Education and Community Programs

Well, the conference in Bilbao is now over, but I’m still chewing on all of the ideas people tossed around over the course of the three days. I’m happy to report that my talk on our civic engagement work went over very well. (The translator only told me to slow down ONCE, and that was when I deviated from my script to explain what Capture the Flag is since I cited OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement) as an example program. I got a little carried away.) I wasn’t sure how our ideas about the town square and our definition of civic engagement would play out in Europe, since I am picking up on a different approach to these concepts from over there.

None of the European museum people addressed the term civic engagement directly, but we did spend a lot of time talking about access, which is a primary concern for several of the musuems present and it seems to fall under the broad category of civic. Lisa Moran, Curator of Education at the Irish Museum of American Art talked about issues they have with access and funding that are quite different from ours. IMMA is almost entirely publicly funded and thus all of their programs are free, including gallery admission. This is fantastic for accessibility, but aparently this money comes with strings attached. Those strings are the social service agendas of the Irish government which seeks, rightfully, to give arts access to underpriviledged individuals. This relationship drives programs that serve only particular audiences, rather than funding arts access for everyone, including people that don’t fall into a category of “underprivileged.”

Another difference between the Walker’s work and that of several European institutions that this conference cemented is in our definition of “civic engagement.” At the American Association of Museums Conference this spring in Boston I attended a panel on European examples of civic engagement, which is how I first learned about the programs of IMMA. While the programs presented in that panel were excellent, I was curious to hear that the core of them was the engagement of so called “excluded audiences” rather than an effort to drive attention to civic issues. At the Walker we are striving to use art to encourage engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of RIGHT NOW. Access to the museum and the creation of a welcoming enviornment is also part of our town square concept, but a major component of our c.e. work relates to social and political concerns.

I came away from this conference wondering if that is a particularly American concern. We are all accutely aware of the current divisions in American politics and opinion, and indeed these frictions were part of the motivation for the civic engagement process in the first place. As I explained to my Spanish colleagues, there is an anxiety in the States right now that one feels no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. Everyone thinks the country is going in the wrong direction and these opinions are causing trouble from the family dinner table to the Senate. Every place in the world has political struggle, the Basque region certainly included, so it strikes me as curious that connecting people to political issues through art was not a concern I heard at the conference from my European colleagues.

I’m off for a little vacation now after the conference, which will include a lot of museums visits so stay tuned for more reports.