Five Ways to Celebrate Interdependence this July

On July 4th 2015, the U.S. celebrates 239 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We know exactly what to expect: fireworks, barbecues, flags, parades, and weekend super-sales. 

Mobile USDAC HQ by Agent Carissa Samaniego.

But what would it look like to celebrate interdependence? What new civic rituals might we create to mark not just the freedom of one group (thirteen colonies of settlers) from another (Great Britain), but the essential truth that—in the words of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer— “nobody's free until everybody's free”? 

To confront the vast challenges of our times—from climate change and planetary degradation to profound economic, racial, and social inequity—we must build a culture of interdependence. We must act from the understanding that we are all inextricably connected to one another and to all of life. 

So, this July, in addition to enjoying a hotdog and a night of fireworks, the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture invites you to help cultivate a culture of interdependence. How will you choose to celebrate?

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Public Declaration of Interdependence. Gather friends and neighbors to write a Declaration of Interdependence for performance in a public space. You could each write and deliver your own or compose and perform a text together. Consider arriving at your performance site via an Interdependence Day parade! (Inspiration: Numerous groups have written Declarations of Interdependence, including Greenpeace and members of the 1976 Congress.)

2. “Where We Come From” Potluck. Acknowledging the rich mix of cultural heritage that defines the U.S., host a potluck where each invitee brings a dish and a story that speaks to “where I come from.” In addition to—or instead of—food, you could have participants bring a song or an object that speaks to where they come from. (Inspiration: Public Show & Tell, StoryCircles, Community Cookbook.)

3. Community Self-Portrait of Interdependence in Action. Invite people to capture images of places and projects in the community that demonstrate interdependence in action and to send them to you with captions. Share the images at an event and then turn them into something afterwards (e.g., poster, zine, online exhibit, PowerPoint to share with other organizations in the community).

4. Solutions Bazaar. Who are the people and the organizations in your community working actively to build a culture of interdependence? What projects are showing the way toward a just and thriving future? Host a solutions bazaar, highlighting  visionary projects just waiting for more people to get involved. Animate the occasion with live performance and art-making. (Inspiration: USDAC Imaginings, Beautiful Solutions, FEAST.)

5. Pop-Up Community Space. Pick a disused space (e.g., vacant lot), come together to make it inhabitable and install temporary seating. Use it as a site for any of the above. (Inspiration: Pop-Up City.)

Name Tag Day submitted to HILI Database by Eric Boromisa

For more ideas on how to cultivate interdependence in your community (or to submit your own!) you can browse the USDAC’s HILI (High-Impact, Low-Infrastructure) Database. If you decide to do one of these projects, we’d love to hear about it! Send documentation of your interdependence celebrations to usdac.us@gmail.com.

Want to meet and connect with other Citizen Artists across the country working to build a culture of interdependence? The USDAC is hosting a video call on July 14th from 6:30-7:30pm EST and you’re invited! Join us as we learn more about featured HILI projects, share ideas and strategies with one another, and get a sneak peek of how to take part in the USDAC’s next national action. For more details and to reserve a spot on the call, drop us a line at usdac.us@gmail.com with the subject line "Interdependence!"

- Adam Horowitz, Chief Instigator

En Plein Air: The Harrisonburg, VA, Imagining

On a sunny May 23rd afternoon at Ralph Samson Park in Harrisonburg, VA, Cultural Agent Jon Henry hosted one of 15 USDAC Imaginings this summer and fall. Harrisonburg, a college town in the Shenandoah Valley, has a population under 50,000, nearly 85% white. About half the local populace comprises students on one of five college campuses. Jon is pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at James Madison University (JMU), the largest of these. He also heads the Old Furnace Artist Residency. 

The Imagining used multiple spaces in the park—a pavilion, a lawn—to engage people from many communities in envisioning a future they want to inhabit. Jon was interviewed by Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard who spoke with him during his residency at Ruth’s Garden in Fjellerup, Denmark. 

Arlene Goldbard: What interested you, Jon? What moments stood out?

Jon Henry: Several did. A grad student, Nate St. Amour, did plein air painting throughout the Imagining. [“Plein air” means “open air” in French; plein air painting takes place outdoors, capturing the moment.] The plan was not to make it an actual plein air painting, painting only what you see. We said, “We want you to take suggestions from everyone at the event about what to paint in the landscape.” 

It was kind of a time-capsule throughout the day, because at the beginning it was kind of standard. But by the end, you can tell that people’s imaginations had opened up because there were floating libraries and water slides in the town. And zeppelins. Since we were in the public park people would come up to Nate and be like, “Oh, what are you doing?” It was a way to get folks involved. I think seven youths got involved in the rest of the day through him. Now the organizers are actually trying to get the painting donated to City Hall so it would be in the art collection of the city.

That connects to another moment that stands out for me. I always get really nervous about when to open an event because you always have those stragglers. We had a group of folks who were doing kind of a traditional African drumming circle. It was inter-generational and interracial. Like the painting, this was something that people could encounter in the park. If people didn’t know what part of the park the Imagining was in, the sound attracted them. We originally said to the drummers, “Oh, do that for ten minutes.” It ended up being like thirty or forty minutes because they were really going well, they were having a lot of fun, everyone was really enjoying it. They brought extra instruments and other people started playing with them; it became a collaborative project. 

And then the closing was amazing. We had Steve B.I.K.O. Thomas, a local hip-hop rap poet. He wrote kind of a rap/slam poetry piece based on the entire chat from that day. It was really, really good. That was a really powerful way to end, with him kind of rounding it all out with his poem. A faculty member from JMU came up to me afterwards and said, “How do I get him to speak at our school?” 

Arlene: I gather the town-gown issue is alive in Harrisonburg, is that right? Conflicts between the university’s and community’s perceived interests seems to be an issue in most university towns.

Jon: Yes. We definitely didn’t solve it, but I saw a good mingling at our event. Even so, I wish more university people had come. 

Arlene: So what did you do with this mixed group of people to spark their social imaginations?

Jon: We did some guided visualizations out on the lawn, like a visual stroll through Harrisonburg. In our own minds, we left our house and walked to the library to return a book and then walked home. 

Arlene: What did people see on their journeys?

Jon: I was really surprised that environmentalism was a guiding commonality throughout all the groups and all the sessions. Everyone talked about the city being pedestrian-friendly. There were all these creative ideas around public transit from zeppelins to water slides to community bikes. A lot of non-university people talked about wanting access to the university: they imagined it being free and having more class offerings, continual learning. That was a really nice moment. It also turned out that a lot of people found the Imagining really relaxing, kind of a self-care activity. We did have a lot of activists and community organizers at the event. I think it was nice for them to dream and lay in the grass on a blanket, to share some chips and do some coloring activities. 

Arlene: Who were your allies in organizing the Imagining?

Jon: Stan Maclin, director of the Harriet Tubman Cultural Center, was our lead co-organizer. He’s been very influential in the town and the state organization on confronting white supremacy and developing culture and connection for the local African American community. Through him I learned about Steve B.I.K.O. Stan was also really instrumental with the drumming, because he has that background as a drummer. He was teaching some youth about the instruments—they’d met Nate doing the plein air painting, so it all came together. And then Steve B.I.K.O. was involved, Larkin Arts—our local arts store/arts organization—helped with advertising and supplies and that’s also where we had all of our meetings, so they were good. And then Southerners On New Ground, a regional LGBTQ organization in the South, helped do a lot of outreach. And the JMU Sculpture Department promoted the Imagining too. 

Arlene: What do you see coming after the Imagining?

Jon: I know people were talking about what happens after this event. That’s what led to the Twitter conversation on art and ecology on June 17th. (You can read a recap here.) I’m really excited by the idea of opening up a USDAC Field Office. I’m hoping to have some meetings in July and August about firming up the Field Office.

Arlene: Harrisonburg would be a super place for a field office with the work that you’ve been doing there. We’re ready to help! 

Meditating on Gentrification: A Personal View of the NYC Imagining

Liliana Ashman, who serves on the USDAC Action Squad as “Story Hunter-Gatherer,” attended the New York City Imagining on June 2nd (follow the link to learn about others happening across the U.S. this summer). Here she writes about the feelings, ideas, and associations evoked by an Imagining billed this way: “#Imagining: Creative Strategies to Fight Gentrification in New York City.”  For more on the ideas thinking behind this Imagining, see Alexis Stephens interview in Next City with Betty Yu, the Cultural Agent  who organized it.

It’s an unseasonably cold, rainy Tuesday evening in June and I find myself wearing a tweed jacket, making my way through the midtown 5 o’clock rush to get to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church to attend the first NYC Imagining organized by the USDAC. Stepping off a crowded train I emerge on Lexington Avenue, surrounded by the country’s largest investment banks and consulting firms. I am immediately made aware of the stark class differences that  exemplify Manhattan. It seems strange to be gathering in a church, yet the setting offers a sanctuary, a place to speak openly and honestly. 

The history of this church is interesting, a poignant glimpse into the many fascinating stories that make up New York City. On June 2, 1862, a group of German immigrants partnered with a local Irish Roman Catholic businessman to gather in a small, borrowed loft above a grocery and animal- feed store on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 49th Street. It seems fitting that more than one hundred and fifty years later we were gathering to discuss the future of New York, and whether there is a future without gentrification.

The USDAC has been rolling out fifteen Imaginings across the country this month. The focus of the NYC Imagining, organized by 2015 Cultural Agent Betty Yu, is creative strategies to fight gentrification. This is an ambitious task to accomplish in the three and a half hours we have scheduled. There is a noticeable tension in the room as Adam Horowitz, USDAC Chief Instigator, asks us all to take a deep breath,, saying, “We are in it together.”

Artist Priscilla Stadler’s piece, Fragile City, hangs in the window. This colorful cheese-cloth tapestry depicting scaffolding and skyline. It is indeed fragile and seems impermanent. To me, this piece represents the current state of the city and at the same time offers a creative, imaginative glimpse of the ever- shifting landscape.

So where do you live? [installation from the Fragile City series] Dyed cheesecloth, monofilament Priscilla Stadler 2014

As I listened to people’s stories of their experiences with gentrification—intense dealings with corrupt landlords, a genuine lack of affordable housing, being pushed out of their homes—it was clear that though housing should be a human right, many New Yorkers are not being afforded this right. A lack of resources and information on affordable housing and tenants’ rights is overwhelmingly frustrating.

Ed Goldman, an active member of the Fort Greene community, has lived there for the past twenty years and has a strong presence every Saturday at the farmer’s market.  Despite this, he told me he didn’t know what else he could do to keep fighting for his neighborhood. A woman living in Williamsburg felt that she was simultaneously affected by gentrification and also, perhaps, a part of gentrification, leaving her to grapple with how she can also be a part of the solution. Ravi Ragbir with the New Sanctuary Movement spoke of the organization’s work to protect those at risk of being deported. Michelle Carlo, a native New Yorker and performer, summed up, “People come to New York to be out of the box, not [put] into a box.” How is it that New York City, known as a cultural hub for artists, a second chance for immigrants, is pushing away everything that makes it so great?

I was struck by how many New Yorkers feel displaced, whether directly from their homes, their neighborhoods, or their communities. I live in Prospect Heights, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. There is a new restaurant popping up on my street every few months and I know that it won’t be long before my landlord decides to raise the rent. Unlike Carlo or Goldman, I am a fairly new resident to New York, having lived in Ireland for three years (where in fact, I was almost deported). I have struggled with the way in which we as a society define our homes, our land, and our rights to what should be basic elements of humanity. There were many amazing projects represented at the Imagining, for instance, Take Back the Land, a national network of organizations dedicated to elevating housing to the level of a human right, is. It’s an incredible project, but the very fact that it exists is an eye-opening example of how critical the state of housing is in this country. Our homes and communities are a part of our identities, they define who we are and shape our future. 

As we envision a future New York without gentrification, where no one is displaced or without a home, I find myself imagining what the role of an actual government agency with the aims of the USDAC would play. What if we took the same  measures to ensure that our communities felt whole and inclusive and applied this nationwide and even globally? In the wake of catastrophic events like the earthquake in Nepal, I wonder if in the future, were there a government organization with a similar mission to the USDAC, could it implement the work of artists and have a role in providing relief beyond food and shelter? Closer to home Rachel Falcone created Sandy Storyline to share people’s stories in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I felt that the NYC Imagining is only the beginning, a spark of something more to come, a catalyst. There is certainly a lot of potential. But as Italo Calvino wrote, it is hard to say what will emerge:

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Imagining Philadelphia: An Interview with Cultural Agent Julia Katz Terry

On May 31st, Cultural Agent Julia Katz Terry and a great group of volunteers held “Imagining Philadelphia” (one of 15 Imaginings the USDAC is rolling out this summer) smack dab in the middle of the ArtWell Festival at Oxford Mills, a renovated textile mill complex in the South Kensington neighborhood. USDAC Chief Policy Wonk Arlene Goldbard interviewed Julia about how she and partners from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, University Community Collaborative, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, Art Sanctuary, and other groups organized the Imagining around its stated purpose: “With youth voices at the center, we will use art, collaboration and dialogue to explore and imagine where, what, and how they will learn....and most importantly how we will achieve equitable and creative solutions that serve our youth and honor our diverse cultures and communities.” What emerged from imagining education twenty years on?

Arlene Goldbard: You wrote, “with youth at the center.” How did that work? Where did the young people come from? Who were they?

Julia Katz Terry: Through all of the Cultural Agents’ USDAC training, each week I wrote down a whole new agenda for the Imagining! But I held off on making anything definite till we had our committee meeting. And as much as I thought we had it planned, it changed once we got the students’ energy in the room. We had high school students through the Upward Bound program at the University of Pennsylvania and from an ArtWell program with the Children’s Hospital’s Violence Prevention Initiative. Most were African American, both boys and girls. They really stepped up and they took their roles seriously and they worked really hard.

We told them about the USDAC and how important it was to have their voices leading the conversation, how this was a really unique opportunity to do something different that felt really hopeful and could have some lasting outcomes. We brainstormed activities and themes and people signed up to take a role. They suggested a carnival theme. We talked about superheroes. And then everyone got excited about this fantasy first day of school 20 years from now. There were so many great ideas, it was hard to eliminate, but we also had to come up with what would be feasible in a limited amount of time. They wanted people to be sent through a metal detector like when you enter most middle and high schools; but this would be a creativity detector, an imagination detector. Someone would get a reading like, “You’re off the charts! Come on in!”

In the context of many, many other organizing activities happening—a lot led by youth—what was unique about this one was that it was really planned by the students. They were so excited and that made it fun. They made people really ready for a different dialogue.

Arlene: Tell me about one of the activities you did.

Julia: In brainstorming the first day of school theme, we talked about the rituals of the first day of school. To our surprise, the students were saying “We still have to say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, maybe we can rewrite that.”

We had a few big pieces of paper on the wall. One said, “I pledge allegiance to…” Another said, “and to…,” and then, “with…”—like how the Pledge is at the end. We had people write different lines on Post-its. Two poets who are ArtWell teaching artists and the students put them in order. They had planned to perform it. I suggested making it call-and-response, because when people do the Pledge of Allegiance everyone takes part. We read a line and then the audience said, “I pledge allegiance.”

Here’s the text:

I pledge allegiance
to one planet in the cosmos
to all beings in the universe
to the people of the people of this beautiful melting pot of colors
to my sisters and my brothers
to myself and others
to love
to the freedom to be me
to the belief that everyone can succeed
to the earth, to the sky, and the seas
to show the world the things we can achieve
to accepting differences, courage, equality
to families growing with joy and support
to open minds and open hearts

And to
confidence
determination
to the unyielding pursuit of peace
to the freedom of others who are different from me
to going for broke
to everlasting hope
to the children, our seeds of the future

With all the love & empathy I can conjure in my heart.

Arlene: How did this work in the middle of a festival?

Julia: In some ways the festival was great because the spirit of the day was so exciting and joyous. The momentum of music led so many people to the Imagining. ArtWell events in general attract an intergenerational and diverse audience. It was beautiful! And this whole new audience came, partly because of the Imaging and also because of our outreach efforts to the neighborhood. So in that sense it was really effective to have it in a festival.

 But I couldn’t keep half of the festival guests in the Imagining through the whole festival, and it couldn’t have an opening, middle, closing, which I would have liked if it were an independent event. Because it was open to the festival, people would trickle in and add their piece. It was cool to see all the different phases of it. At one point I went into this huge conference space and there was just a family—a mother, father and their five year-old daughter—and they were all adding things to a list. They had so much to add and they were this family working together: it was awesome.

Arlene: When you consider the Imagining as a whole, what emerged overall in terms of the future of education? Were there qualities that would make it different? Or new things that would happen?

Julia: People wanted our schools to be like their fantasy first day of school: open and interactive and experimental and kids have a say. Somebody said they want students to be empowered and entitled to create a safe space for all, to have schools that are supporting students to make their own culture and kind of space.

A lot of people wrote about safety and sanctuary in relation to the arts. On the sanctuary flags we made in another activity, there was a lot about safety, courage, poetry, leadership. Outlets for expression through arts and culture are really tied to making people feel safe, that they can belong and be themselves in schools.

People also brought up basic resources, like, “I wish that all schools had books, videos, and computers, to help students learn.” Basic needs, like college counselors, guidance counselors, nurses.

Arlene: Any final words?

Julia: I’m excited about the potential for youth leadership across arts, culture and youth-serving organizations. It was an advantage to have this event in Philadelphia because there’s such a collaborative spirit and interest in collective impact across fields and organizations. This would be a really exciting way to harness that energy: to bring youth together across organizations and have arts and culture be a vehicle for that.

Dispatch from the Ministry of Endangered Languages: An Interview with Daniel Kaufman

New Yorkers walking down Stanton Street on the Lower East Side on Saturday, May 30th stumbled across an unusual sight: a van painted with poetry written in dozens of languages and a tent announcing an “All You Can Speak Buffet” offered by the “Ministry of Endangered Languages.” A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the Endangered Language Alliance, CityLore, and Bowery Arts and Science, this pop-up Ministry was part of the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival, offering passers-by hour-long classes with native speakers of endangered languages. Afterwards, USDAC Chief Instigator Adam Horowitz caught up with Daniel Kaufman, Executive Director of the Endangered Language Alliance,  to learn more about this urgent cultural issue and what we can do to preserve linguistic diversity.

 Adam: Let's start with the basics. Roughly how many languages are there in the world? How many are endangered and what are the criteria for getting on that list?

Daniel: There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world today. More than half are considered endangered. We can define “endangered” by the probability of a language surviving this century. UNESCO has created a set of criteria for evaluating the “health” of a language. The number one factor on this list is transmission from the parental generation to the young children. A language can have many thousands of speakers but if it is not being passed on to children it can disappear within a single generation.

The second factor is the sheer size of the speaker population. Other factors include the status of the language, the community's opinion of the language, the percentage of the country's population that speaks that language, and others. These factors give us a picture of a language's chances for thriving or declining over the coming decades. 

Why is language preservation important? What do we lose when we lose a language?

With the death of each language, we lose a unique identity and history as well as a wealth of knowledge about how human language works. We also lose knowledge about the environment and a body of oral literature. 

What languages were taught at the All You Can Speak Buffet at the pop-up Ministry of Endangered Languages? Who did you find to teach them?

Marie-Reine Jezequel teaching Breton to an attentive audience.

The languages taught at the Buffet were K'iche', Kurdish, Ikota, Mixteco, Breton, and Yiddish. (Kurdish is not an endangered language in Iraq but we included it because we had a great teacher.) All the teachers are collaborators who we've been working with in some capacity over the last five years. Some of them, like Isaac Bleaman (Yiddish) and Daniel Barry (Kurdish), are graduate students. Our K'iche' teacher, Leobardo Ajtzalam is our director of radio and is starting a K'iche' class later this month for the first time. It will be a rare opportunity for New Yorkers to learn a Mayan language from a native speaker over the course of several weeks.

Our Ikota teacher, Safiyatou Dvorak, got in touch with us after an article came out about our organization in the New York Times in 2010. We've been working on documenting her language ever since. Our Mixteco teacher, Maximiliano Bazan, is a maintenance man at a prestigious New York City private school, and he's also an excellent storyteller and translator. He does most of the court translations for Mixteco speakers in New York who don't speak Spanish. Finally, Marie-Reine Jezequel, our Breton teacher, was one of the founding members of the Diwan bilingual school which, more than anything else, was responsible for the resurgence of the Breton language in France. ELA's unique contribution to New York City is bringing individuals like these together to strengthen each others' languages and share them with the public. 

 What's something that you learned or that surprised you during Saturday’s event?

I'm always surprised and delighted at people's enthusiasm for languages they've never heard of. There was a classic advertisement throughout the subway stations of my youth that read: “You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Rye Bread.” We're trying to show that you don't have to be Mixteco to love the Mixteco language or Ikota to love the Ikota language. Languages, like good rye bread, are meant to be shared with everyone and I think that was clearly on display at the language Buffet. 

If someone reading this gets inspired by the cause and wants to help protect language diversity, what would you encourage that person to do?

I tell people to start local. You don't have to fly to the Amazon to do important work. New York has become one of the most—if not the most—linguistically diverse spots in the world. Many of the new immigrants who are routinely ignored in this city— the busboys, the food delivery folks, the taxi drivers, the nannies— possess tremendously rich linguistic knowledge that is not being transmitted to the younger generations. Go forth and meet them. Find out about their languages. Find out if they would be interested in making recordings and translating them with you. Talk to us about how you could produce high-quality recordings and archive them. Saving a language requires a communal effort but almost anyone can contribute to the conservation of endangered linguistic knowledge. 

Now, if you'll indulge a little imaginative act: let's pretend there was an actual federal agency prepared to spend a vast amount resources on this critical issue. They call you up and ask you to propose one massive new program or policy. What do you tell them?

I do not have to imagine very hard here as I had the opportunity to advocate for such a program to the Smithsonian, which is part of the federal government. What I told them was—in a nutshell—if we're serious about keeping languages alive and not just pickling them for posterity, we have to be in the business of creating environments for language transmission. Just as in the UNESCO criteria, transmission is paramount, everything else is secondary. I would create facilities for a summer camp that could immerse children in a different language and culture for two months a year. Let them not only live in their ancestral language but use it in traditional settings. Let them absorb the knowledge that's in danger of being obliterated and ensure the longevity of the world's languages, crafts, songs, literature and approaches to nature.

These things are more important than volleyball. Summer camps can save the languages and cultures of the world if only we were more willing to take a chance with them. Among others, the Latvians set up such a camp here in New York State when they thought the Soviets were going to erase Latvia from the map. It seems to have worked wonderfully and with outside support and some resource sharing we could make a massive impact on truly preserving diversity, not just pickling it. 

The POEMobile, brainchild of USDAC Cabinet Members Bob Holman (Minister of Poetry and Endangered Language Protection) and Steve Zeitlin (Minister of Art in Everyday Life).