InsideOut

In San Francisco, we’ve just celebrated forty years of the Neighborhood Arts Program. Arlene Goldbard, one of the program's early participants, writes that NAP is “generally regarded as a founder and exemplar of community-based arts work.

Neighborhood Arts, Community Arts, Teaching Arts – the labels have changed over the years, but what about the work? What is this work, and how has it changed as the times have?

Here’s one way I’d respond to the first part of that question: What is this work? Practicing artists go to the places in our communities where people are already gathered, and together, everyone makes art. Here’s another (from the Neighborhood Arts Program itself forty years ago): “Nurturing arts for and by the people where they live and work.” Here’s one from Arlene’s essay linked to above: “Collaboration between artists and others is central and necessary to the practice of community arts.”

Neighborhood Arts Program artists made murals, plays, posters, and music with people in neighborhoods all over San Francisco. At that same time, I began the work that became my life work as a young mother volunteering in my daughter’s kindergarten class. I loved poems and I loved children. I loved art-making’s invitation to notice one’s own perceptions, sensations, thoughts. I loved offering some skills to give these shape. I loved work that was based on the belief that making art is a human birthright, and that our world needs everyone’s vision and stories to be whole.

I kept on sharing poetry in schools, first in Mendocino county, where we lived until my daughter started high school, and then in the SF Bay Area. In the mid-1980s I began sharing poetry at San Quentin, and over the years, in dozens of prisons in many states.

Right there, in my story, is one piece of an answer to the question about “how has this work changed?” In my time – a time in which we could live on so little money, a time so different from this time economically – we could meander through life, we could let one thing lead to another. We could have housing (funky though it may have been) and children – in the Bay Area, even – as community artists working in non-traditional jobs with casual funding.

No one without money from elsewhere can live that way these days. No program operating casually will survive very long. The schools, neighborhoods, hospitals, and prisons where artists still share art-making are under siege. For these reasons, and more, one thing leading to another is unlikely these days to get the bills paid, and unlikely to inspire a school to give a few hours each week over to an artist.

So, though the meander doesn’t have to become a march, there’s a lot of present attention on shaping our work into a field. Of course, there are pluses and minuses as work-from-the-heart – worked based on political vision – becomes more institutionalized, but the pluses include a fabulous academic journal, Teaching Artist Journal, college and university programs, and some great websites with bushels of helpful information.

One question I’ve always been curious about is this: As times change, which values and practices re worth staying true to, and which have to change in order to be useful to the needs of the moment? I find it interesting to ask this question when I’m sharing poetry with children or people in prison, as I develop training for WritersCorps’ teaching artists, and as I write about the field. I offer the question to you, too, as you do the work you do.

And, in the spirit of offering, I offer this. I’m often asked for information and advice about prison arts and teaching arts, so I’ve recently upgraded my website to contain many of the resources I’ve gathered over the years. If you’re interested, please visit

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