…. It is more about the courage of imagination and the plural

In regards to “Lead or Follow?” and its relationship to audiences,  I say yes to lead, yes to follow and yes to question. Leadership is not a black/white, lead/follow proposition, life is and audiences are more complicated and slippery than this binary set-up.

As a director of The Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) a local arts agency my charge is to serve the general public, an audience that ranges from the white gloves to the anarchists – the plural, with all its complexities and contradictions. Figuring this plural is imagination manifest in the ways of looking, thinking, feeling and understanding our relationship to works of art and to each other.  Courage in the world of imagination is not about bravery but about the freedom of lives, of creativity and how it is embodied in the everyday.

Courage and the plural ask for leadership acts that are realized through the qualities of listening, looking and learning.  Against this background there are the politics of resources and position, of taste, of validation, of the meaning of “we” that rubs up against the work we do. The challenge is how to work with these politics, that informs how one leads, one follows, one questions.

I believe to do this work one needs to see themselves as a deliberative practitioner who operates as an intermediary, who works with image, song and story, that individuals use in articulating and understanding their conditions. This leadership quality is significantly different than the empiricist frame of understanding human behaviors vis-à-vis audience figures or economic impact that too often cages our understanding of cultural value and impact to a sliver instead of the whole. As audience participation changes from passive to active, as changing demographics animate the cultural public sphere in new and exciting ways these shifts are impacting the work we do.  The cultural public sphere is where thoughts, feelings, and imagination bring into being the meaning of public, feeds the imagining of our plurality, of our relationships to each other – it is the audience of the secular “we”.  To be responsible to these changes I argue that leaders need to employ policy practices that know how the social imaginary functions in a healthy and inclusive democracy and how imagination and policy condition each other. There is the need for policy practices that embolden the aesthetic contract between artist and audience by paying attention to the call and response context of this contract.

In the context of Tucson, the heat of Cultural War 2.0 is on, with attacks against social differences, and the politics of dis-belonging being asserted by ultra right-wing conservatives who want no call and response contract. The attacks on undocumented workers, immigrants, ethnic studies in schools and civil society, are rabid and relentless. Where are courage and the plural in this context? How does one lead or follow under these conditions? The audience of “We the People” that attends art events, that makes art, that engages and animates beauty as an articulation of the plural, is very different of the “we” of me and my friends that is voice of privatization that constructs identity around product (I’m a Mac and you’re a PC) or rigid ideology  or constructs barriers to access. In the cultural sector our audiences are multiple with multiple worldviews with many forms of cultural engagement and how to serve them asks for a belief in the courage of imagination and the plural because these strengths are tethered to ethics and aesthetics and enter into our work as responsibility, as concern, as composition.

For example, in 2008 TPAC created a platform for arts-based civic engagement projects that acknowledges and work with social concerns through the P.L.A.C.E. (People, Land, Arts, Culture, and Engagement) Initiative. The P.L.A.C.E. Initiative is designed to leverage resources and talent to plan and implement community cultural development activities and was establishment through a community stakeholder deliberations process about the distinctiveness and identity of Southern Arizona.  It has become an important vehicle that TPAC employs to support the democratic principles of equity and civil society, and underscores the strong regional ethos associated with stewardship, (cultural, civic and ecological) that exists here. To date we have supported 45 projects.  In our process of deliberation about the projects supported the debates were not about lead or follow but about ethics and aesthetics.

To circle back to “Lead or Follow?”, I have not answer that question directly because the nature of audiences eludes this question and cultural work is more nuanced and complicated than an either/or characteristic. Instead my thoughts on the courage of imagination and the plural as meaningful references to one’s work is what I sit with, because it asks for rigor and vigor in thinking and actions which is fun, but most importantly because of their dynamism – a force the feeds aesthetic possibilities and prompts leadership.