The Work We Have To Do At 30

We have work to do. 

In 2012 The Field sent me to my first Race Forward Conference in Baltimore and the transformative facilitator, Melinda Weekes-Laidlow told me “Yes, you have white guilt but we have work to do.”

Bit by bit, thanks to Melinda and many more advocates over the years, the work is being done. In my capacity as Executive Director of The Field I have attended anti-racism trainings at the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, did power and privilege trainings with Coro Leadership NY and more.  Individually, I learn about justice and equity in my gospel choir, my church and at events like White Conversations for Racial Healing. Organizationally, at The Field we piloted one-off diversity programs like Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists: Diversity with the Nuyorican Poets Café, BAAD! and The Fire This Time Festival to support artists of color with career building services.  We also committed to diversifying our staff and our program constituency in meaningful and thoughtful ways. Slowly but surely we are doing the work.  

In 2016, on the cusp of our 30th birthday, in these deeply violent days in our country, The Field launches Field Leadership Fund, our most ambitious and visible commitment to equity in the arts to date.

A 16-month paid leadership training program, FLF aims to transform the lives and futures of a diverse cohort of 12 under-resourced artists and arts managers*.  Our goal is that these artists and arts managers will leave FLF better connected, better networked and more resourced so that they can advance equity in the arts.  

As FLF Program Manager Rajeeyah Finnie-Myers writes in her post ‘Who makes it as a leader in the arts sector?’ is a really important issue to address and, still, it is only one visible piece of the work we have to do.  Recently, The Field’s staff and Board adopted seven Strategic Priorities to guide our work over the next five years.  A “Commitment to Social Justice” is one priority.  By this we mean that we intend to transition The Field from an organization with an emerging practice in social justice to an organization with embedded and intentional practices and processes in diversity, equity and inclusion.

What does that mean? Over the next five years we will look at everything: Staff, Board, hiring, compensation, programs, marketing, technology, fees, adjudication, everything.  And we will institutionalize and operationalize our commitment to equity and to justice in the arts and culture sector.  Why is this important to us? So that artists and arts and culture workers can have fair, unbiased and impartial access to creative opportunities and resources like gigs, grants, donors, shows and jobs.

This work started already with FLF.  We grappled hard with how not to judge the FLF applications by traditional grantwriting standards that might favor privilege.  We grappled with how to ask about identity: as a check box or an open text box or as a narrative response.  We grappled with pay rate and panelists and process.  And we learned a ton.   We made some mistakes.  We took some risks.  And now we go forward.  

This image comes from a Social Identity exercise we did at our FLF retreat inspired by this type of exercise http://www.odec.umd.edu/we/about/Multiversity/handouts/SocialIdentityWheel.pdf. 

To do all of this, we will aim to learn from our more expert peers.  Like BAAD!, the Classical Theater of Harlem, El Puente, Healing Arts Initiative,  Ifetayo, and 651 Arts. These organizations already do this work and do it really well.  But often they receive less funding, less press, and are deemed less credible than their mostly white-led peer organizations.

    

We have some work to do.

And this work is grounded in The Field’s core.

Thirty years ago in 1986 The Field was founded by a small group of performing artists in a dusty Soho loft to share their artwork with each other and figure out – together – how to thrive.  They got together in this way because they felt isolated.  They got together in this way because they were tired of waiting for the tastemakers and gatekeepers to give them gigs, grants and opportunities.  They felt like there were barriers holding them back and they wanted to push against the system.

They started an open and accessible non-curated performance series – called Fieldays - to give artists time and space to show work.   And they started non-curated critical feedback workshops – called Fieldwork - so that artists could give each other rigorous, non-directorial feedback peer to peer.
  

This is The Field’s historical core: non-curation.  Non-curation as a tool to address the opportunity gap in the arts.  Non-curation as a response to the biases and prejudices of the tastemakers, gatekeepers and stakeholders.  Non-curation to keep the artist at the center of the process.  Back then, this was a radical notion.

Please note: in the early days, Field artists were primarily movement-based and primarily white.   This was not intentional per se.  But it reflected the founding artists’ obvious, easiest and most accessible community.  And it reflected their privilege – the privilege to be able to take matters into their own hands and create an organization that supports their visions.

Thirty years later here we are.  Still a small service organization that prides itself on keeping the artist at the center, on building community, on providing real resources and support, and on giving opportunities to artists who might otherwise not get them. But thirty years later the arts sector hasn’t changed much…For every barrier we’ve helped an artist surmount, there are still more challenges. Many of the challenges point to deeply rooted notions, complex questions and devastating American and world history related to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, economic privilege, cultural background, and other social identifiers. These are the biggest issues. How can we face them? 

Head on.  With programs like Field Leadership Fund.  With our efforts to institutionalize and operationalize equity practices and processes.  By learning from and partnering with allies and peers who know more than we do. 

Happy 30th birthday to The Field.  And to the field of activists, advocates, revolutionaries and mentors who push us toward our highest level of work.   Push us.  Teach us.   We have work to do. 

-- By Jennifer Wright Cook, Executive Director of The Field with rigorous feedback and stellar editing by Shawn René Graham, Artist Services Manager and Diana Crum, Development Consultant!

*By “under-resourced” we mean lacking in resources.  For us, resources in the arts sector are the supplies and opportunities that help art get made, seen, funded, etc.  They include residencies, performances, grants, individual donors, residencies, events, etc.  Resources, for us, also includes having access to the stakeholders and leaders who have  the power to divvy up said resources- including funders, critics, academic leaders, presenters, residency directors, etc.

Eating the Big Apple: Self Producing Work In NYC, By Emilyn Kowaleski

This piece is late, unforgivably overdue. What excuse can I give? My computer dropped onto the subway tracks? A piece of scenery dropped on my head? I was consumed in tunnel vision, tackling a recent production of my work? Or most honestly, I am a young artist, mastered in over-commitment, but admittedly, not yet mastered in time management. “There is never enough time!” I cry, shaking my fists melodramatically to the ceiling. I was underwater trying to solve the myriad of artistic challenges in front of me and the financial and logistical ones that accompanied them. However, the unforgivable irony of the matter is that The Field is a buoy that I've found and clung to for support in those arenas after I dropped myself into what felt like the ocean-like task of making and self-producing my own work in New York City.

I graduated from liberal arts school in New York, a few years ago, from a program I loved that taught me many things about making theater and that whole-heartedly encouraged me to go out and start creating work. But what I discovered when I graduated was that; I didn’t really know how to do that on a practical level. Outside of college, rehearsal space didn’t exist for sign up on the third floor in front of the production offices.  I didn’t get to attend a class anymore where people were forced to sit and look critically at my work. I didn’t know proper grant writing language, or how to get a residency, or really how to convince anyone that I, a bright ideaed, starry eyed, post-graduate deserved time, money and resources to create that work, especially when I am one of thousands. I had no track record in the big bad apple, so I just started biting in wherever I could.

            Two years past graduation, in hungry searching of finding the existing remnants of my cushy college life, and building patterned practices of producing work, I found The Field. There, behold: cheap rehearsal space to be connected with, fundraising workshops, and people to meet with every week who would watch and respond to my work. I started with the later. I signed up for Fieldwork, where I could again, play, try, fail and build in front of an audience who would tell me what they were seeing. I had just begun the first stage of development on a piece called Root of the Rosebush that is based on a series of interviews I had conducted with people about their history with relationships from first crush to present day. I didn’t know what that piece would be, or how to construct it really. I just wanted a place to experiment and a chance to know how my words and images were affecting others; I found that in Fieldwork.

 Six months later, after I had built that piece into a first draft and was looking to develop it further, both financially and artistically, I knocked again at the doors of The Field. I signed up for Jumpstart and another session of Fieldwork, back to back.

             For Jumpstart, I was delighted to turn up at American Table, met by the smiling but serious face of Fran Krimser. “Ok,” she said handing us a packet of information on budgets, networking and fundraising that set off palpitations in my idealistic artist heart that was childishly screaming “But why?! I just want to make things!” My adult brain knows, of course, that this is part of that work.  Thankfully, she made it easy. “I’m not going to spend three hours of your time talking at you generally without applying this to your project specifically.” She breezed us through the packets, took us through some exercises and let us practice how to talk about our work.  Then, she sent us on our way with the homework of creating a budget, a project description, and development and potential sponsor lists. A week later, I met with her individually to discuss how best to proceed with my project. She told me how I could make the timeline more manageable, where I could slash the budget and bit, by bit where I could raise the money I need. She articulated the marketable strengths of the work and advised me on an application to present a workshop production at Dixon Place, which, in thanks to her, I ended up receiving.  My heart palpitations have not gone away, still staring at the gigantic apple in front of me, but they have slowed.  It was as if someone had sat down and helped me cut that apple into manageable pieces that I could actually start to chew.

            Fieldwork, on the artistic flipside, operates in much the same way.  Every week, artists meet and present roughly ten minutes of work for feedback. By showing chunks of a larger piece that I was building, I was able to test flavors, and focus on fine-tuning particular moments as I wove them into a whole. Jumpstart was a process of learning how to market my work. It was all about finding the most captivating language with which to articulate what I was doing.  Fieldwork was a process of discovering what about my work itself was intriguing to an audience. Fieldwork is magical.  It a safe space for creative trials, with caring eyes to greet it with observations that fuel the work. It is easy for me to view Fieldwork as a delicious treasure, and Jumpstart as a necessary chore. However, what doing the two programs in tandem taught me, was that this all of it actually feeds same important skill set that is necessary to develop as an artist—Learning how to articulate descriptions of my work and make it in a way that engages people.