Transformational Leadership at the NEA: Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson’s Keynote
2022 Conference Blog
Tram Nguyen
It was immediately clear from Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson’s keynote why she has been called one of our nation’s most profound thinkers about the intersection of arts and culture with justice, equity and liberation.
Her quietly potent combination of rigorous and visionary scholarship, lived experience as a woman of African American and Mexican descent, and boundary-spanning leadership were on full display, sending me scurrying afterward to look up her publications and read more of her thinking.
It was also evident from her speech that Dr. Jackson, the nation’s first African American and Mexican American chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, views her perch there with an eye toward creative possibility and willingness to build and exercise power in the service of change.
She has already expanded the NEA’s budget and is leveraging its influence with other federal agencies, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and state and regional arts infrastructures to increase resources and seize the opportunity of crisis for transformation. As she noted, the last two years have seen extraordinary challenges of pandemic, heightened racial reckoning, political polarization, and more. The arts as a sector have been among the hardest hit—with the value added to GDP by performing arts falling nearly 73% between 2019 and 2020.
Since taking up her post at the NEA in January 2022, Dr. Jackson’s message has been consistent: we must “learn from our examined experience and imagine and plan for what the future can look like — rather than simply aspiring to snap back to what things were like pre-pandemic.”
This is where her 30-year background of work to understand and advance the role of arts and culture within the field of urban planning and community development offers such deep insight. Beyond default notions of just “adding art” to make things fun and engaging or to beautify neighborhoods, Dr. Jackson’s work is about a framework to consider creativity and cultural self-determination as foundational to efforts to address historic and structural racism and harm to marginalized communities.
Whether in planning and community development, or in public health, Dr. Jackson has been on the ground floor of laying the foundation to build connections across disciplines and transforming their practices from a community-centered and culturally-rooted approach.
From this vantage point, it becomes clear that the opportunities emerging from the last few years’ crises—these opportunities of racial equity declarations and equity offices cropping up from the White House on down to cities and counties across the nation—will be neither durable nor meaningful without the arts. Without, in other words, the full participation of communities whose humanity and creativity find expression through their art and culture.
It's through the concept of “artful lives,” a way of being, that communities make meaning, ask questions, dream, and connect to the divine, in Dr. Jackson’s words. “The arts are necessary for us to do the work of repair and evolution, essential to getting us unstuck. It’s through the arts that we’re fully able to access our power to make change.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tram Nguyen joins us from Oakland, CA for the virtual track of the 2022 GIA Conference.
She currently works in the Health Equity, Policy, & Planning team in the Office of the Director, Alameda County Public Health Department.
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The 2022 GIA Annual Conference begins on Thursday, October 6 and runs through Wednesday, October 12. In the meantime, get familiar with our virtual portal and check out the in-person sessions!
You can follow the convening and join the conversation using the hashtags #ConvergeTransform and #GIArts2022 on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And, don’t forget to visit the Conference Blog for stories and reporting from the in-person and virtual conference tracks throughout the week.
