Feeling the Ground Beneath Our Feet: Reflections on Freedom Maps
Ron Ragin and Maria Cherry Rangel
From 2017-2020, Maria Cherry Rangel and Ron Ragin conducted a research project that culminated in the report Freedom Maps: Activating Legacies of Culture, Art, and Organizing in the U.S. South. Here they share reflections on that work and look to its future.
In Spring 2017 we responded to a request for proposals from a national foundation to conduct a scan at the intersections of arts, culture, and organizing in the U.S. South. The foundation wanted to better understand the current state of artistic practice in the region; the health of its arts and culture infrastructure; and the ways artists and culture workers were helping to build progressive infrastructure and movements for justice. We knew we had to submit a proposal.
It was an auspicious time in U.S. politics, and the South was the front line of many struggles. The first Trump administration was well underway. Anti-trans and anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation were on the rise. Extrajudicial murder of Black people was escalating. New jails and detention centers were being constructed and planned. Climate catastrophe was increasingly undeniable. Systems of oppression were mobilizing to target and attack our communities, and folks were organizing and fighting back.
In that context, we believed that a report on arts and cultural infrastructure in the South could help amplify and draw resources to the transformative actions taking place in the region, often below the radar of national and/or private philanthropic organizations. As queer artists of color living, working, and organizing in the South, our lived experience showed us that many critical efforts were stewarded by communities that are excluded from grant-based funding sources. We knew that we had networks, perspectives, and politics in which we wanted a regional scan of this sort to root. And along with more conventional data collection approaches, we wanted to center collaborative community storytelling and the dreams and visions of folks who were Black, Indigenous, rural, queer, trans, immigrant, and/or approached their work with explicitly radical politics. When we received the contract, we were thrilled and knew we had a charge to keep – to our colleagues, our ancestors, the generations coming behind us, and our home communities whose realities were all too often erased, dismissed, and forgotten.
It is important to emphasize that the report mattered to the people. We intentionally brought in colleagues whose stories were undertold. For many,this represented the first time they had been asked to share their stories, and talk about their work and experiences. It was meaningful to have their work amplified in a national context, and meaningful that a national funder wanted to understand the South and their practice better. To many it signified a kind of cautious hope. It felt like it could be the beginning of a sea change, or different funding futures.
From 2017 to 2019, and with additional partnership from Ignite Arts Dallas at Southern Methodist University and Alternate ROOTS, we conducted 41 interviews with artists and cultural workers, facilitated community visioning sessions in five locations across the region, and collaborated with DataArts, National Association of State Arts Agencies, and Candid to examine numerous national and state-level data sets – providing to the field the first regional comparative analysis of arts funding to date. One data point, in particular, continues to haunt us: In 2017, a person living in the South received only $4.21 in arts and culture funding from philanthropy, compared to the national average of $8.60 per person.
We published Freedom Maps in July of 2020, when the ongoing SARS-COV2 pandemic was still new, and many institutions and safety nets were overwhelmed or abandoning the very communities centered in their research. Police murders of Black folks brought millions out into the streets in protest across the globe. We witnessed the findings of our report reverberating loudly and clearly amidst these upheavals:
W.E.B. DuBois’ insight, “as the South goes, so goes the nation,” was manifesting in real time. Many artists and culture bearers in the South knew how to respond to the mega-crisis because our communities evolved cultural practices through centuries of overlapping human-made disasters —from colonization and enslavement to climate. And we were able to share what we knew with folks across the country.
“In the report we speak about legacies of extraction in the South, particularly around resources, people, land, and culture. In many instances the field’s treatment of the report – and of us – replicated these harmful patterns of extraction.”
Philanthropy failed to show up to resource Freedom Maps when asked, leaving us largely uncompensated for our labor on a report that has carried significance for the field and is still regularly referred to. White-led arts organizations in the South used our research to fill their pockets, replicating patterns of empire and left organizations of color that were engaged in critical work to face resource gaps. Our report was misattributed at the 2023 GIA conference by a presenter, erasing the unique context, legacies, and communities we brought to our research.
Despite the numerous obstacles, we found our way onward, like our ancestors did, and like Southerners do. We produced a beautiful report that honored the cultures of our people and their commitment to sacred remembering and making worlds of beauty. And while we were thrilled by some of the changes we did witness — e.g., new commitments made by several funders to resourcing the South and more representation of Southern voices in field gatherings and decision making processes — it is not enough, and there is still so much left to do.
While its quantitative data may have aged, Freedom Maps’ findings remain salient. Its recommendations have yet to be realized, and its areas for further inquiry and emergent research questions have yet to be fully pursued. In 2019 and 2020, we shared the research findings at numerous conferences and community forums, but due to the early-pandemic timing of the report launch and lack of investment, we were unable to realize our vision to activate the findings via local cultural organizing campaigns and to expand and deepen the research into a third phase. We believe that now is the time for this next phase of work, and more than ever, for arts and culture philanthropy – as well as funders who are supporting grassroots movement building – to step up and make bold, explicit long-term commitments to community arts and cultural power building in the U.S. South.
We hope to reignite Freedom Maps in 2025 so that we can update the data, broadcast more stories about cultural organizing in communities throughout the South, and build a more robust network of funders in and outside of the region who support homegrown cultural work for liberatory change. We look forward to continuing to find paths forward in solidarity, and to doing what is collectively ours to do.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ron Ragin (he/him/anything lovingly offered) is a researcher, strategist, organizer, coach, and interdisciplinary artist. His creative practice is rooted in music of the African Diaspora, improvisation, and cultivation of spiritual technologies. He is ever-curious about the role of sound – the unamplified human voice in particular – in transforming our environment, our selves, and each other, attuning us to liberation. Alongside his creative work, Ron partners with artists and organizations to help them move in deeper alignment with their values, goals, and principles. For more than two decades, he has worked in the field of arts and cultural philanthropy, and currently serves as Director of Programs at MAP Fund. Ron grew up in Perry, GA, makes a mean red velvet cake, can throw down on some biscuits, and resides on Tongva lands in Southern California.
Maria Cherry Rangel (she/they) is the founder and executive director of Temple of Two Waters, a land justice initiative that activates sites of freedom and sanctuary for queer and trans BIPOC to dream, rest, create, heal, and be together. Their work for nearly two decades as a resource organizer, innovative grantmaker, facilitator, researcher, and advisor and coach to numerous philanthropic leaders has helped the field of arts and culture develop a deeper understanding of the South, best practices for supporting queer and trans artists and Black and Indigenous artists, has moved numerous institutions, processes, and leaders closer to the side of justice, and has ensured that tens of millions of dollars have been redirected to Southerners, BIPOC communities, and TGNC and queer communities. Cherry is an initiated priestess of Yemayá in the Lukumí tradition. Cherry’s loves include dancing (raqs el baladi/sharqi + Afro-latine dance forms); mapping the intertwined dance vocabularies, rhythms, histories, cosmologies, and migrations between the Levant, Africa, and Turtle Island; curating spaces for queer and trans joy, tending her garden, and spending time in the waters of the Gulf South. Cherry serves as Board Treasurer for Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, was a Year 2 ILI fellow, and a Cohort 7 Just Economy Institute fellow.
References
¹Begin by listening; Do your homework, check your framework; Consider community-driven philanthropic models; Resource existing community cultural institutions and acknowledge them as organizing spaces; Support the development of local artists and their work on their own terms; Make long-term capital investments in existing community assets and projects (beyond the arts)
²Beyond the Black and White Binary; Investments in Southern Storytelling; Deeper Research on Southern Arts and Cultural Infrastructure and Funding; Generational Transition, Succession, and Support for Elders
³What supports do immigrant, undocumented, and migrant artists and cultural workers most need now? What are opportunities to support efforts to further document and uplift Southern stories that link art, culture, and justice? How is the Southern ecosystem resourced and supported via community foundations, local arts councils, individual donors, and corporations? What is the role of locally grown intermediaries in advancing arts and cultural work in the South? How can the field concretely support Southern elder artists and culture bearers? What are the possibilities for developing the next generation of Southern arts leaders and providing them with the resources and support they need to thrive?
