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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.

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.