A CLUSTER OF RELATED THINGS: ON COMMUNITY, NETWORKS, EXCHANGE
SHANNON STRATTON On a shuttle ride between two smallish cities in Western Canada, I discover that one of the 3 other passengers is currently at McGill in Montreal finishing an MA in Art History. I offer up a few friends’ names and despite a likely age gap between me and the graduate student, we quickly find ourselves to be familiar with the same people, if not sharing several mutual connections. When the shuttle leaves my new friend at the airport the shuttle driver remarks: “Isn’t that amazing how you two knew so many of the same people?” and I reply: “Well, it’s a small field I guess, we all know or know about one another – at least in Canada.” That exchange left me with a certain comfort. In confirming out loud, that despite having been away from Canada for 12 years, I still enjoyed robust connections to the art community that I had left, I was reassured of how enduring that community was, both inspiring a sense of fellowship as well as creating a network. And that community was only one of several I figure I worked in, like most people, I exist in a number of overlapping contexts that knit together a constellation of people, places and projects. In some cases the connections are active, producing something (new work, a conversation) in others, the connections lie dormant, but with the potential of being revitalized with a new invitation. In an essay on DIY activity in the visual arts, Lane Relyea describes networks as a series of weak ties – elaborating on a thesis that DIY culture favors immediacy over commitment and contacts over context. 1 But as I finish my shuttle ride, I think to myself how significant the nested “contexts” that I exist in are. Their interconnectivity strengthens my commitments, as opposed to weakening my investment in my field. I have lived in Chicago for 12 years, 10 of which I have been a Director of threewalls, a not-for-profit visual arts organization I founded with 3 other colleagues after graduate school. threewalls’ inception might be described as DIY or its organization as artist-run, but 10-years later I have no immediate, instinctive category for it to belong to. threewalls exists in multiple, nested contexts (and I along with it), that include urban residencies, DIY, artist-run, Midwest, small-budget, 501c3 and other networks that it had attached itself to through common funders and shared programs or ethos. Each of these contexts are like families, providing fellowship that is often more complex and committed than the more broadly defined “community.” I feel distinctly loyal to the collaborators I have worked with, their organizations, their objectives, their programs, their artists, their cities. Together these families overlap and provide recognition and support for one another. Occasionally they band together and act as a collective, moving to act around a specific issue over an extended period, other times they collaborate on a temporary project. In either case, these moments create bonds that extend beyond the organizations themselves, their strength, or weakness, tested over years. In her essay, When (Art) Worlds Collide, Arlene Goldbard looks back on the work of artist-run organizations in the United States in the 70s and 80s, noting that the urgency to transform the art world that had once braced the work of organizations in the past is no longer on the agenda. She claims that as a veteran of the field, she and her colleagues had failed to recognize the limits of their work and their real power to effect change in the art world or in the world through art. Instead she says: “our grandiosity helped create a mood of defeatism.” 2 Goldbard looks back on the work of artists at this time and resists
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