Transforming Communities
Art Education's Role in Cultivating Community through Creative Collaboration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pamela Lawton, Margaret Walker, Melissa Green
The presenters CBAE practice, theory, and research will be discussed to demonstrate how creative collaboration with multi-generational stakeholders teaches art and leadership skills that empower and transform communities while increasing their interest in and appreciation of art as both a pleasurable activity and means of communicating with others. Through discussion of a CBAE conceptual framework developed and implemented by the presenters and the age-integrated arts learning curriculum theory they developed, this presentation considers how to plan and implement effective CBAE programs. Examples of four CBAE projects will be discussed to demonstrate how to provide all stakeholders with personally meaningful outcomes for themselves and all collaborators involved, find like-minded community partners, successfully develop shared ideas into goals, and effective ways of meeting goals such as: recruiting participants, developing activities, sharing tasks, seeking group consensus in decision making, and the process of envisioning concepts as art products.
Aesthetics of Hong Kong Community Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Phoebe Ching Ying Man
This research examines community art in Hong Kong by studying community art projects of five active organizations. The research will study the concept and the practice of art projects and perceptions of the audience. Contextualization, participation, collaboration, antagonism and empowerment will form the framework to discuss the concept and the practice. Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics and Claire Bishop’s theory of antagonism will also be applied to identify similarities and differences. Can the local project leader, Wallace Chang’s “massage” style community art and activist Tse Pak-chai’s “community appreciation” discourse be part of the local aesthetics? This research will generate a set of aesthetics underlying Hong Kong community art to allow for a better understanding of this art form and a set of methodologies sensitive to art practices to explicate their impact and influence.
I Landed a U.F.O. on Main Street: An Autoethnography of the Founding of an Arts Education Organization in Appalachian Kentucky
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elise Kieffer
The Appalachian region of the south has long been the source of stereotyping for dramatic and political affect. Through the course of nine years as a resident in an Appalachian community in south-central Kentucky, the author experienced life as it is lived by the local people. Through the establishment of an art education organization, the author became entwined with local families and became familiar with the origins of many of those stereotypes. Using autoethnography to interpret her experiences, the author will confront the primary issues that surfaced: the acute designation of outsider status; the perception of the arts in underexposed communities; and, the unorthodoxy of a woman in the role of expert and leader. The goal of this analysis is to facilitate greater impact by arts organizations into isolated populations where outsider status is a prohibitive factor and relationship building is central to success.
