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September 14, 2003 By Uncategorized

I am about to engage with DanceArts Vancouver on a three year global project called the Earth Project. It is an international collaboration that will bring together all kinds of people involved in the arts, sustainability, community development and activism and social justice to look at how the arts can facilitate conversations and dialogue on these issues, especially with youth.

I’ll be attending an Open Space meeting on Monday with Bill Cleveland from the Center for the Study of Art and Community in Minneapolis who wrote a fantastic paper called Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development. I will be learning a lot more about this over the next little while, but right now I am struck by the above diagram (another quadrants model!) and this description of the field of arts-based community development:

Much of our work at the Center for the Study of Art and Community is about documenting, describing and learning from the ABCD field. We have also challenged the field to consider some hard questions about the efficacy of their work in and with communities. The information, ideas and opinions we have gathered show a field that is new and growing rapidly. It reflects a field that is hungry to learn from itself and eager to make collegial connections. It also portrays a field largely unaware of its history, driven by a diverse pastiche of philosophies, practices, motivations and intents. The mix is complex and intriguing and some through lines and patterns have emerged.

Read the paper to find out about some of these lines and directions. I’ll report more from the Open Space.