Event Background
Freedom to Create: A Leadership Forum on the Cross-Sector Value of Creativity is the third in a series of conversations organized by the Alliance of Artists Communities to bring dialogue on creativity and imagination, the arts and research and development, to the forefront of the national dialogue. Begun in 1996 as a reaction to the “Culture Wars” of the mid-nineties, these creativity symposia have evolved as the times we live in have evolved, recognizing the global context of our work even as we remain primarily concerned with the United States.
Following are excerpts from the narrative reports published following the first two symposia, American Creativity at Risk and Future of Creativity, to provide grounding for the current conversation. Full copies of both reports are available through the Alliance of Artists Communities at http://www.artistcommunities.org/publications.html.
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American Creativity At Risk Symposium
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Providence, Rhode Island Prologue By Brendan Gill
In November, 1996, in the ancient and proud port city of Providence, Rhode Island, and under the sheltering roof trees of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, the Alliance of Artists Communities held a three-day symposium entitled “American Creativity at Risk.” This is a bold name to affix to any gathering, and as a person who felt honored to have been invited to participate in the event I felt also a sense of disquiet. I have confidence in the words “American” and “Risk”—indeed, I am happy to regard them as having proved in our history to be almost synonyms—but any mention of the word “creativity” prompts in me a shiver of alarm. Creativity is a word as light and wayward and almost as untetherable as milkweed down. On my way to Providence, I recalled and old Jewish joke to the effect that if you ask a question of two rabbis, you will get three answers. In something like the same fashion, I feared that if a hundred people were asked to define creativity, two hundred definitions would be the result.
My fears turned to be groundless. More by intuition than by definition, participants in the symposium sensed without debate what the word stood for in the context of the occasion. Creativity was transported down to earth and made an object of examination without any loss of grandeur of scale. The old thrilling American capacity to bring into existence by the force of our imaginations something that had never existed before, whether in the fine arts, pure and applied science, statecraft, or in the very shaping of our daily lives as more or less anonymous members of a given community—that kind of creativity has long been practiced by us as naturally as we have breathed. It is the creativity that in recent times—so unnecessarily, so recklessly—has been put at risk. And put at risk, moreover (an irony well worth bearing in mind), at the very moment in the history of our nation, and in the history of the world as a whole, when our ability to exceed past achievements is demonstrated from one day to the next, if not from hour to hour. Why have we allowed this ability to be placed in jeopardy, instead of being made to flourish? Who or what are the adversaries that aim not merely to hold us back but to bully us into impotence?
It was with the consciousness of our possessing a power worth fighting to preserve that the symposium got under way and carried out its labors. From the start, the noted struck was one of a reasoned optimism. It was as if we sensed something in that cold November air, something in the setting of that nobly rockbound marine city, that led us to feel a measure of exaltation in our task—an exaltation not unlike that felt by a certain heroic earlier voyager, whose purpose, so Tennyson tells us, was “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Brendan Gill was a fiction writer, poet, biographer, journalist, and film and theatre critic. Beginning in 1936, he was a member of the staff of the New Yorker magazine, to which he contributed innumerable short stories, poems, profiles, and reviews. (He was also responsible for the revival of “The Sky Line,” the architectural column of the magazine). His last book was Late Bloomers. At the time of the symposium, he was Chair of the Board at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He passed away in 1997.
What is Creativity, and Why is it at Risk?
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In the words of symposium speaker and moderator Robert MacNeil, “America is creative or it is nothing.” With the Declaration of Independence, MacNeil said, Americans created a social contract based on an ideal, and over the years both the contract and the ideal have been recreated to reflect our evolving understanding of citizenship and community. MacNeil described how Americans have transformed, in the past three decades, their views and laws regarding women, minorities, and people with disabilities effecting changes in attitude that have reverberated worldwide. Likewise, American computer technology, American medicine, American merchandising, and American film and television have effected global change. That is the good news.
Working Toward a Blueprint for Action
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Artist Mel Chin described his own efforts at negotiating the terrain between his own work and popular culture. Invited to participate in “Uncommon Sense,” the group show commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (for which Mierle Ukeles created Unburning Los Angeles), Chin asked a Hollywood producer to collaborate on the project. Chin and his studio of students from Cal Arts and the University of Georgia now create art for one of the producer’s popular prime-time shows. The project allows the students/artists creative freedom, yet they work within the deadline and budget constraints of a weekly series. “If we are at a crisis,” Chin insisted, “then this is the time where more experimentation, as opposed to less, should occur.” He argued that the artist must understand popular culture and must be prepared to expeditions into it:
I’m interested in those outside my world and how [creative process]…is being destroyed. I don’t feel I’m at risk, but actually that we should take more risk…We should be inventing tools to re-examine our lives—if it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living—because those tools are being stripped on a daily basis. And we have to understand popular culture and what it does to strip that away.
Future of Creativity Symposium
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Chicago, Illinois Prologue (excerpt)
By Peter Richards
While the “Future of Creativity” symposium yielded many ideas, first and foremost it was a testament to the importance and value of diversity. Reverend Clifford Jones called for an expression of unified diversity that would celebrate the power of collaboration among diverse strengths. Writer Lewis Hyde called for an award system that recognized those that performed as collective beings rather than individuals. Writer and jazz critic Stanley Crouch called on artists to recognize and depict in their art the “interwoven nature of our humanity.” Scientist bill Joy called on artists to help technology imagine a new “Secular Ethic” paradigm that crossed disciplinary boundaries. Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, spoke of our collective responsibility to “dream a better future” for our communities.
The most poignant statements came from the young members of Street-Level Youth Media. Eric Hernandez talked about the power of “group strive,” and Lia Garcia talked about their collaborative process at Street-Level, and the difficulty of establishing a consensus on project focus and direction: “A group just makes your piece better because you have more than one view. That’s what our world is. It is not just one view, one norm; it’s actually not a norm at all. It’s our diversity that makes us great.”
Peter Richards is a sculptor, lecturer, and arts program director. He was the Chair of the 2001 symposium. Currently Senior Artist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, he was previously Creative Director at the Tryon Center (now McColl Center) for Visual Art, in Charlotte, NC, and before that, Director of Arts Programs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco for twenty-seven years. During his long association with the Exploratorium, he created artworks in public places that explore the relationship between people, places, and the environment, including Wind Riders, in collaboration with Sue Richards, which was installed at Washington State University-Richmond in 2001. Peter served on the Board of the Alliance of Artists Communities and was Chair in 2002-2004.