A Reciprocal University: a model for arts, justice, and community.

• Date: 22 December 2002
• Author: O'Leary, Cecilia
• Published date: 22 December 2002
• Author: O'Leary, Cecilia

IN FALL 2002, CECILIA O'LEARY INTERVIEWED RICHARD BAINS AND AMALIA MESA-Bains to learn more about an experimental arts education model they have created at California State University, Monterey Bay, called the Reciprocal University Arts Project. (1)

Cecilia O'Leary: To begin, could you explain what reciprocal learning means and how you are trying to create a different kind of connection to communities surrounding the university?

Amalia Mesa-Bains: I think the Reciprocal University Arts Partnerships program at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), is an innovation in the field of community arts and arts education. We are attempting to break from the traditional mold of arts education outreach. In the past, I experienced attempts to provide services for ethnic communities as a one-way relationship. My own background, as a representative of community arts organizations, was often to try to broker the relationship between community organizations and larger, more mainstream institutions. The efforts of the latter were missionary at their core- we used to call it outreach. Many of our community-based organizations, like the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, were experimenting with other models of service and community. Lorraine Garcia Nakata, a very good colleague at the Mexican Museum, was the first person I knew to use the notion of reciprocity.

Later, when I was on the board for the Center of the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, Lorraine was our educational director. She again instituted the idea of reciprocity, which is like a mobius loop--the idea being that relationships have influence on both sides of the line. When Richard Bains and I came to CSUMB in 1995, we found the university struggling as a new entity with how to best serve the surrounding region. At that point in the university's history, the notion of service was defined by the idea that we had something we should go out and give to people who did not have anything. Having grown up in community-based organizations, I knew that it was more likely the opposite -- that there were values, strategies, and practices in those communities that could help the university to realize its own very lofty goals and vision. Consequently, Richard and I decided that reciprocity would be the organizing concept we would use for working with local communities.

Cecilia O'Leary: Could you tell us a little more about the communities surrounding CSUMB, and how you began to implement a strategy of community service based on the concept of reciprocity?

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Richard came here with very strong experience across multiple communities in San Francisco. He had helped develop a school-based program with the San Francisco Symphony in 1989. It created an arts education model based not on classical music, but on world music. Richard was able to fundraise and deliver an arts education program to the elementary schools in the San Francisco Unified School District even after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which deprived public schools of funding for the arts. When we combined our experience in thinking how we might serve the communities surrounding CSUMB, we began with an analysis of the region. We observed that this was a very segregated area. At its front gate, the California State University, Monterey Bay, faced Monterey, Pacific Grove, Carmel, and Pebble Beach -- rather upscale communities with more aging, white, and affluent neighborhoods. Adjacent was Seaside, with largely Black neighborhoods that were becoming increasingly multiracial as th e Latino population grew. On the other side is Marina, which is one of the most multiracial cities in the country, with a very large Asian population. Salinas, at the university's back gate, has a very, very large Latino population -- mostly Mexican and Central American farm workers' families, as well as a rising Latino and Anglo middle class. Not only were these communities segregated, they also held very different views of themselves and of each other.

In 1998, we brought together 40 community-based organizations -- from Monterey, Salinas, Seaside, and Watsonville -- during a planning year funded by the Lila Wallace Foundation. Our goal was to try to find out what these communities expected of us as a university and what they felt the arts could do for them and with them. Two consistent themes emerged. First, they all wanted arts programs. With the exception of Monterey, they all felt there was a negative perception of their community and they wanted to change that. The second theme was that their communities did not have the resources needed for permanent sites. Unlike larger cities, cultural resources, or access to them, were very shallow. So place-making became important. For example, Salinas had no museum. The Steinbeck Center exists, but at the time, its focus was not necessarily inclusive of the larger Latino population. Even Monterey only had two museums. So we developed the idea of reciprocal partnerships that would help surrounding communities bui ld their institutions and help us deepen transformative arts practices.

Cecilia O'Leary: Could you describe the process you went through in creating reciprocal community partnerships?

Amalia Mesa-Bains: The most valuable part of the planning process was bringing together these 40 community groups. The basis for the structure of the reciprocity initiative came from our dialogue. We asked if they were interested in partnering. From the group we selected two organizations from each of the four cities, one largely arts oriented, the other largely oriented to social service, keeping with our values. That is, we saw our vision to be inherently tied to social practices that had to do with community and public life, both in the visual and public arts and in the music and performing arts.

In the art world, there is typically a double standard in which criteria for what is considered high art is set by collectors and the investment market. Art that is popular, consumable, community-based, and public has little value in that monetary system--because anyone can enjoy it. Art that is engaged, that has a content, that has a connection to community, and is accessible is set apart in the art world. Often, artists who work in communities never have the same influence as art institutions, historians, and curators. Ourprograms aim to strike a balance between those two models.

In our belief system, art is a transformative practice that arises from people's struggles to make sense of the world. Art is a language and a form in which people express their deepest needs and beliefs, and in doing so, art lives for them. It is not something put in a building for which you pay to get a glimpse, but do not even receive an explanation. It is the set of practices concerning people's life choices. In Latin America, and in many other places, art is not separate from culture. There are ministries of culture and artists are influential cultural citizens. This is not true in this country. Our program provides students with the opportunity to think about what it means to be an artist, what it means to stand between private and public enterprises, and how an artist is capable of creating work that activates, propels, and gives vigor to the daily life that people lead.

Cecilia O'Leary: Tell me more about the students in the project and how you have built trust with the surrounding communities.

Amalia Mesa-Rains: We have two groups of students: CSUMB students and youth in the community. We designed the reciprocal university arts program to work with community-based organizations that serve youth. If we reach young people, particularly in their adolescence, perhaps they will eventually be able to give voice to their own communities. From labor organizing to community murals, manifestations of cultural citizenship draw upon funds of knowledge that are intimately connected to the history, value system, and struggles for social justice.

We have built our program on a respect for this community experience and knowledge.

Reciprocity comes from the notion that learning in art making and community building cannot start without the frame of the relationship. We began very small and grew slowly because we learned from our planning process that many of our community partners were working in very stressed community organizations with fewer resources than they needed. They also lack deep roots in terms of an infrastructure and were waiting and looking for assistance. We knew we had to win their trust, and would have to be patient and willing to demonstrate our respect for them, before they would engage in a project with us. Two years elapsed before there was a deep sense of joint commitment and before they gave us total access to their youth.

At the beginning, our students did more work with the community and the community students slowly came to the university. In a reciprocal model, you want community elders to come, so we created the notion of a community faculty member. We paid a good stipend and promoted their work on campus in public lectures or in an exhibition. They would give at least two lectures in key classes in our curriculum, advise us on our curriculum, and suggest possible changes in the way we were teaching and in the course content. The idea of a community faculty is situated in the notion of respect, which is the inner working of reciprocity. Without respect, none of it can happen. In a sense, respect is the core element of reciprocity in teaching that we enjoy with our students when we are doing a good job.

Making relationships with these diverse communities and winning their trust meant that we had to ask them to appraise the best aspects of their communities. We learned what they really believed in and that no one had ever asked them that before. Respecting them and believing that they had something to teach us changed the nature of...