PUBLIC ART REVIEW  |  VOL. 19 NO. 2 • ISSUE 38  PAGE 76

 

BOOK REVIEW 

by Jay Walljasper 

 

NEW CREATIVE COMMUNITY:

The Art of Cultural Development 

Arlene Goldbard 

Oakland: New Village Press, 2006 

272 pages, $19.95 (paperback) 

 

In arts-rich Minneapolis, where I live, the artistic organization that draws the largest single crowd every year is the scrappy little In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater. Working out of a once-abandoned movie theatre in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, this unabashedly iconoclastic troupe lets people walk in off the street to help plan its annual May Day Parade and Festival, which draws upwards of 50,000 people to celebrate the political and spiritual undercurrents of the spring holiday.

This would come as no surprise to Arlene Goldbard, a long-time champion of community arts organizations. Her most recent book, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, is a comprehensive, well-written, and passionate chronicle of this overlooked sector of the art world.

Magisterial in her research and uplifting in her storytelling, Goldbard gives us a close look at where these feisty organizations have come from, what they have accomplished, and all the places they are now headed.

The book introduces us to Appalshop, a group located in the mountains of Kentucky that began as a film training program to give underprivileged kids a way out of poverty. Appalshop now boasts a radio station, a theater company, and many other means to express a vision of Appalachia that outsiders seldom see.

We also meet Lilly Yeh, an artist who stuck it out in tough North Philadelphia, encouraging neighborhood people to transform rubble-filled lots into community parks and gardens. These efforts flowered into the Village of Arts and Humanities, an ambitious collection of arts enterprises, youth programs, urban agriculture plots, and economic development plans. Yeh has now turned to Rwanda, where her Barefoot Artists project aims to help heal the horror of genocidal civil war.

This is just a sampling of the many remarkable stories Goldbard gathers to show how arts projects can restore the spirit and animate the hopes of struggling communities. But more than just inspiring us, she offers a wealth of details about how this work is conceived and carried out, which is invaluable to anyone wanting to see something similar happen in their own town or neighborhood.

 

JAY WALLJASPER, author of The Great Neighborhood Book (New Society), is a senior fellow at Project for Public Spaces.

 

© 2008 Public Art Review