Teaching Arts
Passing on the vision and practice of art-making is as old as culture itself. Even in the United States (a country not known for its support of the arts) there’s a long history of government and other support. Here’s an excellent article by Arlene Goldbard.
By the late 1960’s, many of us sharing art with people in non-traditional settings - public schools, neighborhood meeting halls, hospitals, senior centers, prisons, drug treatment programs, libraries, veterans groups, etc. - were calling our work “community arts.” Central is the vision that making art is a human birthright, and that each of us is the expert about our own life and story. The best single site for information about the history and practice of community arts is Community Arts Network.
In recent years, “teaching arts” is the description most often used for this work, though the focus has often narrowed to sharing art with young people. A comprehensive source of information is the Association of Teaching Artists. As noted on the site, teaching artists are, for the most part, self-employed, independent contractors who do not have health care and retirement benefits. For this reason, and others, there is currently a strong effort to gather into a field. Two particulars that often denote a field already exist: 1) a professional journal, the fabulous Teaching Artist Journal, and 2) graduate degree programs.
Of course, there are pluses and minuses as work-from-the-heart – worked based on political vision – becomes more institutionalized. Here’s a link to a piece I wrote on this subject.
Among the hundreds of teaching arts/community arts programs, these are a handful:
- WritersCorps, and here’s an article I wrote about the structure of our program
- Alternate Roots
- Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education
- New York State Literary Center
- Opera Piccola
- Perpich Center
- Streetside Stories
- Teachers & Writers Collaborative
- Writers in the School
The book, AIMprint, describes one excellent teaching arts program - the Center for Community Partnerships - and fully explores arts integration, which is a major focus of the field. Arlene Goldbard’s New Creative Community sets the work of community artists in the larger context of cultural development. Other useful texts include:
- Art in Other Places by William Cleveland
- Beginner’s Guide to Community-Based Arts by Keith Knight and Mat Swarzman
- Putting the Arts in the Picture edited by Nick Rabkin and Robin Redmond
- Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change edited by Mark O’Brien and Craig Little
- The Citizen Artist edited by Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland
Good work has to be paid for, and funding often depends on public support, so it’s important to sustain arts policy and advocacy organizations. Here are a few:
- Americans for the Arts
- Arts Providers Alliance of San Francisco
- Center for Art Policy
- National Guild of Community Schools
- “Gifts of the Muse”
Finally, since teaching artists are practicing artists, needing time and resources to create their own art work, here are links to information about grants, residencies and other resources. And here’s an informal report I wrote of artist colonies I’ve been fortunate to spend time in.