Читать книгу Becoming Citizens - Susan Schwartzenberg - Страница 8

Foreword

The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs is honored to support Becoming Citizens, a collaboration between artist and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg and her partners in the disabilities community in Seattle. Believing in the critical importance of art in our civic life, the city has initiated and funded this and dozens of other projects through its innovative ARTS UP program, which supports community-artist teams in a collaborative process of exploration and creation.

Extending the parameters of contemporary public art practice, ARTS UP (Artist Residencies Transforming Urban Places) paired artists and communities to develop arts-based collaborations around shared goals. ARTS UP was an act of faith in the creative process and reinforced the notion that art could be at once community-based, challenging, and articulate. The program deployed the potential of arts in community change and development, grounded in the principles of cultural democracy, selfdetermination, collaborative cultural production, and social justice. ARTS UP sought to develop public infrastructure in support of arts-based civic dialogue, sustaining the City of Seattle’s public art mission "to actively engage artists in the civic dialogue" and its goal of strong, healthy communities.

The ARTS UP model supposes a role for the artist that embraces his or her potential as a critical thinker and agent of change. The artistic results may cross disciplinary boundaries, so that their character as “art” may not even be readily apparent. Yet the artist’s creative thinking, focus, and aesthetic are essential to such projects. Across the country, artists are engaging communities in this sort of generative process, compelled by the belief that art plays a vital role in civic life: that it can stimulate fresh ideas about old problems, give voice to citizens, and create a forum for group expression and action.

Becoming Citizens evidences the incredible power of this marriage between artistic practice and social agenda. As a work of art, Becoming Citizens combines a seductive elegance with the artist’s critical observation and provocative juxtapositions. Schwartzenberg’s identity as first an artist is readily apparent in both the book’s visual articulation and its unlikely combination of materials and ideas. She brilliantly employs the power of the anecdote placed within the broad sweep of history, giving a compelling yet unsentimental face to the players in this important phase of the disability rights movement.

When employed to relate the story of the individual, art is a great leveler, communicating lived experience with a resonance and power that makes it our own. The testimonies and mementos juxtaposed in Becoming Citizens offer an evocative window into the hearts of these Seattle families, letting us walk in their shoes in a way that mere description could not. By excavating the evidence of this particular moment in time, Schwartzenberg has added it to the historical record in a way that invites participation from a broader public. The shared experience of storytelling incites us to lend our voices to the continuing struggle for social change.

Yet the work reaches out beyond art to many other disciplines as well, inviting a conversation with the fields of history, anthropology, medicine, and disability studies, to name a few. The exhaustive research engaged in by Schwartzenberg, the rigor she brought to her field interviews, and the incisive analysis that has led to this book can leave no doubt as to the relevance of her voice in these more concrete disciplines.

We are at a critical time in the development of community-based art practice in this country, a time when the development of policies, infrastructure, and critical dialogue can coalesce the field, or their continued absence can evince its demise. Projects like this one contribute so much to the larger body of community-based art, greatly expanding our definition of the artist and opening windows of opportunity for artistic engagement with broader issues. The Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs has been proud to be part of that process of expansion through Becoming Citizens.

—Lisa Richmond, Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs