Terron Banner engages the local community through outreach at the Urban Arts Space
BY TERRON BANNER (PhD, 2019)
As the Manager of Community Learning and Experience at the Ohio State Urban Arts Space (UAS), I have had the opportunity to put many of the arts, cultural and educational policies I explored during my time in AAEP into practice. Through an action-research methodology, I have helped to establish a critical framework to evaluate UAS’s internal policies and procedures and the organizational decisions in the arts administration process. Additionally, I have implemented two key policy shifts that reflect the progression of the arts administration, education, and policy field and employ an asset-based approach in evaluating students to empower and equip them with the skillset and real-world experience needed to be successful in arts and cultural sectors and creative economies.
The first order of business when I came to Urban Arts Space was to make sense of and define success in terms of arts and cultural equity. The impact measurements I use to define success are the organization’s: “amenity functionality,” or its position as a community asset that improves community life; “collective efficacy,” or its ability to improve connections among the community; and its “unique patterns of participation,” or the established connections around multi-dimensional experiences (Stein and Seifert, 2018). Arts and cultural equity deal with the distribution of, and access to, just opportunities within communities to engage with art. More specifically, art that includes the perspectives and experiences specific to that community. “Just” being the operative word, describes aspects of opportunity, such as the availability of resources that are not disadvantaged and the promotion of culturally responsive decisions being made in the arts administration process. If an area is impoverished when it comes to opportunity, then that scarcity is a lack of freedom (Stein and Seifert, 2018). With this new philosophical approach to programming, it reframes how UAS understands and measures organizational contributions to communities through the arts. The key is to understand “community culture as a ‘field’ — rather than as a collection of individual programs” and the “social impact of arts as a collective process” (Stein and Seifert, 2018). Often the individual is the common unit of analysis to measure impact of the arts — how did an individual grow, learn and/or change based on the artwork they experienced at a certain place? Instead, my approach at UAS is to determine success by our ability to influence the “field” and the benefits that can bring to communities and their residents.
Secondly, I sought to create a social space for learning and growth in the arts for students at Urban Arts Space by reframing and expanding the existing internship into the “Arts Administrator Internship Program at UAS.” The internship in its current form is built on four applied knowledge pillars: (1) contextualizing language and space, (2) learning and utilizing key concepts, (3) understanding the role of artists and the arts and being empowered as an arts administrator, and (4) open communication with experts in the field. Through these pillars, students can learn about and apply concepts, theories, and methodologies to actual exhibitions, projects, and community initiatives in the field. Students can examine and utilize space (physical and virtual) as a built environment imbued with meaning through diverse modes of language and examine, in real time, the tension that exists between external language and internal thought processes. By fully realizing the role of the arts and being empowered as arts administrators working in the field (not just interns), students are able to network, interact and engage with artists and leaders in the industry.
Both initiatives were on full display over the summer of 2022 during the celebration and commemoration of Juneteenth. As a result of this new direction, UAS joined into a collaborative project with Dr. Monica Stigler at The Ohio State Community Extension Center (CEC), the Maroon Arts Group (MAG), student artists (from UAS and Ohio State), and other local artists from the Bronzeville community and the wider Columbus area to program and activate the Mt. Vernon Avenue area for the “Juneteenth on the Ave” community celebration. One project we completed was a large-scale mural that embodied the spirit of community, collectivism, and “Blackness” in terms of Afro and Afri-diasporic people. We created this project after visiting and forging relationships with community organizations like Columbus Africentric Early College, the CEC, King Arts Complex and the historic James Pythian Theater (built in 1925 by Black masons). This was important so that our efforts were collaborative, authentic and responsive to the community. The two-month project now lives at the CEC and belongs to the Mt. Vernon and Bronzeville communities. The collaboration took the original charge of UAS to question “how art is imagined, made, viewed, and understood” and expanded it to incorporate the organization’s position in this equation. The identified impact measurements of success (amenity functionality, collective efficacy, unique patterns of participation) helped to support arts and cultural equity by providing access to communities to engage with art that reflected resident’s lived experiences and celebrated their culture. Moreover, students were a critical stakeholder in this project from creating and programming the space, creating art and engaging with community, and collaborating with a diverse range of educators, community leaders, artists, institutional departments and community organizations.
