Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Seattle, May 3–5, 2002

Topic Sessions: Partnership / Ownership

Facilitator:  Pat Romney

Presenters:  Jessica Arcand, Margery King, Jay Brause, Diane Johnson-VanParijs, Liz Lerman 

Reflecting Team:  Selma Jackson, Norman Kleeblatt, and Lisa James

Pat Romney’s Introduction
The definition of an institution is: a fixed mode of thought which enjoys common acceptance, the deviation from which causes disturbance in the group.

The Reflecting Pool is a tool borrowed from therapy models, and here explored as a tool for dialogue.  The reflecting team allows therapists to tell patients what they’ve heard in a non-hierarchic and non-diagnostic way.  After each presenter speaks, this team will have a thoughtful conversation amongst themselves about what they heard, what they thought, what was interesting, etc. (allowing the larger group to listen to different perspectives and further reflect before engaging in open dialogue).

Andy Warhol Museum
Margery King:  Our project included the exhibition, other displays, areas for discussion, daily dialogues, forums, and other programs.  We convened an advisory committee to assist in all areas of the exhibit.  There were many reasons for undertaking this project, including part of the museum’s mission which is to offer a forum for community issues.  The issue of racism was timely in Pittsburgh.  The advisory committee included a range of community organizations, the  NAACP, YWCA Center for race relations, and others.  We really needed each other to create a project that was important to all of us.  We had to respect each other’s expertise.  Things that were important to us:  mutuality, clarity, action, individual relationships, sharing, letting go, willingness to take risks, honoring specificity.

Jessica Arcand:  When I think of the successes of the project, one clear one is the relationships we developed with our partners.  These relationships informed my own personal growth and the growth of the museum.  They include Sherry Cottom with YWCA center for race relations—she moved me out of the safe space where I normally worked, and we worked back and forth to come together on the daily dialogues which would work from both of our perspectives.  The daily dialogues were co-led with artist-educators and facilitators.  One poet had trouble being part of the program because she felt the exhibit was unburying history.  She brought her students to the exhibit and that helped her work through it to perform at the event.  ED of NCCJ (Betty Pickett)—saw that the exhibit was in line with their own goals and was able to get behind the project.

Margery:  A personal experience—I got a call from NCOBRA, a group that advocates for reparations, shortly before the exhibit opened.  The caller did not feel the museum should be showing the exhibit.  I couldn’t really disagree with her—she felt it was not important to show the photos but to advocate for reparations.  She touched my ambiguity.  She asked to speak.  I invited her to the forums, but she wanted to present at one of the forums.  We did not speak again before the opening of the exhibition, and many representatives from her group came to one of the dialogues and dominated the discussion.   When they called back, we invited a representative of their organization to be on the panel for the Pittsburgh Responds forum.  It was good because she provided an important viewpoint.

Reflecting Team
Selma:  I wasn’t sure if issues of race in Pittsburgh motivated the exhibit or if they had the exhibit already planned—which came first?  I also wasn’t sure what made the museum choose this particular exhibit.  I was interested to hear about the relationships that developed as a result of the work on the project.  I had questions about the relationship to the organization that focused on reparations.  It was curious to me that they waited for the person to call back.  It seems to me that we should be searching to include as many viewpoints as possible. 

Lisa:  What do you do with those people who come to the table?  Once we open ourselves up to this, what do we do with people who claim their place?  Where do we go from here?  Once you’ve unburied the dead, what happens next?  For me, it was appropriate that a “white” institution showed the photos, since whites perpetrated the lynchings.  We create this intimacy, but what happens next?  What is our responsibility to the community?

Norman:  I think that’s one of the big problems with civic dialogue that is based in an exhibition or a series of performances, because we have this limited time and then we have to go on to the next thing.  Will we use this process, these partners down the road?  I have been justifying the Warhol’s work as if I were the curator, and I could think of many other justifications than just that it’s part of the mission.  Warhol was an artist who took risks and raised issues in his art, issues of marginalized communities, and I was looking for the artistic rationale for presenting this exhibit.  The ideas of taking risks and letting go hit home for me.  The civic dialogue was a way to engage risk and support risk.

Understanding Neighbors Project
Jay:  On ownership—our project is rooted in our own community experience; the problem of being the insider, rather than the outsider, and trying to share our experience with others.  Gene Dugan founded Out North.  In 1990, we expanded the mission, but still wondered how to deal with our own personal issue.  [Jay and Gene have been involved in a controversial legal battle in the state of Alaska over the right of marriage for same-sex couples.]  We decided to weave the two together.  ADI allowed us to integrate the personal, the political, and the artistic as one.  That was ownership.  Partnering was not an easy thing given these circumstances.  We realized through our clergy partners, the Interfaith Council of Anchorage, that the legal battle was over and now it was about changing people’s hearts and minds.  To ask people: how, why, and where do I fit?  The dilemma is that we come with intense community baggage.  Because Out North was recognized as an advocate on this issue, we had to agree to step back and be less of a voice in order to gain broader community participation.  So we’ve set up a coordinating committee that deals with the project, and now Out North handles the artistic part only.

Diane:  It’s been a struggle.  People (specifically 2 clergy) have left the project.  Communication is difficult.  What information is getting out to the public about the project?  The invitation to the dialogue is the first step.  We need to model what we are asking the public to do.  We need to be transparent in our invitation.  We need to put the question out front and show the process. 

Jay:  Artistic process:  the artists are conducting community interviews, and will create art that reflects these interviews and their own messages.  The art is folded into a video, which will be presented to the dialogue groups (as a shared experience and catalyst for dialogue). 

Diane:  We’re continuing to build trust between the coordinating committee and the artists.  We want to be sure that assumptions aren’t being made. 

Reflecting Team
Lisa:  Combining the personal and professional, that vulnerability.  The issues are always life and death.  For me, the resonance is:  how do we trust our community when these are our issues?

Norman:  The personal is a motivating force in these projects.  Why do we not expect the personal to be at the forefront when we are working in art?  If the issue is so central a stake in your life, those personal issues cannot be resolved just by you and your partner—you need the community.  By making it public and involving those who may dissent, it’s creating the dialogue that will bring the possibility for more safety to allow families like ours to exist and be validated.  It’s interesting how much these projects are motivated by the personal.

Selma:  As I thought more about my involvement in my project—we were invited to participate because of our place in the community.  The artistic aspect of the question: how do you work in community?  Recognizing change, redirecting your energy when you have a goal that you want to reach, and how your current energy/place could hinder that goal.  Awareness at community level—it’s not just a project, it’s a continuum, an on-going process.  The communication issue—awareness of who is speaking to whom, and who the individuals are.

Lisa:  As far as who’s in and who’s out, and making sure that you invite them in—the invitation is an event in and of itself.  The response is a separate event.

Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Liz:  Living between worlds can be pretty bruising.  In Hebrew, the word for angel also means messenger.  Maybe I should think of myself as a messenger.  Our project is to teach fish to explain how they swim.  I don’t know what the outcome will be.  Questions around editing: my experience has been that editing other people’s stories, experiences, etc, is a delicate, fragile, challenging place to be.  We have tried to make the editing as public as possible.  There are competing loyalties in making art—the audience’s needs, the artist’s needs, the needs of the performers, and the needs of the piece itself.  At the Dance Exchange, we retain the right to final edits and artistic control.  Partnership has to border on love in order to trust.  When partnerships are cross-cultural is when editing really gets complicated.  You have to be able to be yourself and also step out of history.  It’s more than just race, it’s aesthetics.  [Liz shares an experience from the Hallelujah! project in Ann Arbor/Detroit, In Praise of Paradise Lost and Found, in which the Dance Exchange collaborated with the Rudy Hawkins Singers.  Liz came to understand that in Gospel music, the aesthetic tone of the music matches the message.  Good sounds like good, and evil sounds like evil.  But she was interested in juxtaposition.  They had difficulty agreeing on the music for one section of the piece.  At one point, Rudy Hawkins said to Liz, I can’t do what you want with Gospel.  I could do it with the Blues.  But my singers don’t want to sing the Blues anymore, that’s why they sing Gospel!]   In this example, I compromised artistically in ways I’ve refused to in other communities, because I felt Rudy could take me to a new place.

Reflecting team
Selma:  The notion of risk, and trusting the partner to take you somewhere you may not want to go.

Norman: I liked the discussion of angel as messenger.  I also think that in each of our projects, we have the messenger-angel instinct, but there is also a demon in the process that wants to shoot the messenger.  On fearing to destabilize institutions—I think the issue is not fearing destabilization, but asking, is the institution strong enough to withstand it?  The work functions out of destabilization.  It’s a scary thing but ultimately a good thing.

Lisa:  The three kinds of partnerships we’ve heard about today—what’s next; the personal, the professional, and the community; the partnerships and relationships in the community that have their own lives which have nothing to do with us.  There are things that we’re a part of, and there are other things that we have to realize have nothing to do with us.

Open Discussion
Pat:  Opening question:  Who owns the issues of aesthetics and art, and how do we partner together?

Peter:  What did honoring specificity mean? 

Margery:  Dealing with the range of issues in our project, we felt it was important to be open to the range of issues, but also to honor the specificity of that material [the photographs of lynchings in America] and make it the table around which we discussed whatever came up. 

Jessica:  When you generalize the discussion, it takes the specific issues off the table.  It’s important to stay specific.

Don:  Forming safe space to allow us to express our passion should be the goal, and finding partners to help create that safe space.

Bill:  What do you mean by mutuality?  Also, issues that arise as you set a project down—when  the civic issue is so powerful, how do you deal with it when the project is over?

Jessica:  Mutuality is based on real need—recognizing what we didn’t know, and what we needed.  Also, when we brought the advisory committee in, we had already decided to present the exhibit, so that was not on the table for discussion.  We moved from there to ask for the committee’s help in presenting.

Margery:  We made the decision to do the exhibition, rather than giving it to the community to decide.  Our partners had certain things that they made decisions about.  We needed each other.  We couldn’t have done this without our partners.  We had to be intertwined.  Within the mutuality was mutual respect for each other’s expertise.

Michael W:  Jay talked earlier about a suppressed space rather than a safe space; for him a “safe space” is a suppressed space.

Jay:  When you are in a room with a multiplicity of issues, something is closed off, and it’s usually the minority view.  When my views are closed off in the room, that is suppressive for me.  What’s safe is a space that allows me to be authentic.

Peter:  Partnership as love—what are some of your strategies for falling in love with your partner?

Liz:  I’m really curious about what people think.  I’m quick to see a glimmer of possibility.  My staff thinks I’m hopelessly optimistic.  Part of what I mean by love is learning something.  You need to monitor your own experience.  Sometimes I design projects, things I’ve done a million times, to add something so that it will still be a learning experience for me.

Raylene:  Teaching fish to explain how they swim – What is the desire that they need to learn how to swim?  Is it ok that they get there differently, that they swim differently?  

Liz:  Acknowledging the different ways people participate is critical.

Raylene:  It’s also maintaining focus on the goal.  Is it necessary for it to take a specific form?  The difference between the I and the We.  With great emphasis on responsibility. 

Margery:  I wanted to respond to Selma’s question of what happened with the NCOBRA group.  We could bring to the table people who agreed with us, and people who disagreed with us but were sympathetic to what was going on, but it was difficult to bring in people who felt this was bull.  The bottom line was that the person who called me didn’t want to give her name or the organization’s number.  We tried to find them but couldn’t.  So we were reliant on them to call back, and thankfully they did.