The devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the calculation of racial injustice continue to affect the artistic sector, most of the institutions still in shock. This moment requires a visionary and decisive action, and it requires dependence on the freedom of spontaneous creativity with the certainty of intentional conviction – aka Improvisation of jazz– to guarantee the survival of our artistic ecosystem, even without the certainty of a score or a plan noted for what comes next. As Miles Davis said one day: “This is not the note that you play, it's the bad note – this is the note that you play later that does it well or badly.” Spontaneous creativity is particularly critical for the institutions most at risk.
In no case, my reflection here seeks to divide or reduce the difficulties taking place in the arts and wider culture sector. I think we have to work together and create solutions like a wider collective. But this reflection aims to prioritize the resources of these communities and institutions, historically, and most of them in need during this current crisis – institutions and communities directly in the fire line. These institutions focused on immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ +community, the community of disabled people, women and girls and disadvantaged economically. By increasing support in these areas, we can carry out a training effect which guarantees that “all boats go up” through the sector, while we are fighting for the very soul of our democracy, and indeed, the soul of our civilization.
I am inspired by the work of the founder of Cholicylink, Angela Glover Blackwell, whose champion of the “sidewalk cup effect” provides a powerful goal for this plea. The sidewalk cut on the sidewalks was initially designed to help people with disabilities. But this simple but deep intervention has proven to benefit everyone, parents with strollers to bikers, travelers and workers. The principle behind the sidewalk cutting is that policies aimed at raising the most vulnerable often leads to societal advantages that stop outside, strengthening the collective whole.
“There is a societal hinged rooted that intentionally supporting one group in injuring another,” wrote Glover Blackwell “The sidewalk cutting effect” For Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2017. “This equity is a zero -sum game. In fact, when the nation targets support where it is most necessary – when we create the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind and fully contribute. well-being.
The leaders who serve cultural institutions and historically disadvantaged communities do not lack vision, competence, imagination or nuances and cultural sensitivities that can only come from our communities. What is required now are supported investments and an unshakable belief in our ability to direct, to be Changakers and Critical Opinion leaders, and to dynamically contribute to a dynamic flourishing artistic ecosystem which anchors a civilization in danger.
Technology is essential for our future, but it is not the next border. The construction of larger and more advanced buildings plays a vital role in the growth and expansion of our ecosystem, but they are not the next border. Defense and lasting force of our most fragile institutions and communities –that is the real border in front of us. That is the construction of a civilization. A. Philip Randolph, leader of the 1963 historic march on Washington, reminded us that “a community is only democratic when the most humble and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic and social rights that the largest and powerful.”
Without well -orchestrated and highly coordinated interventions and partnerships between the philanthropic, business, community and arts and culture sectors, these long -standing fragile institutions can close, recalling the moment when federal financing cuts in the 1990s meant that 87% of the institutions of black theater could not keep their doors open. Just in New York, eight African-American theaters closed in the 1990s, while Samuel A. Hay recorded African-American theater: a historical and critical analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Without the largest sector of arts and culture protecting the very institutions that hold and embody the rich various stories which are our great pluralist and democratic experience, the arts and culture sector could very well be part of the cultural monolith against which we try to repel – one that builds empires and not civilizations.
I understand that equity is not a monolithic or singular construction, but a complex and multifaceted intersectionality. It is woven through the sons of race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, faith and much more. This nuanced holistic understanding is the border we have to kiss if we want to move forward together. So many institutions in this vast and magnificent cultural sector have resolutely at the intersection of social justice and the arts, serving as guidelines for marginalized voices to hear and celebrate. Now, while we are confronted at this pivotal moment, we must support ourselves to redefine the very role of artistic institutions and to reach a resounding radical consensus – to challenge the status quo, to reinvent our objective, and to move away from “imagining a world”, in the words of Audre Lorde, “in which we can all flour.” With the need to exercise courage, an unprecedented condemnation and a tireless commitment to constitute a civilization which will live in fractured democracy.
The writer winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Alice Walker, urged: “The most common way that people abandon their power is to think that they do not have.” I would humbly recommend some actions that can be taken now. I am convinced that there are many more.
- A national working group on the arts of the cross sector: This working group would bring together national leaders of philanthropies, societies, communities and the arts and culture sector by emphasizing a strategic and multi -year plan to invest in artistic institutions that are specifically in the line of shooting at that time: immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ + community (in particular trans people), the community of deficiencies Disintment economically.
- Community standing with the community: Community leaders, community members and companies can seek vulnerable institutions and invest in it: buy tickets, make a donation (giving to all levels is significant) and creating sponsorships and partnerships to establish resilience and higher links between the community. Volunteer! If there is a pro bono skill or service that can be provided to advance an institution, provide it. Make noise! For these vulnerable institutions which can be in danger of closing their doors in silence, do not let this happen. Share their website and their upcoming events on social networks to keep them alive and alive. Use your influence. Share with your subscribers.
We have the power to reinvent the world, but only as a collective. In the middle of the Second World War, Pulitzer's winning writer Katherine Anne Porter, wrote a feeling in 1940 which resonates with the struggles we are now confronted with – words that give hope, encourage us to take the long term and propel ourselves …together::
Faced with such a form and weight of the current misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may not seem more consequence than the whirlwind of a cricket in the grass, but the arts live continuously, and they literally live by faith; Their names and forms and fundamental uses and uses survive unchanged in everything that matters through periods of interruption, decrease, negligence; They survive governments and beliefs and societies, even the very civilization which caused them. They cannot be completely destroyed because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are eliminated.
Dr. Indira Etwaroo is producer, director, scholar and director of arts and culture. She is artistic director and CEO of Harlem stage.
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