New Strategies: Education of Public Artists

Panelists: Judith Baca, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Suzanne Lacy

Lorie Novak: When I read that the topic of today's lecture was educating a new generation of artists, I asked Cheryl if I could take this opportunity to tell you about the center we are forming at Tisch School of the Arts. Right now, for lack of a jazzier name, it is called the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy. It's the brainchild of faculty at Tisch who have spent much of our careers practicing or theorizing an expanded role of the arts in the public domain. This will be an interdisciplinary center at the school, with three overlapping components. One is an arts policy project which will include assessment of the history and rationale for arts funding in the U.S. and other countries, and how support for access to the arts is part of popular democracy, among other topics. Secondly, curricular offerings include a course called Urban Ensemble that gives students an opportunity to have internships in community arts projects, as well as some cultural policy courses. The third component will be community partnerships, in which students will be able to facilitate arts projects with community groups that service people in a range of circumstances. We also see this component as a way of allowing our students to participate with artists on public arts projects that are happening here in New York. One way of plugging our students into these three components will be a clearing house we will start in the spring of 1999, which will have listings of internships. If any of you are doing any public arts projects in New York that you'd like students to be a part of, our clearing house would be a place you could advertise it. We'll also be sponsoring lectures, symposia and workshops that will be open to the public. I encourage any of you who are interested to give me your address and we will add you to our mailing list.

There are several universities and arts schools that have programs that engage students in cultural policy and community arts projects. At Tisch, we see our center as being both a think tank and a laboratory, and we are interested in finding out about other programs that are conceived of in this way. So I will now turn this over to the panel, who will tell us about the programs they are involved with.

Younger: Thank you. For me, this is one of the most important panels because one of our seminar's objective is to investigate the things that are not happening in higher education and explore how we might cause them to happen. This is an incredible panel. You have before you three women who have been leaders in the field. Suzanne Lacy became the Dean of California Arts and Crafts at a time when our field was going through a lot of hostility and changes. She has a reputation of having brought some peace to that in a logical, sensible way through a program where the faculty learned how to work as part of a group rather than in a hierarchy. That is a big change for higher education, and it still hasn't come to many places. These three women started a program for public art, one that is socially and politically engaged. If we look at our own art educations, we will note that we haven't been taught to politically and socially engage, we probably haven't been taught to collaborate, we haven't been taught the skills of negotiation and working with a community that might make it possible for us to engage our audience, to be part of our community. They have created a unique and important model for the future of higher education.

Mesa-Bains: I'd like to introduce our panel. We wanted to talk about the program, but it is impossible to talk about the program, which is within the California State University at Monterey Bay, called the Institute for Visual and Public Art, without talking about how it was founded and the practices out of which it arose. Suzanne has been dean at CCAC, Judy is a senior faculty at the Chavez Center at UCLA and I come from a background of both public education and art making. All three of us are artists. Over the years there were many discussions, particularly between Suzanne and Judy, who both had worked collaboratively. In order to talk about this new program, the foundation and implementation, we should have Suzanne and Judy first talk about the old way and why they responded to building this new way of making art. Then I will talk about the program which I am directing now. I am only the godmother, watching over things until they come.

Baca: There is a great distance between vision and application. I come from an art education background, and my early notions about being an artist were that I would become engaged in community. For some period of time, because I worked with high school students and young people, I had ideas about myself as a teacher. I got my Master's degree in art education. What I found in that system was a system that focused in training on the object. From the 1930s to the 1950s, there was a concern that the arts had to legitimize themselves by becoming scientific about how they would treat a person who needed to be educated in the arts. In other words, the focus for educators was to focus on the object itself and to break down the art work. The assumption was that if you could understand the sum total of the art work's parts, you would become a creative individual. There is a great fallacy to this kind of thinking. But looking at line, form, color, rhythm and composition can be quantified and can be made to seem scientific, and thus fit in the realm of other disciplines and be legitimized as a serious endeavor in education. Third, the sum total would equal a creative act.

Of course, if you take that idea of an art education and how young people were being trained in art education, largely by studying the object, and add the university training for artists, you have art students who have been trained without any notion of the world they would have to face. When people came out of the university they were not prepared to fundraise, write grants, understand that they would be immediately struck by poverty, that only 1% to 2% would be employed in the art world. Yet we kept churning out these students. There were more women graduates, as the population shifted, yet the programs never accommodated the changes.

When I was invited to come in at the advisory stages of Fort Ord, I was enchanted first by the notion of a transformative act. I wasn't so interested in the university as a university, but in the fact that there was a fort in which all these major wars had been staged, and there was an opportunity for thirteen of us to come together and imagine a new university. It was an artwork. They didn't know it, but it was an artwork. With colleagues, we were going to be put into a room to rethink what a university could be. Suzanne and I became engaged in the idea of thinking what it would be to train one of us, looking at what we needed, what it would look like. That was exciting and daunting, because it's wasn't as simple as one would think to reinvent what you already understood, because we were stuck in skill based training. Another part of the university system was that if you learned to draw and to paint, and you took a series of these courses, at the end of it you would have drawing and painting skills.

We went about taking apart our own processes. We began to look at the process of the art making act engaged with community with ethical underpinnings, with the kinds of struggles we had in our process related work. For a long time Suzanne and I had been talking about how her work and my work was allied even though we took different routes. What was common to that practice and what we could extrapolate from it to create a curriculum that would support students' understanding of how to do the work was our goal. We began taking apart our own practice and going step by step through notions of how we related to community, how we did research, how that research led to analysis, how that analysis led to the creation of alternative ideas about how to approach something we were irritated about, whether pesticides or the conditions of farm workers. We looked at how artists could be successful problem solvers for the twenty-first century. In other words, how could the arts and the artists that we knew be engaged in such a way that our skills as creative problem solvers could be applied to the social conditions of our time. It doesn't really matter at a certain point whether you write a book or do a performance work or make a mural. We thought there was something common about the processes up to the point where you actually went into production. That is what we set about trying to do.

Lacy: Just to back track a little bit, I was trained at California Institute of the Arts in the early seventies after coming from an interdisciplinary background of graduate level science and psychology. At CalArts, I encountered art in a very non-object-oriented way. I studied with Allen Kaprow, and we looked at things like how to take notions of daily life, art as a daily life activity. I remember at one point when Kaprow was meticulously describing a performance where he had swept the floor, inch by inch, with a toothbrush. He was going on and on about daily life and the focus on the process. Faith Wilding stood up and yelled, "That's okay for you Allen Kaprow to talk about daily life scrubbing the floor because you don't have to do it." It was a grounding at that moment in time of avant garde aesthetics in women's sensibility and issues, multicultural issues and public space. It's like looking at the reason you might be interested in daily life as art, which was one of the early feminist projects. After CalArts, I worked for seven or eight years at the Women's Building, developing an educational program called the Feminist Studio Workshop, with Judy Chicago, Sheila de Bretteville, Ruth Iskin, Arlene Raven and Deena Metzger. Together we represented many kinds of disciplines and we worked to deconstruct our own disciplines, to see how those forms of art could in fact create meaning, create change, articulate values in a public arena. We didn't have the onus of the New York art world breathing down our back, as a lot of the feminists here did, which allowed us a great deal of latitude to experiment. We worked on experiential based art. I think that is a concept that we revitalized again in the Monterey project: art that comes directly out of people's lived experience and relates to creating identity, both cultural and personal. We would start with a consciousness-raising group. Every woman in that room would sit and talk about things she had experienced, and we would discover, for example, that one-fourth of the women had been sexually violated. That was a personal issue, but also a political issue. Our educational programs were oriented to supporting and developing the prioritizing of individual experience in a social or political context, and understanding the political implication of that personal experience.

Many years later, when I went to CCAC, I was really brought up short. It was an environment that was rigorously, religiously and skills-based. The concepts inherent in that educational program were concepts of medium. I did the heretical, coming from CalArts, of saying that in order to make room for time based ideology we could just get rid of one of the drawing courses. That was my first clue that my way of learning, which was concept and experiential first and media and materials after, was not what was happening at a traditional art school.

I joined Judy Baca at the Monterey project. We started designing a program called the Visual and Public Art Program. The reason we called it visual and public art was that we wanted to name it in a way that you could never disconnect the notion of its public presence and social motivation from art. It is not a fine art program with a public art component. We knew we would have to come from what we believed in, first, build onto that the processes we had developed in our own work over the years, then add on the skills. The context for all of this is Fort Ord, the transformation of a military base, and some of the founding principles of the group of fifteen founding faculty from various disciplines who designed the school.

Mesa-Bains: It's significant because it is probably the most interdisciplinary project I have ever been engaged in. There are ups and downs of that. I have always thought that one of the problems with only going to an art school is that you don't get social history and environmental policy and great literature. Diego Rivera said, when he was asked about the best way to educate an artist, don't study art. Study history, politics, culture, language. There is a context that is interdisciplinary. It is very technology based. We are not that far from Silicon Valley. There is a real interest in making it a wired school. We struggle with it. I'm not a very wired person. I am getting better. But Judy and I are working on doing a distance learning between Cesar Chaves and CSUMB, to do a rural urban connection. It is diversity based. That is a big, uphill struggle. It was founded with a strong Chicano-Latino base because Salinas has such a huge population, but you have to keep working at it. There is a lot of attrition. It is project-based learning which I think is one of the most important characteristics of it. Often the traditional view of art is that you make objects and wish for the best. You don't know where they are going to go. The project base gives students a real chance to work through material. One of the other ones have to do with ethical enlistment, or the concepts of ethics as a foundation. That has been very helpful to us. It is not a discourse found often in the art world. We know why. Ethics is at the core, and it has been so useful to have people who are the best in the country in ethics and rhetoric. There is a very strong environmental strain that is also helpful. The aquarium and marine sanctuary are nearby. All of those elements make a context that allows us to create what Judy and Suzanne envisioned as an intersection for artists standing at a point between public policy, environmental studies, social theory, landscape gardening, community activism. It allows us to create that kind of space. That is some of the context.

Baca: I think that is fairly accurate. Part of it was looking at the metaphor of the fort itself, and realizing that it provided us every possible opportunity to build a curriculum about the transformation of that space. We focused on the Fort Ord Project as one of our first projects. We let the fort be the site out of which the art would derive, letting people apply in a project-based, student-centered process, always in relationship to participant-audience in which the boundaries between artist and audience are blurred. We knew we had the sanction of the university to move into the community, to bring the community in, to blur those boundaries. They had to do it because Fort Ord was a series of military barracks. We had nothing. So for the first two years of this program, we had no facilities. The only choice was to send the students out into the world. We took all our detriments and turned them into assets in a significant way. I also saw early on that Suzanne and I were truly interdisciplinary. For example, in my own work, I had realized that I had to reach out to academics to find the historical material. I was working with people in social service. I drew heavily on multiple disciplines. A lot of artists I know are more interdisciplinary than most academics. Also, we were at the center of the university because we were about transformation. All of a sudden the arts shifted in their importance in the paradigm because we were transformative, interdisciplinary and poised to get people into the community.

The first thing we did was a small project called the Windows Project. We got to the fort and it was grim. We moved on to the abandoned base. It was a ghost town, and all around us, the 40,000 people in the community were angry, because they had lost all of the commerce and economy of the military base. We were going to supplant it with this university. We were saying that the university was going to provide a new economy. But the fort was completely boarded up, and I began with the simple notion of repeopling the windows, to talk about who had been there. Students in a painting class with no facilities began to draw on stories from interviews and research and to repeople the windows. They started filling up the windows and the buildings started to change. That was one of our first projects. There have been many more Fort Ord conversion things you might want to describe.

Mesa-Bains: One of the things that came out of the Windows project was the notion that part of the process of creating a university was excavating or coming to terms with its previous life as a military base. One thing that became obvious was that the military base had a guard house, and hadn't been open to the public for fifty years. People had gown accustomed to not getting on the base, unless they were military family and passed through the guard house. The guard house is empty, but people still don't like to enter. There is something about that old history, those old ghosts, that lived social space that has circumscribed it. One of the hardest things we are facing is breaking that down so that people feel it is porous enough for them to enter. The Windows project was a visible manifestation of retaking and remembering the space. One of the things we are working the hardest at is trying to develop a curriculum that maintains the original goals and vision of transforming the military base into higher education, of balancing an education between skill-based object making and a more conceptual base, in a way that doesn't fall prey to that nineteenth-century model.

One of the contexts that came into place as you were finishing the foundation was the notion of OBE, outcome-based education. Usually you go to school and count up your units. This is a different model which says what are the things you need to know to do this work? When you leave, how will I know that you know these things? What will you show me? What will I give you as experiences? What will you create for yourselves that will help you to learn these things? The six things that came out of Judy and Suzanne's original curriculum and foundation were: One, historical and philosophical analysis, in order to be able to take contemporary work and analyze it with thinking skills, research skills and problem solving skills. Two, the ability to define a community or audience: how do you know who you make this for? Why do you know? Who are they? How will you work with them? Three, how do you work through the process of collaborative and community organizing across disciplines and across communities? What kind of skills do you need to organize a meeting, collect resources, work with other people? It doesn't matter who the audience is. There is no rule of thumb about what constitutes a public or a community or an audience. Audience is a weighted word; I prefer public or community. Four, the ability to demonstrate your skills in production in a focused area. Five, revision and evaluation: having done your research, identified a community audience, learned how to collaborate and learned how to do something, are you willing to take feedback and change what you have done to make it better? The last is distribution: will you be responsible for what you make going out into that world or community you have defined. Could you write a decent tour? Could you do a poster? Would you go on television? Could you write a radio ad? Could you write curriculum? What can you do to make sure that the intended recipient and you have a relationship?

Whenever we were trying to show outcomes, this way of being, we would run into problems because they don't work as a sequential list. We put them in a circle now because they are unending and overlapping, a continuous process you are always engaged in. Constructing the curriculum was partly working with Judy and Suzanne to take that original vision into a structure and then taking that structure and trying to adjust it to the everencroaching bureaucracy of the California State University. Even so, we have been able to start constructing a curriculum and a process that can hold on to the original values and ethics. Suzanne will talk a bit about that; then, at some point, I would like to talk about some of the strategies: case-based teaching and learning in the company of masters, two important parts of how the program operates.

Lacy: I'd like to go back a second and add a point. What Amalia described in terms of learning outcomes go right back to how we analyze an art work. These were the skills we knew we had to develop. We took our own art apart to come up with those points.

Baca: So, can you imagine going to an art school where instead of the first year being spent in learning how to draw, you first had to learn something about historical and philosophical analysis? Where you had to have a class, like Amalia teaches, called Ways of Seeing as a core concept class? Can you imagine going on to a project based in the community where you learned to think about and listen to the people you are working with? You may have a value driven desire to work with teenagers, but then you have to go learn to listen to the teenagers, then you have to evaluate where they are found and why. What are the institutions within which they have to operate? Maybe you have to learn Spanish. One of the interesting things about this school is that you can't get out of there without learning a second language.

Lacy: If you are going to take history, we have cast that as multiple histories so there is no one cannon of history from one point of view.

Mesa-Bains: And then you do a workshop or apprenticeship to learn strategies of collaboration. You learn how to community organize_ all the things I get asked in my lectures: strategies of communication, collaboration and community organizing. Then you might take a class in sculpture where you learn how to handle the materials you need to do your project. Finally, all along, you are being nailed to the wall: Why are you doing that? What do you think it means? Explain this to all of us. Explain it to the people you are working with. For distribution, you would learn what students also always ask at my lectures: How do you get that on television? How do I get this kind of commerce going with a community? That is the kind of curriculum. It is divided into core concepts, which are the ethics, community and research things that Judy talked about; core skills which are 2D, 3D and 4D skills; and advanced courses, which are really projects. That is the fundamental structure. There are some problems with that.

We started out with this family-based approach. And we have been an all-woman faculty for three years. We are getting a guy next year. People ask if we are ever going to hire any men, and I say, "No, because I am making up for all the other universities in the California system." But we actually found a couple of guys who are good hearted. I know there are some of you out there. It was really hard, because one of the reasons that what Suzanne and Judy founded is able to survive is that it is really based on a woman's way of thinking. That sounds so sexist to say. By this I mean only that there is more support for the students on a family based model, that doesn't create those horrendous crits, that doesn't define a student by how much they copy or are like their professor, that doesn't demand a panic attack every time they have to talk in class, that asks them for ways of thinking that care about others. Maybe that is just women, or maybe it can be true for men. My sense of this, having worked through it with only women, is that it is much easier to accomplish with women because we take care of the students.

Lacy: The other reason it's easier is that we didn't come into a pre-existing arena.

Mesa-Bains: There wasn't an established faculty and you have people teaching there who have never taught at university before, except for Suzanne and Judy. Of the existing faculty on campus, all have been visiting artists, done other things, taught in public schools, but not in university. Consequently, sometimes, it makes us more open to reconsidering the foundational elements of what constitutes a university practice around art making.

One of the things we use is project-based and case-based teaching. They both rest on the notion of experiential learning. You have a set of experiences and look at them to learn how to do something. Case-based teaching means that you take a case of something. For example, in Ways of Seeing, we use the Vietnam veteran's memorial, the Pioneer monument in San Francisco, the Welcome to America's Finest Plantation, To Protect and Serve (the Black Panther mural), and sometimes Endangered Species, which is the environmental project by Patricia Johanssen. We take historic pieces and examine them as case studies. Students receive a case. The case will have history material, materials from art commissions, public testimonies, publicity from newspapers and television. They use it as a base from which they exptrapolate and build a case and present to each other. The case is a way to intensify analytical skills, to begin to develop hypothetical cases in which you test your own values, develop moral principles, ways of guiding your thinking. Case-based teaching is based on what Harvard has done in business and law for years. Before I came to CSUMB, I worked with Julie Shulman on a case-based teaching method for diversity in the classroom. She used the testimony of teachers and you looked at what they said happened. They were like the fish that got away. We do the same things in Ways of Seeing. We take the most difficult, controversial cases to look at and discuss. At the end of the year, students have developed their own set of values about public funding and public art, about the ethical issues of race and gender in history. They begin to use those cases to build their own cases. They construct a case, and at the end present their own version of what they consider to be an important art issue going on in their community. It can be a vernacular form.

So case-based teaching and project-based teaching have to do with using experience. What bridges that is the residency program. We have put a lot of money aside for a strong residency program. The idea is the Howard Gardner notion of learning in the company of masters and fluid states of making and thinking. Basically, our cognition is situated. We learn as we do, and we have to test and employ and retest and revise and make it our own. If we don't use it, it's just something we learned in class that we forget. Project-based teaching occurs in the studio. Case-based teaching occurs in theory. The residency programs with visiting artists are ways by which students have in-depth and intense relationships. Judy just brought the World Wall to CSUMB and a team of Israeli/Palestinian artists came to work there to point their segments. It was not easy and had an aftermath of natural disaster with the murals themselves because of El Niño, but with all that, it was still an absolutely amazing experience of global studies, earth science, policy, world languages. Judy hosted a roundtable discussion. There was a moment at which students came to us and were shaken by the fact that they had witnessed this process. It was a bumpy process. We put them in an apartment together.

Baca: We wrote them a note, asking if they could live together. I got back, "We think so."

Mesa-Bains: They still weren't sure when they left.

Baca: We started with ten days, but it went longer than that. That part of it, they were very endearing with each other. One of the most profound things for me was to witness how these men, who had huge differences, created a real convivial space between them for difference. They didn't agree, but in the U.S., if we don't agree to that degree, we kill each other. They do in their home country, of course, but what I learned was really significant in terms of their capacity to make space for difference, which I think is essentially one of the things we have to learn on a massive level. I find it difficult to sit with a person I disagree with so profoundly and not call them a name. It is hard. There were many lessons in the work.

Mesa-Bains: We've learned a lot through the residencies. The lectures are very important, but it is the lived experience that is the most important. Students painting for fifteen hours straight, while guys are telling stories and negotiating their histories through the images. There are things that they can't get in a studio. The same thing happens in the project-based teaching, but on a less intense level, because they last longer. We are working now with a potential prison project. We just finished one where we did a digital mural, which I hoped Judy might talk about as a strategy, which is marrying together technology and the public art making processes. It came out of work Judy had already done at SPARC and UCLA. We are in the second generation of developing the digital mural model at CSUMB. It is very exciting because it is a university that is technologically very supportive, so there is a way for us to work on that. I always say the biggest social public space in the world is the Internet. It is the one place those kinds of social relations are formed across electronic media. We have to look at those cyber realities if we are going to move forward in what we construct as a public space.

Baca: I will talk about the digital mural concept a little. Part of the alchemy of this whole story is that part of the struggles of California is where to put your efforts. In the midst of all these planning groups for CSUMB there was a huge hunger strike at UCLA. The Chicanos for the first time reclaimed Chicano studies. I was asked to come and went back to the UC system, and worked in the development of a new community Cesar Chavez mural and digital lab. We implemented that as well at Monterey. We are looking to try to create two pivotal points, between an urban environment and the Salinas valley. They are intrinsically tied in terms of the welfare of Mexican people, and the movement back and forth between the urban environment and the rural environment. Even during the time of Cesar Chavez's organizing, I witnessed great discussions among Chicano activists, who questioned dealing with the UFW, who didn't understand how clearly these things were tied together.

Let me give you a model. The digital mural lab notion, and how I am teaching with the Chavez Center students, is interdisciplinary and mixed skill base. Not everyone is at the same skill level. There are some arts students, some political science students, ethnic studies students, world arts and culture students. By mixing the teams, they recreate the experience of the communities. Each brings a different skill to the project. I call it the mission impossible, taking on a project in a twenty-week period. The class takes the commission and produces a work, negotiating all internal differences as well as with the community. The first piece was the Witnesses to Los Angeles History. The second piece we did was in a housing project, one of the most violent housing projects in Los Angeles, in the east side. It is populated by over 500 families. There is almost no public space for the families to negotiate. It is the site of many drive-by shootings, and one of the largest and most contested gangs in Los Angeles. They control the public space totally. The exterior of the walls are filled with the legacy of Chicano murals. It has an interesting history. Can I take Chavez students and UCLA students into this space and work on a site? Instead of putting it into public space to become victim to whatever might happen, we created relationships with twenty-five families. The families signed up to join us in the project and the students developed intense relationships with these families. In each family they found all of the issues: gang members, welfare mothers, children with children. They came back with those materials and brought them into the classroom, and we made a picture of the housing project. From that we created the imagery, by making an analysis of the material that came in; each making five, large-scale images that were permanently installed in Estrada Courts. It worked. It was magnificent. The housing project raised $5,000 out of their community fund to print the pieces, and we got money from the Housing Authority. My students had the experience of a real production. It was very difficult to do in the amount of time.

The next thing we are doing is a piece called Los Angeles Tropical, because the Getty, as some of you may have read, is restoring America Tropical. In this case we are working with high-risk youths. The students of the lab and the Alviera Street historic site are making a comparison between the 1930s story of immigrant population of Los Angeles and the 1990s. There are huge parallels. We are simply sending cameras into the neighborhoods and bringing back that material into the classroom with selected high-risk youths. I have never put the youths with the university students together before. It is very complex. We will be doing this in the fall and winter. As we proceed, we have created a parallel lab. It is fascinating to look at the differences in the images. The first image in the digital lab in Salinas is . . . .

Mesa-Bains: ...the strawberry mural. Most of the kids who are in the group that developed it were not art students. Most weren't even computer science students. They had learned some amount of Adobe Photoshop, and were able to do some stuff. We had a muralist and tech helping them. They ended up going out and creating images from their own experiences. Our difference was that we did it in a university setting that is in an agricultural region that is called the salad bowl of America, in which agribusiness is the single most powerful political force. When our dinky, portable eight-foot by nine-foot mural went out for an advocacy group that was an umbrella group for UFW and Farm without Harm, all hell broke loose. The agricultural commissioners, the congressman, everybody went to see it. I said, it is $500 worth of vinylized paper, what's the problem? It was wonderful for our students to learn. They learned that their intervention, however modest it seemed to them, actually shook the foundations of the most powerful business and political figures in the area. It took almost a year to peel them off our backs. Our university stood their ground with us. I bring that up because I think when you engage in art, that is project-based, rooted in real life, conflict and controversy comes with the territory. They threatened an audit of the university. They wanted to know who paid for it.

Baca: What is interesting about this process is that it is not just the life of the physical piece, but the fact that the images can do 100 things.

Mesa-Bains: They can be posters, cards, on the Internet.

Baca: As we get these virtual classrooms hooked up, I think we will be able to see for the first time, joined visually, the images of rural Chicano experience and the urban manifestation of it. This is significant for us as a political organizing tool. As activist, I am waiting for that moment. I want to pipe Amalia into my classroom, and we are going to pipe me into her classroom, and we are going to move back and forth between our capacities to teach in this way.

Mesa-Bains: I have been thinking that the next step is that we have a very strong African American community in a small town called Seaside. My husband, who is black, says, "Who ever heard of blacks by the sea?" They came there because there was a military base there. People built communities around the base. I think the next step is to create reference points and apertures between the Mexican communities and the African American communities who are slightly beginning to bridge a kind of distance between them about whose home it is and who has political power. There are ways in which we keep adding layers and making this discourse between rural and urban more and more rich and complex. I think those are directions we need to head.

Baca: One other point about that is, imagine if you could make an instant national campaign, by shipping disks and printing in five cities at once. There are terrific capacities as organizing tools.

Lacy: One of the things we haven't talked about is that we are weak in skills-based classes. We don't want to paint the picture as only rosy. We are slugging through and trying to provide enough skills opportunities for students to be able to implement their ideas, which are often more sophisticated than their ability to construct. In closing this portion of the panel, I want to say that we are at an interesting intersection now. There are a lot of forces that are being played out in the art world that are reverberating in the educational institutions. The kind of community art that we have tried to stress has really been going on for twenty years. This isn't a new idea. What is happening is that the interest in it is colliding with a social milieu that is bringing the idea of service back to colleges. People are now beginning to look at the things we are talking about as examples of service learning in the arts. There is an interest from the social justice sector of higher education in community based art. I was just invited to Stanford to talk about how this could be converted into an educational model.

In education, in California, people have suddenly discovered that twenty years ago, Proposition 13 wrote a death sentence for twenty years worth of young students. The school systems are completely without art. People are now beginning to look at how to bring the arts back into education. The community practice comes out of social justice interest and ethical positions that we have had our entire lives. Suddenly the world of education is noticing.

Mesa-Bains: Carnegie Mellon is doing artists in community. The Chicago Art Institute and the San Francisco Art Institute developing a theme of artist as citizen. It is happening.

Lacy: It is a moment in time that is particularly exciting for artists and art education. So let's open it up now.

Mesa-Bains: I want first to close with a few paradigms we are struggling to integrate. They haven't been integrated in a substantial way in most places. On one hand is practice, on the other hand is theory; how do you weave them together? What is the relationship between the individual form and vocabulary of the artist and their collaborative and collective practices? How do skills anchor themselves in the desire to produce something, i.e., a project base? How do products relate to processes? How is the analytical side of what we do related to the expressive side? These are things we are struggling to weave together in this curriculum and in the strategies of delivery. They are probably more doable in an interdisciplinary university like this, but I think they are going to be fought out in other arts programs as well.

Audience: It is really important and necessary for you to be doing this work that no one else is doing at a time when everyone is falling over themselves over technology. I teach at CalArts in the art school. There is no technology class. My class is the only project-oriented class.

Lacy: I really am not interested in technology specifically. I am interested in the access of information.

Question: I don't know how to frame this question, but it seems that your art project has become this university, and the illustration of your ideals will be implemented at the university. I am going to be a teacher soon, and my work is project oriented. At the university I am at, we still battle with modernists. You are talking about a new paradigm of education and teaching people how to negotiate in the world. How can people who are interested in implementing this at the university level create a new space in which to do this? Are you planning to write up your experiences?

Lacy: We do write periodically, but from having been in the thick of it, writing isn’t the issue. At CSUMB we have a faculty that is 50% and 60% people of color. There is almost no place in the country where that exists. The reason we have that is because there were no other faculty, and there were no pre-existing rights. We did not have to deal with the previous faculty and tenure. In most university situations, only a handful of faculty are interested in community art. Its hard to develop any real programming. You have to implement these models very locally. You will find that the students will start coming and the classes will get bigger. You can't transform an institution single-handedly.

Audience: I think it is phenomenal that you guys have created a university.

Baca: I tried in my own experience to build a universe in my classroom, and found it was impossible. There was no way to get an echo through other professors. You are seeing three people who echo each other. Amalia's interest in the theories she is working on lead directly into things I am working on. Suzanne's processes have a relationship as well. We have our differences, but with the echos, we can implement change. How do you get our old institutions to change? Wait for the old faculty to die? In fact, they replicate themselves. You have to join with people of consciousness. The models for social change are always the same, whether institutionalized or individual or in a community. Find a community of consciousness and join with them to expand your impact. If you take your students out of the university and have them relate to the community, and that is an expanded group, there are ways to make changes.

Lacy: That is why, I think, one of the problems in the art world is that it is disconnected from deeply held values and practices of a community and a political consciousness. In the art world, innovation is prized. It behooves one to pretend like they invented something because that is valued. Collectivity is not. There is a wave of artists who came on board in the late 1980s who are great artists, but some of whom don't like to look back or make the connection with earlier artists. The problem with that is a political problem. How are you going to build a social movement if you ignore everyone who came before you?

Audience: I think the problem is bigger than the structure of the institution. It is part of our cult of the new.

Mesa-Bains: One of the residues of technology is the idea that you keep moving faster and faster, getting newer and newer.

Lacy: But it is also ironically a kind of adherence to narrative that disallows analysis. If you look at the way media is constructed, it is around personal story. They will talk about a social theme that is of large consequence through the voice of one person. That is not bad, but it restricts analysis about root causes.

Question: Do you see in the future that it will be necessary for you to remain part of the university system? The reason I ask is that it seems that the nature of your work and of the people you are training is that it will undergo continual political clash. Will that eventually force you to break with the university system?

Baca: I have one idea about this. I don't think the old paradigm that you can own a professor still holds. People are resources that are ideas. We need to be multiply owned. I am challenging the UC system now by keeping two affiliations. I am affiliated with the state system, which they don't like at all, because it is considered to be not as prestigious as UCLA, even though it is where people are getting educated.

Mesa-Bains: That is what I want to talk about. I am going to stay there until the end, because I want to be there. When I look out and see hundred and hundreds of kids graduating who we have had an influence on, and who represent the communities that we have come from, we see that as potentially making good life together. State colleges are where a lot of Third World kids go, and working class kids go. In some oddball way, I feel you can do things there that more prestigious universities would not allow. Our university is only three years old, so even if I work until I am sixty-five, another ten years, that is only thirteen years, which is nothing in terms of creating ideas. One thing that brought many of us to the stage of wanting something like this program was the idea of codifying a body of experience that could be passed on. This is harder to see when you are younger, but as you get older, you gain a sense of your own development and the idea of a legacy to be shared with people who hold similar values. If we can codify and pass on our experience, people who want to make engaged work can come to learn certain strategies and skills. This will be only one of many places for that, in time. You are right that the state university system is a problem. We are the slave ship of America's educational institutions. We have very few resources.

Lacy: But I think your question has to refer back to a political environment in which you feel your energies are going to be most strategic. When I was a member of the planning group of the Woman's Building, we left CalArts. We had gone as far as we were going to go there. We were conflicting with the values. We started our own institution that lasted ten years. The problem was that it lasted on everybody's back because society doesn't adequately resource nonprofits. The reason I am working with the police in Oakland and the hospitals is to position a more radical perspective within the belly of the beast.

Mesa-Bains: And if you can change that even on some small level, you are teaching people that they can change the society they are in. However they define their projects, the fact that they have seen you do that means it can be done. When you codify the practices that you developed, someone else doesn't have to start from scratch.

Baca: I am more an advocate of parallel systems, rather than being within the beast.

Question: Socially motivated art is often defined as a problem solving mode and as crisis intervention. Are you incorporating crisis prevention, as far as looking towards work that can be done to avoid the levels of conflict you are often asked to resolve once they have developed? How much is that part of your curriculum?

Baca: I don't know. We are in such crisis.

Mesa-Bains: We are from California, we are so beat up. But what you are talking about is resiliency, the ability and capacity of particular people and communities to sustain themselves in the face of difficult situations. People have wondered for a number of years what those abilities are. Creative problem solving is one. Stable identity is another. Those kinds of models can be integrated into projects that are being developed before something happens. In the long term what are the things that can prevent crisis? I think we are in a crisis, so it is hard for us in California to see how to get out of it. I think the other side is investing in the future, taking these models and moving them into public education. We are now looking at trying to develop a curriculum around these concepts of public life and culture that could be tested in elementary schools. To prevent crisis, you have to go to public education, to teacher preparation. We have been interfacing with a teacher preparation program on campus and we have a task force with them because we want to be sure that arts is at the center of that preparation. We want the people who will eventually be our students to be taught by teachers who have an investment in a community-based notion of art making. You have to work on a number of fronts in order to build enough momentum to transform things.

Audience: I haven't heard you talk about the discipline of urban planning or urban design and architecture as an interdisciplinary program. I have worked in that field, particularly connecting urban planning to public art. I find them easier to work with than art programs, but there is a lot of skill-based information to be learned within urban planning and community development.

Baca: We have worked very deeply with urban planners in the Social and Public Art Resource Center in SPARC, in which we have studied the nexus of blighted communities, the incidence of graffiti, the amount of gang warfare, the amount of poverty. We have been siting murals with a more systematic approach. We now have a legacy of some 5,000 murals that we are maintaining. We have a hot line and do cataloguing and condition reporting on the murals, some of which are the only method of marking for an ethnic community the significance of their presence and their memory. Instead of just responding to the large number of requests we get, we are looking at social issues to determine where murals might have the greatest significance. Urban planning has been critical to the work we have done.

Audience: You described the larger picture. It is also possible through working with urban planning to learn the basics of working with building departments, building codes, structures and risk management. Once you get into urban planning, you really learn nuts and bolts of being able to produce anything in an urban environment. Even to get a right to congregate permit, you go through that discipline.

Mesa-Bains: It is a part of the program that really is in the early stages of development, in part because it has taken a while to identify the players in our region, since it is not an urban setting. And our university doesn't have those disciplines on its campus, so we are going to have to go outside. What we have is master planning on campus, the first beginning in the architecture, landscape and design areas. We are part of the design review committee. So we have a lot of say in the development of the campus, and we are trying to control it to the degree that we don't end up with ploppy big sculptures, and so that we engage the students and the surrounding region in the development of the campus. We are planning to start a mapping and inventory of the region of these kinds of relationships between different policy bodies, community organizations, arts organizations, grassroots organizations. People are really excited about the possibilities. It will happen, but it will be slow. It will take time to figure out how to do it without departments on campus to provide support.

Audience: I want to go back to the idea of changing arts institutions at universities. It is important to look at many models. One thing Laurie and I are finding here at Tisch is that because we are so discipline based there is a real consciousness of the limits of that. What helped our program move into community-based art was Americorps, President Clinton's domestic Peace Corps. We created an arts-based Americorps, which gave us just enough national impetus to be taken more seriously. My second point is, "It's not the ship in the sea that makes the waves, it's the motion of the ocean." I think we have a movement happening here. You will do it the way you are doing it, we'll do it the way we are doing it. It's happening around the country. I dare to hope, on my good days, that we will expand the vision of what it means to be an artist and art schools will have to expand theirs too. I do think institutions change.

Question: I wanted to add a bit about what has happened here. For us, finding each other in other departments has given us more power in the school. I get more support from Jan for my community arts projects that I have been doing in the photo department than I get from in the department. Our dean, Mary Schmidt Campbell, has also been very much in the public world of cultural policy, so she is also behind our initiative. A group of us went to her with the idea for the center. It came out of work we were doing. I started small in the photo department trying to get a class in which my students would be teaching photography in the community. All of the sudden service learning grants appeared, and now I can get funding because it fits into that category. Are you the only arts program in your college?

Mesa-Bains: There is also music and performing arts.

Question: And are they as innovative? Is the whole college as innovative as you are? Are you undergraduate and graduate?

Mesa-Bains: They are, and we are undergraduate only.

Question: I am wondering a little bit if the department is going to breed a whole new wave of formalism. Looking at my own practice, which is very much based in parallel thoughts and philosophies as your own work, and is coming out of a strong reaction to intensive formal training, those skills that I learned, are very much part of my artistic practice today. As I have been trying to teach a model of making that is process based at the University of Southern Maine, Albion College, the San Francisco Art Institute, I found an absence of a certain quality of formal attention in the works that are being made, similar to what you described. How do you make that bridge? I have encountered in my students the situation where the philosophy and ideas of the students are radically opposed politically from my own. How do you go about giving a student the skills to be the best conceptual artist who is advocating against abortion? How do you give students who are in the same class, who have radically different philosophies and political beliefs, the same tools to express those opposing beliefs?

Mesa-Bains: Let me clarify, I didn't say there was a lack of formal properties in the work, but a lack of technical skills base. That you can't do a drawing as well as if you studied it for five years does not mean that there are not a lot of formal properties. There are formal properties of time, of concept. I think we must broaden our notion of what is formal and what is not formal. I think the coherence of a model is about formality. That can be ethical coherence, all kinds of things.

Baca: The other thing inherent in the model we are describing is that it allows for students to make a choice. We are not assuming that drawing is something you need to do. You might be working in time-based work. It allows students to choose the avenues in which they can build the skill. If you want to be a painter, you can still be a painter and deal with formalist elements. In terms of creating a space where people can disagree with us, I think this is all about that. What you are talking about is negotiating difference. At every stage of the way, we do not assume that everyone will have our politics or point of view. It assumes that at every step of the way we are making negotiations. I suspect that if there were two or three students who were very conservative in a classroom, the piece would shift, if they were working collaboratively. Would it be a piece I liked? Probably not. It might not agree with my politics. I've seen that happen. We are not putting forward a dogma. We are talking about creating a space in which the work is relational, in dialogical communication with an audience or people who participate, blurring the boundaries between the people it is for and the people who are making it. We are talking about creating a capacity for people to address in a profound way the world they live in. In Salinas, you might very well find people who are against abortion. We are not talking about political positioning, but a methodology that makes it possible for people to be engaged in the world they live in.

Mesa-Bains: In fact, we have a great deal of conflict and difference. One of the reasons we partnered the ethics class with the orientation to the program is to help people look at the difference between institutional practices and personal practices. Being able to use material in an analytical way so that their discourse is not simply based on their feelings and opinions. They matter, but they matter most when they are articulated through material that they can manipulate. Part of it is to give them voice, whether or not we agree with what they are saying. They have to have the skills to do it. We move them from critical thinking skills at the lowest level, we work with people who have never spoken in public and have never worked on a team. Eventually, they gain a certain amount of fundamental respect for the process, out of which comes a little more openness to other points of view. People change, not radically, but in important ways. It has been a difficult process at the university. One of the biggest issues there is racism. It has almost stifled some of the other issues. We have worked hard to create a climate of ethical regard when someone says something you don't agree with, as long as they are using tools of thinking. Then you have to put up with what people are reasoning out.

Audience: At our school, a group of graduate students is trying to finish a community collaborative work among a community of African Americans and an African American historical and genealogical society. It started in 1992, and during the process, one of the problems was a lack of funding. I think this semester it will become a book. A history of Carbondale published twenty years ago didn't include any of the African American community. Society is changing, but it takes time.

Mesa-Bains: I think those ethnographic tools of oral history are significant devices in art making. We have a really strong oral history and community memory institute which helps us provide tools to our students for more formal aspects of oral history taking. It is very useful.

Question: These questions are about some of Suzanne's work. How do you both give value to a categorical assignment, such as women’s conversation among themselves, and at the same time support new options for activity, to give support to what has been assigned as roles in society and those new ones? And when dealing with a subject like battered women, a first step is to give voice to the undedog. How do you move from giving support to the underdog, to including the other aspects of that system in the discussion to find solutions? I am not interested so much in terms of these projects,but generally how you see these difficulties in public art. In socially motivated art, how do you address the difficulties of supporting stereotyped, possibly gender- or race-based activities, and at the same time make space for new opportunities? And how do you move from supporting the underdog to engaging the other powers that play into the power dynamic?

Lacy: I think that is in the work. I work very institutionally, with a union of individual people, institutions and systems within which they operate. How to create a methodology of dialogue after the expression is what my work is about now. The notion of victimization and the representation of a single aspect of an experience is something that we did a lot in the seventies. We used that methodology as a way of taking a society that had no awareness of certain issues and bringing it to an awareness. Around 1976 there was a shift where the womens’ experience of violence was transformed into entertainment. At that time, snuff films and underground pornography became mainstream. So the strategy shifted, and since then I've been developing strategies to do what you said. How do you do it? You do a media analysis and then do media campaigns. You create opportunities for intimate dialogue and then for expanded dialogue.

Mesa-Bains: You are also asking a question about how to avoid stereotyping women by using the practice of dialogue, which is what women are known for. Right? How to support that but not reify it.

Lacy: I see the "Auto" piece not as a single work, but as seven installations with multiple viewpoints, some of them expressed by people who have not been battered. You reposition the issue in the midst of the people by getting all kinds of people to identify the issue.

Audience: I am not asking a piece specific question.

Mesa-Bains: For example, if you wanted to do a piece about women's conditions, i.e., domestic violence, could you do it without using language? If language and dialogue is women's game.

Audience: Often there is a modality of oppositions. Either you embrace it or reject it. I want to both embrace and move beyond it at the same time.

Audience: In the project with the girls who were talking at the construction site, the conversations that were typically private are now public. So you are using the communication structure that may be a gendered construction, but you are putting it into the public.

Audience: I am not trying to critique a piece of work.

Lacy: I know, but you are saying how do you, and I am saying that's how I did it.

Audience: I am just identifying this as a serious need to consider in making work that will embrace a full dialogue.

Lacy: You also can never look at any of the work that I do in terms of just the performance. You have to look at the process.

Baca: I think there is an assumption of neutrality that artists think they have to have. I don't think there is neutrality. The nonpoliticized art idea, art as formal dialogue that is above political scrapping, is mistaken. I think every person who is making art has a point of view. I brought growers and farm workers into the same room. For them to have to listen to each other was perhaps a significant part of the art work. But there was no neutrality in that. There are people who are injured by that system. If I was going to present the differences between the growers and the campesinos, I couldn't.

Audience: I am going to move back to the university. I teach at two different universities, and I am curious, because so much of the admission process is based on object orientation, how do you decide who to take into your program?

Mesa-Bains: We take everybody who applies.

Baca: It's a state school. Once they get into a university, we don't say we have internal requirements.

Audience: Do you have them write up anything?

Mesa-Bains: When they go through major pro seminar, they have an option at the end to leave or stay. We have a very high conversion rate. We are proud of the fact that we have stolen students from almost every other discipline on campus. We have people from social and behavioral sciences, from science and technology. They get to the senior year and ask to come in, and we let them. This is a school that is going to produce X graduates, only a small percentage of whom will be traditional art makers. Another percentage will go into art education, another percentage will go into arts administration. Others may end up in landscape and design or public policy. That's our dream, not just to churn out artists, but to make people who want to go out and work across disciplines and reshape space and make community. For me, the arts education part of it is almost as important as producing artists.

Analysis by Maria Alos

The theme of this panel was centered on Art Education for Public Artists. The three panelists have collaborated together—along with other people—to create the Institute of Visual and Public Art at California State University at Monterey Bay. Amalia Mesa-Bains is currently the director of this Institute.

As an introduction, the panelists gave a precise description of the program, how it was founded and their goals and interests while creating such a program. This undergraduate program began as a response to the ‘old way’ of art education, which all three of the panelists were subjected to. This ‘old way’ of teaching—which is the way in which most of the art programs work in the US—was focused on training in media-specific and object-oriented processes. Often students do not learn how to survive as artists once they are out of school. The panelists started re-thinking their own educational backgrounds and what it would be to train a public artist, especially in terms of how they could engage students with communities, political issues and contexts, in order to become, in Judith Baca’s terms, "successful problem-solver artists" of our time.

They created an interdisciplinary program in which students learn multicultured history, sociological issues and ethical issues. The instruction is technological, project-based and community-based. Students learn what they need to learn specifically for the projects they have in mind. Students in this program are even involved in the configuration of the campus itself —which used to be a military fort.

A key point of this entire school is that seventy percent of the faculty are "people of color." Students are required to learn one other language which would help them to approach a greater range of communities in their practices. The panelists made clear that they are not only creating "public artists" but also professionals that can apply their careers in areas like public art, visual art, arts administration, arts education, museum studies, museum administration, art gallery management, curating, community arts organization, cultural arts policy and so on.

Many people in the audience expressed concerns about how colleges and university programs could be re-structured to help the institutions and their students become more aware of social and political issues. The panelists agreed when they said that such an effort would be almost impossible because of the politics and basis of art instruction as it is usually practiced, and that this new kind of education is most likely to be accomplished in new programs with more freedom of decision and less pre-existing ideology.

Although this type of public art education seems to be exceptional and unreachable by other art programs, I think there is a risk taken here which implies that students will not acquire enough technical skills to develop art projects once they graduate. The Institute for Visual and Public Art is still very young—only three years old. It seems to be offering a great opportunity for people interested in working in this realm, but we still have to wait a little while to see if this new, advanced and diverse education can really accomplish its goals and create superior artists that would mark a change in public art practices.