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Evaluation of the ACTA Arts in Corrections Demonstration Program

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We “mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree” — we must take care of the roots to heal the tree.
— Gullah Geechee Proverb

A new publication of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts
Researched and written by Amy Kitchener, M.A., Shweta Saraswat-Sullivan, Ph.D., and Lily Kharrazi, M.A.

Every cultural community in the United States is rooted in a sense of belonging, shared by members, and anchored by collective wisdom and aesthetics. These roots of cultural heritage are maintained, strengthened, and expanded through the practice of folk and traditional arts. The realities of slavery, displacement, structural racism, systemic poverty, and cultural appropriation have tested the strength of these cultural roots. The stresses are even more apparent, viewed against our present-day national reckoning with these harms amidst a global pandemic. In this context, traditional arts practices are potent political acts of social belonging, power, and justice. From this field have emerged works and artists of beauty, technical prowess, and meaning. Music, dance, craft, oral tradition, foodways, and other heritage ways are transmitted and engaged in as part of the cultural life of a community. We invoke the metaphor of the taproot, a term borrowed from botany, to describe a community’s central cultural root, growing downward to a considerable depth. In our extended metaphor, key artists and culture bearers tend these taproots, serving as teachers, creators, and visionaries as well as advocates, managers, fundraisers, curators, planners, and actors.

Yet, the vast majority of traditional artists—and the organizations, collectives, and informal networks of practice they lead—have never received the philanthropic investment that would allow them to realize long-term visions for change in their communities. There has been little national effort to invest in, convene, or capitalize these artists and organizations, a fundamental inequity in arts funding in the US. As a result, artist-leaders at the pinnacle of traditional arts practices lack the financial and infrastructure stability to plan for succession and to set goals at a more forward-thinking scale for their organizations.

This report, Tending the Taproot: Opportunities to Support Folk & Traditional Arts in the United States, presents the findings of the Alliance of California Traditional Arts’ (ACTA) Taproot Initiative. This national planning effort, aimed to re-center traditional and folk artists and their art forms as catalysts for transformation and restoration in our larger society, is aligned with other important movements in the arts and culture sector to spur critical thinking and action during this hallmark moment of radical change. The report describes the resource landscape of folk and traditional arts. It offers operational recommendations as a call to action to support taproot artist-leaders and organizations with focused investment in funding and development to do more and do better, resources for infrastructure, elevated national recognition, and new standards for robust data and research infrastructure. Our recommendations are evidenced by qualitative and quantitative research findings, grounded in ACTA’s quarter century of experience as a funder and advocate in this field.

Here is our challenge to national, regional, local, and philanthropic organizations and funders of folk and traditional arts:

• Invest in taproot artists and culture bearers through sustained fellowships for accomplished artists and multi-year support for large arts projects, institute continuing operating support for artists’ cultural enterprises, and provide technology transfer and training for taproot artists and administrators

• Invest in ongoing operating funding to the many organizations that sustain the taproot ecosystem and that develop and host key programs and performances; invest in economic opportunities and training for organizations and culture bearers to develop and expand their arts-related income 

• Raise the visibility and position of this field through a national communications strategy and partnerships with public agencies, philanthropies, and private partners to widely disseminate traditional arts education and materials to the public

• Update data collection and research infrastructure with investment in new quantitative and qualitative research to illuminate the roles and impact of traditional artists and their organizations; upgrade cultural heritage documentation, data collection, and dissemination infrastructure to establish new standards in the field; elevate the regional and national research repositories of living cultural heritage in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress

Download Tending the TaprooT

Or preview the report via our interactive magazine preview below.

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A new publication of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts
Researched and written by Lily Kharrazi & Amy Kitchener
Commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, 2022

ACTA’s newest publication, Communities of Change: Traditional Arts as Enduring Social Practice in California’s Bay Area, was commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to examine the traditional arts landscape of the greater Bay Area. What began as an internal report to inform and guide the planning and design of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions for Folk and Traditional Arts, can be found here in an expanded version.  It is intended for those seeking to learn more about this rich field.  We invite funders, cultural workers, arts administrators, policymakers, curators, traditional artists, and activists who engage with a diversity of peoples, aesthetics, languages, and locations to look at the content with their own communities in mind. 

The commissions were launched in 2017 to honor the Foundation’s 50th anniversary.  The five-year, $8 million initiative awards10 commissions annually in five performing arts disciplines including music, theater, dance and movement based performance, folk and traditional arts, and media arts. As long-time advocates and grantmakers to California’s traditional arts field, we at  ACTA understood that the inclusion of folk and traditional arts was noteworthy among the creation and premiere of 50 exceptional new works by world-class artists in partnership with Bay Area nonprofit organizations. The Hewlett Foundation was making a strong commitment of resources to an underserved sector, and very importantly making a statement about the value of art-making beyond Eurocentric models that dominate most arts funding initiatives.

Communities of Change discusses and interrogates definitions and terminology, and describes case studies illustrating some of the larger issues and nuances inherent in this discipline, such as tradition and innovation, Native California practices, concepts of indigeneity, and cultural immersion as a teaching model. We list major cultural communities and related art forms across the wide band of 11 Bay Area counties, and share snapshots illustrating the contours on a county-by-county basis. Finally, we conclude with recommendations and implications for the broader arts field and the philanthropic sector. 

The report is by no means a comprehensive inventory but the information is culled from the trust that artists, culture bearers, community organizations, and funders have put in ACTA by inviting us into their communities, conversations, commemorations, intimate ceremonies, and to their kitchen tables in order to understand what values do indeed endure over time and generations through their arts practices.

Download the Communities of Change Report

or view the report via our interactive magazine view below.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially devastating to the folk and traditional arts community. During this time of extreme need among our constituents, ACTA did not close down or downsize operations. Rather, we more than doubled our output of funding for the field, administering several new grant programs and organizing multilingual sessions to share information on available resources through this period. We’ve linked arms with institutional partners and national coalitions to increase the depth and efficacy of our COVID responses, tapping into new skills in online convenings and remote collaboration.

Download ACTA’s Year in Review: (2020-2021)

Our interactive Year in Review highlights how ACTA responded to the pandemic with record-breaking grants, new programs, and creative adaptations to our existing work.

Learn about some of our special programs and new approaches this year by flipping through the report below (or click here to download).

Want to learn how you can support the work of ACTA?

Consider making a contribution today!

The post ACTA’s Year in Review: 2020 – 2021 appeared first on Alliance for California Traditional Arts.

Visite esta página en español aquí.

“The beauty and power of the work of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts is in their insight that artistic and cultural practices are central to both healthy communities and transformative social change. Through the arts, we come to see that what is traditional is futuristic and what is futuristic grows from tradition. This guidebook offers a powerful framework for anyone interested in moving our communities from resistance to restoration and regeneracíon.”

-Jeff Chang, author and narrative/cultural strategist

ACTA is proud to announce the launch of our latest publication SaludArte: Building Health Equity on the Bedrock of Traditional Arts and Culture. SaludArte is a reflection of nearly a decade of work in Boyle Heights as a part of the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative. Co-authored by Dr. George Lipsitz of UC Santa Barbara and ACTA, the bilingual publication explores what can happen when traditional artists engage cultural practices to address social determinants of health like structural racism, poverty, and other conditions that impact our ability to lead healthy lives where we live, work, and play.

ACTA’s work in the communities of Boyle Heights, Santa Ana, Merced, and the East Coachella Valley integrated traditional arts into BHC campaigns addressing these social determinants of health. The SaludArte publication focuses on ACTA’s work in Boyle Heights as well the other sites, adapted to local conditions. SaludArte is available both in English and Spanish, and includes an inventory of tools for carrying out this work in a number of community-based contexts.

Browse the publication below.

Bring arts and health equity tools into your work with SaludArte!

SaludArte: Building Health Equity on the Bedrock of Traditional Arts and Culture is ACTA’s bilingual guide providing an inventory of health equity tools and tactics. It outlines examples of what can result when we support traditional artists to use and experiment with their cultural practices to arrive at collective answers to a community’s social and political needs.

This guide is especially designed for the following groups and individuals:

Organizations, scholars, and groups working within community development, the social determinants of health, public policy, social work, community organizing, and community art who want to work with traditional arts practitioners committed to social justice work.

Self-identified traditional and community-based artists who would like to intentionally open their practices to support transformation within social justice spaces.

Artists who don’t identify as culture bearers or traditional artists but are interested in working with traditional artists in their community.

ACTA offers participatory workshops and seminars tailored to a variety of settings—university classrooms, organizational or field-based gatherings, or community and cultural organizing spaces.

Workshop Themes

Living Into the Work by Embodying Our Values
How can we create environments for social change where practicing and living the principles we are fighting for is as important as seeing those principles in policy change?

Re-Humanizing the Social Justice Meeting
Learn how the traditional arts methodologies of Arriving, Agreeing, Connecting, and Affirming (AACA) can transform your organizing from the inside out. 

Creating the Ground for Your Work: Cultural Asset Mapping
Learn how to lead a community-based mapping process as a foundation for social justice work rooted in the traditional and cultural arts.

Work at the intersection of traditional arts and culture, health, and community development is profoundly necessary and often difficult to grasp in its fullness. This documentation of and reflections on ACTA’s many years of work in this space—attention to both the compelling art and cultural practices carried out by activist artists, culture bearers and neighborhood residents and the often invisible work required to bring such programs to fruition—are critical to the advancement of more impactful practices and healthier communities.”
—María Rosario Jackson, Ph.D.
Institute Professor, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts &
Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions, Arizona State University

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Flip through the report below, or click here to download.

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ACTA and the AFC wanted to spark a discussion about the current state of national infrastructure, networks, or support for folk arts and traditional culture. What services are being offered? What are the gaps and obstacles? What are the opportunities and strategies? What form would national service take? Is it even feasible or desirable to pursue coordinated planning for national service or support at this moment in time?

The report identifies common themes, areas of concern, and possible next steps. We hope readers will comment and add to the description by sharing their thoughts with us on social media.

Download:

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Written by Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, Citlalli Chávez, this report is intended for anyone interested in better understanding how heritage-based arts practices can contribute to community empowerment, comprehensive neighborhood revitalization and better health outcomes, ACTA’s 32-page case study examines the Engaging Cultural Assets Pilot Project from 2011 through the fall of 2015 in Boyle Heights, a vibrant neighborhood in Los Angeles, full of challenges, assets and opportunities.

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This briefing is of particular interest to funders and organizations with a mission to support programming in the fields of the arts, health, and community development, as well as to artists and researchers in the fields of community medicine and public health and policy, the folk & traditional arts, and community-based arts and culture.

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