Doing Horizontal Work in Vertical Structures

Han­nah Jick­ling and Helen Reed in con­ver­sa­tion with Loree Lawrence, Syrus Mar­cus Ware, and Pami­la Matharu.

Han­nah Jick­ling: Helen and I want­ed to get the three of you togeth­er because we all work using sim­i­lar frame­works in the city of Toron­to. We have been think­ing about the three of you as points of ref­er­ence, over the past year dur­ing our res­i­den­cy projects, and we have been lucky enough to have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss these projects with you. You are all artists, you all work with youth, and you all work for major pub­lic insti­tu­tions. We thought that get­ting all five of us in a room for a con­ver­sa­tion could be fruit­ful, par­tic­u­lar­ly in light of recent con­ver­sa­tions we have had about redefin­ing com­mu­ni­ty arts prac­tices. Per­haps we could begin with a round of intro­duc­tions – your names, your art prac­tice and sig­nif­i­cant projects, and your insti­tu­tion­al affiliations.

Syrus Mar­cus Ware: My name is Syrus Mar­cus Ware, and I’m an artist, and I pri­mar­i­ly work with paint­ing, mixed media and per­for­mance art. I’m a par­ent and that seems like more and more of an excit­ing project too. I have worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) for 10 years run­ning all of the youth pro­gram­ming. I also work doing com­mu­ni­ty research relat­ed to HIV, pris­ons, and black/trans queer communities.

Loree Lawrence: I’m Loree Lawrence. I am cur­rent­ly the Com­mu­ni­ty and Mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary Arts Offi­cer at the Ontario Arts Coun­cil (OAC). Before that I worked for numer­ous years, per­haps 20, doing col­lab­o­ra­tive the­atre devel­op­ment with street-involved youth. Dur­ing that time, I was the artis­tic direc­tor at a pro­gram called KYTES (Kens­ing­ton Youth The­atre Employ­ment Ser­vices). Until 2003, KYTES oper­at­ed as a satel­lite pro­gram of OASIS, a Toron­to Dis­trict School Board (TDSB) alter­na­tive sec­ondary school. It was a very cool project; one of the best mod­els of edu­ca­tion I have ever par­tic­i­pat­ed in. My inter­est has always been in work­ing in infor­mal edu­ca­tion­al set­tings and out­side of insti­tu­tions, thus one of my cur­rent focus­es, in my job at the OAC, is to facil­i­tate and devel­op com­mu­ni­ty-engaged prac­tices in areas out­side of Toronto.

Pami­la Math­aru: I’m Pami­la Math­aru. I’m a prac­tis­ing artist and a teach­ing artist. I teach at SEED Alter­na­tive School, in the TDSB. Estab­lished in 1968, SEED was the first pub­licly fund­ed alter­na­tive school in Cana­da and we are based on the Sum­mer­hill School mod­el. SEED was the first school to intro­duce cat­a­lyst mod­els into edu­ca­tion, where artists were invit­ed to come teach at night, in the sum­mer, or on week­ends. And not just artists, but sci­en­tists and lawyers and philoso­phers too. What­ev­er young peo­ple want­ed to learn in those pre-inter­net days, the teacher would find a cat­a­lyst and learn­ing would be facil­i­tat­ed by these pro­fes­sion­als. I’m just start­ing my third year at SEED and I was brought in to revise and reshape the visu­al arts pro­gram. I don’t try to sep­a­rate my artist iden­ti­ty and my teach­ing artist iden­ti­ty, but rather my artis­tic prac­tice informs what I am doing at SEED. Pri­or to SEED I did a lot of instal­la­tion-based work, pho­to-based work, and a lot of cura­to­r­i­al projects such as TAAFI (Toron­to Alter­na­tive Art Fair Inter­na­tion­al) and “Come Up to My Room” at the Glad­stone Hotel in Toronto.

Helen Reed: Loree, some­thing that we’ve been inter­est­ed in are your efforts to rede­fine com­mu­ni­ty arts prac­tice and to expand the term com­mu­ni­ty arts. Com­mu­ni­ty arts comes loaded with all kinds of asso­ci­a­tions – such as mur­al paint­ing, mosaics, com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens – and these kinds of art prac­tices have typ­i­cal­ly been under val­ued in the art world. We have always been reluc­tant to have any kind of affil­i­a­tion with com­mu­ni­ty arts, as it is gen­er­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with art­work that does not seek an audi­ence beyond the com­mu­ni­ty in which it was gen­er­at­ed. It’s impor­tant for us to cre­ate work that can have rel­e­vance in mul­ti­ple con­texts. There are so many exam­ples of process-based art­works that have the abil­i­ty to trans­mit beyond the ‘event.’ Can you talk about how you per­ceive the stig­ma of com­mu­ni­ty arts and also what kind of poten­tial you think the term holds?

LL: Trac­ing back my own his­to­ry, as a prac­tis­ing the­atre artist, I involved the com­mu­ni­ty in the work that I did. And at that time, in the mid 80s, we referred to our­selves as ‘pop­u­lar the­atre artists.’ All of a sud­den, in the 90s the term ‘com­mu­ni­ty arts’ emerged to describe the work of artists of all dis­ci­plines who were co-cre­at­ing art with peo­ple who did­n’t iden­ti­fy as artists. It was impor­tant at the time because the prac­tice of mov­ing beyond the arts world to engage with oth­er peo­ple need­ed an iden­ti­ty and it also need­ed a way to be fund­ed in the art world. OAC played a pret­ty key role in earn­ing a place for engaged arts prac­tice by estab­lish­ing the fund­ing pro­gram Artists in the Community/Workplace in 1998.

In my role at the OAC I’m inter­est­ed in refram­ing the def­i­n­i­tions of com­mu­ni­ty arts prac­tice and the assump­tions that accom­pa­ny them, and move toward cre­at­ing more open notions of what the prac­tice embod­ies. In my mind there should be no dis­cernible aes­thet­ics to com­mu­ni­ty arts prac­tice if the work is tru­ly co-cre­at­ed. You know, colours and shapes and all sorts of images come to mind in ref­er­ence to com­mu­ni­ty arts when there is absolute­ly no basis for that, oth­er than the fact that a par­tic­u­lar group of artists have dom­i­nat­ed the field. How­ev­er, that is chang­ing now with a new gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple inter­est­ed in doing sim­i­lar work. For exam­ple, I have pro­posed to rework the OAC’s Artist in the Community/Workplace pro­gram to iden­ti­fy the core prin­ci­ples of com­mu­ni­ty-engaged prac­tice. Fur­ther­more the OAC needs to be more respon­sive to the myr­i­ad ways artists work out­side of the con­ven­tion­al art world and its asso­ci­at­ed insti­tu­tions. For exam­ple, artists might be using a com­mu­ni­ty arts mod­el, but don’t iden­ti­fy as com­mu­ni­ty artists, or they don’t know what com­mu­ni­ty arts is, and there­fore expand­ed terms and def­i­n­i­tions are need­ed. There are a lot of mis­con­cep­tions about com­mu­ni­ty arts that I hope to address in my posi­tion at the OAC.

PM: Can I just make a quick com­ment to that? Because I won­der why it is that what I do with youth col­lab­o­ra­tors, even before I got into teach­ing, was mis­rep­re­sent­ed as ‘com­mu­ni­ty arts?’ I use the term ‘mis­rep­re­sent­ed’ because when artists work with non-artists to cre­ate a work of art (and we see this a lot now), their work is under­stood as con­tem­po­rary art, but when an artist of colour works with young peo­ple, it is typ­i­cal­ly labeled ‘com­mu­ni­ty art.’ Judith Thomp­son is an award win­ning Cana­di­an play­wright, who often works with non-pro­fes­sion­al actors. On Kawara is a Japan­ese-Amer­i­can artist, known for his date paint­ing series enti­tled “Today.” In 1997 he installed sev­en pieces from the series in kinder­garten class­rooms around the world as a social exper­i­ment project, which he called “Pure Con­scious­ness.” Their works cir­cu­late as con­tem­po­rary art, while my prac­tice has often been mis­rep­re­sent­ed as com­mu­ni­ty art.

LL: And there is the hier­ar­chy with­in the art world around what is legit­i­mate art.  Cur­rent­ly com­mu­ni­ty arts are not con­sid­ered to be a legit­i­mate form of con­tem­po­rary art.

SMW: It’s about prin­ci­ples of work­ing. When the AGO was under­go­ing a ren­o­va­tion to cre­ate the West­on Fam­i­ly Learn­ing Cen­tre, one of the issues, for those of us in the edu­ca­tion depart­ment, was what to call our com­mu­ni­ty gallery space. Over­all we were on board with the idea of a ‘com­mu­ni­ty’ gallery. How­ev­er, ini­tial­ly the staff per­son who came on to do the pro­gram­ming in that space was con­cerned about the term. She had a real­ly ter­rif­ic vision and great ideas, but she was caught up in what it meant to call a space a ‘com­mu­ni­ty’ gallery. She want­ed to take the word com­mu­ni­ty out of the title, because hav­ing the word com­mu­ni­ty in front of the gallery would pos­si­bly con­jure up images of spray paint and mac­a­roni; a cer­tain a kind of aes­thet­ic. There were many of us there who real­ly fought for the word to be includ­ed, argu­ing for its impor­tance. We felt that using the term was quite sig­nif­i­cant. In a large insti­tu­tion that has maybe been per­ceived as being an elite art space, maybe even per­ceived as unwel­com­ing to diverse and non-art com­mu­ni­ties over its long his­to­ry, hav­ing a space called a ‘com­mu­ni­ty gallery’ helps to make our walls per­me­able and sit­u­ates the insti­tu­tion as being in/part of the com­mu­ni­ty – maybe even an essen­tial part of it.

LL: We are see­ing the need with­in insti­tu­tions to expand, increase and diver­si­fy their rev­enue base. To do this, insti­tu­tions need to become more open to the pub­lic. At the same time there is a grow­ing expec­ta­tion that because the insti­tu­tions are pub­li­cal­ly fund­ed, the pub­lic should have greater access to these insti­tu­tions. Cur­rent­ly the push with­in insti­tu­tions for pub­lic engage­ment is dri­ven by get­ting as many peo­ple in the door by pro­gram­ming what is pop­u­lar rather than what is both com­pelling and complex.

SMW: I always thought that my role at the AGO was to make some change and to try to use the phys­i­cal space and the resources there to sup­port some amaz­ing youth-based com­mu­ni­ty projects. How­ev­er, when the insti­tu­tion makes a deci­sion to sup­port ini­tia­tives based on par­tic­u­lar pri­or­i­ties, but those pri­or­i­ties are posi­tioned with­in a rhetoric of con­sump­tion, which often rein­forces dom­i­nant stereo­types and norms, it can be dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate the insti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty with com­mu­ni­ty ini­tia­tives and rela­tion­ships. So what does it mean for those of us doing work with­in the insti­tu­tion that is geared to non-nor­ma­tive forms of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, such as part­ner­ing with the Reel Asian Film Fes­ti­val, invit­ing and pay­ing artists to cre­ate stop ani­ma­tion films with youth, or col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Deaf Film Fes­ti­val? It is chal­leng­ing when the insti­tu­tion con­tin­ues to repro­duce edu­ca­tion­al and pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als that par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties find prob­lem­at­ic and which under­mine the work that I, and oth­ers, do. It’s one of the ten­sions of work­ing with diverse com­mu­ni­ties from with­in the institution.

HR: So how do you nav­i­gate insti­tu­tions, while work­ing from with­in one that may not reflect your ideals? How do you work with them and try to change them from the inside?

LL: In many ways I think I’ve changed OAC more than it’s changed me. I nev­er thought that was pos­si­ble. I’ve brought my pri­or­i­ties and val­ues with me and this is what has made a dif­fer­ence in the cul­ture and pri­or­i­ties of the insti­tu­tion. These days I think of myself as a rela­tion­al artist, part­ner­ing with the province of Ontario to pro­duce and dis­sem­i­nate com­mu­ni­ty-engaged prac­tice beyond Toronto.

SMW: That’s true, and I would say that the AGO is very dif­fer­ent from when I start­ed work­ing there. For exam­ple, the Youth Coun­cil was made up of most­ly kids from pri­vate school; there was not a lot of rep­re­sen­ta­tion out­side of that. I worked hard to change these demo­graph­ics and to open up the pro­gram for youth going through tran­si­tions and who may not be in school at all. A lot of peo­ple in the cur­rent youth pro­gram have dropped out of school, some are in school, and all have vast­ly dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al and com­mu­ni­ty expe­ri­ences. These major dif­fer­ences are what make our project more respon­sive and mean­ing­ful to the youths’ lives, and not sim­ply an insti­tu­tion­al pro­gram cre­at­ed to attract diverse audiences.

PM: His­tor­i­cal­ly SEED was also a very white space, very upper to mid­dle class. Today there are a num­ber of street youth at the school. These stu­dents pre­vi­ous­ly didn’t have access to this form of education.

SMW: I also think the cat­e­go­ry of youth is arbi­trary because the mean­ing of the term youth changes with each orga­ni­za­tion that works with youth. Some orga­ni­za­tions say youth starts at age 13, some say 15. Some say it ends at 19 and oth­ers at 29. So it’s clear­ly not an essen­tial cat­e­go­ry. It is also a con­tem­po­rary way of look­ing at age, which is not fixed or sta­ble. If these iden­ti­ty cat­e­gories are blurred then it is pos­si­ble to imag­ine more approach­es to work­ing with youth, more pos­si­bil­i­ties for them. 15 years ago the term ‘youth’ was rarely used. Peo­ple often used ‘teen.’

So instead of ‘youth,’ maybe I’ll say I work with peo­ple who are going through a time of tran­si­tion in their life. Tran­si­tion­ing from not being able to make a lot of choic­es to being able to make more choic­es. In any art project that you are doing, in any kind of cre­ative endeav­our, your life is also hap­pen­ing. In one of our pro­grams for indi­vid­u­als in an age of tran­si­tion, one of our par­tic­i­pants has only been in Cana­da for two months. He came here as a refugee claimant and had to leave his fam­i­ly of ori­gin and home coun­try because his fam­i­ly found out that he was gay. So he jammed what­ev­er he could into a bag and was on a plane at 6 am. So of course I spend maybe anoth­er hour and half of my day talk­ing to him because he does­n’t know any­one here. It’s part of the work I do. For some rea­son we have devel­oped a rela­tion­ship where he feels like he can talk to me about some of the strug­gles. Peo­ple don’t see what it means to do work with par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties; they don’t see the addi­tion­al com­po­nent that is total­ly part of the work.

LL: When we talk about vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions I think what we are talk­ing about are peo­ple who are in tran­si­tion­al times in their lives. Often, peo­ple involved in com­mu­ni­ty-engaged projects are extend­ing them­selves beyond the assump­tions and expec­ta­tions they have of them­selves for a vari­ety of rea­sons. There is an asso­ci­a­tion of com­mu­ni­ty arts with per­son­al trans­for­ma­tion. It doesn’t mean the art is ther­a­py but we do acknowl­edge all of the ten­sions and con­flicts sur­round­ing change in the process of art making.

HJ: And I think to bring it back to the idea of nego­ti­at­ing insti­tu­tions, for all of their evils, what I hear each of you say­ing is that you are able to have these kinds of rela­tion­ships because you are bring­ing your prac­tice into the institution.

LL: Doing hor­i­zon­tal work in ver­ti­cal structures.

HJ: The insti­tu­tion enables some­thing that would­n’t hap­pen out­side of the institution.

HR: Do you think that queer pol­i­tics inform the way that you inhab­it the institution?

SMW: The activism that I’ve been involved with has always informed my art prac­tice and has been very much root­ed in try­ing to work towards a world where we all get the right to self-deter­mi­na­tion. And I think my desire to do that work comes from the fact that as a racial­ized queer and trans per­son I did­n’t feel the right to self-deter­mi­na­tion. So that informed my desire to make some change in the world.

PM: As an artist I strug­gle with ques­tions like: Am I a queer artist? Am I a South Asian artist? Am I just work­ing through fem­i­nist pol­i­tics? What am I? I think I’m all the above but it is about nego­ti­at­ing these iden­ti­ties. They are all inter­re­lat­ed to me. My prac­tice is con­nect­ed to race; it is also con­nect­ed to class. I’m con­stant­ly work­ing through these inter­sec­tion­al­i­ties inside and out­side of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem, as both an artist and as a teacher. It’s all these selves that are con­tin­u­al­ly strug­gling with a pol­i­tics that exists on a day-to-day basis. I’d say I’ve always been part of the mar­gins and I work from the mar­gins. I use the qual­i­ties of grass­roots activism in the class­room. So you want to make a sound pro­duc­tion, what tools do you have? Just a cell phone? But it has a recorder on it! So just try­ing to show stu­dents how to work with­in their means with what­ev­er they have.

LL: Com­ing from the mar­gins and being in school­ing sit­u­a­tions where per­haps we weren’t being served our­selves, we try to address those gaps in the ways that we work with oth­er people.

SMW: And that is also par­ent­ing. I just saw this inter­view with “Far From the Tree” author, Andrew Solomon. He is a queer dad, and he has a gigan­tic fam­i­ly; there are many dif­fer­ent peo­ple who had roles in rais­ing his chil­dren. You can par­ent in a dif­fer­ent way than how your par­ents par­ent­ed, but then his cau­tion was: are you par­ent­ing the way that would have been best for you as a child? The way you wish you had been par­ent­ed? But is this how your child wants/needs to be par­ent­ed? So then his ques­tion was: “how do you par­ent the per­son who is in front of you?” This relates to my work with youth, where I have to con­sid­er: “is this pro­gram the best fit/program for the youth who are in front of me?” And how do I make those eval­u­a­tions? Who gets to decide what is the best fit?

The Youth Coun­cil decides what projects they want to do. I can give them infor­ma­tion about what artists are out there and then they can pick which artist they want to work with and how they want to work togeth­er. If we did­n’t do it that way, they would­n’t come. If you are not going to be inter­est­ed or engaged with the project why would you go? You could be going swim­ming or doing some­thing else. To keep engag­ing the par­tic­i­pants and to make projects that are reflex­ive of and root­ed in youth com­mu­ni­ties, our projects require that the youth direct them. The Youth Coun­cil has own­er­ship from the plan­ning to the out­come or else they would­n’t want to come.

HJ: So we are talk­ing about repar­a­tive work, about cre­at­ing expe­ri­ences for oth­er peo­ple that might have been absent or miss­ing in our own expe­ri­ence com­ing to be artists? The idea of repar­a­tive work implies that art has an oblig­a­tion to ‘do good,’ or to cre­ate some kind of pos­i­tive social change. Syrus, I’m inter­est­ed in what you said about being a par­ent: mak­ing assump­tions about what you think is best for that oth­er per­son based on your own expe­ri­ence. And that leads into a con­ver­sa­tion about per­form­ing social hero­ics, around the assump­tion that art is trans­for­ma­tive, and that art can save peo­ple. Can each of you offer thoughts about what could pos­si­bly be mis­di­rect­ed about these concepts?

LL: Com­mu­ni­ty arts are deeply inscribed with this repar­a­tive work. It was very much part of the way that KYTES got fund­ed, and the way that com­mu­ni­ty artists and orga­ni­za­tions con­tin­ue to get fund­ed to this day: for repar­a­tive work, to help peo­ple to become employ­able, to pre­vent crime, do harm reduc­tion, etcetera.

One of the rea­sons I want­ed to do my Mas­ters degree was because I was so tired of the overuse of lan­guage like ‘empow­er­ment’ to describe what we were doing. I real­ly want­ed to go back to the youth that I had worked with 6 or 7 years ago, to talk about what the hell we were doing. How we eval­u­ate what we are doing and mea­sure the suc­cess of these kinds of pro­grams is fun­da­men­tal. You cer­tain­ly can’t mea­sure empow­er­ment; that’s a com­plete­ly false premise for doing this kind of work, which is much more nuanced.

HR: I’m inter­est­ed in the reflec­tions that the KYTES par­tic­i­pants had about the project. You men­tioned to us that the reflec­tions were noth­ing like you imag­ined they would be: that they remem­bered things like the qual­i­ty of light in the room, things that are not quan­tifi­able, but were very mean­ing­ful to them. So it goes back to a ques­tion of nec­es­sary evils: how does this work get fund­ed? How can you con­vince peo­ple to fund art pro­grams with immea­sur­able outcomes?

LL: Well the pro­gram lost its fund­ing. We were known for being a pret­ty rad­i­cal crew; we were orga­niz­ing a pro­gram that ran 5 days a week for 4 months, for 16–24 year old street-youth. It kept us on our feet lit­er­al­ly try­ing to keep the doors open and deliv­er process-ori­ent­ed pro­gram­ming with results ori­ent­ed fund­ing. We did every­thing we could includ­ing enlist politi­cians like Jack Lay­ton and Olivia Chow who were huge sup­port­ers, but the rela­tion­ship was prob­lem­at­ic and even­tu­al­ly we, includ­ing the youth, lost out.

SMW: That’s very inter­est­ing, because if you try to look up Regent Park Focus in the phone book, it’s Regent Park Drugs Pre­ven­tion Arts Pro­gram or some­thing like that, and it had to be named accord­ing­ly so that they could access these kinds of grants. In fact they are a youth video/media arts pro­gram that I’m sure indi­rect­ly pro­motes drug pre­ven­tion, but that is not their main focus. Rather than this deficit mod­el, their goal is to empow­er youth as cul­tur­al pro­duc­ers, teach­ing them skills relat­ed to media arts. Cer­tain­ly a lot of the part­ners that I work with get a lot of fund­ing that’s either HIV pre­ven­tion fund­ing or some sort of project that some­how teach­es peo­ple about HIV. The Grif­fin Cen­tre gets HIV and new­com­er set­tle­ment fund­ing and does great art pro­gram­ming with youth. So many pro­grams have to tai­lor or tweak their pro­gram focus to fit fund­ing that is avail­able. And it is very inter­est­ing when these cer­tain pots of fund­ing come up because so many places are on a shoe­string bud­get and often have to repack­age what they are doing, even if they don’t intend it to be that way. And the way the pro­gram appears on paper can real­ly can effect it in practice.

LL: It’s impor­tant to involve all of the stake­hold­ers in con­ver­sa­tions about the impact of the work. The par­tic­i­pants in the pro­gram need to be at the table as stake­hold­ers, talk­ing to the fun­ders about what is going on and why the pro­gram is important.

HJ: Helen and I strug­gle with the stig­ma of com­mu­ni­ty arts but then we don’t want to be under­stood as teach­ing artists either. We want to col­lab­o­rate with youth. In addi­tion, we think about what it means to enable par­tic­u­lar learn­ing expe­ri­ences for the peo­ple we col­lab­o­rate with, and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly ques­tion the sense of author­ship, that we as artists desire.

SMW: I haven’t resolved the issue of how to ini­ti­ate col­lab­o­ra­tion and yet still have an author­ship role with­in the project. How do you hon­our the youth you work with but also under­stand the project as your own art prac­tice? It’s a very famil­iar ten­sion in activist prac­tice too, it’s very com­pli­cat­ed. Nat­u­ral­ly, dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties are there and peo­ple have dif­fer­ent skill sets and there are peo­ple who are like, “no I’m actu­al­ly going to make sure that this project gets finished.”

HJ: I have joined col­lab­o­ra­tive projects because there is an amaz­ing leader who I want­ed to learn from. It is very com­pli­cat­ed when we con­sid­er how author­i­ty or exper­tise plays a role in such col­lec­tive sit­u­a­tions. Per­haps what we need to think about are the ten­sions between author­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion, and that at the same time it is real­ly prob­lem­at­ic to make assump­tions about what is transformative.

LL: If you are not being respon­sive and allow­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors to come for­ward and be part of the design then that becomes prob­lem­at­ic for everyone.

SMW: It’s tricky because there is a pow­er dynam­ic. Even when you are try­ing for there not to be, there is. I do a lot of con­tracts for artists to come in short term, and it’s some­thing like, “You have to work with the par­tic­i­pants in a col­lab­o­ra­tive way and make it through con­sen­sus deci­sion-mak­ing, and you have to make sure the project is fin­ished and is beau­ti­ful.” Because at the end of the day the insti­tu­tion needs there to be an out­come, and that respon­si­bil­i­ty has to fall on some­one. So let’s say that there is a project, and there are all these tan­gents, and it is a real­ly amaz­ing expe­ri­ence, but time is run­ning out, and there are two weeks left: it is the artist who is going to have to be doing the 24-hour days to make sure the project fin­ish­es. Even when you are doing a col­lab­o­ra­tion, some­one is going to have to fin­ish the project. It’s less than ideal.

LL: And what is fin­ished? Why can’t it be a doc­u­ment of the process?

HR: It is an inter­est­ing prob­lem, and it seems to depend on the inten­tion of the work. Is the inten­tion to have the work move out­side of the com­mu­ni­ty in which it was gen­er­at­ed? There is a lot of process in what we do and it means a lot to the folks that par­tic­i­pate in that process, but some­times these things are hard to trans­mit to anoth­er audience—like anoth­er art audience.

SMW: The artists who work with the youth coun­cil typ­i­cal­ly have a show at the end in the com­mu­ni­ty gallery. There must be a sort of exhi­bi­tion at the end that accounts for the time they spent in res­i­dence. You have to show how you used the mon­ey or that some­thing has come out of it, it can’t just be feel­ing or thoughts. There is this unwrit­ten les­son that because we are teach­ing the youth there always has to be some sort of out­come. I recent­ly gave a pre­sen­ta­tion In Switzer­land about the Youth Coun­cil and the audi­ence had a num­ber of valid cri­tiques of the pro­gram. They asked, “What if the what the youth want­ed to do was not a project? Or if it was to change some­thing about the AGO?” The audi­ence cri­tiqued the premise of the pro­gram that sug­gests that the youth have the pow­er to deter­mine what they want to do with an artist, that it is total­ly open, but that at the end of the day the insti­tu­tion con­trols the outcomes.

HR: The issue is not objects. The art world sup­ports a work that is essen­tial­ly an email to a cura­tor, but when we work with kids, there is a feel­ing that it is not seri­ous, that it is not rig­or­ous and there is a demand that the work trans­late out of the classroom.

PM: It is real­ly hard to nego­ti­ate pow­er around col­lab­o­ra­tive prac­tice. Also, the feed­back you are get­ting from peers and col­leagues who are so rigid in their own expec­ta­tions of art. You have talked about the strug­gle between cre­ative process and com­ing out with a prod­uct, and I think it real­ly comes back to the cap­i­tal­ist struc­ture and who the stake­hold­ers are. Who is look­ing for some­thing that can be attached to a fund­ing agency report?

HJ: But we all do that with our jobs, with all the insti­tu­tions that we nego­ti­ate. For exam­ple, how do you get that cred­it for that one stu­dent who wants to build a record­ing booth? How do I think of the final prod­uct because it sat­is­fies this expec­ta­tion, but also reflects the com­plex process?

PM: We con­stant­ly nego­ti­ate pow­er struc­tures with­in these rela­tion­ships; decide what we can do and what our lim­i­ta­tions are.

SMW: Over my past 10 years of work­ing with artists and these very large scale projects that the Youth Coun­cil does, no two artists have han­dled it the same way in how they under­stood what we asked for in a col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ence, nor in what they thought about cred­it. It is very telling that they are all so dif­fer­ent in their approach. I worked with artists who said it was col­lab­o­ra­tion but then at the end of the project did­n’t want the Youth Coun­cil’s name attached to the work that the youth had co-cre­at­ed and co-devel­oped with them.

HR: But maybe what is at stake is the issue of pow­er that is often not dis­cussed in col­lab­o­ra­tive projects. Even if you work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly there could still be a hier­ar­chy. There is this expec­ta­tion that every­one is equal but that is not the case. When you work with younger par­tic­i­pants, of course there is a pow­er dynam­ic, but how do we name it while also nam­ing the process­es of col­lab­o­ra­tion? That is some­thing we have been think­ing about—the dis­com­fort of nam­ing the work as a collaboration.

LL: You know some­times the only ingre­di­ent is time. If your project is two years ver­sus two weeks you are going to see peo­ple take up dif­fer­ent roles. Dur­ing the KYTES troupe I wit­nessed a lot of change in the par­tic­i­pants. In par­tic­u­lar I remem­ber a guy who was the most resis­tant to par­tic­i­pat­ing at the begin­ning of the process say, near the end, “Lis­ten to her, she knows what she is talk­ing about.” It was unbe­liev­able at the time.

HJ: Syrus, you were say­ing that the one tru­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive project at AGO took the longest time.

SMW: Many of the projects that have worked the best have been the longest. There was this project that we did with Rebec­ca Tabobon­dung and John Hup­field: it was a video project called USPN (the Under­ground Sasquatch Pro­tec­tion Net­work) and we took 7 or 8 months to cre­ate it. It was a project with Indige­nous artists talk­ing about Toron­to hav­ing an unset­tled land claim. We cre­at­ed a fic­ti­tious TV sta­tion, USPN to talk about this. I think it is one thing to say we are going to col­lab­o­rate, but then if the group is new to each oth­er or new to you, it is very dif­fi­cult for every­one to put them­selves out there and to col­lab­o­rate on ideas. To allow them to have a voice and pow­er requires time and we don’t have a lot of that at the AGO. The Youth Coun­cil works togeth­er for about a year, so near the end of their time togeth­er, they push back with the artist and share their ideas and how the project should go—but at the begin­ning they typ­i­cal­ly just say “ok” to what the artists want to do, because they are ner­vous and just get­ting their con­fi­dence as they get to know each oth­er. So tim­ing is everything.

HR: Hav­ing more time can often cre­ate bet­ter work­ing rela­tion­ships, and allow for roles and dynam­ics to shift and be exam­ined over the course of the project. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the mean­ing and inten­si­ty of the process, in many cas­es, exists only because there is a col­lec­tive goal – the pro­duc­tion of a fin­ished work or some type of outcome.

It seems that the ten­sions that exist between expe­ri­ence and out­comes per­sists. This was one of the per­ceived weak­ness­es of the com­mu­ni­ty arts movement—that, at the end of the day, the aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties of the work were sec­ondary to the expe­ri­ence of par­tic­i­pat­ing in its cre­ation. Yet, the dilem­ma of par­tic­i­pa­tion is that most par­tic­i­pa­to­ry prac­tices are a strat­e­gy for audi­ences to con­sume work in a hands-on way. In the end par­tic­i­pants don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to change the work or their expe­ri­ences work­ing with­in a col­lab­o­ra­tive process. It is already deter­mined for them. As artists work­ing in edu­ca­tion, we expe­ri­ence sim­i­lar chal­lenges. The mea­sur­able out­comes of learn­ing trump both the expe­ri­ence of col­lab­o­ra­tion, and the for­mal qual­i­ties of the art­work. But it is this for­mal con­sid­er­a­tion that might engage an audi­ence beyond those involved in its cre­ation. This is where a dif­fer­ent kind of learn­ing might come into play a learn­ing about the slip­pery and illu­sive qual­i­ties of art—those things that are not so eas­i­ly quan­tifi­able, that make us curi­ous, delight­ed, or disoriented.

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HANNA JICKLING exper­i­ments with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of form, par­tic­i­pa­tion and mean­ing-mak­ing across dis­ci­plines and publics. Her projects often take shape as site-spe­cif­ic sculp­tures, pub­lic instal­la­tions, events, exchanges, pho­tographs, mul­ti­ples, print­ed mat­ter and oth­er ephemera. Atyp­i­cal forms of dis­tri­b­u­tion, entre­pre­neur­ial schem­ing and audi­ence-seek­ing are impor­tant strate­gies for sup­port­ing and dis­sem­i­nat­ing her work. Han­nah has recent­ly com­plet­ed artist res­i­den­cies at Out­door School (Mult­nom­ah Edu­ca­tion Ser­vice Dis­trict), The Ped­a­gog­i­cal Impulse (Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to), Becom­ing Ped­a­gog­i­cal (Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia) and the Rau­mars Artist-in-Res­i­dence Pro­gramme (Rau­ma, Fin­land). Her work is held in pri­vate col­lec­tions across North Amer­i­ca and can be tast­ed in the form of sour­dough pan­cakes, an ongo­ing work host­ed at Bubby’s in Man­hat­tan. She holds a BFA from the Nova Sco­tia Col­lege of Art and Design and an MFA from Port­land State Uni­ver­si­ty. She fre­quent­ly col­lab­o­rates with Helen Reed.

HELEN REED works with spe­cif­ic groups of peo­ple such as Twin Peaks fans, les­bian sep­a­ratists, and high school art teacher can­di­dates. In each project, col­lab­o­ra­tion is a work­ing process from which the art­work emerges. Reed favors col­lab­o­ra­tors that reflect her inter­est in par­tic­i­pa­to­ry cul­ture, affin­i­ty groups, and fan­ta­sy-based sub­cul­tures. Her projects take ver­nac­u­lar form such as tele­vi­sion shows, pub­li­ca­tions, post­cards and oth­er forms of eas­i­ly trans­mit­table and dis­persed media, so as to cir­cu­late back into the com­mu­ni­ties from which they are generated.

Reed has exhib­it­ed work at Pre­fix Insti­tute for Con­tem­po­rary Art (Toron­to), apexart (New York), Smack Mel­lon (New York), Port­land Art Muse­um, Seat­tle Art Muse­um and La Cen­trale Galerie Pow­er­house (Mon­tréal). She holds a BFA from the Emi­ly Carr Uni­ver­si­ty of Art and Design (Van­cou­ver), an MFA in Art and Social Prac­tice from Port­land State University.

LOREE LAWRENCE is the Com­mu­ni­ty and Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Arts Offi­cer at the Ontario Arts Coun­cil and a co-active coach for orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­u­als. Pri­or to join­ing the OAC, Lawrence worked as a con­sul­tant, co-cre­at­ed the­atre per­for­mances, media arts projects, instal­la­tions, arts-based research projects with com­mu­ni­ties in Toron­to and Van­cou­ver, and found­ed Red Wag­on Col­lec­tive, a com­mu­ni­ty-engaged arts ini­tia­tive that is active in the Junc­tion neighbourhood.

Lawrence’s cur­rent pre­oc­cu­pa­tion is spread­ing the art of col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­ni­ty-engaged prac­tices across the province through what­ev­er means pos­si­ble and with some success.

PAMILA MATHARU is a visu­al artist, teach­ing artist, and cul­tur­al pro­duc­er.  Her prac­tice is root­ed in the ‘oth­er’ experience—from the ‘mar­gins to the cen­ter’ by inter­sect­ing crit­i­cal ped­a­gogy and con­tem­po­rary art. For the past 19 years, Math­aru has worked in Toronto’s diverse visu­al arts com­mu­ni­ty. In 2003, she co-found­ed and co-curat­ed with artist Christi­na Zei­dler, Come Up To My Room: Glad­stone Hotel’s Alter­na­tive Design Event. As a teach­ing-artist, she col­lab­o­rates with youth artists and teach­es sec­ondary school lev­el Visu­al and Media Arts, and Social Sci­ences in the Toron­to Dis­trict School Board. She holds a BFA in Visu­al Arts and B.Ed in Fine Arts Edu­ca­tion, both from York Uni­ver­si­ty, Toronto.

SYRUS MARCUS WARE is a visu­al artist, com­mu­ni­ty activist, researcher, youth-advo­cate and edu­ca­tor. He is the Pro­gram Coor­di­na­tor of the AGO Youth Pro­gram, Art Gallery of Ontario. Ware’s work explores the spaces between and around iden­ti­ties, act­ing as provo­ca­tions to our under­stand­ings of gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty and race. His paint­ings, instal­la­tion, and per­for­mance work has been exhib­it­ed at the Art Gallery of York Uni­ver­si­ty (AGYU), Glad­stone Hotel, A Space Gallery, Har­bourfront Cen­tre, and SPIN Gallery and has been pub­lished in FUSE Mag­a­zine, The Globe and Mail, THIS Mag­a­zine, and Black­ness and Sex­u­al­i­ties. Ware’s pub­li­ca­tions include: co-edit­ing an issue of the Jour­nal of Muse­um Edu­ca­tion enti­tled “Build­ing Diver­si­ty in Muse­ums;” “Going Bold­ly Where Few Men Have Gone Before: One Trans Man’s Expe­ri­ence of Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ics;” “How Dis­abil­i­ty Stud­ies Stays White and What Kind of White it Stays;” and a forth­com­ing chap­ter with Zack Mar­shall about dis­abil­i­ty, Deaf cul­ture and trans identities.