THE ESSENTIAL ARTIVIST READING LIST (Part One)
Artist + Activist = ARTivist.
THE ESSENTIAL ARTIVIST READING LIST (Part One)
Update! Part Two now available.
Remember, showing up as an artivist looks different for everyone!
Hit me up with any questions you have about artivism! Most days of the week, this is the work I do, and I’d love to talk more about it with you. Hope these resources aid your journey!
ARE MIRACLES ENOUGH? SELECTED WRITINGS ON ART AND COMMUNITY
1983-1994, Liz Lerman. Takoma Park, Md.: Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, 1995. Essays on art and community, including "Toward a Process of Critical Response," a description of Lerman's six-step process for critiquing works-in-progress and community based artworks.
ART IN OTHER PLACES: ARTISTS AT WORK IN AMERICA'S COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
William Cleveland. Amherst: Arts Education Service, U. of Massachusetts, 2000. First-hand accounts of the histories of institutional and community-arts programs across the U.S. describing how creative processes have been used to address pressing social issues. Update of the 1992 classic, with new introduction.
ART IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST
Arlene Raven, ed. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, new edition 1993. Anthology documenting and analyzing new public arts forms. Writers Gómez-Peña, Roth, Becker, Kuspit, Lacy, Durland, Burnham and others look at Greenpeace, the AIDS quilt, the La Lucha murals, TheatreWorkers Project, the Electronic Café and more.
BUILDING AMERICA’S COMMUNITIES: A COMPENDIUM OF ARTS AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS.
Washington: D.C., Americans for the Arts, 1997. Profiles 130 arts programs in communities across America, with statistics on the use of arts for social and economic change. Topics include crime prevention, arts and healing, cultural tourism, youth at risk, jobs and economic development, education and arts and older Americans and innovative funding mechanisms.
CHALLENGING THE HIERARCHY: COLLECTIVE THEATRE IN THE UNITED STATES
Mark Weinberg. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. Looks at collective theaters as socially conscious and politically oriented, often aligned with the people's theater movement. Examines collectivization as a way of successfully challenging the hierarchy and ideology of traditional theatre and of society. Includes El Teatro de la Esperanza, United Mime Workers, Dakota Theatre Caravan and Spilt Britches.
THE CITIZEN ARTIST: AN ANTHOLOGY FROM HIGH PERFORMANCE MAGAZINE, 1978-98
Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland. Critical Press, Gardiner, NY. 1998. Anthology of articles from High Performance magazine, exploring the development of art in the U.S., from the conceptual art of the 1970s to the community-based art of the 1990s.
CREATIVE COMMUNITY, THE ART OF CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard. The Rockefeller Foundation, New York City, NY, 2001. A report to the Rockefeller Foundation, taking stock of the work supported by the foundation’s PACT program through 2000. Provides historical context, assessment of the field, suggestions for future directions. Proposes using the phrase “community cultural development”to call the category of social action involving the arts.
THE CRISIS OF CRITICISM
Maurice Berger, ed. New York: The New Press, 1998. Essays including and in response to Arlene Croce's landmark 1994/5 New Yorker articles, "Discussing the Undiscussable," attacking contemporary issues-based art. Articles by Berger, Brenson, Hoberman, hooks, Oates and others look at critics as activists, consumer advocates, sycophants and artists.
FREE PLAY
Stephen Nachmanovitch. Lovely poetic book about improvisation in life an art, the creative practice, with theory that draws from Buddhism.
FRIENDLY FIRE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF 3 PLAYS BY QUEER STREET YOUTH
(Los Angeles: A.S.K. Theater Projects, 1997), Norma Bowles, editor. The texts of three performance-art pieces written and performed by homeless, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teenagers living on the streets of Los Angeles. Includes introduction by Peter Sellars, plus commentaries, reviews and workshop exercises.
FROM THE GROUND UP
Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective, edited by Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman, and Janet Salmons-Rue.
GAMES FOR ACTORS AND NON-ACTORS,
Augusto Boal. Theater of the Oppressed work, packed with activities!
GENERATING COMMUNITY: INTERGENERATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS THROUGH THE EXPRESSIVE ARTS
Susan Perlstein and Jeff Bliss. New York: Elders Share the Arts, 1994. The founder and intergenerational arts coordinator of New York’s Elders Share the Arts outline successful models for using the arts in planning and sustaining meaningful connections between generations and between cultures living in the same communities.
GRASSROOTS THEATER: A SEARCH FOR REGIONAL ARTS IN AMERICA
Robert Gard. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1999. New edition of the seminal 1954 book by Wisconsin Idea Theater Director Robert Gard (1910-1992), a spiritual autobiography recounting Gard's travels across North America discovering and nurturing the folklore, legends, history and drama of each region. Includes a new introduction by Gard's daughter, Maryo Gard Ewell, herself an influential community-arts advocate in Colorado.
IMPROVISATION FOR THE THEATER
A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (Third Edition) Viola Spolin
LEARNING AUDIENCES: ADULT PARTICIPATION AND LEARNING CONSCIOUSNESS
Nello McDaniel and George Thorn. Washington, D.C.: John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing arts and the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Study by two arts consultants that explores the premises and imperatives of adult learning, cites real-life programs and projects that have advanced our understanding of the techniques that work, and provides insights into the qualities that contribute to the "learning consciousness.”
LOCAL ACTS
Community-Based Performance in the United States (Rutgers Series: The Public Life of the Arts) by Jan Cohen-Cruz
At the beginning of this article, I promised you vocab and a case study! So here you go--your phrase of the day is : CIVIC PRACTICE.
CIVIC PRACTICE -- The Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP) defines “Civic Practice” as an arts-based partnership that is developed in service to the needs of a partner organization or agency that does not have an arts-centered mission. Working together, an arts organization and a non-sector partner identify a pressing urgency in the community and work together to solve it using art as the conduit.
Below, you’ll find a video of THE CROSSINGS (a case study of this work): UWM Professor Anne Basting has built a career blending performance that empathetically engages older adults, more specifically people facing issues from memory loss to isolation. Her latest venture, THE CROSSINGS, sets out to illustrate the ability to navigate city sidewalks and cross streets safely is critical to everyone's safety - including older folks.
And that is all she wrote. Check out Part Two here! <3
*Hi friend! I’m almost brand-new here, just over a week! I’m releasing content every day as part of @MarkRMorrisJr’s #DolphinSchool Bootcamp along with 20 other awesome emerging authors. I’ll be using steemit to share thoughts on artistic practice, arts opportunities, equity, my personal projects, and other fun things happening in my world (like hiking!). Check out some feminist truth for another taste! See you around! -- @lilyraabe
This is an awesome list. Thanks for putting it together. I have not read any of these, but will add them to the pile.
Thanks for stopping by to check it out. More for the pile tomorrow, lol. :)
Awesome list of resources, as an artist and very interested in how I can get more activism into my creative output.
Can't wait for the next post.
Thank you for that feedback and the next one will be up tomorrow! <3
I love all the resources you are compiling, and the resources you choose to share are very intriguing! Which of these would you recommend as a good first read? I am all about incorporating social change into my art, from the name I choose to create art under, to the things I sample etc. I also really like your gif up there! Makes me want to make a new stop motion animation <3
As a good first read I’d actually recommend a combo of 2 books: Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. If you can only read one, do Theatre of the Oppressed. Those should both be popping up on the 2nd half of the list for tomorrow (it was just too unwieldy to do all in one post, I felt like people’s eyes might bleed). Ha. I’ll also be sharing lists of related online articles at some point (which are nice because they are short reads rather than full on tomes).
Awesome. I'm always looking for interesting new reads, and I appreciate the time you take to compile these lists!
Hey @lilyraabe, great to see this most excellent post! I love this term, "artivist," as you're embodying the energy!
So cool to have you in the RMS community! Can't wait to meet you in person.
Thanks for stopping by and reading! :)
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Great list - not heard of many of these before.
You might like beautifultrouble.org ?
I wrote a review of it here, in which I describe it as the 'discerning artivist's wikipedia', if you're interested:
https://annnarkehmedia.com/2017/01/27/beautiful-trouble-book-review/