Have Art, Will Travel--to Skid Row, or Jail : National Gathering Shares Joys, Frustrations of Exhibiting, Performing in Non-Traditional Sites

Visual artist Susan Hill was rearranging chairs in a small UCLA classroom before convening an afternoon workshop. Splitting up unfriendly unconnected rows to create a friendlier circle, Hill smiled and explained, “I believe in creating an image anywhere I can.” That, after all, was what this conference was all about.

“Art in Other Places” was the theme for this first national gathering of artists and administrators working in innovative programs in alternative settings--prisons, mental hospitals, senior centers. But some of the 130-plus participants--dancers and poets and visual artists who labor in non-traditional “studios”--had difficulty with the theme itself.

Wrap-Up Session

Judy Baca, the muralist who is director of SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center), hosted the group for a wrap-up session Saturday morning at the center, a converted 1920s Art Deco jail in Venice. Baca noted, “I have some objection to the term ‘other places’ because I think perhaps that’s the only place” for art.

As a case in point, she stood before one of two giant murals being painted under her direction by Southern California art students with funding from RKO and coordination by Las Familias agency, scheduled for installation at a Skid Row hotel at 6th and Stanford on Oct. 17.

By any definition, the murals, depicting Skid Row life and titled “The Street Speaks,” will be art in another place. The intended art-watchers: the homeless, the jobless, the drug addicts, the disabled, dropouts and misfits who inhabit the mean streets. The canvases convey nitty-gritty information such as where to find food and shelter and medical aid but, Baca hopes, they will also give off subtle messages about self-esteem, networking and political reform.

And, she told artists who wondered about the hazards facing an artwork on a public street on Skid Row, the acrylic murals will have a “graffiti catch coat” that can be removed with solvent without harming the undercoat. With any luck, Baca said, this is street art that ought to be able to withstand smog and other abuse for about 20 years.

At the kickoff session for three days of discussion, exhibits and performances, keynoter Lenwood Sloan, a dancer and writer who is former deputy director of the California Arts Council and is now affiliated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, laid it on the line about money for alternative arts in 1986 and beyond:

“I think we should sell our product like we sell catsup.”

Historically, much of these artists’ work has been funded by small grants but Sloan was here to say, “I don’t give a damn if you write another grant in your whole life. . . . I think you need to move with your product into the mainstream.” That, he explained, means “demystifying your work. If you’re the only one who understands what it’s about, you’re the only one who’s going to fund it.”

If alternative art is going to get major corporate funding, Sloan said, those who are producing it are going to have to put aside “artspeak” and tell the corporate world exactly how their art effects change, and for whom. Further, he said, alternative artists have to move into the 21st Century and that means computer networking, brain banks and paid lobbyists.

“People are wondering,” he observed, “when there are people sleeping in the streets, why they should give money to us.” His advice: “Don’t get into that (corporate) line with your cap in hand. Get in that line with your project prospectus.”

Unless artists get political, Sloan said, “We’re an endangered species.”

His rallying cry: “Move on to the board rooms, move on to the banks and move on to the ballot box.”

It was a message that made some in the audience uncomfortable. Later, participants would talk as a group about the dangers of selling out, of losing artistic integrity, about clean money and dirty money.

One of the respondents from the podium was Rebecca Rice, an actress and writer who is co-founder of the Human Bridge Theater, a Washington, D.C., women’s theater committed to social and political change. She spoke of “discrimination within the art community itself” against those who are non-traditional artists.

Every day, Rice said, “I struggle to elevate the circumstance of the people that I work with. . . . I do what I do because I got salvaged by somebody like you.” But in doing the salvaging, she told her colleagues, they must not forget their own souls. She asked who among them had recently “danced a dance; who sang a song, who wrote a play?”

Liz Lerman, for one, was there to dance a dance. Lerman, founder-director of Dancers of the Third Age in Washington, introduced her performance by explaining that she dances about “things that are just incomprehensible to me.” She then performed two dances from an original suite, “Nine Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters.”

As director of Arts-in-Corrections for the state Department of Corrections, Bill Cleveland was there to say that he sometimes feels like “an ambassador from another planet” thrust into places “where truth, beauty, trust, excellence, tenderness, responsibility, vulnerability, color, variety, sensitivity, choice, decisions, independence, companionship, cooperation, physical contact and much more have been consciously and unconsciously excluded.”

California was a pioneer in bringing cultural programs to prisons in the late ‘70s, a move that Cleveland noted has been called both “a miracle” and “an affront to decency.”

(Among those at the conference was Eloise Smith, a former California Arts Council president who went to Vacaville in 1977 to judge an art show and was so moved by what she found that she went out and obtained grants for the first in-prison arts program.)

Statewide Partnership

After a decade of “fits and starts,” Cleveland said, there is now a statewide partnership of state agencies, nonprofit organizations and 200 independent artists giving 40,000 hours of multimedia arts instruction annually to 15% of the state’s 55,000 prisoners.

Inmates have been employed to beautify the state’s 13 correctional institutions and to provide artwork for public buildings in 23 communities. And, Cleveland said, Arts-in-Corrections will be integrated into both the design and programming for 10 new California prisons, with a projected budget of $2.5 million annually for arts by 1990.

Whereas prison administrators were in the beginning “neutral to negative” on the whole idea, Cleveland said, most have come to realize that the arts can have a profound effect on the lives of the inmates, of whom more than 90% will be released back to society.

Indeed, a 1983 evaluation of the Arts-in-Correction program, directed for the department by Lawrence G. Brewster of the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University, concluded that the program is both cost-beneficial to taxpayers and effective on a human level and stated, “It is imperative that institutions make use of the creativity and skills demonstrated by so many of the inmates.”

Specifically, the study found a “strong relationship between Arts-in-Correction participation and reduced disciplinary actions,” with up to 80% of participants at one of the four institutions surveyed--the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, San Quentin, Deuel Vocational Institution and the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad--showing improved behavior after entering the program.

Inmates themselves have written about sublimating their aggressions through immersion in jewelry making and bookbinding, painting and sculpture, of having for the first time feelings of self-esteem and respect for others, of these activities being as exciting as stealing once was to them.

Cleveland also put it in human terms: “The truth is, many of the people we send to prison are very bad and in prison, badness is power. . . . You must learn bad or accommodate bad to survive.” Artists are not there to save souls, he said, but to provide “a powerful alternative” for those wishing to extricate themselves from despair.

And that, he said, happens quite often.

Michael Jon Spencer, founder and executive director of New York-based Hospital Audiences Inc., works with a broader population. His clients include prisoners, the institutionalized mentally disabled, those in nursing homes and in drug rehabilitation programs and the homebound disabled and elderly.

Hospital Audiences, conceived by concert pianist Spencer in 1969 as a way to bring mental hospital patients, for whom he had performed, into the theaters and concert halls of Manhattan, is the grandfather of art in other places programs; his directly spawned a dozen now-autonomous organizations nationwide, including UCLA’s Extension’s ArtsReach.

Today, Hospital Audiences has a $2.5-million annual budget and each year arranges for 100,000 people to attend concerts and performances; a recently acquired bus accommodates in stretchers the bedridden who have a desire to participate in cultural events.

Spencer, a UCLA graduate, looked around Room 147 of Dodd Hall, where he was speaking, and concluded, “It’s been one hell of an experience since I was in this room 25 years ago.”

(Later, in an interview, he acknowledged that a program of similar scope in Los Angeles would present an almost insurmountable challenge: “L.A. is mystifying,” Spencer said. “How do you move people around? And where do you take them?”)

One who is working in Los Angeles, albeit on a much smaller scale, is Margaret Ladd, co-founder and artistic director of Imagination Workshop, a theater program for the mentally disabled. This population and artists are a “perfect match,” she said, explaining that “art comes out of conflict, it comes out of struggles. . . . The real artists are living there,” in the prisons and the mental hospitals.

At a later workshop, the men and women incarcerated in prisons and their hunger for spiritual nourishment were discussed by Grady Hillman, a poet and initiator of writing workshops in prisons throughout Texas; Ellen Davidson, director of the William James Assn., a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit community service organization operating a prison arts project in seven state prisons, and Joseph Bruchac, a writer and American Indian storyteller from Greenfield Center, N.Y., who founded Prison Writing Review.

“Nobody ever accused the Texas Department of Corrections of running country club prisons,” said Hillman, who from 1981-84 was the first writer-in-residence in the TDC, which oversees a system of 28 prisons with 38,000 inmates, second in size only to that in California. He described the isolation of these prisons, the aura of hopelessness.

Nonetheless, Hillman emphasized, “We didn’t bring culture in. We joined an existing culture,” as does any artist entering a prison society. He found, for example, that about 40% of the prison population already wrote poetry, for different reasons. There was the romantic motivation, Hillman explained--”In Texas, we do not have contact visits” with lovers and spouses. “They want something to be out there when they get back. . . . Poetry is the closest thing to an embrace.”

Some of the poetry, he acknowledged, is “absolute dribble. . . . They have guys who churn that stuff out for other inmates,” the L-is-for-the-lovely-lips-I-kiss kind of verse that earns a few dollars for the writer and is sent out to another inmate’s loved ones.

But there are other reasons for an inmate to write poetry, Hillman said, and one is the need to affirm one’s humanity and individuality in an environment that is “tremendously violent--they write about the things they can’t say to anyone else.”

And, he noted, “People go years without seeing a full moon or stars” and their memory “begins to lose its integrity. . . . It’s a really scary proposition.” Writing, Hillman said, seems to help these longtime inmates validate their memories of the world outside.

Finally, Hillman said, inmates have a need to “displace the five senses” that surround them with imagination; they write a great deal of science fiction and erotic fantasy. “Bizarre stuff,” he said. “They really travel in their imaginations.”

Paying for a Lawyer

Some prison poets become very good at it, indeed. “Goodnight, Irene” and other songs originated in prison cells. Bruchac told of a former inmate in Arizona who won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship--”He used it to buy a good lawyer and he got out of prison.”

Today, virtually every state permits writing programs for prisoners and Bruchac stressed that inmates should be introduced to the best contemporary writing. But, he added, “Always be sure they’re clear on what plagiarism is.”

In a workshop on programming for the elderly, Susan Perlstein, founder and director of Elders Share the Arts in New York, spoke of what she sees as a danger that “arts in settings (such as ours) are being relegated to therapies.” In general, she said, those who fund these arts programs are “not interested in the fact that older people can be wonderful artists.” She disagrees. Perlstein observed that someone taking up dancing at 60 “can become a great dancer in 20 years.”

Benefiting an Elite

A man in the audience suggested that today’s performing arts are largely for the benefit of a very small, elitist group and are “performing 18th- and 19th-Century art” for them. The creative artists, those who are pushing community art, haven’t stood up to be counted, he said.

Another man spoke of the ‘80s as a transitional period, one in which “we are in the process of redefining what art is,” how it relates to special populations such as seniors.

A woman said, “Now is the time to change the consciousness about how we think” about older people. “For the last 20 years we’ve been trying to make them younger.”

Another woman wanted to go on record: “There’s got to be more than Bingo.”

Rebecca Rice was saying, “There’s a part of all of us that nobody wants to see--or to be seen.” The task before artists working with special populations in their settings is to bring out that hidden self, she told a workshop.

She laughed and said that when actors do improvisational theater in mental hospitals, “Somebody walks in, they don’t know who the actors are and who the patients are.”

In group discussion, artists talked about the challenges of working with prisoners and juvenile offenders--the sexual dynamics that must be dealt with (impossible mutual attractions may develop), the need to remember that the artist is a teacher and not a social worker, the challenge of keeping the experience enjoyable for participants and artists. “You don’t want to be the art police,” one woman said.

In presenting drama in prison settings, said Laurie Meadoff, co-founder of Manhattan’s Network Theater program for youths at risk, “It’s very difficult to stay away from happily-ever-after endings,” which are guaranteed to lose the audience. She advised artists moving into this population to go slowly--”When they’re ready, the group will start talking some stuff with you.”

In a poetry and dance workshop led by Hillman and Bruchac, participants were reminded of the vital part that both art forms can play in working with special populations. Said Bruchac, “Everyone can speak and everyone can move, in one way or another.”

Those in the group were asked to write down, in verse, their remembrances of childhood, to close their eyes and conjure up the smells and sounds and feelings of their youth.

Some jotted down pleasant memories--the snap of firecrackers, a mother humming as she sewed, experiments on a Gilbert chemistry set, running through sprinklers, stickball and lilacs and chocolate and wooden blocks.

A man wrote of childhood fears still vivid, of lying in bed in the dark and being absolutely certain that “a crazed red monkey with black eyes” was lurking beneath that bed. More than one recalled loneliness, others the embarrassment of living in a household where dishes were left to pile high in the sink and beds went unmade.

Later, Hillman and Bruchac chose several of the poems to recite, inviting participants to dance--instant choreography! Three women kicked off their shoes and spun and leaped about the floor, not in a literal interpretation of the verse but as an expression of what that verse had caused them to feel.

Just the kind of thing they try to nudge their clients into doing.

Strategies for taking art out into the community and issues of exploitation and of art ownership were discussed at a workshop on “Going Public With the Arts.”

Norma Fleischman’s job is to make community-based residential care facilities acceptable to their Washington, D.C., neighbors who are “nose-punching” mad about having the mentally ill and substance abusers among their new neighbors. She is using art as the link, initiating projects that beautify the entire community.

“We’re struggling” for acceptance, she acknowledged (the District of Columbia is trying to absorb 480 of these facilities). But Fleischman remains adamant about the need to “integrate the arts into every nook and cranny in our society.”

Susan Hill, director of UCLA’s ArtsReach, which serves prison populations, the elderly and the mentally and physically disabled, told of two women prisoners, under death sentences, who created a six-foot Chinese dragon out of thread sent by friends. “In the face of death,” she said, “they made a creature that danced.” (Their death sentences were eventually commuted).

One of the problems of alternative artists, Hill said, is that people tend to place them in the “bake sale” category. “I like to think that what we’re doing is urban folk art.” Not all of the issues had been thrashed out when conference participants met Saturday morning with Judy Baca at the gallery in Venice. During a 90-minute wrap-up, the prevalent theme was: Is it possible to accept corporate funding without compromising artistic standards? Or personal standards? What if a sponsoring company makes a product that the artist considers evil or harmful? Whose interests are really being served when a corporation sponsors art?

Network International’s Laurie Meadoff, who gathered 1,000 young people together for a three-day paint-in in May in New York to create a six-story-high “Citykids Speak on Liberty” banner for the Statue of Liberty centennial, had faced all of these issues. She explained that Burger King, the project underwriter with $60,000, had asked pop artist Keith Haring to leave a tidy five feet at the bottom of the banner for the Burger King logo.

No, Meadoff had responded, explaining that “our bottom-line standard” was a separate logo. (The resulting banner, now on international tour, will be on a U.S. tour in the fall).

Meadoff, whose current crusade is to raise $20 million to build in the heart of New York the Manhattan Empire, a living arts complex for young people, told how she had had to compromise here also and permit commercial tenants. But, she said, she was able to turn it into a jobs program.

The artists grappled with the issue of burnout among those working with people whose lives are being destroyed. But they kept coming back to the issue of artistic integrity. Finally a white-haired printmaker, Minna Agins, spoke up: Compromise is tricky--”We artists are recorders of history. Let’s never forget that.”