Explore creative community transformation with teaching artist Jeff Mather as he shares stories of art, collaboration, and social change in education.

Jeff Mather's work as a teaching artist and public art digital storytelling alchemist underscores the vital role of art in fostering community resilience and engagement. The conversation with Bill Cleveland reveals how, despite the challenges posed by recent global events, Mather remains optimistic about the transformative potential of creative collaborations. By reflecting on his experiences in various educational and community settings, he illustrates how art can bridge divides, empower youth, and reinvigorate spaces that have been overlooked or abandoned. His dedication to involving students in the artistic process not only cultivates their creativity but also instills a sense of agency and responsibility for their environment.

The episode captures the essence of Mather's philosophy: art is not merely an aesthetic endeavor but a powerful tool for social change. Mather recounts the impactful project in West Baltimore, where he worked with local youth to design and install an environmental sculpture in a park that had long been neglected. This initiative not only beautified the area but also engaged the community in a dialogue about safety, ownership, and the importance of reclaiming shared spaces. Mather's insights into the dynamics of teaching and collaboration highlight the necessity of recognizing and valuing each participant's unique contributions, which ultimately enriches the artistic outcome.

Furthermore, the discussion delves into the challenges and rewards of community-based art practices, particularly in relation to trust-building and navigating complex social landscapes. Mather emphasizes the importance of entering communities with humility and a willingness to learn, rather than imposing external solutions. His experiences with Alternate Roots showcase the power of grassroots movements in advocating for social and economic justice through art. As the episode unfolds, it becomes evident that Mather's work embodies a vision of art as a communal endeavor—one that celebrates diversity, fosters connection, and cultivates a shared sense of purpose in navigating the challenges of our times.

Key Moments

00:18 The Turning Point: Reflections on Change and Future Challenges

00:35 Reflections on Creative Change Agents

13:59 Alternate ROOTS and Community Engagement

22:55 The Impact of Community Engagement in Public Art

31:14 Engaging with Community Through Art

40:03 The Impact of Art and Community

BIO

Jeff is a community-based public artist and teaching artist in Georgia, (and South Carolina and Massachusetts and Utah), for over 30 years. He is the STEAM artist-in-residence at Drew Charter School 45 days each semester/90 days each year and has presented on his partnership work there at national and international conferences. He was a delegate and presenter at the 1st International Teaching Artist Conference in Olso in 2012 and at the ITAC3 in Edinburgh and at ITAC6 in Oslo. He is an ITAC Innovator, leading Think Tank webinars. He has been on the Georgia Council for the Arts registry of visiting artists since 1992. He has a BA degree in Proxemics from Hobart College. He served as president of the Atlanta Partnership for Arts in Learning, an arts infusion non-profit that he helped to co-found in 2001. He toured a program for nine years with a choreographer - and also a storytelling program with a master storyteller. Jeff has facilitated Learning Exchanges for teaching artists for Alternate ROOTS and for the Community Built Association. Jeff is also the lead artist for the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Arts Access Program in northern Utah and runs interdisciplinary residencies there twice a year. He directed several experimental theater productions at the Center for Puppetry Arts and served as artist-in-residence for the Atlanta Symphony and the High Museum. He is best known for coaching large scale environmental sculpture projects. As a STEAM Artist-in-Residence he’s co-taught robotics, geometry, math, science, engineering, music, dance, and digital media.

Notable Mentions

Individuals

1. Bill Cleveland – Host of the podcast episode.
2. Jeff Mather – Teaching artist and public artist, guest of the episode.
3. Eric Booth – Mentioned by Jeff as an influence in teaching artistry. (See CSCW EP 67)
4. Ed Mack – Sculpture teacher at Jeff's high school in Wilton, Connecticut.
5. Anne and Patrick Poirier – French conceptual artists Jeff worked with in New York City.
6. Alice Lovelace – Key figure in Alternate ROOTS and seminal figure in the US community arts movement. (See CS/CW Episode 76)
7. Bob Leonard – Key figure in Alternate ROOTS. (See CS/CW Episode 22)
8. Normando Ismay  Key figure in Alternate ROOTS.  (See CS/CW Episode 89)
9. Elise Witt – Key figure in Alternate ROOTS.  (See CS/CW Episode 46)
10. Liz Lerman – Key figure in Alternate ROOTS.  (See CS/CW Episode 63)
11. Ashley Milburn – From Culture Works in West Baltimore.
12. Denise Johnson – From Culture Works in West Baltimore.
13. Kenny Clemens – Young artist mentored by Jeff in Baltimore.
14. Carlton Turner – Former Executive director of Alternate ROOTS worked with Jeff Mather with the Hidden Stream project.
15. Lily Yeh – Artist known for her work in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.
16. Tom Dunn – Former public defender and teacher who partnered with Jeff on a digital storytelling project.
17. Joe Lambert –Is the founder of the Story Center. He and his colleagues have trained thousands of story makers and teaching artists in digital storytelling.
18. Paula Lark (Mama Paula) – Drummer, bass player, and storyteller who worked with Jeff on a classroom project.
19. Marquetta Johnson – Textile artist and frequent collaborator with Jeff in Utah.
20. Renee Fleming – Singer and author of Music and Mind.

Organizations

1. Center for the Study of Art and Community – Producer of the podcast "Change the Story, Change the World."
2. Alternate ROOTS – A cultural organization based in the Southern USA focused on social and economic justice.
3. Drew Charter School – A public school in Atlanta with a maker school model where Jeff worked.
4. Georgia Council for the Arts – Supported Jeff’s teaching artist residency.
5. NAEA (National Art Education Association) – Organization where Jeff presented.
6. Culture Works – Organization in West Baltimore, led by Ashley Milburn and Denise Johnson.
7. Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) – Known for its community arts program.
8. International Teaching Artist Collaborative (ITAC) – Provided a grant to Jeff for a project on Tybee Island.
9. High Museum in Atlanta – Produced a documentary on Marquetta Johnson.

Events and Projects

1. Hidden Stream Park – A public art project led by Jeff in West Baltimore.
2. ROOTS Fest in West Baltimore (2011) – Cultural festival by Alternate ROOTS celebrating local culture and activism.
3. Something to Behold in West Baltimore – Online collection documenting the West Baltimore community development story.
4. Digital Storytelling Partnership – Jeff’s digital storytelling project with the South Atlanta School of Law and Social Justice.
5. Climate Crisis Project on Tybee Island – A STEAM project Jeff is developing, including a floating sculpture and data visualization.
6. Skin and Bones Project – A co-residency with Marquetta Johnson involving textiles and structural art in Utah.
7. Art for Social Justice Program – Program developed with Tom Dunn, involving five artist residencies in social justice.

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story, Change the World, a chronicle of art and community transformation.

My name is Bill Cleveland now.

I started working on this episode during the last week of October.

At this point, I'm not going to dwell on what has occurred or what we need to do to weather the coming storm.

What I am going to do is express my gratitude for the fortitude, grace and optimism that are the hallmark of the community of creative change agents represented in the stories we presented here over the past three years.

Evoking these qualities, particularly optimism, at this moment may seem a bit out of place, but as I reflect back on the hundred plus Change the Stories stories here, I'm reminded that the hopefulness they exude is not a hollow wish or sentiment, but rather a material manifestation of purposeful hard work and intention that has produced real, positive change.

I'm also reminded that the impetus for many of these transformational stories has been what many considered at the time a last straw, an end of the road defeat, or a catastrophic event.

Given this, I also want to specifically thank this episode's guest, Jeff Mather, for being right here on this funky day on tape, at least in my studio with his healing stories for me to ponder and learn from.

I hope you feel the same.

As you'll hear, Jeff's eclectic background is typical for guests on this show.

Put simply, he makes big things with lots of people that make it difference.

More formally, you could describe him as a teaching artist, public art digital storytelling alchemist who works in schools and communities in Georgia and beyond.

I should also mention another description of Jeff's work that you will come across in this episode is proxemics.

But I'm going to go ahead and let Jeff define that for you.

Part 1 Close enough for Comfort so why don't we begin by just your telling me and our audience where you are.

Where are you hailing from?

I'm calling from the ancestral indigenous land of the Muscogee Creek, currently known as Decatur, Georgia.

Decatur, Georgia is a suburb of Atlanta.

So what is your work in the world, Mr.

Mather?

I'm a teaching artist.

I would say first and foremost I'm a community based public artist.

I'm an environmental sculptor and I work with communities all over Georgia and sometimes in Utah, directing collaborations and partnerships.

So when you do the things you just described, what Are you doing well?

I saw your prompt bill for a street name or handle.

Sure.

And so, with a nod to my friend and colleague Eric Booth, I might put Agent of Artistic Experiences or something like Arts Infusion Innovator as a broader handle.

Another twist on this handle would be Disruptive Innovator.

Disruptive Innovation in schools might be hard to spot when it is happening, but I'm again going to quote a line from Eric Booth when he said, as a guest on your podcast, he said, teaching artists are this quietly radical force that is actually subversive to compliance.

Our work is inherently subversive.

So, Jeff, let's say I'm, I don't know, 12 years old, I'm in a class that you are visiting.

Can you give me a picture of what's about to happen?

Yes.

Well, as a visiting artist, as a teaching artist, we have a lot of latitude to do things that maybe aren't what's expected.

For me, that might mean that even though I'm there as a visual artist and not a performing artist, I might pull out juggling clubs, which I use to emphasize muscle memory.

I feel like good design can get stuck in people's heads.

They think of it as a mental exercise.

But I've worked with dancers so often that I've learned from the dancers I collaborate with that we think with our bodies and that drawing is thinking with your body.

So to try to get a design team out of their heads and to just sometimes let their bodies lead, because if we're doing environmental art, bodies understand movement in space.

So I was one of those kids, but I was a disruptor, a disruptor in a way that wasn't particularly healthy.

I stumbled into the idea that you could take control of your life by learning how to make something yourself.

Talk to me about a classroom full of kids, but they're all different, and they all come at it in a different way.

And what you know about engaging different kinds of kids in an educational environment that often regards them as just a herd.

I'm in a classroom in a public school.

I'm very aware that sitting in front of me is a cross section of the people you would meet in the general public.

All the percentages that we're told exist.

Like, for me, 5 to 8% of males are color vision deficient.

And I am.

So I know that they're also sitting right there or, you know, oh, my, are you too.

So I do think a lot about some of the terms that teachers have shared with me over the many years, like multiple points of entry is a catchphrase.

But that means, you know, when I'm doing a process, we are headed towards making some giant sculpture outside or possibly even in the building, that there are students who might seem disengaged when we are in the design process.

And then when I break out the tools and it's time to fabricate the art, they turn out to be my rock stars.

And so then I go, oh, it's not that you're not into this project.

Just we have different strengths and you're stepping up when your strength is being activated.

Just thinking about an artist coming to town, coming to my classroom and actually moving me, and we're going to do something, building a big, gigantic, physically engaging artwork that never existed before.

And we get our fingerprints and our ideas manifest through it.

That's thrilling.

Could you talk about how it affects you?

Well, I noticed coming out of the lockdown period the first time I got back outside and made a big cloud of sawdust, prepping some materials for what was going to be the next sculpture to come along.

And I got real happy.

And it was like this moment of going, oh, making a big cloud of sawdust makes me very happy.

So I understand a lot of kids don't have access to tools.

I felt like there's a time when everybody had an uncle or a granddad or a dad or aunties too, who had a peg, a peg wall with all kinds of tools.

And it was just something that every household had.

And that's not as true anymore.

We're all so specialized that when I put a power tool in a young person's hand, sometimes they even tremble with excitement that they've never held a power tool before.

Could you say what you think is happening with a human who is thinking, designing, and creating in a classroom or out on the field where you're building some giant thing?

Yeah, I can.

Because what I'm embedded in, especially in this school, that's my primary partner school here in Atlanta.

It's called Drew Charter School.

It's a public school, and we often talk about it as being a maker school.

And it has.

There's two maker spaces that are in the buildings.

By day, they are engineering design labs, but at night and on the weekends, they are community maker spaces.

There was a time when shop was present in a lot of schools, a lot of school systems.

And then I think it was a classist decision when it was thought, well, why are we training students for these blue collar jobs?

We should be training them for the future, which means computers.

And they ripped out Shop.

And they put in computer labs, which now largely don't exist because the students are all carrying their tech.

They don't need to have a lab, but shop is sneaking back in.

They just don't call it shop anymore.

They now call it Makerspace or Tinkerlab or these other kinds of things.

But there's multiple places at the school where I do a lot of partnership work, where we have Bandsaw, drill, press, all that stuff.

So students are having a chance to become familiar with tools.

And in one case, I was doing a partnership with a Spanish teacher, and we had the students pull all the furniture out of the Spanish room and then redesign the space from the floor to the ceiling as what they considered to be a nurturing learning environment.

And so that meant they got to make all their own furniture, which they could do because the school has the stuff.

Wow.

That's incredible.

So, Jeff, were you one of those kids?

How did you end up being what you have become?

I spent a lot of time growing up, from third grade on, in a town near New York City called Wilton, Connecticut.

And Wilton was a very affluent town.

But we weren't affluent.

The reason that my family lived there is that my dad was clergy.

My dad was a minister, and they gave us a parsonage so we could live in this affluent town.

And there were a lot of artists there, artists who had work in New York City and Broadway and television and opera.

So I've been reckoning with the legacy of white privilege that I was raised in, especially as someone who moved south to Georgia 40 years ago, and how that upbringing in Connecticut contributed to my making this choice to be an artist and making it an easy one.

My parents played Broadway musical soundtracks and folk music albums all the time.

My mother did community theater, and the public schools in Wilton were rich in arts education.

My public high school, which was not a very big one, had five art teachers, each with their own room.

Wow.

Of those five, the guy who taught sculpture, guy, wonderful educator named Ed Mack, he got me making large scale welded steel sculpture.

He didn't even teach clay or ceramics.

That was a different teacher in a different studio who only taught clay.

Of course, when you're a kid, you don't know that all high schools aren't like the one you go to.

Yeah, but most of my Wilton friends played music or created experimental short films.

Some high school kids might be into sports or cars or other things, but we were always making art of one kind or another.

And we felt free to blur the definitions of art disciplines, to create hybrid forms no, always.

No one told us we couldn't.

And then later in life, I've heard artist friends speak of how they had to run a gauntlet of disapproval when they chose to be art majors or to live as artists.

Disapproval from family, from friends, too.

Like that.

The line, what's your backup plan?

But choosing to go into the arts was a completely normal thing to do in Wilton.

And my parents never second guessed my choices.

They supported and encouraged me at every step.

Aren't you a lucky guy?

That's really wonderful.

At some point, moving from a kid excited and interested and living in a rich cultural environment, you decided that it was going to be your life path.

Is that a turning point or that just happened naturally?

Yeah.

So I went from Connecticut, from growing up in the Connecticut shore.

I went to a liberal arts college in the Finger Lakes in upstate New York called Hobart and William Smith.

And you were able at that school to design your own major.

And even though I was making a lot of art, filmmaking and sculpture, I was not an art major.

I was a proxemics major.

That's a branch of anthropology that studies how our perceptions of space and our use of space is culturally determined.

And this is a bit of academic jargon, of course, but it was an ideal major for a future public artist.

And it led to my moving to New York City and working for two conceptual artists from France, a married duo, Anne and Patrick Poirier.

Their work was focused on creating imaginary ruins, sometimes enormous, sometimes in miniature.

And this brush with the art commodity system was fun at first.

Even though Anne and Patrick were represented by a major soho gallery, the Sonoben Gallery, most of what they made was not for sale.

I jumped into the art commodity system with both feet when I moved to Atlanta in the 80s and briefly worked as an art consultant.

And that was not a good fit for me.

And when I met a bunch of grassroots artists who were making large group exhibits happen in empty industrial buildings in Atlanta and thumbing their noses at the gallery scene, that had a lot of appeal for me.

My pendulum swung from the art commodity system to the art making community.

And the camaraderie amongst artists from many disciplines in Atlanta was strong then.

As musicians, painters, sculptors, performance artists, dancers, we found it easy to work together and be influenced by each other.

Part 2 Roots now there's a significant distance between the commodified art world and the one in which it appears you're most comfortable.

That is, as a teaching artist and as a change maker, a person who contributes to an educational community or a neighborhood or institutions in the community.

You talk a lot about partners, some of whom are artists, some of whom aren't artists.

Yes.

How did that bridge get built?

Well, you know, at first I didn't know that being a teaching artist is a whole professional field that exists with international conferences and journals and many books on being a teaching artist.

But my girlfriend back in the 80s, she was a photo and video artist, and she was running an extended teaching artist residency for the Georgia Council for the Arts in Middle Georgia.

And when I visited her, I became interested in this way of working and being part of a community.

And I realized that I really love working with youth and multigenerational community groups.

And I found that collaborating with educators felt natural to me.

I met and married my wife, Amy, who was a fourth grade teacher during one of these Georgia Council for the Arts residencies at her school.

And that became the best collaboration of my life.

But around that time, I got swept up in the community based Art for Social justice organization in the Southeast.

Alternate Roots.

ROOTS radicalized how I saw my role as an artist and community.

Here's how Roots describes itself.

Alternate Roots is an organization based in the Southern USA whose mission is to support the creation and presentation of original art in all its forms, which is rooted in a particular community of place, tradition, or spirit.

As a coalition of cultural workers, we strive to be allies in the elimination of all forms of oppression.

ROOTS is committed to social and economic justice and the protection of the natural world and addresses these concerns through its programs and services.

And ROOTS also partially funded several of my public art projects and residencies.

I know that several key figures in the history of Alternate Roots have been guests of yours on this podcast in the past.

Alice Lovelace, Bob Leonard, Normando, Ismay Carlton Turner, Elise Witt, Liz Lerman and others.

So those folks have all had a big influence on me being part of roots.

At one point, I became a facilitator for the rsc, which is Alphabet soup at Roots for Resources for Social Change.

And the RSC was a subset of Roots artists who honed principles of community engagement and honed the language describing these principles and declared themselves available to work in partnership with communities in the Southeast as a team.

Of course, it's not ethical to push into a community and tell them, oh, you need us, you need artists to come heal your problems, and we just happen to be the ones who can do that.

So we needed to wait to be invited into a community.

But then it was like, how would anyone know to invite us?

It felt for a time like we were spinning our wheels, all dressed up with no place to go and twiddling our thumbs and whistling.

Sure wish someone would invite us to come do what we've been getting our act together to do.

And then some folks in West Baltimore did just that.

Ashley Milburn and Denise Johnson from Culture Works in West Baltimore explicitly said, roots, please come work with us in West Baltimore.

Yeah.

And that Baltimore project has had ripples way beyond just the neighborhood there in Baltimore for so many people that I've talked to that have been involved in Roots and the folks in Baltimore as well.

Do you want to describe that?

Yeah.

Alternate Roots had funded several of my public art projects through its CAP program.

More Alphabet Soup.

That's the Community Artist Partnership program in the 90s and in the oughties.

I had coach projects in Atlanta public housing and at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf.

And I directed a stage project in rural Georgia about accessibility for wheelchair users, but also social fabric accessibility.

But when Ashley Milburn at Culture Works in West Baltimore kidnapped me from the Baltimore Convention center where I was presenting a workshop on multi teaching artist co residencies at a NAEA convention, that's National Art Education association.

And Ashley literally just like came swung by and said, get in the car.

And he started driving me around West Fault and showing me the environmental degradation that this community was up against.

And he asked me to run a public art project there with a Roots CAP grant support.

And I was not at all sure that this was a good idea for me.

Ashley took me to a pocket park that was situated between blocks of mostly bombed out row houses.

I mean, block after block in this area there was more plywood than glass.

And the windows in these buildings and this block we walked through the middle, it was the lowest area in elevation, so it was the natural watershed.

When the traffic noise quiets down for a minute, he asks me to listen to see if I can hear anything.

And I can hear a stream flowing, but it's way underground beneath this park as the water heads towards the harbor.

So even though you can't see any sign of the stream, he told me that people around the neighborhood referred to this as Hidden Stream Park.

And he also told me it was a very rough place and that crack dealers had chased off neighborhood children long ago.

What counted as playground equipment was what was left of some large crumbling sewer pipes.

Like, there you go, kids.

Honestly, it didn't feel like I should say yes to this invitation.

I had no idea that this section of Baltimore was this devastated.

But I put it to myself.

You've Been cross training with other alternate roots artists for over a decade.

It is time to walk the talk.

Regardless of how uncertain you may be, no matter how uncomfortable you may be as a white man in this black environment, I was also concerned about not being one of those public artists who do what is sometimes referred to as parachuting in, like acting out of some sort of savior complex.

But I did say yes to Ashley.

I knew that any true collaboration requires forming relationships with people in this community, and that means building trust.

Trust can never be assumed, and doing this takes time.

Even when I've been commissioned by public art programs to direct public art projects that didn't involve a school, I've gone to schools to connect with local families because schools are hubs of connecting community.

So that's what I did in West Baltimore.

I walked in the doors of two schools that were within walking distance of Hidden Stream park, and I asked if I could form student design teams to create a new public art project in the park.

And the leadership at both schools welcomed me and allowed me to have students walk to the park so they could see for themselves how they might reclaim the space by making an environmental sculpture.

At first, they pounded dozens of large wooden garden stakes into the ground that they had painted with patterns.

We thought of this as a way of taking the temperature of the space.

It was a test, like, how long would these painted stakes remain in place?

And it turned out they remained.

I often dedicate public art projects without a title.

I think people should live with a sculpture for a while before they decide what to name it.

But in this case, we started with the title, with the prompt, what would a sculpture called Hidden Stream look like?

And of course, the proposal sketches I was getting were full of watery shapes, Swirling, spiraling, splashing, flowing forms.

And so we made a synthesis of these kinds of sketches and created a plan, a working drawing, and fabricated from those drawings.

Ashley Milburn had asked me if I would mentor a young street artist sculptor in West Baltimore named Kenny Clemens.

He told me that Kenny was a kid magnet and that that was it.

I mean, that persuaded me to hire Kenny to be my assistant director.

And it's great because Kenny went on a decade later to get his master's in the community arts program at MICA at the Maryland Institute in college.

Oh, yeah.

This is so critical because naturally, the most impactful programs are driven by the folks who've had the most stake in the continuation of the work and the relationships they produce.

Not just the project or event, but the continuing presence and availability of arts Based community development as a permanent community asset.

So Kenny's participation, I'm thinking, planted the seed and increases the potential that he'll pick up the baton and carry on.

It's also worth, I think, mentioning that the Maryland Institute College of Art pioneered the hands on training of art students working on long term arts based community development projects, not just as a community, but as professional development for its students.

Yeah.

So anyway, this sculpture was dedicated during a Roots fest, a cultural festival that was produced by Alternate Roots that activated Hidden Stream park, but also the surrounding area.

The festival was a culmination of more than three years of grassroots organizing and arts initiatives like Hidden Stream park that not only celebrated the vitality of local culture, but also drew attention to a massive urban renewal disaster in the form of an abandoned multimillion dollar expressway project in West Baltimore that ended up displacing 19,000 African American community members.

The festival was just one part of an ongoing community cultural development story that is documented in an online collection of essays and videos, Something to behold in West Baltimore that is referenced in our show notes.

Here's an excerpt from that post festival performance and dialogue organized to explore lessons learned and plot next steps.

Named the 1.4-mile expressway, the highway I.

Had organized before around crime, sanitation, infant mortality, you name it.

To organize around something that the community could create now that was fresh and new.

And we transformed this dead end highway into a beautiful piece of art.

When place matters, people matter.

And when people matter, place matters, Culture.

Works was building a highway to somewhere.

Okay, so a year later, I'm driving up the east coast on the interstate from Atlanta to New Hampshire for the summer with my wife and my two daughters.

And I swung by Hidden Stream park to show them why I had been away from home.

And when we pulled up to the park, there were children playing in the park.

And the only children that I had ever seen in the park before this were the children that I had brought there with me.

So a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And so what do you think happened?

You involved a number of people in a design process.

You manifested a piece of art, at least at that point, when you revisited, you had changed the story of that space.

What do you think happened?

How?

Why did that happen?

Well, I was told that children didn't feel safe going to this park.

But I also think that children have power that often goes unrecognized, that they can claim space they can shift the story.

They can say, no, we need a place to run around and play.

And what's with these crumbling sewer pipes?

That doesn't cut it, folks.

And so sometimes working with children is a big plus that could do things that maybe adults can't quite get away with or be heard the same way.

Yeah.

But I will say, Bill, there's kind of a story I like to tell because it had this outcome.

But that's not to say that there weren't setbacks and wrinkles along the way, because in public art, there always are.

Yeah.

For instance, the ground in the middle of Hidden Stream park was so hard packed that when we tried to dig footings by hand, it just.

It wasn't going to happen.

At this point, Roots executive director Carlton Turner jumped in and he said, jump in my truck.

And we drove to a tool rental place and we rented a big gas powered post hole auger machine.

And then Carlton helped me run this machine until we got the footing stuck.

And I'm thinking, how many executive directors of arts organizations would roll up their sleeves and get down in the dirt like that?

Yeah.

We also had offers of donated materials that were unexpectedly rescinded.

And that meant that what was supposed to be artist fee in our budget had to go to purchasing materials.

So the ground shifts beneath your feet.

Yeah, it does.

And I use the word story very specifically because, of course, there are no stories that are set in concrete.

Like the footings.

They're shifting, changing constantly.

And part of the work that you do is meeting the story that you and your team of kids are manifesting with the story that exists in that space.

And it's inevitably going to be, as you said at the beginning, disruptive in good ways and sometimes in bad.

Did you meet resistance from the previous lords of that space?

No.

I'm grateful.

Thankful to say everyone I encountered around Hidden Stream and around that neighborhood were nothing but thrilled that changes were happening.

I think I said that the row houses were mostly bombed out.

I mean, really just gutted.

There was one young guy who worked in Washington, D.C.

and commuted every day up to Baltimore, and he had claimed one of these.

And when he.

When he saw us out in his backyard, he said, run your extension cords to my outlets.

You can have my power.

So angels appear.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting.

I'm sure you're familiar with an incredible angel named Lily.

Yay.

And so Lily had a very similar kind of experience in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia.

And she was the consummate outsider who came to the community with an incredible sense of purpose and a prodigious talent for stimulating creative community.

But she was met by a whole host of angels as translators, as ambassadors, as protectors, and, of course, as creative collaborators who pitched in and eventually picked up the reins and assumed ownership of what became the legendary Village of Arts and Humanities.

It's an incredible story, but she was always aware that some folks were going to think of her as a missionary.

And this kind of resentment, I think, is always a possibility, as is the potential for outsiders to imagine themselves, as you mentioned, as potential saviors.

Somebody coming in to do good in a place that is struggling.

So what I want to ask you is what it is you have to have in your heart in order to be a person that people come to trust in that circumstance.

Because it's not a given, Right?

Right.

Well, it's a hard thing to say about yourself, Bill.

I've been told that people read my body language, even, and say, yeah, you move like someone who's collaborative.

I don't know what that means.

I'm not trying to move in any particular kind of way.

But, yeah, I mean, I think that people's understanding of anyone as a visitor, they're picking up on all kinds of cues.

How you speak, how you don't assume that they understand your Alphabet soup.

So, yeah, I mean, I will say that entering community, there's all kinds of negotiations.

And sometimes the trust you earn is incremental, it's slow, it's stubbornly given, but you keep showing up, and that means something.

Part three stories, digital and otherwise.

I think there's all different kinds of people that come to art making.

Some people are really attracted to the idea of locking yourself up in a space and just using their imagination to manifest without being bothered by anybody else.

And there are others who can't feel complete if the fingerprints of the surrounding culture, you know, the people and their stories, are not present in the work.

You know, monologues are often very boring, and collaborative work can be powerful and synergistic and gives off a lot of heat.

So my experience is talking and working with people like you is that you're attracted to that heat, and it doesn't feel right if the heat is not manifest.

It's just part of the deal.

It's something that you want to engage.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely.

There are different definitions when you say an artist's residency.

For me, a residency is engagement with community.

So the other thing I would say about the way you work is that you dance with the materialized imagination.

I mean, A writer's work.

I mean, when I'm writing, I'm scribbling on a page or typewriting, you know, it's mostly in my head.

Music and theater, when they're live, are temporal.

They come and go.

I know you do that too.

But when you work with stuff, with materials that often have to be manipulated physically and then, so to speak, left to their own devices, and my experience, particularly with people I don't know who is that.

If I work with them doing a physical thing and we get into physical partnership things like, you push, I pull.

Let's pick this up together.

I'll go get this, I'll come back.

You do this, I'll do that.

That is a visceral, primal language of trust making.

Yes.

Which is.

Well, we had a hole to dig and we dug it together.

We both sweated, we both got dirty, we both cursed at the rocks.

But, you know, I don't know what party this guy's in.

All I know is that we finished the hole.

Yeah.

And then we had a beer afterwards.

One of the many things that you described in your email to me was this project you did with Tom Dunn, who was a public defender and then a teacher and not an artist.

And actually maybe now, after his interaction with you.

Could you talk about that?

Because it seems pretty extraordinary to me this cross sector work you did.

Right.

So at an alternate roots gathering one summer, Joe Lambert from Berkeley, who I believe is the guy who coined the term digital storytelling, he brought about five trainers and they trained a dozen of us alternate roots artists in digital storytelling.

Little did I know that would become part of my professional practice for several years.

It's less so right now, but.

So I was doing a partnership ongoing over the years with the South Atlanta School of Law and Social justice, which was a public high school model.

They have now sadly done away with that model.

But it went on for several years, and it was a primary partner for a group of us teaching artists.

And my partnerships were in digital storytelling and then working with different teachers.

I ended up working the last few years with this gentleman named Tom Dunn, who had been a public defender for 30 years before he decided to become a high school teacher.

He was trying to keep young African American men from becoming embroiled in the justice system to begin with.

So he was teaching justice and he was my partner for a residency when I had a small extra grant that allowed me to bring in other artists, and I brought in other alternate roots artists one at a time to show how digital storytelling doesn't have to Be a standalone art form that it could involve movement and dance, it could involve theater.

Know how?

It could involve music that they create, not just download a, you know, something for a soundtrack.

So just to give you one quick example, I brought in Paula Lark, Mama Paula, as she's called it, alternate roots, who is a drummer and a bass player and a storyteller and a remarkable performer.

So she came into this classroom and she plugged in an amp and a very long cord on her bass that allowed her to walk all the way down, up and down the length of the classroom.

And she just started to wander through the classroom and play a really slinky bass groove.

And the students were preparing their narratives that they would then record their voices telling their stories.

The prompt being, tell a story only you can tell.

And sometimes there's additional prompts, but it begins there.

And she's asking them as she's playing bass, show me what you're working on.

Show me your first paragraph.

And they're being very reticent.

They're being very shy.

No, not gonna.

So she finally persuaded one young man to turn his notebook around so it was facing her.

And she zeroed in on certain phrases in his opening sentences and started to work with those phrases with her baseline.

And he lit up.

And as soon as she had like done his phrases, now everybody in the class is turning their notebooks to face her and saying, me next.

And so when she left that day, Tom Dunn, the teacher, said to me, I have never worked with artists before, but you guys are getting through to kids in this building that nobody else gets through to.

How can I keep working with artists?

And I said, we're going to figure that out.

So the following year, we did an art for social justice program that ran on two of his classes year long that was built on five back to back visiting artist residencies.

So there was a photography residency, and then there was a music residency, and then there was a theater residency, and there was a dance residency.

And then I batted cleanup in the spring with a digital storytelling residency where they could take their portfolios from working with all these other artists and combine them into a culminating work as a digital storytelling project.

Well, I have to tell you, I want to sign up.

I want to be a part of that class.

I could see exactly where you took them.

So as you probably are aware, Joe was a guest here.

Yes, and I had the privilege of getting trained as well.

And I think it's one of the wonderful things that a teaching artist often does is take something that seems foreign and inaccessible, complicated, hard to understand, and cuts to the chase and connects it to the thing that everybody has, which is an imagination.

And particularly for young people, gives them permission to make something profound with a little support and some structure in ways that, as I'm sure happened in your digital storytelling class.

Kids just take off and I'm wondering, what is it that you think you're tapping into when that happens?

Well, it is amazing.

That simple prompt.

Tell a story only you can tell.

And these stories are largely 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and you think, well, how much can you really get down to in that short of a time?

It is amazing how poignant these short pieces can be.

I have coached digital storytelling where I'm asking Mr.

Mather, would you please read my narrative before I record it?

Just see if there's anything that's confusing about it.

You honor their.

The way they speak.

You don't change something grammatically because it looks wrong, because that's the way they talk.

You're not trying to mess with that.

But I'm reading this young woman's script one time and I just have to stop and say, let's talk about the difference between making art and doing art therapy.

And she looks at me all wide eyed like, what do you mean, Mr.

Mather?

I'm like, well, I just want to be clear that when you make art, you might be making it for a general audience and you don't necessarily control who's going to come sit in the screening room and watch your piece.

But if you're doing art therapy, you might be making something that is really just to show your therapist or maybe a family member, that's a different thing.

So I'm assuming that she felt unconstrained to the degree that maybe she crossed that line.

And you gave her an opportunity to consider that before she shared it with the world.

So, yeah, I mean, it's amazing how deep, how quick some people go when allowed to With Digital Storytelling.

Part 4, what's Sparking so, Jeff, what's happening these days that's really exciting?

You?

One is a project that I'm developing that addresses the climate crisis on the Georgia seacoast.

So I was visiting the only school on Tybee island on the Georgia Sea coast.

It was a STEAM research trip that I was part of right before COVID lockdown happened.

And talking with some of the teachers there, I heard them say that there are days when they can't go to work.

They can't get to work because the only road to the bridge onto the island is underwater or days when they can't get home after work because the only road to the only bridge is underwater.

They told me that millions of dollars have been spent on raising the road bed recently.

And yet there are still days when the road is underwater at times.

The next day.

After I was at this school, I met some professors at the Savannah campus of Georgia Tech who are strapping tiny microcomputers onto piers and docks up and down the seacoast to monitor sea level rise.

I received a small planning grant from itac, the International Teaching Artist Collaborative.

Just a bit of seed money to return to Tybee island and begin developing a STEAM partnership.

And by steam, I mean a school that is science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

And this partnership would result in potentially a floating sculpture based on the architecture of navigational buoys that would also display innovative data visualization about sea level rise.

The Georgia Tech people will train the students at the public school to program the microcomputers, but more importantly, to learn how to gather the data and experiment with new forms of data visualization.

And because the sculpture is a floating sculpture, it can be seen all the way around the island or shared all the way around the island.

So now I'm on the hunt for a big art and science grant that will enable me to actually go down there long enough to coach this as a community partnership.

And you've mentioned Utah as one of the places you have an ongoing teaching artist relationship.

That environment is so different from your southern home base.

What's going on there?

Yeah.

And it's interesting to hear you talk around.

What are these qualities that do elicit trust out in Utah with a textile artist?

We have done seven co residencies which we, sort of, tongue in cheek, refer to these as skin and bones.

Because she works with the community and develops the textiles.

My team does the structures, the bones, and then we suspend these textiles in the negative spaces of these bones that are giant suspended sculptures.

And her name is Marquetta Johnson.

And Marquetta is an African American elder.

And she's paraplegic.

She's a wheelchair user.

Gun violence.

She got a bullet in her spine.

I'm gonna drive by shooting.

A few years after that, her firstborn son was killed when someone stole his car.

So her family life has been impacted, you know, twice.

So unfair.

By gun violence.

If she was a bitter person, you wouldn't blame her.

But she is the least bitter person.

When I have gone into multiple settings with her.

I've never seen anyone win over a room full of people faster than Marquetta.

She has this radiance, this magnetic personality, and people just cotton to her, like, so quick.

Here's Marquetta talking about her life as an artist from a documentary on her produced by the High Museum in Atlanta.

My name is Marquetta Johnson, and I define my practice as artists.

I'm sharing through lines, shapes and colors and textures and forms.

I've taken on the career of being a teaching artist, giving my students the opportunity to be able to learn and experience the joy of what I do.

I learned to quilt from my grandmother.

My grandmother was an avid quilter.

And I think my influences, my early influences, from my mother and my father, my grandmother, my teacher, contributed to me wanting to share in a meaningful way in my community because I believe that art is not only healing, but that art is uplifting.

And this is what art has done for me.

I wasn't born in a wheelchair.

I needed a way to channel my creativity in such a way that was meaningful to me and meaningful to my community.

And then sometimes she has flown back to Atlanta while I stay an extra week and, you know, finish up things.

And when I show up to a school where it was both of us and now it's just me, they say, well, but, but, but where's Marquetta and I, oh, she had to go back to Atlanta, and they start to cry, and I'm like, well, I think you guys like me, but I don't think anybody's going to cry when I go home.

Oh, Jeff, I'm sure there'll be a few tears shed.

So before we sign off, do you have a few books to recommend to the audience?

There's a book called Teaching Artists Companion by Daniel Levy, and that would be one especially for people that are like, what is this teaching artist field?

And what does it take to do?

I have the stuff to do it.

A really great introduction to the field, and most recently I've got it as an audiobook is Music and Mind by Renee Fleming and other writers.

But she wrote the opening chapter, and it's a stunner.

I was just wowed by what Renee Fleming had to say in the opening of Music In Mind.

Thanks, Jeff, for those suggestions and all those great stories.

And I think some people imagine that 2 and 3D art making do not translate that well in the community arts realm.

But it's so obvious from the imaginative breadth of your projects and the variety of communities you've partnered with that the opposite is true.

So, again, thank you so much for giving us a glimpse of your creative ecosystem.

Yes.

And to you folks out there.

Thanks for listening and thanks for passing this on.

If you are so inspired, please also be aware that links to the resources mentioned in this episode are available in our show notes and as always, you can refer to the transcript of this episode for a double dose of our conversation.

Also, if you have some comments, questions or ideas about people you think we should be talking to, drop us a line at CSAC.

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