Community Arts

Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London, 2008, 297 pages, Edited by Diane Grams and Betty Farrell.

If you want encouragement about the future of music, spend some time around youth orchestras. I had a wonderful experience in Great Falls, Montana. For two one-week residencies every year, the extraordinarily generous violinist Midori immerses herself in a small community (for which she dramatically reduces her fee, by the way), performing on its orchestra's subscription concert, and working with that orchestra's affiliated youth orchestra. She also visits schools and coaches chamber music, spending so much time with so many young musicians that one feels there must be two of her.

It's a long plane ride from Los Angeles International Airport to Nairobi — twenty-four hours in the air, and you get there two days after you started. I arrived with a couple of extra boxes containing books — theater books of all kinds, textbooks, and play scripts. On the label I had boldly printed their destination: Ford Foundation East Africa Office, Rahimtulla Tower, Nairobi, Kenya. Perhaps because of this address — either that or the literature — I was able to pass through customs without paying the duty for which Kenyan Customs is notorious.

When I started DJing back in the early '70s, it was just something that we were doing for fun. I came from “the people's choice,” from the street. If the people like you, they will support you and your work will speak for itself. The parties I gave happened to catch on. They became a rite of passage for young people in the Bronx. Then the younger generation came in and started putting their spin on what I had started. I set down the blueprint, and all the architects started adding on this level and that level. Pretty soon, before we even knew it, it had started to evolve.

Artist Rene Yung's presentation of this paper generated lively discussion at a forum of the Arts Loan Fund of Northern California Grantmakers, in October 2006. It was written just as Arlene Goldbard's new book, New Creative Community, was published. Although Yung refers to an earlier publication (Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, by Don Adams and Gold-bard, 2001), she touches on many of the same themes discussed by the authors of "The Art of Social Imagination" (page 27 in this Reader) and reveals how the ideas have been adopted by an artist in practice.

Over the past forty years, several hundred legal frameworks have been established for cooperative action by governments on ecological issues — treaties such as the Biodiversity Convention, the Climate Change Convention, the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. How do these relate to art?

Outreach

The Vermont Arts Council's second annual arts conference took place on June 16 and 17 in Montpelier, Vermont. This year's conference, titled "On the Street Where You Live, the Arts as a Community Resource," brought together over 100 artists, arts administrators, nonprofit board members and state government officials to talk about how best to engage the arts in the ongoing challenges Vermont communities face in the areas of sprawl, crime, education, at-risk youth, the environment, preservation, and transportation.

The Boston Foundation is one of the oldest community foundations in the nation. With an asset base of about $500 million, it makes grants of approximately $20 million each year in the Greater Boston area. For the past four years, the Foundation's discretionary grantmaking has been guided by its Building Family and Community Initiative. This initiative focuses on helping Boston's children and their families overcome poverty.