Finding a Common Cause
The Rev. Dr. Lynn Osgood
Participants with Foundation Communities’ Daffodil Apartments Learning Center Garden mural. Photo Credit: Bianca Hernandez
Several years ago, I was working on a project and talking to a council aide about the role that the arts can serve when brought into community-building contexts. I wanted her to understand how powerful it could be to bring artists and culture bearers in as project partners. As we stood in the hallway, I spoke with her passionately about how artists create moments of collective understanding – a power that eludes planners and policy makers (such as myself). I wanted her to know how artists work to create warm flames of meaning that allow communities to gather around a collective sense of common cause in spaces; where we normally see people staking out positions and win-lose scenarios.
The council aide listened to me politely, but then gently broke in and said, “Look, I hear you. This work is important and having artists as partners is important too. But I need you to understand that the folks were trying to bring along (elected officials) don’t care about how the magic wand works – they just want to know what it does.” Her comment brought home a lesson that I’ve learned many times over since that day when we stood in the crowded passageways of city hall: When we aim to create interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral projects that bring along many different people, from many different backgrounds and vantage points into a larger civic system, what we need most are clear objectives, and a clear understanding of outcomes, that can be easily communicated and quickly digested.
I remember seeing the Creative Placemaking Research Tool when it first came out and thinking about how it brought a cacophonous chorus of insights into a clearer view. For many years, we watched ArtPlace support study after study that helped identify how the arts could be brought in across a broad spectrum of community development contexts. Each piece of research brought forward new insights into areas such as housing, immigration, public safety, and many others. In addition, new language, new framings, and new ways to connect with the impacts that artists were having in these fields. However, each sector had its own understanding of how the arts functioned within their context, and therefore, placed art differently within the complex equation of community development.
At Civic Arts, we routinely work with municipal and community development partners. These practitioners do not often identify with, much less interact with, the world of artistic and cultural production (although certainly some do). To many, the arts are nice, and they’re certainly glad when their downtown has a good mural, but in their minds, those displays aren’t what’s needed to get the job done of building towns and cities. The pieces of the puzzle they’re thinking of look more like economic development plans, blueprints, parking studies, and zoning debates. It’s important to note that these tools, as civic tools, are important; they’re critical if we’re going to get the roads cleared, the garbage picked up, and the parks maintained. Those same tools are not so good at answering the questions of, “Why are we doing this?” “What does enacting our values in this project look like?” and “How do we come to understand who we are?” For that, we at Civic Arts believe you need to work with artists.
For our work, the Creative Placemaking Research Tool is not so good about detailing one particular insight or another; but rather one of its key strengths lies in its ability to communicate a larger message to a very broad audience: You too can understand this work; you too can contribute your own skills; and you too have something to give to the larger equation. The tool’s concise visuals and clear language calls out physical, social, and systemic levels of impact that, combined, create a framework that helps artists, engineers, planners, developers, community members, culture-bearers, elected officials, and all the other myriad characters who pop up in community projects, to gather around clear and common causes. Of course, the proverbial “devil is still in the details,” but now we have a common language, supported by cross-sector narratives, that can help point the way out of those “times of trial” that all projects go through.
Being able to communicate with common cause to people that never think about the arts as part of their professional, or even personal, life must happen for creative placemaking work to occur. In fact, it is my belief that only when you bring together those folks who “get” the arts, and those that don’t, you truly create the capacity for structural-level changes to start happening from within the system itself. Having passionate people working to create change from the inside goes a long way. The policy wonks, the mid-level municipal employees, the council aides – they’re the ones who truly understand where the micro-fissures of opportunity are.They’re the ones who know how those small cracks in the system can be leveraged and opened to create new possibilities. Their work only happens if they are supported in building diverse coalitions. If they are to do that, then they must speak many professional languages to many people – often simultaneously.
When ArtPlace closed its doors, a new geography for creative placemaking work was created. From a universe with a strong center of gravity emerged an archipelago of efforts dotted along the landscape. While I miss the conversations and sense of common purpose that was formed under the work that ArtPlace did, their dissolution also opened the field for new experiments to take place and new structures to emerge.
Here in Texas, we took that bait and have created the Texas Creative Placemaking Initiative. Born out of a collaboration between Civic Arts, Texans for the Arts, and the Texas Association of Community Development Corporations, we are responding to something we noticed a few years ago. There is an incredible amount of arts-based community development work happening across the state of Texas, but no one is connected to each other. No one is learning from each other, and no one is sharing their insights with each other. To a great degree, we now understand that this is because no one has a common language. Affordable housing developers, for example, may employ artists, but they don’t often talk with other developers, or the elected officials from whom they need support, about the work they’re doing. They don’t have a way to communicate about the impacts that artists and the arts are bringing to the communities they serve. (There are exceptions to this, of course. The work of Kathy Payton and the Fifth Ward Community Development Corporation in Houston is a stellar example.)
As we grow this Initiative, we’re figuring out how we can best support each other, learn from each other, and quite simply, talk and connect with each other across the state of Texas and across our various professions. What we’ve learned is that the equation for doing this is not about having the answer, it’s more about having the ability to listen across professional differences, find similar goals within the context of different working methods, and create ideas that can be communicated across the differences of council chambers, spreadsheets, policy documents, café conversations, sidewalk chats, and poetry slams. That is where the Creative Placemaking Research Tool serves such a valuable purpose; it takes the natural profusion of voices that happen in our project work spaces and points to possible directions for how we can name – and live into – a larger common cause.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Rev. Dr. Lynn Osgood is executive director of Civic Arts based in Austin, TX.
Tasha Golden, PhD is director of Research, International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and adjunct faculty in the Center for Arts in Medicine at University of Florida.
This post is part of the series, Future of the Field: Cross-Sector Creative Placemaking Series.
