Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
November 16–18, 2002

Pam Korza
2001
Case Session: The High Stakes of History: Pursuing Critical Issues in the Community
The intent of this session was to explore the processes, choices, practices, and outcomes related to confronting history when engaging communities in facilitated dialogue about contemporary issues. Project participants framed key questions reflecting challenges around their project.

This session was part of the Animating Democracy Learning Exchange held in Chicago, November 2001. In it, two Lab projects sharing common ground examined philosophies, hypotheses, goals, principles, and/or practices related to their arts/humanities-based civic dialogue efforts. 

Participants (see below for Project Summaries):

  • Traces of the Trade, Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, Katrina Browne, film director; Jude Ray, executive producer
  • The Slave Galleries Restoration Project, St. Augustine’s Church, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Rev. Deacon Edgar Hopper, St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church, Liz Sevcenko, Vice President of Programs, Lower East Side Tenement Museum
  • Without Sanctuary, The Andy Warhol Museum, Jessica Arcand, Curator of Education, Margery King, Associate Curator, Sherry Cottom, Facilitator/Trainer, YWCA Center for Race Relations, community partner

Traces of the Trade, Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities
The film project, Traces of the Trade, will trace the history of the filmmaker’s ancestors, the Rhode Island DeWolfs, the largest slave trading family in the United States by following nine present-day ancestors on a journey from Rhode Island to Ghana to Cuba and back to Rhode Island, and their own reckoning with the family’s past.  The film looks not only at the North’s role in slave trading, but its complicity in perpetuating slavery as the Northern Industrial Revolution demanded cotton picked by slaves. The film will look at the legacy of slavery on White people, including an amnesia about the North’s role and resulting “I’m not racist therefore it’s not my problem” attitudes. The film aims to address the denial, defensiveness, and shame among Whites that pose barriers to engaging in dialogue about race. When the film is completed, it will be presented in a statewide dialogue program developed and facilitated in collaboration between the Rhode Island Committee on the Humanities, the National Conference for Community and Justice, and the Heritage Harbor Museum.

Questions for discussion:

  1. For a film project with traumatic history as its subject, with layers of injury and scars over centuries—that have shaped not only those in the victim group but in the perpetrator group—what support/guidance do participants (mostly people of African descent in Ghana, Cuba and even Rhode Island) need and how much should this process be made transparent in the final film?

    How much do we assume that people of African descent need or want support from us in the dialogue dealing with descendants of slave traders?  Filmmakers had not entirely anticipated that crewmembers would be going through their own relationship to the issue during the shooting process. “There were times our sound man couldn’t take sound, because he was crying.” Filmmakers recognized their impulse to take care of the crew while also questioning whether “they needed or wanted our support.”

    For white family descendants, how much is the project about therapy and how much is it about dialogue?  Given the difficult material, filmmakers emphasized the importance of professional facilitation of dialogue. “You’re inviting people into a space that isn’t safe.” At the same time, Browne expressed concern about how to present the family’s facilitated dialogue in the film. She doesn’t want people to feel they can’t “try it at home” if they don’t have professional support at their disposal.
  2. What support/guidance do the filmmakers need and how much should this process be made transparent in the film?

    Browne is both the film’s director and, as a family member, a participant in the film. Should the final film show her own struggle and lack of clarity or will this confuse the audience? How much distance should be provided?
  3. How do these choices conflict or coincide with telling a good story, making good art? 

    Heading into post-production, the filmmakers are confronting difficult artistic choices knowing the multiple demands of the market place, future audiences, and the intent for the film to effectively stimulate dialogue about race. Questions raised include: How does one balance the provocative nature of the family-based journey toward understanding and dialogue with the need for critical and professional distance? If art making is about making choices, distilling and finding images and symbols, is it fair then to use a family member as a symbol of one attitude or sentiment knowing that s/he is more complex as a person than that?

Participant discussion:
Browne asked, When the goal is dialogue, does this push for (a balance of) multiple perspectives in the film itself? If the film focuses on the filmmaker as family member, for example, does it privilege her instead of encourage multiple views? Many participants supported, first and foremost, keeping a keen eye on the artistic goal to make a good story—a story that is honest and sincere.  They expressed that:

  • Art is by nature subjective, a personal journey.
  • Representing all voices in the art, aiming for the lowest common denominator can weaken the art and its impact.
  • If it’s good art, it will stimulate dialogue. A good facilitator will will be able to draw out the range of perspectives.
  • There is a range of emotion beyond guilt. Give attention to drawing this emotional range.

The question of how transparent to be about the process of the family journey and filmmaking met with mixed responses:

  • In favor of transparency, Valerie Cassel (curator, Houston Museum of Contemporary Art and Animating Democracy liaison) advised, “You don’t want to edit out the messy stuff.  The question may be whether to integrate this within the film or as an addendum of some kind.”
  • Neill Archer Roan, arts consultant felt differently, “Art is like sausage. Watching it being made can diminish your appetite for it.”  He went to say that there is a meaningful distinction between revealing art and revealing assumptions and strategic presumptions that guide the work. If, for example, a presumption is that “the sins of the father are visited upon the sons, that’s a kind of slavery itself. To me that’s the point of the dialogue . . . I feel disquieted. Don’t take away, by revealing your craft, the punch in the gut that your art might offer.”

Artists Suzanne Lacy and Brad McCallum challenged the presumption inherent in the discussion that art and dialogue are always independent activities. Lacy called this boundary “artificial.” McCallum added, “Some artists see civic dialogue as part of the aesthetic process,” and encouraged Animating Democracy to recognize this more integrated approach.

The Slave Gallery Project, St. Augustine's Church and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
St. Augustine’s Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was built in 1828 for an all White congregation.  Slaves were segregated from the White congregation in a hidden balcony chamber or Gallery where they could see but not be seen. Centuries later, the Church, now an African American congregation, recognized the historic significance of this space. Originally setting out to develop a mini-museum about African Americans’ presence in the community, Deacon Edgar Hopper imagined the space’s greater relevance and use to a wider community grappling with ongoing issues of marginalization. He raised the question, “How do we use the whole tool to speak across cultures?” and sought the help of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum with which the church had a relationship to determine how best to make this happen. 

Questions for discussion:

  1. How do we offer the African American history of the Slave Gallery as a metaphor that can inspire connections among divisive communities while maintaining specificity of ownership?

    Because every new immigrant group has come to Manhattan through the Lower East Side, marginalization of ethnic, racial, and religious groups is an historic and present day issue.  Who is at the center?  Who is marginalized? Whose community is it? These are recurring and often contested questions.  The Slave Gallery and its restoration process offer an opportunity to acknowledge the history of African Americans in Lower Manhattan, while also making this space and its history relevant and useful to a wider community.

    The Tenement Museums’ experience with the International Coalition of Historic Sites of Conscience has offered insights into how historic sites can be centers of civic dialogue on important contemporary social issues. History can be divisive (“My people have been here longer than yours.”) or it can inspire collaboration and communication.  A dozen community leaders will serve as community preservationists.  They will identify issues within and across their own communities for which the Slave Gallery project can provide a space and focus for dialogue. These community preservationists will be trained in dialogue facilitation in order that the community is empowered to address the issues with their own resources.
  2. How do we use the Slave Gallery project as a model for historic sites around the world to stimulate dialogue on their own pressing issues?

Participant discussion:
In choosing to bring the Slave Gallery to public light, St. Augustine’s has to contend with:

  • Accurate portrayal of the history (for example, just because slavery was abolished  doesn’t mean that people didn’t keep slaves or find loopholes that continued the practice)
  • The fact that the Slave Gallery has been hidden for the last 170 years and congregation’s own feelings about complicity in hiding this truth;
  • The potential that St. Augustine’s will embarrass the mother church which does not want to make the connection between the church and slavery; and
  • The response of the media and white public.

Liz Sevcenko indicated that history is a process of story telling and counter-story telling. While a physical end product is the restored Slave Gallery space, the process is as important to the partners.

Segregated seating still occurs in some cultures.  How do institutions deal with such cultural practices in our spaces? Afghanis is Maine who use the Center for Cultural Exchange’s space, segregate by gender. Liz Sevcenko added that one of the Community Preservationists is from an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, where within that community, segregation is a hotly contested issue. They want to bring that discussion into the Slave Gallery.

Without Sanctuary, The Andy Warhol Museum
The Warhol Museum is presenting Without Sanctuary, an exhibition of photographs and post cards showing very graphic depictions of lynchings of African Americans. Although typically thought of as occurring in the South, lynchings happened all over the country. The Warhol’s choice to present this exhibition is, in part, to point out the history of lynching in its own region as well as to move local citizens to dialogue about contemporary issues of race during and after the exhibition’s run. 

Question for discussion:

  1. If the personal is central to the politics of race relations, how can community affect institutional change and the institution affect change on a personal level?

    Can a primarily White institution present this exhibition credibly in the eyes of the African American community?  The partnership between the museum and the YWCA’s Center for Race Relations has been essential to the exhibition and dialogue efforts having a credible presence for both African American and White people in the community. The relationship developed from a rocky start:
    • When a leader from the YWCA’s Center for Race Relations was invited by the Warhol to sit on the Community Advisory Committee for the exhibition, Sherry Cottam, YWCA facilitator/trainer rigorously questioned the Museum on its intentions in hosting this exhibition. “I talked with other folks in the community to see if I was on the right raging track!” Cottam was impressed that the museum staff listened and was even more committed to her participation.
    • Curator, Jessica Arcand, felt that the institutional lens of the museum had previously allowed her to work with issues of race in a safe way. This exhibition pushed her and the institution to ask, “how do we get to a place where we can deal with emotionally unsafe issues with real rigor?”   Arcand and Cottam dismissed initial ideas to do anti-racism  training for museum staff in favor of looking at the history of lynching locally.

    The history session, however, brought forward more issues. A White history professor from the exhibition’s Community Advisory Committee was enlisted. Cottam recounted, “This woman presented my history.” There were only about five Blacks on the museum staff; the rest were White. “It felt like we were listening to her describe her vacation trip. It lacked the emotion that we needed to buy into this. We were pretty upset.” The Black people walked out. The afternoon presenter, a representative from the local historical society, and an African American, also upset by the morning presentation, made sure to emphasize the emotional dimension of lynching history. While his presentation succeeded to resonate with many, an unfortunate homosexual slur he made in recounting a personal story shut down several museum staff members who are gay. This became another opening for this internal group to explore issues of trust.

    A third issue to address in designing dialogue activities was to what degree to remain specific to the African American history versus broadening to bigotry and prejudice against other groups. “There was a tendency to turn (the dialogue) to broader strokes.”

    What dialogue activities would look like and who would facilitate was also a question. As a museum presenting these images, Arcand and Cottam resolved that, the focus of dialogue had to be on the images. This reinforced that the Warhol’s intent for dialogue should not be anti-racism workshops, but rather dialogue that enables people to process the images and “that would meet them where they are” in relation to issues of race.

    This also led to a co-facilitation model using the museum’s artist educators and community facilitators.  Each had done racism dialogues before but different and separate. Cottam secured 80 community facilitators from diverse racial and occupational backgrounds, further building credibility for the exhibition across community sectors. Artist educators would be present in the museum to facilitate daily dialogue opportunities for visitors, while community facilitators would commit to facilitate specific dialogues over the course of the exhibition.

Participant Discussion:
Participants asked:  How do you get institutions to recognize and affect their racial behavior in the institution? Are there conversations among trustees and staff? Are issues of power coming forward? 

  • Arcand reinforced the exhibition’s essential alignment with the museum’s mission to be a vital forum for discussion of contemporary issues. The exhibition has engendered significant amount of dialogue within the institution. The project has helped the museum to better understand the diversity within the African American community. The addition of African Americans to the leadership and implementation of this project has forced the question, how this will impact practice of the institution as it moves on to the next project.
  • Margery King, associate curator, described having to relinquish the control she typically has over exhibition content, to embrace a more collaborative and organic process. King continues to believe that, in arts-based civic dialogue, the art has to come first, but interrelated goals of artistic inquiry and civic dialogue make it essential for everyone to work together.

“As Westerners, we have a cultural proclivity to animate things that are not organic—such as institutions.  Individuals perceive and relate to institutions as though they are apart from themselves. This is a difficult issue for the Warhol Museum. It’s implied that the museum exists as a monument to Andy Warhol’s aesthetic and because of this, it feels even more like the museum is a being of its own as opposed to a collection of people who live and work now. In truth, there is accountability for every person who works at AWM. . . In terms of affecting institutional change, we have to figure out what’s at stake in terms of this organization’s collective responsibility to its members. Institution cannot do this work unless it first sees itself as a community of conscience already.”

Small Group Breakouts
Self-defined small groups discussed the following areas of interest:

  1. What is art and what is dialogue in arts-based civic dialogue? Is there a useful distinction?
  2. What specific challenges are you facing in your project work that would benefit from peer feedback?
  3. How can cultural organizations doing this work more effectively navigate the media and press toward more expansive and less simplified coverage of the project and the civic issue? (Documentation notes from this small group is not available.)
  1. What is art and what is dialogue in arts-based civic dialogue? Is there a useful distinction?

    In the arena of arts-based civic dialogue, many find it necessary to draw an artificial boundary between dialogue and artistic practice, when some artists’ work so integrates the two that the dialogue becomes a part of aesthetic practice. When is the distinction useful and when not?  Definitions of dialogue and civic dialogue were revisited.

    Norman Kleeblatt described a documentary film in which the filmmaker explores being gay as an Orthodox Jew. The artist’s process of engaging his subjects to create the work both transformed the work from being an “expose on the plight of gay Orthodox Jews,” to a “non-partisan” and complex portrayal of living in both worlds. Being open to multiple realities made it more believable than if it had pursued a “pinpoint perspective.” Kleeblatt reflected that the power of the final film as a possible focus for dialogue originated in the filmmaker’s ability to listen and be himself transformed through the dialogue of his filmmaking process.

    Wayne Winborne offered that in dialogue, “intentionality” matters, and in “civic dialogue,” organizers consciously “catalyze the political (civic) issues of the day. If the artist were seeking to change minds in his artmaking/dialogue process or through the finished work, that would not be true to the intent of dialogue that is open to multiple perspectives on an issue. Also implicit in this definition, is an intent to bring the dialogue out of the personal or internal realm of the institution and into the public realm.

    Suzanne Lacy (public artist, scholar, and writer) sought to frame the question from an art theory base. For artists who do dialogue as part of the art, is it necessary to think of the artist wearing two hats? The greatness of the art is not solely based in the formal qualities of the work, but in large part because of the dialogic process. Pat Romney concurred that dialogics, not just dialogue, is important.

    Julie Johnson (Henry Gallery) queried whether dialogue is always necessarily a “voice to voice, verbal communication,” suggesting that art itself demands a relationship between the artwork and the viewer that is a form of internal dialogue.

    Sarah McCracken (Wintergreen Performing Arts), is challenged in her project by using non-verbal music to stimulate dialogue. When best should the dialogue activity be positioned in relation to the artistic work in order to most effectively catalyze dialogue? How can the dialogue provide entry to challenging contemporary music as well as entry to the civic issue at hand?
  2. What specific challenges are you facing in your project work that would benefit from peer feedback?

    The Henry Gallery is challenged to facilitate dialogue involving scientists in its exhibition related to issues around the human genome project. Participants pushed the question to, “What are various experts’ stake in the issue? How to get groups whose members are set in their minds to talk with each other?

    Facilitators working with the Warhol Museum have found it difficult to keep the dialogue focused on its purpose related to racism, when there is a tendency to broaden to topics such as the Holocaust, homophobia.

    Marty Pottenger asked advice on how to overcome intimidation she feels in interviewing billionaires for the Abundance project.

Project Summaries
The Andy Warhol Museumm, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Andy Warhol Museum presents, in fall 2001, the traveling exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,100 photographic prints and postcards from 1870 to 1960 that document the history of lynching in the United States. Recent racially motivated killings in the City have heightened existing racial tensions. The exhibition intends to provide a context for dialogue about race in Pittsburgh. The Warhol is working with a Community Advisory Group to determine how the exhibition should be presented and interpreted both within and outside the museum.  Open Forum artmaking dialogues, led by artist/educators, will provide visitors with expressive, reflective, dialogic, and informational outlets to process and learn from their experience of viewing the images.  A range of other dialogue opportunities include: daily facilitated public dialogues, group tour discussions, public lectures, panel discussions, performance, use of the museum as a space for community groups to hold meetings and dialogues around race relations, and artist/educator outreach projects that extend the dialogue into the community. Artist/educators and museum staff will be partnered with and trained by the National Conference for Communities and Justice, YWCA Study Circles, and Facing History and Ourselves/New York Chapter. For the year following the exhibition, the museum will coordinate continued opportunities for dialogues on race. 

St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in collaboration with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York City, New York
The “Slave Gallery Project” will bring together community leaders, scholars, and preservationists to restore and interpret the 1828 slave gallery in St. Augustine’s Church, a cramped room where African American congregants were segregated during the 19th century. Anchored in what is now the largest African American congregation on the Lower East Side, the slave gallery will be interpreted in consultation with a team of 30 Community Preservationists—leaders representing African American, Asian, Latino, Jewish, and other ethnic groups. Within the context of this emotional and symbolic historic space, dialogue specialists Tammy Bormann and David Campt will engage Community Preservationists in dialogue about how boundaries of exclusion and inclusion are drawn and contested in the Lower East Side. They will train these community leaders to use the slave gallery to facilitate their own dialogues among and between their constituents. This preservation project enables exploration of the high stakes around history and what history and historic sites of conscience can contribute to dialogue about contemporary issues. 

Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, Providence, Rhode Island
The Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities and producer/director Katrina Browne are collaborating on the creation of a documentary film, Traces of the Trade, and an accompanying dialogue initiative in Rhode Island.  Traces of the Trade will examine the role of the North in slavery, as exemplified by the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island, from whom Browne is descended. For three generations, the DeWolfs operated a large-scale Triangle Trade involving sugar, rum, and slaves. The documentary will explore the legacy of this history on the DeWolf descendants and trace the evolution of an amnesia in white New England about its role in slavery and how this amnesia created fertile ground for Northern and national blindness about contemporary racism. In collaboration with the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), Browne will experiment with creative dialogue and interview approaches in producing the documentary to reveal the emotional underpinnings of issues of race and enhance later dialogues connected to screenings of the finished film. NCCJ, in collaboration with RICH and the Heritage Harbor Museum, will also help design and facilitate screenings of the finished work and multi-part dialogues in all of Rhode Island's 39 cities and towns. Traces of the Trade will experiment with dialogue approaches that most effectively engage white people, as well as interracial groups, in looking critically at issues of white privilege, collective responsibility, and debt.