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Community Arts

Community arts include performing arts (music, theater, dance, and so forth), multimedia arts, visual arts, literary arts, culinary arts, clothing and textiles, and the multitude of other forms that people, individually and collectively, create to make the ordinary extraordinary. Community arts are first and foremost community based, community focused, and integral to the everyday life of the community. Often community art is rooted in a local culture, which may celebrate a particular regional or ethnic tradition. It may also focus on a political issue important to a neighborhood, town, or city. In that regard, community arts are often a response to the threatened erosion of cohesive, dynamic communities. Community arts can be understood in contrast to socalled fine arts, that is, art as taught in academies and institutes, which often glorifies individualism and promotes isolationist and exclusionary viewing spaces (for example, in galleries or museums).

Defining Communities, Defining Art

Communities are often identifiable through shared purposes and history; however, it is important to recognize within any discussion of community arts that conceptions of both community and art are not static. While community used to be thought of as geographically based, community now incorporates more abstract ideas. Communities of scholars, for example, are now bound together by cyberspace. Many indigenous people feel united by common concerns of oppression and disconnection from their homeland. Talk of refugee communities must refer back to the home countries from which the refugees came. People with the same disease may never have met one another, but they may feel united by their shared trauma, as is evident with communities of cancer survivors or recovering alcoholics.

The idea of what constitutes art is also changing as the boundaries between life and that which has formally been defined as art collapse. Aestheticians and critics are proposing the idea that art is really an idea and not a thing. In this regard anything can now be called art. This makes defining community arts more difficult, especially within international contexts. Consider the community-based practices of the Lithuanian community that settled in various places in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Their artistic practices were intended to keep a culture alive that could not be as easily saved in the homeland, where they were being oppressed. Their goal differs from that of many Dutch community arts centers, which function primarily provide a place where amateur artists can spend their leisure time. Yet another approach to community arts can be illustrated by the many Hungarian community art centers, which are houses of culture, set up to teach such diverse subjects as modern gardening and contemporary literature and to educate children about local arts as a way of preserving Hungarian heritage.

Community Arts Programs

Community arts are often created, taught, and exhibited within the context of community arts programs. Community arts programs encourage all members of the community to participate in the creation or enjoyment of art. They aim to work in a manner that is democratic and collaborative. Community arts programs may be associated with museums, arts councils, social service organizations, performing arts centers, local government, religious organizations, community centers, political organizations, neighborhood associations, cultural centers, businesses, and homes—and this list is not exhaustive. Funding of community arts programs comes from such varied sources as government subsidies, public and private grants, gifts, sponsorships, memberships, and fees for services.

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