The Importance of Place
By Vanessa Whang

What struck me first - and last - about being at the national gathering of the American Festival Project at Appalshop was the importance of place. It was my first visit to Appalshop, and only my second to Kentucky (Louisville, being my first encounter with the state). I had known about Appalshop for many years, had been acquainted with people who work and worked there, and had had it in my portfolio as a grantmaker during my tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts. And yet this was the first time I had made the trip to Whitesburg - the right opportunity and impetus being created by Meena Natarajan’s kind invitation to participate on a panel.

When I was in Louisville earlier in the year, I had thought about finding a way out to Appalshop, but I let myself be daunted by the five-hour drive in unknown territory, and didn’t venture out. I wouldn’t be surprised if that might keep a lot of other well-intentioned people from visiting Whitesburg. It’s not an easy access sort of place - even from a closer airport. But once I was kindly chauffeured into the hills of eastern Kentucky by veteran visitor Chrissie Orr (a member of the Traveling Council) and was impressed by the energy, experiences, and fearlessness of our young fellow traveler, Rose Simpson (both of them from New Mexico), I realized the bigger barrier to Whitesburg had been not so much in the physical geography, but in my mind.

I grew up and have lived my life in the suburban and urban environments of southern and northern California, and most recently have resided in Washington, DC and New York City. So rural Appalachia was completely terra incognita for me. And correspondingly, I would say people like me - a person of Asian descent - are not a particularly familiar quantity in that region. Oddly enough, I have had no hesitation to explore villages in Chile and Bolivia or in Italy and Ireland, and yet I had to admit that I was influenced by the prejudice and fear an urban person of color can internalize about rural areas in the South. But as we drove through the kudzu-covered countryside, populated by many more trees than people, my mind filled with the questions that it would in similar places I had been, even if in different countries: Who lives here? What do they do to survive? How is life changing here? Do people want to stay? Do people want to go? Do they have a choice?

Arriving at Appalshop on that Friday afternoon in September, I could see it was an oasis - filled with creative activity and warm, open, dedicated folk - or better perhaps, an extraordinary community hub, a cultural port of exchange in a land-locked sea of green. Its influence on the town was evident - from the banners with socially-conscious messages that lined the main street through town to the storefront gallery window of the annex and the wonderful wood building housing Appalshop itself. The convergence of people for the AFP gathering as well as the observers and participants in the RFK in EKY project made the streets of Whitesburg unusually populated - in numbers and in kinds of people from outside the town.

I found myself wanting to learn as much as I could about the area to begin to understand what makes Appalshop do the work it has done for over three decades and what its presence has meant to the region. I got my opportunity in many different ways. First, a group of us neophytes got an impromptu Appalshop tour, generously led by Judi Jennings and Herb E. Smith, to get a grounding in Appalshop’s many programs and activities. Workshop sessions at the gathering - such as, the presentations on the community-based art work in Elkhorn City and Harlan County - provided a chance to hear the voices of people in the community and their concerns about their lives, their children, their futures, and how they found in art a door to hope and unexpected empowerment. Then media projects - such as “Holler to the Hood,” “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear,” and “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” - helped me to get a better sense of the lived realities of eastern Kentucky, its richness and resources as well as its economic dilemmas and heart-wrenching contradictions.

Another learning opportunity came in the form of a visit to Neon for the Neon Days Festival and the discussion of the RFK in EKY project’s impact on its participants. To be sure, there was a contrast between the song contest, car show, and other typical festival activities and the conversation that revisited RFK’s War on Poverty assessment and people’s reflections on what it meant to them today. But both served to illuminate local people’s ways of being and thinking - their kindness, their toughness, their willingness to be silly, to be serious, and to engage with each other and outsiders.

By the time Sunday came, the panel I was invited to participate on - “Changing Our Framework with Changing Demographics” - took on a completely different meaning. The demographic considerations in eastern Kentucky were not the ones I was used to being steeped in: suddenly I realized I was in a place with probably more out-migration than immigration, a place with a burst in the growth of the African American population because of the influx of inmates of high security prisons recently built in the region, a place where job growth through the mining industry and the corresponding economic opportunities also meant inevitable degradation of the land one calls home. Not that the kinds of considerations that I was used to thinking about - e.g., a need for a deeper understanding of diversity within races and nationalities, issues of language difference in cultural difference, the complexities of aesthetics regardless of their roots being in elite or popular artistic forms - had become totally irrelevant to the conversation, but rather, that my whole frame of reference for “our changing framework” had changed.

Being in this place and, to the extent possible, letting it permeate my consciousness, shifted my understanding of how demographic changes in this country can play out. Clearly, it could be wildly different in different communities - large or small, urban or rural, racially homogeneous or heterogeneous. But being in Whitesburg gave an enlightening specificity to those different possibilities. It also made me aware that my initial fear of the region was as much a product of the ongoing disenfranchisement of the poor and of cultural stereotypes of Appalachia as of the history of racism and racial segregation in the south. And so I was once again reminded that the struggle to fight against all of these forms of prejudice is not just about how we view and treat other people, but how we can deprive ourselves of experiencing the richness and variety of those people and their cultures, and of understanding life in its infinite complexity.

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to come to the gathering, at long last to have visited Appalshop, to experience a part of eastern Kentucky, and to be among so many thoughtful, dedicated, and creative individuals who were a part of the AFP gathering. Thank you, I learned a lot and had a thoroughly enjoyable time!

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Vanessa Whang is a consultant with interest areas in interculturalism and cultural equity, arts philanthropy, multidisciplinary arts production, community cultural development, and cross-sector partnerships. Her current clients include the Ford Foundation (NY), Community Foundation of the National Capital Region (DC), Asia Society (NY), and Jacob’s Pillow (MA). From 1999-2003, she served as Director of Multidisciplinary Arts and Presenting at the National Endowment for the Art. As a multi-instrumentalist and composer/arranger, Ms. Whang toured nationally with the Latin American music ensemble Altazor and produced their two recordings for the Redwood Records label. vmwhang@yahoo.com

Tangible-Intangible Outcomes of Gathering Annually
By Marty Pottenger

On a chilly September 2004 evening at the Lexington, Kentucky airport, about 80 people traveled from around the United States and Canada to be part of AFP’s Annual Gathering. They came to be participants and observers in the historical recreation; and they came as citizens, community members, artists, students and teachers for the conference that followed. At the ramp where arriving passengers enter the baggage claim area, a grey-haired reporter was standing next to another man who was pointing a big old-fashioned camera in the ramp’s general direction.

I had just arrived and was waiting for the rest of the American Festival Project’s governing board aka the “Traveling Council.” With the seven of us living thousands of miles apart in Tijuana, Minneapolis, Louisville, New York City, Sante Fe and Los Angeles, this was our first opportunity to spend a week together since our last year’s Annual Gathering in Knoxville TN. There, central focus was on the work of AFP member Linda Parris-Bailey and the six Knoxville communities that had partnered to create Carpetbag Theater’s Literacy Project. Here in Kentucky, it was AFP Traveling Council member John Malpede’s “RFK in EKY,” a three day historical recreation of Bobby Kennedy’s Poverty Tour followed by a three day conference on community arts practice called “Art and Democracy.”

I went over and introduced myself and sure enough, the reporter was waiting for the arrival of Peter Edelman, due any minute, who came to play himself and travel in the car with the Kentucky lawyer who was playing RFK, just as he had traveled with Bobby back in 1968. And immediately this Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper reporter started telling me stories about the other time, in 1968, when he had waited at the same airport for Peter Edelman and Robert Kennedy. How he had taken their pictures and then covered the story for the paper on their three-day tour of hearings, strip mines, one-room schoolhouses, town halls and hollers. How perfect.

One epiphany for me came in Neon’s high school auditorium filled with hundreds of students on bleachers, while a handful of fellow students with brown paper grocery bags over their heads, were waiting to testify at the hearing with the same words spoken by a handful of students 36 years ago. Another at Alice Lloyd College where the lawyer representing RFK delivered a speech damning military aggression in foreign lands, condemning a politics of might over right and analyzing the 1968 political quagmire of Vietnam with chilling accuracy to our present invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. I hadn’t remembered that politicians could be so insightful, so honest.

During “Art and Democracy,” our 2004 annual gathering, one of the many synergies was the coming together of many of the most active organizations working in the field. Some of these outcomes are what I call “tangible-intangibles.” Say for instance the long-term benefit having dinner with three members of three different arts organizations whether the conversation dissects diversifying the funding base or ends up on what it’s like to negotiate two year olds into their pajamas every night. Or the long-term effect on future artists when someone sees this amazing young Native hip hop poet, Rose B. Simpson, at the Saturday evening Cabaret and decides to host a residency for her the following year at their Appalachian arts center. Or the experience of riding around in a car with other artists who have been doing this work for over 20 years and getting to talk in depth about methodology, ethics, the challenge of communities who want to use the arts solely as an economic engine with no connection to societal dynamics or progressive opportunities. Or the ever-simmering tensions between the local artists and the national artists when working in a mixed residencies. Or getting to listen as a group of people of color meet to wade through post-colonial terminology to reach to discover/invent/reclaim a language that more accurately describes who they are, what they do and their vision of the future for all of us. We never get to spend that kind of time together. It was a gift.

One of the things that have a deep affect on artists’ ability to make art is their connection with each other, with a community of humans that are in common cause. Isolation, so corrosive and endemic in contemporary society and reflected in individual artists lives, makes everything harder, hopelessness rampant and the courage to live on the edges of economic survival, societal inclusion all the more difficult. The opportunity to spend four, five, six days with other artists and with arts workers, academics, community organizers, people of all ages and class backgrounds, who are all actively engaged and committed in art-making and social change is profound. Its impact cannot be overestimated.

The few similar gatherings I have been privileged to attend have had a more general focus and have lasted for a few hours, not several days. To get to experience a major community arts project together, to have experts and colleagues from the field there morning noon and night is incredible. Concretely I came away with about 30 new relationships with people who work in the same field as myself; I participated in a dynamic discussion of the connections between art and policy that seeded a plan for a national initiative focusing on the same.

During the panel organized by Judi Jennings examining the two ongoing community arts projects in eastern Kentucky, community organizers, members and artists discussed their individual projects roots and strategies. The two projects are from very different perspectives and methodologies. It revealed two very different ways this work is being thought about and undertaken in the field right now. I would guess this is the first place such a discussion has been undertaken.

The partnership that developed between Appalshop, AFP, RFK/EKY and the “Art and Democracy” Annual Gathering was a significant step forward for all involved. Locating a significant national arts project like RFK/EKY in eastern Kentucky was a resounding success in surrounding. For me personally, participating for the last four years in helping sponsor the vision of another artist come to life was a step in one of the directions I want to go, to help bring other artists work to life as well as my own. I also got to experience and explore something I’ve been intrigued by for years…the possibilities of historical re-enactments as art, as social change, as an art form for social change.

Five years ago I went down to Colquitt Georgia to learn more about Swamp Gravy, a community play written from gathered stories by Jo Carson and developed by Richard Geer and townspeople that became a community development strategy for economic revitalization. My life and work as an artist is full of questions about strategy, methodology and outcome in terms of community engagement. The 2004 AFP's Annual Gathering was the most focused opportunity to explore them in my last twenty years.

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Interacting Creatively Across Generations
By Judi Jennings

What does it mean to have a national gathering about art and activism, performance for a purpose, and the future of “the field” in an eastern Kentucky coalfield town of 1,200 people? It means a lot of different things: 35 years of Appalshop history; everyone in town knows there are a lot of strangers around; visitors learn that pure drinking water can be scarce and no alcohol can be sold; community is still intact, but in danger; and rural people, like many of those in urban areas, are creating art to confront the tough challenges they face.

A powerful first day session on “Community Change and Art in Eastern Kentucky” reflected these challenges but also embodied a hard-scrabble hope for a better future. If anyone thinks that all of rural America is the same, these two case studies prove otherwise. Although located in the same corner of Appalachian Kentucky, Harlan County and Elkhorn City are worlds apart in some ways.

Harlan County lies in the heart of the coalfields, while Elkhorn City sits on the banks of a white water river. The participants in the Harlan County project are separated by watersheds and bad roads. The Elkhorn City residents live closer together in a steep river valley. Elkhorn City wants to cash in on cultural tourism through the arts with an eye-catching walking path, a new park, and a community theatre. Harlan County is creating public art projects, including a locally-produced photographic exhibition, mosaic tile murals, and an historic play, as ways to restore community connections and combat crime, drug abuse, and political corruption.

Yet the participants from these two communities had much in common as well: a deep connection to the land, mountains and rivers that define Appalachia; an abiding commitment to staying in their home places and making life better; lifelong connections to friends and neighbors who, for better or worse, “know all your business;” pride in the people and the heritage of the area combined with an aching sense of loss and concern for the next generation; and a belief that the arts can restore hope, engage citizens in new ways, and help revitalize rural communities.

For me, this early session highlighting the creative efforts of people in these two communities to make their home places more self sufficient, healthier, safer, and more beautiful set the context for the two-day gathering. Their dignity and determination mirrored the memories of Robert Kennedy’s visit to Appalachia 40 years before, resurrected by the Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project in the days before this Annual Gathering. Kennedy had listened to the same kind of proud, although economically disadvantaged, people struggling against tough odds to preserve their culture and live a decent life in eastern Kentucky.

The hard work and high aims of the folks in Harlan County and Elkhorn City stand in stark contrast to the values reflected in the large-scale prison projects in the farmlands of nearby southwestern Virginia. As shown in an Appalshop video in progress, “From the Holler to the Hood,” two new prisons, one at Red Onion and another at Wallen Ridge, have recently been built across the mountains in rural Virginia. The colorful place names referring to local landmarks now seem like a mockery of local pride because the two prisons house mostly urban inmates, primarily young people of color, doubly punished by being sent far away from their own homes and support systems in the Northeast. Meanwhile, young men in this region, with few economic opportunities, must decide whether to take jobs as corrections officers which can pit them against the prisoners with sometimes deadly results. Will the values and hopes of these two rural communities be able to withstand the incursions of this prison/industrial complex? Only time will tell.

Thoughts of exploitation and resistance in the coalfields lingered in my mind during a session the next day on memory and transformation. Dr. Jan Cohen-Cruz of NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts asked participants to create human sculptures of remembered moments of resistance. I re-created a group of Appalachian women who sat down in front of bulldozers to stop them from strip mining the land. A sister participant remembered students crouched behind barricades in Paris, France, about the same time.

The closing session on “Youth and Art,” however, jolted my framework and complicated the context I had constructed. An Appalachian teenager showed a video she had made as part of Appalshop’s Appalachian Media Institute about her quest to play the banjo like her father and grandfather while trying to stay true to her own personality and life style. A young Anglo/American Indian woman from New Mexico eloquently described how she struggled with both her inherited cultures but found her own personal transcendence in painting and slam poetry. I realized that these two young women are creating new cultures, not preserving established ones.

Inspired by their stories, I thought again of the earlier panel on art and community change. I remembered a mother and daughter from Harlan County, hands clamped hard together, speaking softly but strongly about their hopes to strengthen their community through art. I remembered the young theater director from Elkhorn City who came home to present “The Kentucky Cycle” from an insider’s point of view. So I left the gathering in a difference mindset than I began it. Long term community change through the arts may depend most on our abilities to interact creatively across generations.

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Judi Jennings (AFP Traveling Council Member) was born in Lexington, KY. Her mother was an Appalachian and her father was a used car salesman, so her background was culturally mixed. She holds a PhD in 18th century British cultural history and authored a book on The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783-1807. She was co-producer and researcher for the Appalshop documentary film, Stranger with a Camera, directed by Elizabeth Barret. The film examines the murder of a Canadian filmmaker in Letcher County, KY in 1967. She is now the Director of the Kentucky Foundation for Women www.wfnet.org. Judi is a member of Appalshop's board of directors. Judi@Kfw.org

The Fusion of Youth and Creativity Can be Fearful
By Chrissie Orr

I have worked with teenagers for many years. It’s their energy, questioning and irreverence that attract me. They are still willing to risk and still willing to experiment. In these upside down times they have a difficult path to navigate.

To some the fusion of youth and creativity can be fearful. Creativity can lead to individualism, freethinking, subversive thoughts and at times, action. Youthful creative thinking is difficult to control; in society this is hard to live with and frowned upon.

I was asked to lead a session on youth and art for the Annual Gathering of the American Festival Project “Art and Democracy” held at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. I was, at the time, working on a project with a young, just turned twenty, Native American woman. Born to a Santa Clara pueblo mother and an Anglo father, she straddled the two worlds. She worked from a young age with her grandmother, making pots and digging gardens in the dry desert with her mother. She demanded to be initiated into the traditions of the pueblo and to be taught the pueblo language. She is still deeply rooted in the traditions of her culture but now is pursuing the path of the hip-hop culture. She is an extremely talented artist, she paints, she draws, she sings, she still makes pots and she is a well-respected spoken word artist.

I was told a similar story about a young woman from Whitesburg. She grew up learning to play the banjo from her grandfather, a well renowned player of bluegrass. She too, embraced her traditional culture and now is involved in the punk scene.

This intrigued me, how did these two young women cope with this duality, the traditional with the individual new youth culture? How did they balance, the two? Both cultures were as important, both served to make these young women creative individuals.

So the session developed, we brought these two young women together to tell their stories, dialogue about their personal experiences and to express their concerns and thoughts about the state of the artist in these strange times.

They were both nervous about presenting to the audience of at least thirty artists, activists and funders from around the country but they took the plunge. They stood there and told their stories and showed their power and passion and they reminded all of us older ones to hold on to the passionate spirit, to walk our talk and to continue to make those leaps of faith.

This was an important session. We have to remember the voice of those emerging and they need to hear from us. The dialogue was critical, open and spirited.

The journey home was long and I wrote in my journal, “It has been an inspiring time. Kentucky was as beautiful as ever, green damp and soft. I felt protected from the rest of the world, the closeness of the hills; they keep things out but also keep things in. I am shell shocked from the weekend, so much energy and information to ponder and digest. New people in my life, new connections, new thoughts and concerns, but soft skin and hair. I wonder what the young woman sitting next to me thinks, has this been as extraordinary to her? What has she gained from this experience? She did have the whole crowd standing on their feet clapping at the end of her session. Does she know how powerful she is?”

I was told as our plane gently landed in Albuquerque that a life had been changed.

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Chrissie Orr (AFP Traveling Council) was born in Scotland, attended Edinburgh College of Art and then proceeded to develop her skills as an artist in unconventional places and ways. She was a circus performer throughout Europe, a muralist in Corsica and she created community-based projects in Australia, Iran, Turkey, Europe, Mexico and America. As founder of the nationally acclaimed Teen Project www.warehouse21.org in Santa Fe, NM, her vision and skills are recognized by both Congress and NEA and she has been nominated for numerous awards for her work with youth. She lectures internationally on her work and process, especially the Bridge Project that addresses issues on the border between El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. www.metamorfosis.com/chrissie/chrissieintro.html; http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archive/64orr.php; chrissie@metamorfosis.com

Daring to Dream Artistic Dreams
By Meena Natarajan

The extraordinary privilege of being part of a place based art project with other people from across the country and world and from different backgrounds across race and class cannot be overstated. Using the Kennedy project as a place from which to begin, a large group of artists, scholars, arts activists were convened to participate in the RFK project and an Art and Democracy panel as part of the American Festival Project gathering at Appalshop.

For someone who has roots in India and comes from a specific background of viewing theater in the context of the society that we live in, being part of this particular gathering and raising questions of our current society through the lens of an event that occurred in the past and re-envisioning the questions and concerns that haven’t changed much in the last 30 years in Eastern Kentucky was eye-opening. Never having been a part of such a large scale project and seeing some of its inner workings has set my own imagination as an artist soaring in terms of my own artistic endeavours.

During the last two years, I have begun to think about two large scale national and international projects that will include the community in which I live. The fact that I consider these ideas doable at all is thanks to the inspiration provided by the audacity and imagination of the Robert F. Kennedy project and its successful completion. This project has inspired me to dare to begin dreaming which is so essential for any artistic endeavour.

The project and gathering also allowed us to spend valuable time with other artists from across the country and exchange ideas in a focused manner. Creating these relationships and networks has been an essential and valuable part of my own growth as an artist. AFP and Appalshop have been a huge part of that process – based on my previous visits to Kentucky and my interaction with the artists who enliven Whitesburg as well as their histories of resistance in the area has influenced my own interaction with my own community/ies in Minneapolis.

Creating the Art and Democracy Gathering, I therefore chose a topic for my panel that had to do with my own concerns that have been a part of my social and political thinking in the last few years – Changing Demographics in America. The fact that by mid century, there will be no single majority population in the U.S. highlights the need for collaborative politics between people with differences in culture, lifestyle, gender, class especially at this particular juncture in history. I was interested in how this shift would impact aesthetics in artistic endeavours, and the lens through which we see the cultural “other”.

The experts who participated in my panel were Vanessa Whang, Dipankar Mukherjee, Linda Parris-Bailey and Elia Arce. The fact that the panel was convened in an area in which the majority are poor working class Caucasians with hidden minority populations who are a tiny percent of the population; South Asian doctors, Afrilachians and other immigrants mainly in urban areas, highlights the class dynamic as well. (WORKSHOPS Link)

As a participant, organizer and convener, my experience was more than satisfactory. I have come away with many ideas, ideas that will affect the community in which I live. The RFK project and the gathering afterward has deeply influenced the way I see art, the inclusion of community in art, scale of projects, the sensitivity with which projects are undertaken in communities and how art, politics and society is interwoven in a fabric that is intricately connected. Difficult as it was to take so much time from my theater, it made sense that these profound experiences and relationships were created over a period of 3-4 days so there was time to absorb and allow the experience to enrich our own thought processes.

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Meena Natarajan (AFP Traveling Council) is a playwright from India whose scripts have been produced professionally in India and the United States. She is one of the founders and the Executive and Literary Director of Pangea World Theater, a theater committed to bringing people together from different backgrounds and ethnicities from around the world. In 2001 she received a TCG Observership grant, a Jerome Foundation Grant and the Twin Cities International Citizen’s Award from the Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul for work in the international arena. Meena is the President of Women Playwrights International, which promotes the work of women playwrights all over the world. www.pangeaworldtheater.org meena@pangeaworldtheater.org