Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Seattle, May 5–7, 2002

Henry Art Gallery Debriefs: Report-backs and Full Group Discussion

Quick report-backs
Liz Lerman: Harvesting gestures and movement from our individual experiences created a deeply personal and collective experience.  The gallery experience is not usually a collective one.  A safe space needs to be a challenging space as well as a nurturing space.  The facilitator is very present as herself in the experience, as opposed to being neutral, which helps both with the safety that is created as well as the challenge.

Dialogic Art: Can there be “civic dialogue” without discussion with the art maker or a representative of the art maker?  What is direct dialogue with the artist through the artwork?  Is the definition of dialogue too time-specific?  Do we only recognize it as valid when you see and respond to the artwork right then and there?  Can it occur later—two hours later, two weeks later?

Visual Thinking Strategy 1: Seeing the pieces using the VTS helped draw us into a subject that otherwise we may not have had interest in.  Can the VTS be modified for lone viewers?  (someone in the gallery without a facilitator)

Visual Thinking Strategy 2: The VTS method does not require expertise in the subject matter (for the facilitator or viewer).  This method works as well for the novice as it does for the expert or those more experienced with art.  People felt more comfortable asking and offering answers to questions.

Full group discussion
Facilitated by Valerie Cassel and Barbara Schaffer Bacon

Question: Are we finding common denominators in Arts-Based Civic Dialogue?  With ABCD as a goal, what are the things you’re thinking about using right now?

Valerie Cassel: Environment of inquiry.  Safe space challenges and nurtures.  Idea of dialogue.  Where strategies incur modification—intended or unintended.  How to collapse the hierarchy in dialogue.

Tory Peterson: I think Perseverance broke down the hierarchy by simply collecting people’s stories.  They used the dialogue where it fit.  They listened to people’s stories and then found the themes. 

Peter DuBois: We worked hard at not including positions.  To polarize would have been wrong, and it would have tipped our hands in a grossly artistic way.  Art is full of questions, not answers.  It’s about presenting questions, not positions.

Elise Bernhardt: Our guides in the gallery had a lot of information (about artistic process, not scientific information)  that I didn’t see as readily available to the general public.  What strategies are there to share that information so that anyone walking into the room has the same opportunity to understand? 

Valerie Cassel: That raises the question about how much mediation should take place.  When is the curator/education director providing too much information so that it slants the viewer’s thoughts in a particular way?

Norman Kleeblatt: How do you create a space where you’re not intimidating people by the fact that there is so much information that they can’t just interact with the art and have a first impression?

Felicia Gonzalez: Being confronted by the work creates an internal dialogue, including expectations of what I’m  seeing, then leads to a dialogue with others, which is a more formal experience.

Abel Lopez: Is there a discipline-specific difference in how we engage in dialogue?  The experience and the expectation of the questioning are different from discipline to discipline.

Margery King: What about the dialogue that takes place among people who don’t see the exhibition, but only read about it or hear about it?  In our case, that was a very lively dialogue.  I would extend the last comment about it being discipline-specific to say that we need to look at it depending on the goals of the specific group that is doing the ABCD.  Different groups have very specific mandates. 

Norman Kleeblatt: Sometimes what seems successful in one group can be a failure in another group.  In our case, we have discovered that people have a dialogue in their head already.  Some people told us that the information we provide at the beginning (videos, 5 questions) limited their experience with the exhibition.  It worked for some people but not for others.  How can we satisfy both?

Kinshasha Holman Conwill: What I found was that I walked around the people who were reading, because I didn’t want to read.  But that was OK for me, I was fine with that.  VTS is about giving permission to people to do with visual art what they already do with dance, theater, or the movies.  It gave people permission to enter the piece in their own way. 

Liz Lerman: I think there are two kinds of people:  people who need to know their place, have things exact; and people who love ambiguity, who slide in and out of inquiry, happy being in a messy environment.  Those two kinds of people need different things if they are going to enter into the other’s world.  Our experience is that the biggest obstacles to participation are wealth and status.  The question of who is participating: we can’t let the people who think they have knowledge off the hook.  Norman, the problem you are talking about is the same one we deal with—do we do program notes or not?

Sandy Agustin: How does knowing the process break down the hierarchy and demystify the process? 

Susan McInnis: Someone said something this morning to the effect of, what passes for thinking these days is sharing opinions with each other. 

Selma Holo: The process of interpretation is such an elite process.  How is anyone in the public going to get to the same place we are?

Mike Travis: It’s an extremely organic process.  The idea of having a civic dialogue done in a safe place gets people beyond their own stories and where they are.  It’s important to be transparent to the organization and to the participants.

Tuti Baker: Can ABCD be put into motion without the artist there?  Can it be done by engaging with the art but not the artist? 

Peter DuBois: We found in our case that it sometimes was better without the artist in the room.