Two articles from the Community Arts Network by New Village author Arlene Goldbard explore the rich possibilities of stimulus money allocation to the arts community, making a strong argument for how it will help bolster cultural democracy and community cultural development:

The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?
The New New Deal, Part 2 – A New WPA for Artists: How and Why

As approved by both houses of Congress on February 13th, $50 million of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan bill will be allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts. This money will be distributed to local arts programs throughout the country via grants, providing much needed immediate funding. But looking to dire economic situations of our Country’s past, these circumstances and finances could also be used to create and fund new programs – at the federal level.

An earlier article by Goldbard, Experiments in Cultural Democracy, outlines the New Deal Cultural Programs from the 30s with some detail. The following is a short list of Goldbard’s ideas for the present and future:

Communities Creating Culture (CCC) – Stipends for artists in residence to create works with specific public purpose and cultural meaning: commemoration, cultural, community events / celebrations
Enlivening Public Institutions (EPI) – Additional / new funding for art programs in schools, community centers, hospitals, and prisons.
ArtistsCorps – A program mimicking AmeriCorps, only for artists. Good for training newbies who could potentially transition into staff for the other ‘WPA’ programs.
National Story Archive (NSA) – For the organization and archiving of community cultural materials, the creation of digital stories and projects responding to local needs, and the production of online broadcasting and publication of the emerging work.
Community Cultural Development Centers (CCCD) – The making of community cultural centers to serve as places for community artists to meet and share and grow together.

“There are actually a lot of potential opportunities in this bill for arts folks,” says New Village author Bill Cleveland. “The key will be to get the arts sector up to speed about how to take full advantage of what eventually manifests.” Artists everywhere need to get organized, get active, and stay active.

On NPR’s All Things Considered, January 27, 2009, Bill Ivey, a member of the president’s transition team, and former chair of the NEA commented: “Once we move away from a consumerist view of a high quality of life — once we’re forced away from it — arts and culture, creativity, homemade art, those things can begin to come to the fore.” These programs would support such a paradigm change – encouraging us to enrich our lives with culture rather than with material possessions.

As such, Goldbard gives us our task as active members of the art community: “To bring community arts and cultural activism into the public policy arena as potent ways to embody full, multidimensional citizenship and stimulate the participation needed not just for economic recovery, but to recover democracy from the near-fatal wounds inflicted by generations of corporate rule and commercialization of the public sector. . . Whether you focus on the immediate opportunities latent in the recovery bill or on the longer-term project of articulating democratic cultural policy, now is the time to make yourself heard.”

All this blogger has to say: Amen.

- Amanda

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

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