This session spoke to me deeply from my own experience deployed this year in my local public health department’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Whether it was being yelled at by angry people during the early days of limited supply and restricted eligibility, the unrelenting and thankless demands of countering disinformation and overcoming distrust, the highs of contributing to saving lives, the lows of confronting your own personal and institutional shortcomings, and the destructive self and interpersonal dynamics that can emerge under extreme stress…I got a small taste of the demands facing healthcare providers, demands that were heightened by the Covid crisis.

Colorado Resilience in Arts Lab (CORAL) is a groundbreaking applied research initiative that explores the use of art, music, dance and writing workshops to help healthcare professionals develop resilience and process the trauma and stress of their jobs. CORAL is a partnership between University of Colorado Hospital, the Ponzio Creative Arts Therapy Program at Children’s Hospital Colorado, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the NEA.

Dr. Marc Moss of University of Colorado Hospital described trends in the healthcare paradigm that have made healthcare professions increasingly difficult long before Covid. Among structural challenges such as administrative burdens, cost issues and less autonomy for providers, two other trends are especially striking to me—that patients are sicker with more chronic disease and critical illness, and that patients’ trust of the healthcare profession has declined to 34% in 2012 (from 73% in 1966). The crisis of burnout among healthcare professionals is system-threatening, evidenced by high hospital turnover rates and immediate challenges such as the national nursing shortage.

Katherine Reed of Ponzio Creative Arts Therapy Program and Mike Henry of Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop shared beautiful and evocative examples of how making art, music, dance movement, and therapeutic writing allows truths to emerge, be explored, processed and shared to build greater self and group resiliency.

I have left work countless times crying, bruised, bleeding, covered in bodily fluids.

Being the holder of someone else’s pain and trauma is never easy and always weighs on you…but we continue to show up day in and day out for our patients and for our coworkers.

From the two times in my life that I have been hospitalized, the memory of those few days at my most vulnerable with my life in the hands of doctors and nurses is indelible. I remember everything vividly and I often think about the people who cared for me, wondering what it’s like for them to show up day in and day out for countless patients like me when we are at our most vulnerable. The gift of arts therapy is that it allows healthcare professionals to express their vulnerability, and to find greater strength.

At our best, we soothe. We heal. We make things better.

Nono never imagined that name would cross seas and languages, and that the beloved granddaughters – mapenzi and mulowayi – would forever espouse this unconditional surrender to the familial.

But they did, and with an oasis in their knapsack they reimagined their childhood playground as their stage. In 2011, the duo from Barrio San Anton in Carolina, Puerto Rico decided to “feel the space, be present” in the known surroundings, says mulowayi Iyaye.

They fashioned a brand of homemade theater, the product of the tension between desire and their surroundings.
Mulowayi experienced “how complex it can be for people like me, who look like me, to become artists, to have access to this way of working and expressing ourselves.”

“When I looked at the art of Puerto Rico, I didn’t see myself reflected there, represented there, visible there.” And the sisters, through the use of their memories, began to “decolonize” the prevalent vision of theater.

This conception of space brings, according to the sisters, “an opportunity to be touched.” The house becomes a site of discovery. There’s food, shared power, and no physical distance between stage and the audience. In this context, they began delving in theater, then photography and multimedia. “We just have to find the spaces to imagine these decolonized futures… you find conflicts and challenges – but you take those and transform them.”

The transformation entails the possibility of discussing the island’s problems in what they term “moments of instant dramaturgy.” Poverty, race relations, the killing of black men in Puerto Rico appear as past of the space they create.

“The space and the ambience is the piece. The space has traveled,” they say, and it has appeared in Haiti, Germany, New York, among many places they have shown their art. “This house has traveled the world as theater.”

From the images of a crowd attending a show at a soon-to-be-closed Rio Piedras movie theater to the photographs of drowning Puerto Ricans, scholar Frances Negron-Muntaner probes the uncomfortable  definitions of the end of an era and of the start of another in troubled times.

“To say Puerto Rico is to say catastrophe,” says Negron-Muntaner, emphasizing that there always is a possibility to overturn such catastrophe, that action (artistic, political) is possible. In this reconsideration of the unending yet volatile relationship between place and art, artistic practices make up for a new infrastructure: outliving disaster by solving or finding a problem. Thus art becomes a research process, “a creative and transformative way of imagining,” even after 120 years of colonial rule.
But what do these artistic dreams owe to reality?

Reality, Negron Montaner posits, has been eternally composed of bodies in turmoil, yet always gesturing towards a future way of solving the catastrophe du jour. For example, the photographic series by Adal, “Puerto Ricans Under Water,” is presented as an archive of physical research, of “political and colonial neglect,” but also as the present that “allows citizens to exist.” Bodies, posing under water and sensing the forthcoming mystery that island life will allow them and the debts that they will have to feel responsible for and pay for. Almost buried in debt.

That has been the nominally inscribed PROMESA that the island has carried on its shoulders since 2015 – the colonial power’s mandated extraction of payment. A promise to “pay your debt.” A federally-mandated PROMESA, uncertain, in flux, but undoubtedly there- the neoliberal era that “makes the underneath visible” and attempts to make the unpayable payable.

Two things jumped out at me the most from this workshop. The first was the set of sharp and wise recommendations for guiding organizational change and sectoral change during uncertain times from the ArtsEd Response Collective, which was convened by Ingenuity to address the immediate challenges of COVID-19 and the police murders of Black people. And the second was the deeper dive into dance as an educational tool uniquely well-suited for engaging children and youth around issues of anti-racism and racial justice.

The ARC Final Report presents a plethora of resources for arts educators and organizations, schools, and equity practitioners in adapting and innovating new strategies and best practices that are responsive to the challenges of remote learning and pandemic conditions. The report lifts up what I think is one of the most important principles for any sector during these times of rapid change and volatility—to commit to open source knowledge sharing and learning, which is part of recognizing that we must engage in building anew and that “experimentation is now a part of the new operating norms for every industry…in order to do important work in an uncertain landscape.”

Another insight from this report is about fully exploring the arts as a tool for recovery from the crisis. Within the context of schools, this is especially poignant to consider the needs for reconnection and healing from learning loss, Covid-related traumas and economic hardships so many students have endured in communities hardest hit by the pandemic.

This session highlighted Forward Momentum Chicago’s dance education program, funded by Ingenuity with an explicit focus on anti-racism and racial justice, in partnership with Sutherland Elementary School in the Chicago public schools system. As program staff Bradlee Lathon and Jamerial Gloss described, designing and implementing the class pushed them to surmount the challenges of remote dance teaching and to confront (and address) gaps in the lack of age-appropriate teaching resources on anti-racism geared toward middle school and younger ages.

“We had to take a step back not to water down the content, but use language that youth understand and that turns the light on for them in a way that they maybe never experienced before,” Bradlee said. “Anti-racism and racial justice are still taboo topics for kids. People believe children aren’t ready to have these conversations. Maybe they don’t have the language and don’t know what to say, but they have feelings about it and they want to express it, and we have to give them the opportunity.”

Community-based art from my vantage point sounds a lot like community organizing.

The projects described by artists Chemi Rosado Seijo, Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón, and Edgardo Larregui make me think of the possibilities that emerge at the edges between creative disciplines, in service and collaboration with communities. These art projects were incubated by professional artists in dynamic partnership with residents, democratizing the arts among marginalized communities, uplifting and nourishing community life, and sparking the possibility for new solutions small and large.

In 2002, Chemi Rosado Seijo began collaborating with the community of El Cerro in Naranjito, Puerto Rico to paint their houses green, honoring and amplifying the topography of the mountainside where the houses are built. Alongside this activity, the community built relationship and connectivity as children and adults participated in painting, art workshops and creating a museum/community center.

Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón has worked throughout Latin America on community-based art projects that deliver very concrete solutions, such as paving an unpaved street in Chiapas, Mexico or rehabilitating a basketball court buried by a landslide in Bolivia. In 2003, he worked with homeless people in Puerto Rico, who earn income by watching cars, to come up with uniforms and signage (the Vela Parking Services) that gave them a visible identity and recognition for their work.

“I use the strategy of art as a reason to mobilize people,” he said.

Projects shared by Edgardo Larregui inspired me to consider, in working to build community engagement and power, how to begin through particular points of resourcefulness and strength within each community. An artist’s vision can help to see the potential of carports, for example, as a site for neighborhood residents to share what they want to with one another—whether that be playing music, bringing horses from the field for kids to ride, or youth creating their own dance workshops. Other projects, such as El Caldo de La Perla, tapped into the history of local fishermen, bringing their catch together to cook a giant fish stew to share in a communal event. Dr. Recao in 2003 was an invitation for farmers in the community to collect the seeds of the herb recao (culantro in English), a key ingredient in Puerto Rican food, and mail the seeds to diasporic family members to plant in New York City. The campaign included street murals and street signs lifting up the healing properties of the herb, its accessibility and cultural roots, in contrast to fast food chains.

“Community art is not a painting, sculpture or performance. You are working with human beings, who are in need,” said Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón. “We can effect change in the community and in ourselves. Through our work, we have created new spaces for artists and people who are not artists to participate in art.”

Such is the social impact of artist-led, community-based change.

I love traditional and folk art for its intimacy. My most treasured art, the only ones I have in my home, are a pair of Oaxacan tapestries I bought from a family of Indigenous weavers in the village of Teotitlan del Valle. We sat together in their home—which was also their workroom with wooden looms and stone mortars and pestles for grinding indigo and cochineal dyes—and spoke of the symbolic meanings of designs representing the elements of earth, water, fire and water, and the cycle of birth and death. In house after house in this village, Zapotec families maintain their way of life and sustain their local economy with weaving and selling their art.

Years later, these tapestries adorn my altar and are beloved companions of my spiritual practice. They are an intimate, daily reminder of the connective power of cultural and traditional arts. As Maribel Alvarez said, these are “practices, rituals, and ordinary overlooked aesthetics that have to do at the end of the day with living in beauty.”

The panelists in this workshop posed a question for the audience: What are the centers of creativity that you are privileging? Folk and traditional arts have long existed in the context of family, community, and marketplace, often passed down from one generation to the next. It is the largest sector of arts, yet the least visible and the least resourced, according to Dr. Alvarez, who is the dean of Community Engagement at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Folklife Alliance.

Lori Pourier (Oglala Lakota) of the First Peoples Fund described traditional arts as “supporting collective spirit, that which makes each of us stand up or extend a spirit of generosity.” First Peoples Fund directs resources and support for Native artists and culture bearers to carry forward ancestral knowledge, art forms and traditions that sustain and lift up everyone in their communities.

Kuma Hula Vicky Holt Takamine shared her journey of becoming a master teacher of Hawaiian dance and founding Pa’i, a school to preserve and pass on Native Hawaiian arts and traditions for future generations. Along the way, that journey included having to learn how to operate in the world of big foundations and arts institutions, which is complicated for Native and community-based artists trying to navigate and to challenge those Western models and systems.

Thankfully, emerging efforts are coming together to support and advance the traditional and folk arts sector, such as the National Folklife Network and the Taproot Initiative. Amy Kitchener, executive director of Alliance for California Traditional Arts, described the initiative as a national research and planning project focused on traditional artists and culture bearers as the “catalysts for group care and repair from harm.” Interviews and research is underway with 24 key informants across the nation, with a publication forthcoming in February 2022.

An elevator. Train tracks. These two settings were sites of profound trauma and historical significance in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The elevator where a young black man bumped into a white woman one hundred years ago in Greenwood, setting off events that became the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The train tracks dividing the Black part of town from the white, that were also the path Greenwood’s survivors followed on foot to escape the killing of hundreds of residents and the burning and destruction of their district known as Black Wall Street.

In 2021, the elevator and the train tracks also became art. They were both art installation and storytelling projects that emerged from the Greenwood Art Project. The initiative, funded through the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge, was a partnership of Bloomberg with the City of Tulsa and the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to add a cultural component to the centennial commemoration.

Over a period of three years, lead artist Rick Lowe facilitated a process of deep engagement with the Greenwood community and 32 local artists to tell their stories and activate the process of healing. The Greenwood Art Project launched as a biennial from May 26 to October 25, 2021 with local installations including murals, sculptures, performances, historical tours and interactive technology.

This was the first time the City of Tulsa was officially involved and the first time the city’s residents as a whole engaged in a broader, open discussion of the massacre. What the project partners found was that “the city was not ready for a memorial, but needed a conversation,” said Stephanie Dockery of Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts Team.

Artists initiated that public conversation by telling the story of Black Wall Street and their community’s past, present and future.

L. Joi McCondichie, whose grandmother escaped the massacre as a nine-year-old child, produced A Century Walk, inviting persons of every background to walk with her on the train tracks that Greenwood residents used to flee the massacre in the middle of the night. This community walk retraced the steps and paid homage to the experiences and lives of Black people who fled on foot more than 40 miles north from Tulsa to Pawhuska, the smoke from their burned homes and businesses billowing behind them.

Rick Lowe approached the Greenwood Art Project not by coming up with a preconceived idea, but by hosting dinners and discussions with the community. “He started the project by not having a project,” said Anita Contini, program lead for Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts. “He understood it wasn’t just about his work but about local artists and bringing together the community.”

Lowe along with artist William Cordova curated a permanent installation along I-22, the interstate highway built during urban renewal that cut through the district and precipitated the second destruction of Greenwood. The installation transforms this destructive creation instead into the “Pathway to Hope,” a pedestrian walkway that symbolically reconnects the district.

Documentaries about the artists and projects are collected on The Greenwood Art Project website. One in particular, a Visual Poem for TheRese Aduni, a local filmmaker, playwright, and dancer, stays with me. In it, the Tulsa native shares a personal story of turning depression and loss into resurrection and hope.

“They might want to kill us,” she says. “They might want us to die. But we can be resurrected, we can be revived. We can revive ourselves as a community.”

Centering Indigenous self-determination, power building and movement leadership is an experience of deep learning and humility. Because of the enduring mythos of America that centers the settlers and the immigrants, and the Western worldview dominating this country’s systems, entering into Indigenous worldviews is one of the most radical shifts possible into what it means to reparate the wrongs of the past and present, and to build a regenerative, just future.

I was grateful for the invitation to listen at the roundtable talk of three powerful and wise teachers: Tina Kuckkahn (Ojibwe), director of grantmaking at NDN Collective; Gaby Strong (Dakota), managing director at NDN Collective; and Quita Sullivan (Montaukett/Shinnecock), program director at New England Foundation for the Arts.

As the first step in entering a respectful relationship with Indigenous communities, Tina Kuckkahn offered this teaching: to consider that all creation stories are true.

“That’s about respect and understanding that our creation stories are not myths, but teachings about how we came to be on this place, on this earth, at this time. It indicates the beautiful diversity of our indigenous peoples and deep connection to the land.”

Beyond the land acknowledgement, what does meaningful support of Indigenous peoples and communities look like?

Gaby Strong honed in on a core message for grantmakers. Since 2006, the share of grantmaking to Indigenous communities and organizations has hovered at 0.4%, not just in the arts and cultural sector but in all areas of funding. Foundations must do more and better. But beyond that, movements such as #LANDBACK are fighting to reclaim Indigenous stewardship of public lands and economic practices that empower communities and create sustainable and equitable systems.

“We do not subscribe to the notion of donor education,” Gaby said. “We call for repatriation and rematriation of wealth to Indigenous and BIPOC communities. The liberation of that wealth first and foremost, anything less than that is secondary.”

Quita Sullivan reminded funders of the importance of building and being in relationship—that supporting Indigenous artists and organizations is not about a transaction that ends when program funding runs out. “You’ve built a relationship, what are you doing to continue the relationship even when the resources are not there? That is building trust, and putting people at the center.”

In Indigenous worldviews, artists and culture bearers are valued and provided for communally. Cultural creations and artwork was made, given and shared, without people having to worry where their next meal came from when they did that work. The arts is a way of living and being, not a separate thing.

“In my language, we don’t have a word for artists and that’s because it’s such a big part of who we are and what we do every single day,” said Quita. “People want to fund the beadwork, the carving, the jewelry making, but not the heat in the house so that it can be made, the food required for the elder to survive to pass down the knowledge that we cherish. We need to de-silo arts and acknowledge that it is a part of everything.”

The land acknowledgement is not enough, but let it be a reminder each time you do it to look toward and support the leadership of Indigenous organizations and movements at the forefront of decolonization, reindigenization and radical transformation of this country, so that it works for everybody.