Beverly Naidus

(2002 draft proposal for chapter) Upcoming: for the Peter Lang/Lesley University Series in Arts and Education

THE ARTS, EDUCATION, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

I will be writing from a personal perspective about what it means to practice and teach activist art at this particular moment in time. I will start from my own history and discuss how I came from a modernist art practice and education and how I became disenchanted with the conventional goals of decorating gallery and collector's walls with my personal iconography. Instead my increasing passion as a budding feminist, and as an anti-war and environmental activist began to inform my work and gave me a sense of how an artist might interact differently in community. My experiences working with inner city students, diverse populations in southern California, Jubilee Arts in England (a radical community arts organization), and the international students at the Institute for Social Ecology provided me with a wide range of tools and goals for my teaching.

I have been facilitating courses on activist art and cultural for the Institute for Social Ecology over the past 11 years. The focus of that teaching has been to help students see how art can inform and catalyze activist movements and to guide artists into more socially engaged practices. We look at the intentions of an art piece, the context in which it will be seen or performed, and the audience who will interact with it. We discuss the difference between working in community and functioning as an animator or facilitator of a project, versus developing a concept on one's own and presenting that work to create a reaction or provoke dialog. We study the history of art for social change, work in collaborative groups, do action/research in the community, explore media literacy and theories of social ecology, and develop projects for feedback and discussion.

I have been developing interdisciplinary curriculum with a focus on arts for social change for over two decades. In the early eighties I worked for several museums in NYC including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA. In these museums I used the collections in combination with studio art projects and media literacy exercises to raise consciousness and develop the imaginations of high school students. An article on this work was published in Radical Teacher magazine in 1987. In the mid-eighties I went on to teach at a college-level and developed courses on activist art and new genres for Carleton College and California State University, Long Beach. In the early nineties I started working with the Institute for Social Ecology. In the late nineties I joined the faculty of a new interdisciplinary MFA program at Goddard College. An article I wrote about the work we do at Goddard was published in the February 2001 issue of the New Art Examiner.

At this moment, I see the arts as one of the most profound tools for social change. The arts can provoke dialog, empower the invisible and alienated, raise questions about things we take for granted, educate the uninformed, heal rifts in polarized communities and within individuals who have been wounded by society's ills, and provide hope for a sustainable future on this very endangered planet. I have wanted to share something about the work I have been doing among arts educators. Perhaps the work I have been doing might inspire others and keep the passion for social change burning.