This session began with a song of welcome from cultural practitioner and filmmaker Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu (Native Hawaiian, Kanaka Maoli) that opened up a space for radical imagination and relationship. Artists from the 2021 cohort of NDN Collective’s Radical Imagination Grant shared their work from the project, which invests in Indigenous artists’ community-based expressions of “a radically imagined, more just and equitable future.”

Engaging with this work—whether it be taking in fine art photography and film, hearing Native languages spoken and sung, or learning about specific customs and ceremonial practices within the context of decolonization—is about experiencing the gift of centering Indigenous worldviews and knowledge.

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), a contemporary fine arts photographer, shared images that visually express her people’s cultural landscape, presence and connection to the water, land, flora and fauna of the Mojave Desert of Southern California. “People outside the reservation have little idea about contemporary life of Natives on the reservation. Everything is taught as historic and bygone. From an early age, I knew I wanted to change this narrative,” she said. “I want to counter the narrative that we were historic and bygone, with an emphasis on our modernity, resilience, and the beauty all around us.”

Cara’s series of #Tongvaland images are a powerful disruption of the invisibility and erasure of California First Peoples, such as the Tongva of Los Angeles. Billboards with #Tongvaland and stunning images of Native women in regalia next to oil refineries or in natural springs that remain still amidst L.A. industrial spaces, the Hollywood Sign reimagined as TONGVALAND—these are examples of how Cara’s art radically educates and shifts understanding about a place like Los Angeles. “Los Angeles is a holy place,” she asserts, pointing out that it is second to Manhattan as home to the highest population of inter-tribal Indigenous residents.

Marianne Nicholson (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations) is a visual artist whose project undertakes the reclaiming of meaning and repatriating of material culture forcibly removed from her people, whose homelands are on the coast of British Columbia. That work entails rebuilding her own understanding and knowledge, and designing community-based platforms to share and return the knowledge to the tribe. This included the carving of a 14-foot traditional feast dish, which was given to the community with a feast being planned around it.

Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu’s animated short film, Kapaemahu, tells a Native Hawaiian story hidden from history, that honors legendary healers who embodied two-spirit, dual male and female energy.

“My work focuses on the movement and advancement of my people, where the U.S. continues illegal occupation of our land. We struggle to know what is our identity because the colonization has been so great, the loss of language,” Hinaleimoana said. “My work is dedicated to challenging the norms, and sharing how our people understand the world.”

All 10 artists from the 2021 Cohort are featured at the Radical Imagination virtual festival on November 12, 2021.

How can mid-level leaders identify what is within their power to change when they don’t hold the top position? How can they develop their own management skills to lead with equity at the center?

The status quo in most institutions’ leadership and organizational development efforts is that all too often “executive coaching” is reserved for top leaders and periodic, one-off trainings for everyone else. This makes the coaching initiative being pioneered by NAS and Barr Foundation all the more visionary and cutting edge, with its focus on making coaching more broadly accessible and its strategic targeting of mid-level and emerging leaders within arts organizations.

Coaching is a deep investment of time and money, which is why it’s been a privilege only those in top organizational positions could enjoy, or those who by luck or by pluck pursued their own coaching opportunities for personal and professional development. Yet coaching could be such a powerful lever for change, through unlocking individual leadership potential and unearthing possibilities for new solutions, that organizations would be wise to consider the insights and data NAS is collecting as this initiative unfolds.

But what exactly is coaching, and what is the coaching process? As shared by NAS Director Sunny Widmann, coaching is: A thought provoking and co-creative process where you and a coach embark on a journey of self-discovery to inspire you and maximize your personal and professional potential. The co-creative process itself helps to develop and create new knowledge by tapping into the innate wisdom of the client as well as the coach’s partnership in guiding and drawing out the expertise of those they serve.

Being someone situated myself in the middle levels of a large institution, I especially appreciated that the initiative is focused on mid-level and emerging leadership. This is strategic in so many ways. As shared in research featured at one of last year’s conference sessions, very often, BIPOC middle managers are the “catalyst class” for driving change in the public sector. Meanwhile, glass ceilings and white patriarchal supremacy also mean that very few BIPOC, women, and transgender leaders ever reach the top echelons of mainstream organizations.

Yet despite the challenges (or maybe because of them), mid-level leaders are also well-situated to champion equity and change, operating from that in-between space within organizations from which to take a systemic view and to build more decentralized, democratized influence. But as fascinating and full of potential as it can be, this undertaking also leaves people feeling over stretched, under supported and isolated while navigating complex and political dynamics.

“Managing up, sideways, and down—it’s a precarious situation to be in,” as Deryn Dudley, director of Learning, Evaluation and Engagement at NAS and a coach herself, put it.

The initiative trains and certifies coaches from the arts and cultural field, to support practitioners in the field with advanced skills such as change management, having difficult and courageous conversations, greater self-awareness, personal growth, and leadership style development. To learn more about the program or apply to be matched with a coach, visit NAS Leadership Coaching.

What does it look like to build another possible world, in the midst of resisting and surviving the assault on your present one?

Perhaps it looks like installing solar panels in homes, groceries, the fire station, and the cinema of your town; and during Hurricane Maria when much of Puerto Rico lost power for extended periods of time, becoming an “energy oasis” for the community. Perhaps it looks like owning your own radio station and newspaper, selling coffee to support community programs, and setting up a Bosque Escuela, a school in the forest to teach conservation and sustainable development.

And, perhaps most importantly, it means persevering for the long haul, learning and adapting through setbacks. These are some of the lessons from Casa Pueblo, a “community self-management project committed to appreciating and protecting natural resources, cultures and humans.” As Arturo Massol Deya described, the project began 40 years ago in Adjuntas, a municipality in central Puerto Rico, in response to the government’s proposal to conduct open pit mining, which would have caused an ecological and social catastrophe in the area. At their first protest in 1980, one person came.

“We realized science itself is not enough,” Arturo said. The group kept iterating, and came up with a practice formulated as Science + Culture + Community toward social transformation. Fifteen years later, the mining proposal was defeated.

Casa Pueblo and AgitArte, an organization of working class artists and organizers in Santurce, Puerto Rico, are two of the case studies shared in this panel highlighting the work of artist-organizers innovating new systems to advance environmental justice. Alongside them is the strategic partnership of grantmakers at the Surdna Foundation, Hester Street and the María Fund, who also shared principles of critical allyship and ideas for transforming philanthropy.

As Xiomara Caro-Díaz of the María Fund explained, “Critical allyship is connected to your own freedom and work. Puerto Rico is not something to add to your bucket, but about the future of movement building across the globe. Puerto Rico is a place many grantmakers and movement building organizations should be learning from.”

Hester Street is an urban planning, design and community development nonprofit partnering with Surdna’s Radical Imagination for Racial Justice program. The project is part of a national regranting cohort of 11 organizations working at the intersections of climate justice, racial justice, arts and culture. More specifically, as Vanessa Monique Smith described, this work is about integrating arts to “create space to activate communal action and spur culturally relevant solutions for climate justice.”

Along with Robert Smith of the Surdna Foundation, grantmakers in this panel shared practices of allyship, such as removing grant report writing and other administrative burdens, decentralized and unrestricted funds, multi-year giving, and more. Vanessa’s advice to funders: 1) Am I focused on my work’s intent or the impact of the group on the ground? 2) What am I assuming based on my place of work and experiences that may be different in Puerto Rico? 3) How can I do more than just provide funding? What are the networks, resources, and information sharing that we can promote?

Panelists also delved into the problematic power dynamic that exists when money is involved, and how to forge dynamic, deeper and trust-based partnership between funders and frontline organizations. As Jorge Díaz of AgitArte summarized trenchantly, “Partnering with folks who are wealthy should look like how can you move resources? Because we have to organize our people, so go organize your people.”

Photo Credit: Casa Pueblo

During the first months of pandemic lockdown, I really got into watching historical documentaries, perhaps for the escape out of our own times. One of my favorites was the National Geographic series “The Greeks” on Disney Plus. I was struck with the archaeological finding that, after the collapse of the first ancient Greek civilization, it was the arts that nurtured the society’s survival and re-emergence through an ensuing dark age. Drawings on pottery and wine vats, jokes scribbled in cuneiform. These artifacts were a testament that through millennia, human beings have found recovery from disasters in much the same ways—starting with nurturing our shared humanity and creative spirit.

But in addition to providing healing, joy and community building, the arts play a substantial and less acknowledged role in economic recovery after downturns and disasters, producing jobs and revenues as well as stimulating economic activity in other sectors and fostering vitality for businesses to thrive. In 2020, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies commissioned economic research to compile empirical evidence measuring the connection between states’ economies and their cultural and arts sectors, in particular examining before and after the economic shock of the 2012 Great Recession. The report’s key findings make a compelling case for investing in the arts sector as one that grows independently from other sectors (not as reliant on supply chains), and rebounds faster than the broader economy.

“The results suggest that the arts and cultural sector can improve—not merely reflect—the health of the broader economy,” according to the report. Case in point, as Ryan Stubbs of NASAA pointed out, was the pivotal role of creative sector events like the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival in supporting Louisiana’s economic recovery after Katrina.

Cultural Relief and Resiliency in Puerto Rico

Freddy Velez Garcia shared examples of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña’s work to refocus its cultural programs in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Maria in 2017, the 2019 earthquakes, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Groups of artists, volunteers initially, began visiting shelters in communities, “to give cultural relief to people.” Eventually, the organization leveraged social media to expand its reach from several thousand people, to 2.5 million people on FaceBook. Cultura Rodante (Culture on Wheels) facilitates free performances, film screenings and arts education workshops in shelters, public plazas, community facilities and senior centers of neighborhoods hit hardest.

Isabel Rosa Irizarry emphasized that arts and culture are a crucial component of Puerto Rico’s ongoing recovery, through key venues such as tourism and folk arts fairs, and through the diaspora. As communities and places across the world begin the work of Covid recovery, we should look to arts and culture not only as powerful medicine in healing our souls, but also as a powerful strategy to reignite economic growth.

The stories we tell ourselves matter. Starving artist. Dying in poverty or hitting the jackpot of stardom. Impractical artist, not able to pay rent or bills, much less know anything about credit associations or portable benefits. Only the winners have worth and take all.

I was drawn to the preconference session We Do This to Free Us: Artists and the Solidarity Economy on artists and the solidarity economy having lived with an artist for 15 years, and having flirted with my creative writing dreams for longer than that. Ultimately, the government job with its healthcare and pension won out for me, and attempts at fitting writing into the margins happen less and less these days with the demands of motherhood and working for an employer. He, on the other hand, continues as a gig worker, musician and creative—a path that can be by turns liberating, terrifying and inspiring.

“We do this to free us.” For my partner and others like him, the work itself is freedom, and the ability to be who he is outside of conventional economic systems. Yet there’s no denying the lack of a safety net, the months navigating Unemployment Insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic, the patching together of resources like rehearsal spaces, equipment and studio time. As Caroline Woolard of art.coop said during the session, she does this work for “artists who are creating the spaces of the future but cannot pay their rent or bills. There’s no way to be an artist without being part of this systems change work.”

So often our society’s focus when it comes to artists is the commodified art itself, the products but not the lives and the livelihoods of those creating them. Arts and cultural practices support society’s spaces of imagination, serving to regenerate and create wellness, community and connection. They create wealth and value. What if economic practices—reimagined as “sustainable and equitable community-control of work, food, housing, and culture using a variety of organizational forms”—created in turn a fertile and free environment for more artists to exist?

And I mean exist not in some rarefied or marginalized way, but in delightfully common and everyday ways. As the Solidarity Not Charity report points out, “the arts sector has a superstar system where the winners take all and the rest are left with crumbs.” It’s a symptom of our capitalist and neoliberal story that glorifies super wealth. Artists = individualists and iconoclasts, not workers. Yet we would benefit from artists being seen as a labor sector with the dignity and protections of organized labor.

More than that, we could interrogate the idea of wealth building itself. As Angie Kim of Center for Cultural Innovation asked, should community wealth really be the goal? Session participants discussed how human beings deserve support whether they are workers are not, whether they are productive or not. Instead of wealth-building, what if our focus shifted to building infrastructure that holds caregivers, disabled people, elders, and all the supports of a healthy community (including ecological sustainability)?

Part of the story shift we need is about uplifting different values and rewards for a life in the arts and cultural sector—or any sector. Lately, I’ve been trying to appreciate and value enoughness. Not more and not wealth, but enough for me and my family, and enough for all. This session brought together a wealth of ideas, tools, dreams and examples of how artists, community changemakers and grantmakers are supporting the emergence and growth of a solidarity economy movement.

The Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) announced recently that it received $3 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for APAP ArtsForward, a new program to support the performing arts field’s safe, vibrant, and equitable reopening and recovery.

According to the announcement, the program will focus primarily on providing grants to APAP presenter members and their artist/ensemble partners as venues reopen, tours resume, and audiences reconnect. It will also offer services and resources to the field-at-large around reopening, booking, and touring through the pandemic.

Read here.