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, thereby generating momentum for programs and policies that help shift ours from a society of consumers to a society of creators?

We officially launched the USDAC with a press conference in October, 2013. Since then, we’ve hosted hundreds of participatory, arts-infused community events in more than 40 states, engaging more than 10,000 people of every age and background in envisioning and enacting a society rooted in empathy, equity, and social imagination. From the People’s State of the Union, to #DareToImagine, to the Imaginings led by Cultural Agents to spark ongoing local organizing, we’ve seen how hungry folks are to bring their full creative selves to building a more just world. (You can read all about what we’ve been up to and where we’re headed in our recent report, “An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research,” meet our National Cabinet, or explore our videos to see the USDAC in action.)

Given what’s happened in just two years since our public launch, it's evident we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible with large-scale creative and cultural organizing. We’ve held off from asking friends and family for financial support until we were certain that this project had legs. It’s now abundantly clear that it does. In fact, it feels like it could sprout some wings….

In order to sustain the momentum and to build the infrastructure that can bring our efforts to the next level we need support, and so we’re inviting you today to make a tax-deductible investment in creative people-power. The first 250 folks who sign up to give at least $5/month (or make a one-time donation of $75 or more) will be listed as Founding Co-Conspirators and issued a limited edition Artistic License! You can donate easily and securely here. (If you’d prefer to send a check there are details posted for how to do that.) A contribution at any level is deeply appreciated and will be matched dollar for dollar.

To borrow a phrase from a Billie Holiday song, “the impossible will take a little while.” But we’re committed to the long game, knowing that the cultural shift we seek is going to take time, audacity, and some radically creative organizing. As a people-powered department, growing a base of supporters is critical to our success. This is an invitation to be among the first...

www.usdac.us/donate

The USDAC is an act of collective imagination, and it's through your participation that it has come into being. Thank you for being a part of this journey. We look forward to all that we will create together. 

There’s A Place for You in the People’s State of the Union

Share a story you think the next President absolutely needs to hear.

Imagine sitting in a Story Circle of friends or neighbors at the People’s State of the Union 2016 and being offered this invitation. What would your story be?

Some Citizen Artists might want to tell about the time they invited neighbors to #DareToImagine a world without homelessness or HIV. Another teller might share a tale about a job being imported overseas or a new job opening up unexpected possibilities. Someone else might tell about the anger, pain, desire for justice that birthed #BlackLivesMatter; or a time a city welcomed refugees with open hearts and arms.

Share a story about something you have experienced that gave you insight into the state of our union.

Last week the USDAC launched #PSOTU2016, the second iteration of our annual civic ritual. Already, dozens of people have signed up to host Story Circles between January 23 and 31, 2016. Whether you’d like to host a single Circle of a few friends around your own kitchen table or plan a large-scale community event with multiple Circles, please scroll down to sign up on this page, and you’ll instantly have access to a Toolkit, online training, and a bunch of other materials that make it super-easy to do.

Scroll down further to check out 2015 stories, a video, and the collaborative Poetic Address to the Nation to get a glimpse of what #PSOTU2016 can do. This year, the Poetic Address will be live-streamed on Free Speech TV!

Share a story about a moment you felt true belonging—or the opposite—in this country.

In 2015, belonging and community were the top tags for stories shared to the PSOTU Story Portal. In a way, the PSOTU motto says it all: Democracy is a conversation, not a monologue. No single individual can sum up the state of our union; it takes all our stories to understand where we are now and where we want to be going. When we join together in real time to share those stories in a Circle of absolute invitation and true equality, we experience a taste of belonging that feeds the hunger for community.

If all PSOTU accomplished were to introduce neighbors to a wonderfully engaging and democratic mode of dialogue and an opportunity to listen deeply to each others’ stories, that could be enough. But it’s also a form of action research. Download our free publication, An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research, to see how community members’ stories turn into exciting, generative ideas for new policies and actions that respond to their concerns and hopes.

To give you a taste, here’s a snippet of a story printed in the report that was contributed by a teacher in Philadelphia:

On a Friday afternoon before school began this year (I’m a teacher in a public school in North Philadelphia, about ten minutes from where I live in East Falls), every single teacher in the entire school and all the staff and the security staff as well walked throughout North Philadelphia as a group. And all of us wore our Edison shirts and walked the neighborhood that our kids walk to school. People came out to look, like who are these crazy people walking in green shirts throughout the neighborhood, and it’s a neighborhood I worked in as a teenager painting murals. And kids were coming out— they hadn’t started school yet, and they were yelling at us “Hey,” and I thought that maybe there’s this potential they would throw things at us because we’re teachers— we’re the bad guys in many cases—but the people in the community came up to us and said thanks. Thanked us for coming out and seeing them.

The USDAC is working with organizations to promote Story Circle events to their constituencies, tailoring Story Circle prompts to their issues: “Share a story about something you have experienced that gave you insight into the state of education in our union” for instance. Or environment, health care, gender justice…. If you’re interested in talking about it, just drop us a note at hello@usdac.us.

Behind #PSOTU2016 is a simple idea befitting a people-powered department: policy shouldn’t be something abstract, imposed on communities. People’s voices, visions, and dreams should create the fertile field from which real cultural democracy springs. To change the world, we have to change the story. Sign up today. 

USDAC Statement on Syrian Refugee Crisis

The USDAC calls on all artists and creative activists to use our gifts for compassion and justice, sharing images, performances, experiences, writings, and other works of art that raise awareness, build connection, cultivate empathy, and inspire us to welcome those who are forced from homes that are no longer safe.

More than four million Syrians have been driven from their homes, becoming refugees. Although state governors hold no power to bar entry to the U.S., a short time after the acts of terrorism that took lives in Beirut and Paris, more than half have issued statements rejecting Syrian refugees within their borders. Polls have shown that many Americans oppose accepting Syrian refugees. Poll results from the 1930s and 1940s showed majority opposition to accepting German child refugees and Jews; and from the 1970s majority opposition to the admission of refugees from Southeast Asia.

Once again, we must ask:

• Who are we as a people? 
• What do we stand for? 
• How do we want to be remembered?

As a culture of fear and isolation? Or as a culture that values every human life, extending love and compassion to newcomers needing refuge?

As a people-powered department, we honor the stories of those whose ancestors were brought here by force, those who sought refuge here, and those rooted on this land before others arrived. Together, we can choose to create a culture of belonging, welcoming new culture-bearers. Together, we can live up to the promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty:

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome….

We join together in affirming to all public officials and policymakers that a culture of fear and isolation cannot stand. We join together in applying our gifts to sustaining a culture of compassion and justice. We stand together with generations of creative activists in communities across the nation who have been envisioning and working toward a world of equity and belonging for all.

Signed by:

• Maribel Alvarez, Minister of Public Sentiment, Tucson, AZ
• Liliana Ashman, Story Hunter-Gatherer, New York, NY
• Caron Atlas, Minister of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts, Brooklyn, NY
• Judy Baca, Minister of Sites of Public Memory, Venice, CA
• Daniel Banks, Catalytic Agent, Santa Fe, NM
• Jack Becker, Public Art Mobilizer, St. Paul, MN
• Roberto Bedoya, Secretary of Belonging, Tucson, AZ
• Ted Berger, Senior Policy Advisor, New York, NY
• Ludovic Blain III, Chief Political Wonk, Berkeley, CA
• Larry Bogad, Minister of Tactical Performance, Berkeley, CA
• Eric Booth, Head Cheerleader for Teaching Artists, High Falls, NY
• Amelia Brown, Minister of Emergency Arts, Minneapolis, MN
• Sarah Browning, Minister of Poetry and Public Life, Washington, DC
• Con Christesen, Cultural Agent, St. Louis, MO
• Chrislene DeJean, Cultural Agent, Boston, MA
• Maria De Leon, Minister of Inclusive Leadership Transformation, San Antonio, TX
• Martha Diaz, Minister of HIp Hop Education, New York, NY
• Jayeesha Dutta, Cultural Agent, New Orleans, LA
• Dana Edell, Secretary of Creative Sparks, Brooklyn, NY
• Hayden Gilbert, Cultural Agent, Cleveland, OH
• Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk, Lamy, NM
• Beth Grossman, Cultural Agent, Brisbane, CA
• Lynden Harris, Cultural Agent, Cedar Grove, NC
• Mattice Haynes, Cultural Agent, Decatur, GA
• Jon Henry, Cultural Agent, Harrisonburg, VA
• Barry Hessenius, Minister of Nonprofit Arts Organizations, San Anselmo, CA
• Bob Holman, Minister of Poetry and Language Protection, New York, NY
• Adam Horowitz, Chief Instigator, Santa Fe, NM
• Denise Johnson, Cultural Agent, Baltimore, MD
• James Kass, Secretary of Belief in The Next Generation, San Francisco, CA
• Paul Kuttner, Minister of Cultural Scholarship, Salt Lake City, UT
• Dave Loewenstein, Cultural Agent, Lawrence, KS
• Kate McNeely, Action Maestr@, New York, NY
• Liz Maxwell, Chief Dot Connector, New York, NY
• Angela Miles, Master of Swag, Philadelphia, PA
• E. Ethelbert Miller, Minister of Sacred Words, Washington, DC
• Jaléssa Mungin, Deputy Deputy, Philadelphia, PA
• Meena Natarajan, Radical Equity Catalyst, Pangaea Division, Minneapolis, MN
• Martha Richards, Senior Strategist for Women Artists, Berkeley, CA
• Favianna Rodriguez, Secretary of Cultural Equity, Oakland, CA
• Julianna Ross, Cultural Agent, Seattle, WA
• Sebastian Ruth, Secretary of Music and Society, Providence, RI
• Allison Schifani, Lead Initiative Investigator, Bureau of Speculative Acts & Technologies of Empathy, Cleveland, OH
• Michael Schwartz, Cultural Agent, Tucson, AZ
• Shirley Sneve, Tribal Liaison, Lincoln, NE
• Jessica Solomon, Chief Weaver of Social Fabric, Baltimore, MD
• Elizabeth Streb, Action Architect, New York, NY
• Jack Tchen, Secretary of Curiosities, New York, NY
• Julia Terry, Cultural Agent, Philadelphia, PA
• Makani Themba, Minister of Revolutionary Imagination, Detroit, MI
• Fabiola Torralba, Cultural Agent, San Antonio, TX
• Ali Toxtli, Cultural Agent, Passaic, NJ
• Carlton Turner, Minister of Creative Southern Strategies, Atlanta, GA
• Mark Valdez, Minister of Ensemble Creativity, Los Angeles, CA
• Veena Vasista, ArtReach Coordinator, Santa Fe, NM
• Lily Yeh, Urban Alchemist, Philadelphia, PA
• Betty Yu, Cultural Agent, Brooklyn, NY
• Roseann Weiss, Cultural Agent, St. Louis, MO
• Yolanda Wisher, Rhapsodist of Wherewithal, Philadelphia, PA
• Steve Zeitlin, Minister for Art in Everyday Life, New York, NY

Meet the Minister of Hip Hop-Based Education and Sign Her Petition

Last week, USDAC Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz talked with our newest National Cabinet member, Martha Diaz, who is serving as Minister of Hip Hop-Based Education. On November 11, Martha launched a petition calling on President Obama to “designate Hip-Hop culture as a valuable and uniquely American national treasure worthy of being taught and practiced in all K-12 public schools.”

 The petition is part of a yearlong campaign leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Originated by the Hip Hop Education Center, which Martha founded and directs, it was created to accomplish three aims:

1. Have President Obama publicly acknowledge Hip-Hop culture as an American treasure worthy of study and practice in all public schools.
2. Create a national alliance with a policy committee for the Hip-Hop Education movement.
3. Introduce a joint resolution in both houses of Congress to integrate Hip-Hop culture in K-12 public schools curriculum and the National Park Service programs.

You’ll notice the USDAC listed as one of the campaign’s national allies, and we are proud to be there.

Adam began by asking Martha what brought her into this work.

Martha Diaz: Hip hop for me was beacon of light. As someone who is a first-generation Colombian-American, I didn’t have family members living near me, so I had to figure things out for myself. I was a shy girl in school. I spoke English but I thought in Spanish. It was always difficult for me to articulate what I was feeling. When I discovered hip hop in the school yard, I instantly knew that this was a way not only to express myself, but to build a community—build a family I didn’t have. So the b-boys became my family members, the b-girls, the deejays, the graffiti artists, the MCs.

Having this community helped build my self-esteem and create an identity that could help me through my life. It built my leadership skills. It politicized me through the music. It allowed me to see that it’s alright to be different. We have issues today with immigration: well, we had immigration issues back then too. Hip hop was a way for me to cope with all the issues surrounding me. I wanted to share this power with young people who are struggling, who are lost, sad and lonely. I wanted to say, “No, hip hop is here, is welcoming you, is offering you a platform, giving you a way to express yourself whether you want to dance or write or organize like I do.”

Adam Horowitz: Why the We The People for #HipHopEducation in Schools petition now?

Martha: With the upcoming election, it’s critical that political pundits and candidates know the hip hop community is very organized and powerful. We want to be part of the conversation politically and economically. We know that we’re contributing billions of dollars into the economy. Hip hop moguls are paying a lot of taxes and building companies and hiring people. We have some clout and we want them to understand that we want things to change.

The first thing we want to change is that we want hip hop to be recognized by our government as a national American treasure. Why? Because it needs to be taught in schools. Why? because young people need to identify with something positive. Right now the media is just showing one side of hip hop. We want to tell the whole story, and the only way to do that is to start in schools from K through12, the whole gamut. Starting with kindergarten, we want people to begin to come out of their shells and realize their own potential.

We didn’t just pull this out of a hat. It took five years of research and organizing to get to this moment. We are building on forty years of hip hop history, on the work of the pioneers who have traveled around the world as diplomats and peacemakers. The moment is now and we’re ready. And of course, November is hip hop history month!

Adam: So for the Citizen Artists reading this, what would you ask them to do?

Martha: First, really look at what we’re proposing. We’re proposing to have hip hop in the classroom as a valuable history, as American history and world history that should be studied by all. This isn’t just for black and brown kids. White kids love hip hop just as much: it’s for everyone. If we integrate hip hop in the classroom it’s going to help everybody.

I want people to sign and share the petition and be part of the movement. This is the beauty of hip hop: everybody gets to contribute. There’s no discrimination, we’re all one big family. Look at the allies we have listed in the petition. Everyone is contributing in some way, shape, or form. This is for everyone. Please join the movement.

Adam: Thank you. Welcome to the USDAC National Cabinet! We look forward to working with you!

Are You Ready? Cultural Agents’ Learning Community

Note: The USDAC’s Call for Cultural Agents inspired this reflection. Find it here and apply by November 20th.

I recently took part in a workshop co-led by Daniel Banks (who serves as Catalytic Agent on the USDAC’s National Cabinet) and Adam McKinney. The two together make up DNAWORKS.

In one exercise, small groups selected one of a long list of words that come up in conversations about equity, then proceeded to dive into its origins, the ways it is used (and possibly misused), its many facets of meaning.

Our little group chose “community,” which gave us plenty of scope for overlaps and contradictions. When does a group attain the status of community and why? We looked at geography, values, identity, and other grounds for forming—or feeling—an affiliation bearing that name. I cited my favorite observation on the subject from Raymond Williams, that “community” has only positive meanings—which can have a kind of negative effect: it’s easy to sanitize something by appending “community.” “Defense community” and “intelligence community” sound a lot cuddlier than “war industries” or “espionage operatives,” don’t they?

But that doesn’t negate the concept and the many ways “community” is used to lean into a sense of belonging and equality the word implies. USDAC Cultural Agents, for instance, take part in a learning community through video calls, elists, and other modes of communication at a distance. They learn from each other and from Cabinet members and other USDAC folks who have a wealth of experience and knowledge to share. That shared learning, which includes reflecting together on the work we do, is a big part of why we call the USDAC “action research,” why we see it as learning by doing. We know that knowledge must be grounded in practice, and for practice to become knowledge, we must explore and reflect on it.

Sound interesting? Until November 20th, the USDAC is accepting applications to serve as a volunteer Cultural Agent; you can apply online.

From the Great Southeastern Imagining of 2014

Later on in the workshop, participants paired up and listened deeply while each in turn shared a question we were afraid to ask. A lot of great ones were put up on a wallsheet. One person talked about a desire to go deeper: is it okay to ask whether people have questioned their methods, rather than feeling that what they are doing works well enough and simply repeating it? He asked himself this all the time: how much impact do I want make, and is the way I’m going about it the best way to achieve that?

Asking yourself this kind of question is good, but asking each other is going to yield more information. One thing I love about the USDAC is seeing people come to grips with questions like these in a supportive environment where everyone has something to learn and to teach.

I thought again about our small group’s conversation on the definition of “community.” Among the growing number of community-based artists (who go by many different labels), I see two ways the word is deployed. One seems analogous to electrical power: the artist plugs into “the community” just as a power cord plugs into an outlet. There’s some type of connection, representation, interaction, but it’s not so much about asking questions as applying the answers you already know. The work can be good, but does it invite and challenge people to go deeper?

In the other model, people think of community almost as a verb. Like democracy and freedom, it is never complete but always becoming. Activist artists and others who take part see themselves as partners, as collaborators, in weaving the cultural and social fabric that can contain all of the hopes and fears, skills and needs, and ways of being that create the deep belonging we call cultural citizenship.

Interested in going deeper? Here’s a link to information and an application to serve as a volunteer Cultural Agent; you can apply online Until November 20th.

Apply Now! Recruiting Cultural Agents

Today launches the USDAC’s third call for applications to serve as volunteer Cultural Agents. It’s been an amazing experiment and a rich learning journey since the first cohort—chosen from nearly 100 applicants—came on board early in 2014, followed by a second cohort at the end of that year.  

If the list of capacities and attitudes below resonates with you, or if you know someone else who’d be perfect for this key role in the nation’s first and only people-powered department, you’ll find everything you need to know about how to apply here. Don’t wait, because the deadline is Friday, November 20, 2015.

Cultural Agents are:

• Individuals with a demonstrated commitment to art, culture, and social change who are inspired to take up the USDAC call to action.

• Artists, organizers, educators, entrepreneurs, administrators, or others dedicated to fostering a creator culture in place of a consumer culture, and willing to volunteer their time.

• Connected to local creative life and committed to contributing to a national movement around USDAC values, through local organizing.  

• Experienced in and comfortable with group facilitation and organizing.

• Eager to learn from othersdoing similar work and to share expertise and experiences.

Cultural Agents take part in a learning community with dedicated artist-activists from every region and background working in a variety of arts media and with many different issues. It’s a serious and potentially transformative commitment. Just read about Cultural Agent Denise Johnson’s work in Baltimore in the aftermath of the April 2015 uprising; or the new Pledge of Allegiance created in Cultural Agent Julia Terry’s Philadelphia imagining.

Cultural Agents are key to growing national movement. More than 150 communities signed up to host People’s State of the Union 2015 story circle events, sharing stories online in a collective national self-portrait. Imaginings have included more than 3000 people. Volunteers come from a pool of 4,500 Citizen Artists who’ve signed on with the USDAC. Since October 2013, more than 10,000 people have been part of USDAC events in 40 states. We have a 29-member National Cabinet and an Action Squad which supports basic operations. We also partner with Imagining America, a consortium of 70+ universities nationwide, to develop USDAC college hubs. Because we want USDAC projects to be replicable, we create toolkits and offer technical assistance, such as our HI-LI Database.

If this sounds like the kind of company you want to keep, apply now.

First cohort cultural agents tuning in for a training call.

Four things we’ve learned from the first two cohorts of Cultural Agents are helping to shape the current call:

First, past Cultural Agents have hosted an Imagining (an arts-infused community dialogue focusing on the future of their community). This time around we’re opening Imaginings up to people who want to create a community gathering and art-based conversation focused on a specific issue or action rather than cultural life in general (for instance, see how Cultural Agent Betty Yu has focused on gentrification and displacement in her New York City Imagining and follow-up events).

Second, maybe a convening isn’t right for your community at this moment. In that case, as a Cultural Agent you can work toward another type of art-based project or campaign. We’re open to whatever your social imagination dreams up!

Third, it’s become clear that USDAC National Actions such as the recent #DareToImagine are great forms of action research—learning by doing—for Cultural Agents. The third cohort will come on board in mid-December (though we’ll have a holiday recess before the learning community gears up in January). This will coincide with our next National Action, People’s State of the Union 2016 (which promises to be even bigger and better than last year’s), so every Cultural Agent will be guided and supported to host a story circle as part of that action.

And fourth, the work Cultural Agents do in their communities has most value when they are thinking long-term rather than focusing on a single Imagining. Cultural Agents who’ve gone on to open local Field Offices have seen the impact of taking part in anational movement for cultural democracy that meets their local community where people are and connects them to allies across the country. Read about Dave Loewenstein’s experience in Lawrence, KS and Jess Solomon’s in Washington, DC, for instance: part one and part two of that series. Not every Cultural Agent will open a Field Office—that depends on local will and circumstances—but we ask everyone to consider ongoing impact and capacity-building, rather than focusing only on the short-term.

Each of these creates more opportunity, but also more responsibility. Being a Cultural Agent is a serious commitment geared toward long-term local cultural organizing. Read the call online for a full explanation of the role’s expectations and rewards. If it doesn’t fit with your plans right now, no worries; being a Cultural Agent is just one way of participating in the people-powered department. You can also join the USDAC community by taking part in National Actions as a Citizen Artist or as a partner organization, or by joining the Action Squad to volunteer in other roles.

Please let folks know about this amazing experiment in cultural democracy. And be sure to sign up as a Citizen Artist to be on the USDAC mailing list and learn about future calls. It’s fast and free and serious fun. 

Emissary Spotlight: #DareToImagine in New York City

The USDAC’s NYC Field Office and friends were busy during #DareToImagine earlier this month. There were 16 Imagination Station events on the map. Among others, New York City folks hosted:

• #DaretoImagine: An Evening of Cultural Resistance, Film and Art with Picture the Homeless;
• Staying in Harlem: Daring to Imagine Our Future with Brotherhood/SisterSol; and
•  #DaretoImagine Station: The Self-Determination Transporter at JACK, an arts center in Brooklyn.

There were also several events where #DareToImagine activities were folded into larger contexts, such as Cultural Agent Betty Yu’s leading a “letter from the future” exercise at the Laundromat Project; another with Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts-New York as the final session of their citywide forum October 23rd at the Point in the South Bronx (NOCD-NY Co-director Caron Atlas serves as Minister of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts on the USDAC National Cabinet); and another writing exercise at Bluestockings Bookstore, based on the prompt "Dare to Imagine: What if the U.S. wasn't an occupier of Afghanistan but...."

Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard spoke with Betty and Caron about their #DareToImagine experiences: what happened, how did people respond, what is the impact?

Arlene Goldbard: Congratulations on opening the NYC Field Office! It looks like a lot is happening.

Betty Yu: I was a little nervous after our big Imagining in June and the smaller follow-up in East Harlem whether folks would be up for more, but they were really, really excited about #DareToImagine, so that helped it come together. It’s a really good group of folks in the Field Office. We have seasoned folks, and then we have folks who don’t consider themselves artists but are telling their own stories in creative ways and are  helping others do the same. This idea that everyone has the potential to be artful is really interesting. It’s allowed for a wide net for folks to really get engaged. We got them activated for #DareToImagine, which is really great for laying down the groundwork for future membership and partnerships.

Arlene: What came together specifically for #DareToImagine?

Betty: Folks really wanted to continue the theme of housing rights, gentrification, and the rise of homelessness in New York City, because they all go hand-in-hand. In the last month and a half, Mayor DeBlasio and the NYPD have waged an assault on homeless people. So folks really identified that as a clear thing they really wanted to address. A lot of the subgroups from the different boroughs met. Almost every single group mentioned the increased amount of police surveillance and police violence. So folks wanted to also focus on that.

The two #DareToImagine events that we ended up putting a lot of time into were one in West Harlem, which was with Brotherhood/SisterSol, and the other was in East Harlem with Picture the Homeless.

#DareToImagine with Brotherhood/Sister Sol

Also, I had been talking with Alex from JACK Art Center in Brooklyn because they’re a part of the Brooklyn Anti-gentrification Network. They are really aware of their own position as a new art center in a highly gentrified area. They really want to be a part of this conversation and not be seen as a gentrifier, which I appreciated a lot. We worked with them in this Afrofuturism teleporter station, because they had a series scheduled, “afroFUTUREqu##r.”

Then we did some more things centered on artists: with Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts-NY and another around a week of anti-war activities around the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.

Arlene: I saw some of your letters from the future on the #DareToImagine site. They all began, “I though you’d be happy to know,” which I loved as a prompt.

Betty: That worked great. I was happily surprised by NOCD-NY’s and the Laundromat Project’s success of the discussion. People really wanted to continue discussing and we ran out of time. People were very, very thoughtful and obviously had been thinking about this a lot because the New York City—that is the overarching main issue that everyone is dealing with—as artists, as poor people, working-class folks. The idea that all of New York City is just becoming Disneyland.

There was this theme of “people see us as these rich artists,” but whether they were a person of color or not, it was the same: “all of a sudden you get labeled as artist, because you’re clearly looking artsy, you’re coming into a neighborhood…” But in both sessions, people said, “We’re barely getting by.” Most folks are holding down a gazillion freelance jobs and adjuncting or teaching, and barely making ends meet.

One working artist talked about struggling in New York City, holding down multiple jobs and freelancing and still making only $11,000 that year. Other artists acknowledged they are perceived as gentrifiers by long-time residents, and also talked about how they were struggling and need affordable housing too. One artist said, “You know, I need a place to live too. I am very much empathetic with people’s struggle around housing rights and affordable housing.”

So those nuances kept coming up.

Arlene: In that kind of a situation artists can be bridge people, translating in both directions, seeing if there is any potential for movement. And they are often not seen that way, often they’re put in one category or the other.

Betty: Yeah, that’s exactly what multiple people said. They were like, we’re allies, we really want to be seen as not the culprit. We are people who are advocates for these kind of things, but we are also part of causing the problem too.

Arlene: Is there a story that particularly comes to mind when you think of these #DareToImagine experiences?

Betty: The one story that keeps coming to mind is from the East Harlem activity. We’d worked together before and I was thinking the #DareToImagine event should be in the Picture The Homeless office. Lynn Lewis, the executive director said, “No we’ve got to take over the plaza because that’s ground zero where they’ve been beating on homeless folks and pushing them out.”

It was about 80 percent homeless folks at that event. Folks who had been kicked out returned when they heard music and the film playing and all this laughter, and the NYPD were nowhere to be found because the homeless really fought hard for a safe space from it and finally at the last day got it.

The look on the people’s faces was amazing, that they were actually able to claim the space. There was a speak-out session at the beginning and end. Story after story, it was heartbreaking. This one African American man who is in his late 70s, a Marine who fought in Vietnam, told us, “I need a home, I am a vet, I’m not taken care of.” He pointed to the fact that he had no shoes, just some paper around his feet. It brought tears to my eyes when he said, “Thank you so much for listening to my story and allowing me a platform. I never knew that there was a group like this or a space to tell my story. So that was really powerful to me.

The biggest thing now is building on that momentum. We’re going to have a big visionary kind of planning meeting the first weekend of November.

Arlene: You are doing great work there. I want to thank you on behalf of the USDAC.

Betty: The fact that you all are so open, supportive of how folks organize the Field Offices—I really appreciate that because for me, especially because this is New York City, I know it’d be different if it were Kansas or somewhere else. In New York City there are so many artists collectives, and it’s important to bring those together and have those conversations, but also to be a bridge between the artists’ community and those working on organizing work. And then the artists themselves figuring out how we use culture and the arts to help unleash people’s creativity. And through that, bringing different communities together that often are isolated from each other even though all it’s New York City. So, that’s why it’s exciting, and it’s really resonating with folks.

#DareToImagine with NOCD-NY

Arlene Goldbard: What connects Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts with the USDAC and #DareToImagine?

Caron Atlas: We love the idea of imaginative agency. A lot of what we’re doing is trying to shift the way people think, get out of a reactive mode and be in a proposing mode. Even our name—Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts—instead of complaining about cultural districts being artificial or not really including the people in their neighborhood, we decided to be what it should be: cultural districts that recognize what’s already there and build it up and strengthen it.

Arlene: How did you come to #DareToImagine?

Caron: An artist brought it to us—Ryan Gilliam, who’s part of our working group. She wanted to open up another circle focused on artists to look at some of these policy issues from the experience of artists’ practice, so she started up the NOCD-NY artist's circle to complement the NOCD-NY core group of organizers, which had been going for about five years. All of us that were part of the Naturally Occurring Cultural District Alliance recommended some artists and one of them was Betty Yu, who’s worked with The Laundromat Project and with Arts and Democracy, which is my group, with Participatory Budgeting and others. She’s leading up the New York Field Office for the USDAC. At the second meeting, Ryan wanted to have artists really lead some kind of creative process and talk about their work and practice, so Betty offered to do #DareToImagine with the group. It was really amazing because such a powerful group of artists engaged in it. Betty and Ryan really led: I’m a cheerleader for it!

It brought people together for these powerful conversations using a cultural methodology. A lot of people are concerned about gentrification and displacement, so that was the theme. It gave people a way to talk about it that wasn’t a complaint session, it was about imagining how it could be different.

We called what we did “speed dating,” a kind short dyad where you share stories. Music was on, we walked around, and when the music stopped you find somebody to talk to. Betty gave us a prompt: one was to tell a story about a time you were displaced, another prompt was to tell a story when you were the displacer, and another one was what are you doing to try and shift it. I’m always amazed how you get so deep in that kind of thing. I found out so much about the people there that I never would know even if I went to hundreds of meetings with them.

I also guest-taught Kathy Engel’s class at NYU and I suggested we do #DareToImagine as a closing for the class. We went around a circle and everyone said what they dared to imagine. It was so hopeful and powerful; people went deep inside themselves with what they dared to imagine. I was inspired to do that because I was really moved when we ended a USDAC Cabinet meeting call and someone said “I #DareToImagine Utopia.” I was almost moved to tears because we don’t let ourselves imagine things like that.

Arlene: Thanks so much, Caron, for being a such a heartfelt and steadfast part of turning that around!

Emissary Spotlight: Imagining Salt Lake City

USDAC Minister of Cultural Scholarship Paul Kuttner Reports and Is Interviewed by CityHomeCOLLECTIVE

It has been an exciting week for the USDAC, with Imagination Stations popping up all around the country. This past Wednesday, Salt Lake City got in on the action. The station was a partnership between a few different local groups that share an interest in public art and participatory community development. The event took place at the Sorenson Unity Center ArtPark, in front of a huge mural of the local river system painted by one of our partners, Chris Peterson. The Sorenson Unity Center is located on the city’s west side, a majority Latina/o and immigrant area that has often been marginalized from local decision-making. We set up four canopy tents on the ArtPark’s green grass, each sheltering a different activity from the severe Utah sun. Hanging in front of the foremost tent was our banner, with the hashtag #DareToImagine and the question: What are your dreams for your community?

Attendees had a few choices of activities when they arrived. At one tent, they could take part in photography project called "OurSLC Claim It!” which asks residents to make “claims” for what they want in their neighborhoods and public spaces. These claims will be used to inform four youth-created public art projects. At another tent, they could share a story with the West Side Storytelling Project, an oral history initiative collecting local stories for a new library special collection. At another tent, they could fill out a survey asking for their opinions about local development. Or they could grab a stone, write their dreams on it with oil pastels, and add it to a cairn being constructed in the Center’s Garden. Finally, if they were there at the right time, they could join a “walking conversation” to a nearby river confluence with Seven Canyons Trust and Jane Jacobs Walk.

We stayed out from 1:00pm to 7:00pm, hoping to catch different waves of people coming to the center. At some points it was a slow trickle, while at others there was a small rush. Things were the liveliest when, twice during the day, after-school programs at the nearby multicultural center came by. These elementary-aged young people enjoyed going from tent to tent, asking questions, writing on stones, and partaking of the free candy. OurSLC Claim It! had to leave at 4, so after that we switched to having people write their imaginings on a small chalkboard I borrowed from my three year old son. We closed out the day as the shadows were getting long. In the end, fifty-some people took part in the activities, offering thoughts from the playful (I #DareToImagine that I am Spiderman) to the profound (I #DareToImagine a safe place where my children can grow, learn, and become well-rounded adults). The ideas, claims, and stories shared during the day will live on—as part of the USDAC online collection, and as part of local arts projects. And, hopefully, the new relationships built among the partners will live on too, sparking future creative action for community change.

The following is the text of an interview with Paul entitled "#DareToImagine | Claiming Our Future," which ran on 9 October on the CityHomeCOLLECTIVE site. 

We’re all for the expansion of this fair city. Where some see outsiders moving in and the terrifying notion of change, we see the opportunity for a rap sesh with a few fresh faces, both “new in town” and “established as hell”. One of the most crucial components of a successful city is its inhabitants’ ability to grow, and, subsequently, to have an open dialogue about the direction of said growth. And would you believe it? It’s almost as if the US Department of Arts and Culture has been reading our dear COLLECTIVE diary, ’cause that’s exactly the round table discussion they’ve conjured up with #DareToImagine: Claiming Our Future In SLC. The event, which takes place Wednesday, October 14th, is an opportunity for folks to gather and discuss the future they want for this salty town of ours. Organizers hope that through a range of activities–storytelling, photography, and a guided walk–attendees can begin “claiming spaces for our voices, our families, and our futures.” #DTI is “a part of a national week of action run by the US Department of Arts and Culture”, which is “the nation’s newest people-powered department, founded on the truth that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources for social change.” You don’t need usto tell you that we’re in a full round o’ applause for that notion ’round these parts. The organization is rattling off a few of our favorite buzzwords, too: “radically-inclusive, useful and sustainable, and vibrantly playful” (yes, yes, and yes please), and they aim to “spark a grassroots, creative change movement, engaging millions in performing and creating a world rooted in empathy, equity, and social imagination.” Haven’t gotten involved in your community lately? Roll up your sleeves and get some social activism all up in those nail beds. We chatted with USDAC national cabinet member Paul Kuttner to get the lowdown on this local landscape-changing event. Listen up.

---

How do you fit in to all this? My role in this stems from the fact that I am on the USDAC’s national cabinet, my title is “Minister of Cultural Scholarship.” When the week of action was called, I began reaching out to see if anyone was interested in doing one in SLC.

And we’re ever-so-glad you did! Is this event for all residents of Salt Lake, or just those folks on the West Side? Everyone is welcome—they can discuss whatever communities they are a part of.

Will there be more of these events in other neighborhoods? This is the only SLC-based event during this week of action. However, there are hundreds around the country, and the USDAC will be calling for similar national actions in the future—perhaps next time we can get more partners to do multiple events if this one goes well.

Who will be choosing the ideas on which to move forward? Locally, the stories, ideas, and photos collected at DareToImagine will be incorporated into ongoing projects. For example, the story booth at #DareToImagine represents the launch of an ongoing oral history effort called the West Side Storytelling project, run through the Sorenson Unity Center. Claim It! is an ongoing photographic arts project, and the photos taken at the event will become part of that project, which in turn will inform the construction of four art projects in locations around the city. In general, these efforts are not so much about choosing a few ideas and developing campaigns around them. Rather, they’re about collecting and sharing many ideas and diverse voices, in ways that can inspire action and change across the city. At the national level, the USDAC will be going through all the stories, hopes, dreams, and ideas from across the country, and pulling out some recurring themes. These themes will be selected based whether they have broad relevance across communities. They will inform a national policy platform focused on arts and cultural policy, to be pushed forward by the USDAC.

How will the projects be funded? Locally, the groups already have funding. The Civic Arts Studio, for example, is working on cultural development on the West Side, and is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Nationally, the USDAC is already developing proposals for how cultural policy can be funded through alternative forms of investment.

Is this an ongoing process or a one time gig? This is a one time project, but by partnering with local groups and integrating their ongoing work into the #DareToImagine, the products created here will continue to have a life locally and nationally.

Is there an example of something like #daretoimagine working in the past? Where has this been successful? The USDAC has been doing similar actions for two years around the country.

Any ideas in particular that you’re anticipating? We will be asking the same questions in different ways through each project, and expect a wide diversity of ideas, concerns, hopes, etc. We expect to be surprised!

#DareToImagine — An Invitation, A Mandate, A Call To Action

Picture this: It’s the year 2035. I would be 50 years old, and can imagine I’m experiencing the world quite differently than I am now at age 30. Imagine that you also are 20 years in the future, walking down the street in 2035 on a bright spring day and you suddenly have a moment of pause and reflection. It’s one of those personal touchstone moments, where externally the patter of life continues on as normal, but you personally for whatever reason flash back to the world as it was 20 years ago, and quietly reflect for a moment on how far things have come.

Now picture this: It’s 2035, and things are awesome. It’s a radical proposal, actually. We spend so much time perpetuating cultural narratives of gloom and doom, Hollywood produces a new apocalypse movie every week it seems, and even the progressive changemaker community I consider myself a part of spends a lot of time griping about how politics are owned by corporations, worrying that our natural world may be damaged beyond repair, genuinely struggling to disrupt systems that perpetuate class and race-based violence and prejudice.

And it’s true, in 2015, things were pretty bad.

But #DareToImagine this:

It’s 2035, and there’s a tangible sense that the tide is turning. Imagine that the work you have been engaged in for the past 20 years is showing significant results. All of the amazing people you know — organizers, activists, innovators, changemakers — all of that work and people you were inspired by in 2015 have made major strides in the past 20 years. It’s a really wild thought experiment, I realized yesterday as I facilitated a group of 10 people through this 20-minute exercise at #FeastUnite gathering in NYC, prepping for USDAC’s upcoming national action campaign. When I tap into this visioning, here’s what comes up for me:

The tangible sense in public space of a true melting pot — truly diverse and integrated spaces with more eye contact, a felt sense of trust and dignity, subconscious class and racist prejudices no longer defining our default interactions. Urban green spaces are valued, commonplace, and cared for collectively. Farming is cool, and there’s a big wave of the next generation moving outside the cities taking up the charge of growing sustainable, healthy food on a mass scale. The UN Development Goals set in 2015 really made an impact, and we’re learning what it means to live with our changed but still incredible, vibrant and resilient planet. The world is significantly less violent than it was, with radically strict gun control laws in the U.S. that seemed as impossible as a black president did at one point, but now it would be silly to fear a public shooting, it simply doesn’t happen anymore.

It’s not an idyllic utopian state — there is still work to be done. But you can feel in the air that a real cultural shift has taken place, that there is momentum in service of equity and empathy, and that now even more can be done.

I believe that this is possible. I believe in our capacity as dreamers, as strategic thinkers, as conscious creators to design new ways of being. I believe that there are so many options in front of us much, much bigger than the social systems we’ve created to date.

Here are things that feel too bold to say: I believe the U.S. could provide significantly more publicly funded social services that would come to redefine acceptable standards about the quality of life and dignity of all human beings. I believe that through a lot of hard work, it’s possible to heal the deeply damaging racist structures that were baked into the founding of this country and have been perpetuated for centuries. I believe that white people can come to terms with the guilt and damage caused by ancestors past, learn to take more ownership for all the ways institutional racism is perpetuated in the present, and begin to celebrate the individual responsibility and agency we have to dismantle that.

None of this is inevitable; there’s a lot of work to do over the next 20 years, and surely beyond.

But the good news is: the world will change. We hear all the time: “the world is changing fast,” “things aren’t what they used to be.” They sure aren’t. They couldn’t be. Change is the nature of our universe and all beings.The more interesting questions are: What will those changes be, and how many voices can be involved in visioning and creating the world’s next iteration?

When I started envisioning this yesterday, I was surprised at how much fear came up that made it really difficult to begin, get specific, and go even further. I think I am afraid, because maybe it won’t come true. I am worried about the problems of the world in 2015, and some days they just seem to get more complex and irreparable. Hopelessness is real, and maybe one of the greatest cultural dangers we have to grapple with today.

And so of course, this is why the process of envisioning is the most critical and perhaps the most radical thing we can do. As the great imagination gurus tell us: “Our capacity to create new worlds is directly influenced by our ability to imagine them.” If we actually want to use our agency and voice to help define what the world will look like in 20 years, then imagining is a mandate. Even if it’s scary, even if it feels silly, even if it feels impossible or that the world we want is so very far away.

Beginning October 10th, Emissaries from the Future will be popping up in strange, unexpected places all across the country, inviting thousands to join this radical act of collective visioning. It’s a bold charge, but I believe we’re up to the task. #DareToImagine new possibilities. Dare to dream real alternatives. Dare to let your heart open to that biggest, brightest possible future for all of us. I can’t wait to see what we come up with…

Emissary Spotlight: #DareToImagine Weapons of Mass Creation in New Mexico

“I’m a Chicano artist from Los Angeles,” Israel F. Haros Lopez—“Iz”—told me. “I’m a multimedia artist, I do visual work, I do music, I do mural work.” He’s currently an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, focusing on this year’s theme of “Immigration/Emigration.” Iz is also an Emissary from the Future in the USDAC’s #DareToImagine National Action, taking place nationwide from 10-18 October. And he’s taking his role as a catalyst very seriously.

“My work is invested in talking to people, waking their artistic sensibilities, giving people the tools to recognize their own potential, to not feel like they don’t have enough skills—to know that art is always something in the people, you don’t have to be a professional artist to make art. It’s directly tied to politics. For me, a lot of work has be in conversation with immigration policies, with local policies, and in some ways about healing but also in finding direct local action and being creative.

“#DareToImagine is in direct alignment with how I work.

“It sparks the possibility of doing events on a regular basis. For a lot of us in Santa Fe, the intersection between art and politics is hard to find. There’s not a lot of people here engaged in that. This is an art community that is second to New York in art sales, which has a lot to do with tourism, with a very particular art aesthetic. So while there’s a lot of things to do with art, art that’s socially and politically inclined—spaces that work with that type of work—are fewer. So we’re trying to create more spaces. #DareToImagine is the perfect art form to be doing that. When we heard about #DareToImagine, we said let’s try to do as many events as possible to plant the seed, to spark the artistic movement. It definitely sparked people’s imagination, being free to create Imagination Stations.

“Whatever USDAC actions are coming up, we’ll branch out because we want to have Albuquerque involved and other parts of New Mexico. New Mexico needs so many things around education, teen pregnancy, drug use—this state needs things like #DareToImagine to be empowering, people-powered art initiatives that use creativity to change your local environment.”

Israel F Haros Lopez behind projected images of his own work.

Iz has been in Santa Fe for six years. He grew up in Los Angeles, surrounded by the creations of the Chicano mural movement, then when to school at UC Berkeley. I asked if he was familiar with the mural work of SPARC, whose founder Judy Baca serves on the USDAC National Cabinet as Minister of Sites of Public Memory.

“Yeah,” Iz told me, “thinking about coming to my own artistic creativity, it took me a while to realize how much that influenced me. I was painting on these big boards, and I would get a bigger board and get a bigger board….  My art history classes were the neighborhood murals, so that was part of what created me as an artist. East L.A. has more murals condensed in one location than just about anyplace. That was my museum. I find myself making bigger and bigger work all the time because of Judy Baca’s work and other East L.A. street-scapers coming out of the ‘70s Chicano muralist movement.”

After USDAC Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz approached Iz about #DareToImagine, instead of creating a single Imagination Station, the artist set out to engage others in a whole chain of events. There’s a mural in Espanola, a predominantly Latino community north of Santa Fe where a significant proportion of the population lives below the poverty line, and where Moving Arts Espanola, a much-admired arts program for kids, is making a difference. Founder Roger Montoya, along with artists Scott Davis and Luis Pena, “found me a wall in Espanola that will be part of #DareToImagine. I do these coloring books, so it will be me coming in doing the original line work, and then the community filling it in.”

 “The mural is called ‘Weapons of Mass Creation,’” Iz continued. “We are weapons of mass creation. The imagery will be based on Azteca and Mayan images but modernized. The bigger issue that they want to bring in is around reciprocity, looking at the earth as something that we’re connected to and that we have to respect.”

That’s just one element of Iz and his colleagues’ #DareToImagine plan. He’s making an Imagination Station “based off of this ice cream cart that’s a screen printer by Fe Montes’ and Joel Garcia’s work back in East L.A.” [There are some great images of the Politricked Public Art Cart here.] “This cart has a screen printer on it. It’s a two-way thing where we teach people how to stencil, then put those stencils on the screen printer. We’ll put these different people’s stencils on it, so whatever messages that they’re bringing can be included.”

Then there’s a second Imagination Station where “people come inside of this giant Olmeca head to imagine what Santa Fe could look like in the future they want.” Plus “someone out in Ribera, New Mexico, is taking the lead on doing #DareToImagine a world without borders, and setting up a watercolor station there. We’re also looking at Indigenous People’s Day, October 12th, and the theme of #DareToImagine Indigenous People’s Day every day, which would be an open-mic art happening. And we’ve got some youth in Santa Fe High School that are doing a whole #DareToImagine around hip-hop, doing rap and breakdancing and making a mural which will actually be on the school site, which is going to be pretty awesome.

The giant Olmeca head Imagination Station beginning to take shape.

“Also, Scott Davis has been designing a universal passport, connecting #DareToImagine to a world without borders, a world where we’re free to migrate back and forth. If you look back at our histories, we’re all migrating to something. We’re inviting people to migrate towards a bigger artistic vision. What does that look like with all the refugee crises that are going on through out the world, not just here in the U.S.-Mexico border, but in Europe and other parts of the world where war is creating all these refugees? How do we create a different reality of accepting all our differences and respecting other people’s boundaries and cultures? That’s something that we’re going to have for the second Saturday, October 17th.”

These are just a few of the New Mexico #DareToImagine events planned. Be sure to visit the #DareToImagine website on or after October 10th, when the Action launches, to learn more about the Imagination Stations of New Mexico and others across the country, and to post your own vision of a future you #DareToImagine!

Arlene Goldbard, Chief Policy Wonk

"An Act of Collective Imagination" Is Published!

While #DareToImagine is gearing up for what promises to be an amazing launch on October 10th, we’ve got even more news to share. The USDAC’s first major publication—An Act of Collective Imagination: The USDAC’s First Two Years of Action Research is now available for download from this link: http://usdac.us/report-on-first-two-years

An Act of Collective Imagination is the first publication to summarize the USDAC’s work to date along with the lessons we’ve learned about translating community members’ visions into powerful ideas and action.

In 2016, after multiple rounds of Imaginings and National Actions, the USDAC will launch its first official policy platform, a compendium of proposals for policies and initiatives that can significantly advance cultural democracy: pluralism, equity, and collaborative creativity in support of social justice and social inclusion.

This report was created to offer an inspiring glimpse of the possibilities to come. It portrays community-envisioned cultural policy that embodies the public interest in culture. We know this can take the place of special-interest cultural policy designed by and for the most powerful direct beneficiaries.

What if that glimpse turned into a steady gaze? We foresee a time in which cultural policymakers understand their task as listening deeply to the aspirations and concerns of the populace and responding with creativity to ensure full cultural citizenship for everyone in every community. 

An Act of Collective Imagination features six specific policy ideas to address the needs and aspirations people have shared at Imaginings and through National Actions:  

• A Bureau Of Cultural Citizenship to support and enact full community belonging;
• support for Rapid Artistic Response in times of crisis;
• a Cultural Impact Study, analogous to environmental impact assessment;
• a Bureau Of Teaching Artistry;
• a universal Basic Income Grant; and
• an EcoArts Fund. 

In addition to these and other ideas emerging from USDAC organizing, An Act of Collective Imagination offers responses to the perennial question: "and how will we pay for a deeper investment in culture and creativity?"

As we always say, everything created must first be imagined. So as a people-powered department, we’ve taken matters into our own hands, demonstrating how it might be done. The required culture shift may start small, with specific communities and organizations adopting the generative policy ideas offered here. But with the help of Citizen Artists like you, it can spread and come to fruition. Download the report, share your thoughts, and join us in making the impossible possible!