The Rubber Meets the Road: Community Arts Activism and Cultural Hegemony

I found Carol Marie Webster’s article entitled, The Rubber Meets the Road: Community Arts Activism and Cultural Hegemony quite provocative. I characterize it in this way because she believes that “more frequently than is admitted, practitioners in the field spend far too much time engaged in the perpetuation and recapitulation of the dominant cultural hegemony,” a loaded statement aimed at the field of community arts activism. Why does she say this?

I believe she is trying to get arts practitioners to direct the critical lens at themselves but she is doing so in a condescending, pessimistic way. She paints an accurate portrait of the underpaid, underfunded community arts activist in the current economy which places nonprofits in direct competition with one another for sustainability. However her pessimism is biting and directed at those artists whose efforts continue to privilege the privileged while ‘pathologizing’ the others.

I think I can take something positive from her negative writing though. She relates a story about Bill T. Jones and how he personalized his art-making which had a great, positive impact on her. At a dance seminar, he noted that he would honestly have preferred to be with his partner who was dying at that moment, but instead he found meaning in his art and in the expression of the tensions that were raging inside of him. Webster explained the impact of being a witness to Jones’s eloquent description, “Jone’s summons was an invitation to unpack and momentarily dismantle the hegemony that saturated our lives, an invitation to unmask our personal and professional complicity, and an invitation to engage the tensions and contradictions that informed our understanding of ourselves as artists, as community members and as human beings.”

Webster’s and Jones’ words caused me to pause and ask myself, have I, however unwittingly, through my zeal in bringing acoustic guitar training to at-risk youth, continued to privilege the privileged? Have I excluded particular instruments or types of music that would have more effectively appealed to the cultural background of the young adults that were participating? Have I then failed to seize the opportunity that presented itself to me by failing to recognize the unique cultural and personal tastes of the young adults in my program? I think perhaps I have since the vast majority of the participants were in fact, Latino.

Webster is therefore effective in shaking up the thinking of community artists in this piece. She challenges arts practitioners to be ever mindful of the alternate perspectives that exist and to guard against the convenient tendency to serve the interests of the dominant culture.