Friends and Neighbors
How can art and community grow?
Friends,
Over the past few months, I’ve taken a turn toward the local. It started with discovering thriving Native art and culture in the Twin Cities, and it continued as students traveling in Australia used that same letter to explore their own multicultural life. Far from limiting our perspective, going local with art and culture puts things into focus and makes our shared life more grounded and accessible in an embodied way.
All of this writing and thinking led to TWIN CITY LIFE, a monthly curated calendar for art and community in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul region. There’s much more to share soon, but in the meantime here are some quotes I’ve gathered from recent books on community, art, placemaking. They help me imagine what can happen when friends and neighbors work together, and I hope these voices encourage you as much as they’ve encouraged me.
Take care,
Michael
“The dynamic of the relational culture is created by leaders who initiate and deepen and multiply effective public relationships. These leaders know, consciously or unconsciously, that their ability to act depends on the number and quality of relationships that they and their colleagues can muster and sustain. They see themselves as recruiters, talent scouts, and trainers. They look for other leaders, not passive followers or adoring dependents. Their bottom line is not profit and loss, or clients served, but expanding pools of reciprocity and trust among people who can act with purpose and power. When they act, as they act, people change.”
Michael Gecan, Going Public An Organizers Guide to Citizen Action
“The context that restores community is one of possibility, generosity, and gifts, rather than one of problem solving, fear, and retribution. A new context acknowledges that we have all the capacity, expertise, and resources that an alternative future requires. Communities are human systems given form by conversations that build relatedness. The conversations that build relatedness most often occur through associational life, where citizens show up by choice, and rarely in the context of system life, where citizens show up by obligation. The small group is the unit of transformation and the container for the experience of belonging.”
Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging
“Neighborhood life is the life that brings or tries to bring as much of human life together as possible...in a new birth and building of neighborhood life, all human activity could be brought back together so that work, play, love, life, politics, science, and art could be a shared experience by people sharing a space, sharing agreements as to how to live together, and mutually aiding one another to enjoy the fullest, ripest existence as human beings in a humane setting. The first steps toward that rebirth are being taken all across the country.”
David Morris and Karl Hess, Neighborhood Power: Returning Political and Economic Power to Community Life
“True community is more than a technique or a practice, but a praxis to transcend individual privileges, where separate expectations are replaced with equality and collective interest. By creating experience of dynamic demographics, with exercises that everyone can create in, there is a unification of new community that is inclusive in its being.”
Quoted by Ellen Mueller, in Social Practice Zines
“Art is—or should be—generous. But when working with place, artists can only give if they are receiving as well. The greatest challenges for artists lured by the local are to balance between making information accessible and making it visually provocative as well; to fulfill themselves as well as their collaborators; to innovate not just for innovation's sake, not just style's sake, nor to enhance their reputation or ego, but to bring a new degree of coherence and beauty to the lure of the local. The goal of this kind of work would be to turn more people on to where they are, where they came from, where they're going, to help people see their places with new eyes. Land and people—their presence and absence—makes place and its arts come alive. Believing as I do that connection to place is a necessary component of feel close to people, and to the earth, I wonder what will make it possible for artists to 'give' places back to people who can no longer see them, and be given places in turn, by those who are still looking around.”
Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in Multicentered Society
“How we spend our time affects our personal lives, but we don't often think of those choices as threads in the fabric of community. Yet the connection between available time and the strength of community is obvious: if our identity is tied up in the constant search for money, prestige, and public recognition, there's not going to be a lot of time or energy left over to put into community. Our culture tells us that money, prestige, and public recognition are the goals we should be striving for, and that achieving them will give us happiness. It tells us little or nothing about how much attention we should be paying to community, or what community will give us. Consequently, many people assume both that community just happens and that it has something to offer us only in crises, which we'll be able to avoid if we achieve enough money, prestige, etc. In the past, community happened because most people made it a priority, invested their time and energy in building it.”
Susan Berlin, Ways We Live: Exploring Community
“People's organizations rooted in the life of communities—what can also be called free spaces or mediating institutions, like schools, political parties, locally grounded businesses, unions—once anchored citizenship in local communities. They sustained values of civic responsibility. They taught skills of engaging people who were different from immediate friends and family. They connected people's everyday life to the larger public world. Many of such mediating institutions have changed into service providers in recent decades. Instead of sites where people work together on everyday problems and develop habits and values of civic life, they now often simply provide services to clients and customers. This change has weakened civic muscle. It has contributed to the privatization of our common world, the walling off our imaginations and identities as well as our neighborhoods. Yet there are signs of change.”
Harry C. Boyte, The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make A Difference
“Creating a group culture of caring for one another, no matter what. has been key to our success so far...It's all about the collective benefit. We all have opinions, and desires, and personal demons. But we also have to identify something bigger than ourselves, that we all can benefit from, enjoy and celebrate. So we have to remain honest and humble. I'm interested in walking alongside someone, to accompany someone in their struggle...I would say with no hesitation that when we offer ourselves in an honest and genuine way and acknowledge the dignity of all those involved in any given project, things tend to work out well. Acknowledging the dignity of people is key to a successful collaboration.”
Armando Minjarez, CO-LABORATION
“Placemakers can now have an added significance by helping, even in a small way, to prevent the waste incurred by disinvestment in older neighborhoods. By encouraging pride of place, they release community energy for maintenance and conservation, just as they help save the energy that might otherwise be expended to demolish older neighborhoods and construct new ones. Placemakers help rekindle a connection between objects in the environment and the layers of association with that environment that can impress itself on the minds of the city's dwellers, and nourish a feeling of belonging.”
Ronald Lee Fleming and Renata Von Tscharner, Placemakers: Creating Public Art that Tells You Where You Are
“There are many dedicated individuals and groups, quietly working away to bring about human values, ecological aspirations and social cohesion through small but significant projects throughout the world. They are the guardians of the future, they are the salt of the Earth, and they are servants of the people....The community encompasses commitment, compassion and consensus, by which we can live again as a people. In search for genuine alternatives anywhere, we turn instinctively to the living community in order to recover an untortured sense of self, and an identity that is rounded because it is an inextricable part of a wholeness.”
Satish Kumar and Vithal Rajan, Rebuilding Communities: Experiences and Experiments in Europe
"The Good News" by Thich Nhat Hanh
The good news
they do not print.
The good news
we do print.
We have a special edition every moment
that we need you to read.
The good news is that you are alive
and the linden tree is still there
standing firm in the harsh winter.
The good news is that you have wonderful eyes
to touch the blue sky.
The good news is that
your child is there before you,
and your arms are available.
Hugging is possible.
They print only what is wrong.
Look at each of our special editions.
We always offer the things that are not wrong.
We want you to benefit from them
and help protect them.
The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,
smiling its wondrous smile,
singing the song of eternity.
Lo! You have ears capable of hearing it.
Bow your head.
Listen to her.
Leave behind your world of sorrow
and preoccupation
and get free.
The latest good news
is that you can do it.TWIN CITY LIFE discovers local art and community one day at a time
Michael, thank you for these powerful quotes!