advocate since the mid 1960s, primarily in the Bay area. Her 2000 book, Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development , co-authored with Don Adams, is a veritable bible on the American and British history and theory of community cultural development. In the late 1970s she was the co-director of the organization that ultimately became the Alliance for Cultural Democracy and lived in Washington, D.C. to track cultural policy. For a brief time, Goldbard lived in Baltimore in the early 1980s, and recalls such early local community-based arts projects mounted by the Baltimore Voices troupe at the Theatre Project, then under founder Philip Arnault (currently with his Center for International Theatre Development). “If you look at art in museums, art in theaters that don’t identify as community arts, you see a lot of participatory, crowd-sourced, collectively based, telling-ordinary-people-stories work,” she continues. “Some of the values and characteristics of community arts have infused what’s seen as experimental practice that actually exists in a more higher art frame. So there’s bleed over into that, and we see that in a lot of places across country—a sort of convergence of identified community artists and people who are doing other kinds of performance and installation work that are affected by their methods.” Today, Goldbard travels around the country as a cultural development consultant, speaking on college campuses and meeting with people working in community art and the intersections of art and social justice. “The creativity and resourcefulness that people bring to make it happen even in the absence of funding streams is really kind of amazing,” she says. “It feels to me as this kind of a volcano situation. There’s this gigantic reservoir of creativity in the service of democracy and then we’re seeing the amount of it that pokes up above the surface of the land mass. And that’s true across the country.” That situation is very true in Baltimore, which over the past decade has witnessed an explosion in its arts community—in music, visual art, theater, literature, performance, and the ecstatic combinations of all of the above. Arts organizations, such as the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, have community building as part of their mission. Artist/curator Peter Bruun founded Art on Purpose in 2005 under the vision that “creativity and community go hand in hand.” The Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts has long sponsored community murals and other projects. The Contemporary Museum was founded by curator George Ciscle under the idea that community outreach could connect contemporary art with people’s everyday lives. This flowering has coincided with changes in the city's landscape, which often took root in areas associated with the arts community. Remember, ten years ago we didn't have arts pockets, official or unofficial, like the Station North Arts District, the west side Howard Street corridor, the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower, Greenmount West's City Arts. Most recently, Open Walls Baltimore, the partially PNC Bank-funded street-art mural project in the Station North Arts District, has been discussed as a community revitalization effort. If there’s a symbolic moment of Baltimore’s adoption of the arts as a tool for revitaliztion, it probably came in 2003, when then-mayor Martin O'Malley invited sociologist/economist Richard Florida to address the city's Cultural Town Hall meeting at the Baltimore Convention Center. At the time, Florida had become an urban pied piper for his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, which argued, with data, that "creatives"—a demographic that included science and technology professionals as well as artists and designers—can encourage the sort of economic development that drives urban revitalization. Whether this is a good strategy or not, it’s been happening for some time. However, consider what it represents: recognition of economic value in the creative arts. That might not seem like such a big deal, but recall that
36 may 2012 www.urbanitebaltimore.com
Street art: Kalima Young, project coordinator of the MICA-administered Baltimore Art + Justice project, stands in front of a portrait of Trayvon Martin by local street artist Justin Nether.
as recently as the 1980s, creative culture was enough to go to domestic war over. In Baltimore in the early 1980s, “there was a lot of stuff there at that time and there was a feeling of rising expectations [for community arts practice], but then Ronald Reagan was elected president and funding for all of that work was eliminated overnight,” Goldbard says. “In the Department of Labor there were public service community arts jobs, quite a few in Baltimore, and those all ended immediately. So then we had this long period of ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do?’” Today, of course, we’re seeing local and state government agencies and foundations everywhere partner with creatives. Take, for example, the nonprofit cityLAB's 6% Place in Pittsburgh (www.citylabpgh.org), drawing from community art’s values. Launched in the fall of 2010, the 6% project has targeted three neighborhoods to test a 2007 CEOs for Cities study that claims that neighborhoods with a minimum 6 percent population of creative workers become destination attractions. Or consider Chicago’s artist/ cultural planner Theaster Gates, featured in December’s Art in America, who has used community-based performance and installations to explore race in America. His Dorchester Project, started in 2009 when he moved into two buildings on Chicago’s South Side, is his effort to show that “spaces committed to art, public education, design, and advocacy can contribute to the cultural and economic redevelopment of a neighborhood,” according to the project’s Tumblr site. All this points to a psychic shift in creative labor's perceived value, even if everybody in the creative arts community doesn’t identify with the “community art” tag—as Karen Stults, the director of MICA's Office of Community Engagement—knows from experience. The Office of Community