Can an artist from outside a community become an effective force for change

—or does arriving with good intentions risk repeating the very patterns the work is meant to challenge?

Bill Cleveland joins Alice Lovelace and Barbara Schaffer Bacon to examine one of community arts practice’s most persistent questions: when outsiders enter a community, what allows their work to take root, and what turns a promising intervention into a brief visit—or even a source of harm? Through stories from Serbia, Atlanta, Ohio, and rural Georgia, the conversation moves beyond simple answers and into the practical ethics of entering another community’s living room.

Listen for three ideas that can change how artists, hosts, and funders approach community-based work:

• Why local knowledge and leadership must shape the work from the beginning—not merely approve it afterward.
• How an outside artist can sometimes become a catalyst, witness, or lightning rod when local people cannot safely raise a difficult issue themselves.
• Why the deepest measure of success is not the artwork left behind, but the relationships, skills, confidence, and community power that remain after the artist leaves.

Join us for a candid exploration of what it means to enter with humility, listen for the truth of a place, share leadership, and leave a community more able to tell—and act upon—its own story.

Notable Mentions

People

• Alice Lovelace: Poet, educator, performer, and Executive Director of ArtsXchange whose decades of community-based practice inform the episode’s most vivid stories about the opportunities and risks faced by visiting artists.
• Barbara Schaffer Bacon: Cultural policy leader and co-founder of Animating Democracy, known for advancing ethical, reciprocal, and civically engaged arts practice.
• Bill Cleveland: Host of ART IS CHANGE and longtime community arts practitioner whose book Art and Upheaval examined artists working amid war, oppression, displacement, and social crisis.
• Dijana Milošević: Serbian theater director, activist, and co-founder of DAH Theatre, cited for describing artists resisting tyranny as citizens acting inside their own community.
• Slobodan Milošević: Serbian and Yugoslav political leader whose authoritarian rule and the wars surrounding Yugoslavia’s breakup form the historical setting for the discussion of DAH Theatre.
• John O’Neal: Civil rights activist, playwright, co-founder of the Free Southern Theater, and a major developer of story-circle practice in community cultural work.
• Liz Lerman: Choreographer, educator, and civic arts pioneer whose residencies model inquiry, participation, and shared creative leadership.
• Michael Rohd: Theater-maker, facilitator, and civic-practice leader whose community residencies use creative process to support public dialogue and local problem-solving.

Organizations & Initiatives

• Center for the Study of Art & Community: Producer of ART IS CHANGE and a resource for arts-based community development and cultural organizing.
• ArtsXchange: Atlanta-area interdisciplinary arts center connecting artistic practice, community development, environmental work, and social justice.
• DAH Theatre Research Center: Belgrade-based theater laboratory founded during the breakup of Yugoslavia, using performance as a form of resistance, memory, and civic engagement.
• Urban Bush Women: Black women-led dance company and social-change organization that combines performance, artist development, education, and deep community engagement.
• Animating Democracy: National initiative documenting and strengthening the role of arts and culture in civic dialogue, community change, and democracy.
• Appalshop: Appalachian media, arts, and education organization dedicated to telling stories from within the region and challenging stereotypes through locally rooted cultural work.
• CETA Arts Legacy Project: Project preserving the history of federally supported artist employment under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, referenced through artists who worked in communities with unusually open-ended assignments.

Events & Programs

• Hurricane Katrina: The devastating 2005 Gulf Coast hurricane whose aftermath prompted many artists to seek ways to enter affected communities and help—raising difficult questions about urgency, expertise, and the impulse to parachute in.
• Story Circle: A structured method for sharing personal experience, discovering common ground, and grounding community work in local voices; used in the Lima, Ohio residencies discussed in the episode. (See also, John O'Neal above)
• Building Blocks of Effective Community Arts Practice: ART IS CHANGE conversation series examining the skills, ethics, and strategies required for effective arts-based community work.
• Alice Lovelace — Episode 23: Earlier podcast conversation in which Lovelace recounts in greater depth the controversy, community response, and lasting impact of her work as an outside artist in Georgia.

Publications & Learning Resources

• Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World’s Frontlines: Bill Cleveland’s examination of artists responding to war, oppression, cultural dislocation, and community crisis in places including Serbia and Cambodia.
• Literature Is History: The course Alice Lovelace created for young people in rural Georgia, grounding literature in lived experience and restoring the history, skills, and cultural gifts of enslaved Africans to the community narrative.
• Story Circle Facilitation: A Quick Guide: Practical guide to the community story-circle method developed through Roadside Theater and Junebug Productions.

Places & Institutions

• Atlanta, Georgia: Home ground for Alice Lovelace’s community arts practice and a central reference point for considering the difference between working inside one’s own community and entering another.
• Evans, Georgia: Community associated with one of Lovelace’s experiences of becoming a politically targeted outside artist whose resistance helped provoke local solidarity and institutional change.
• Lima, Ohio: Site of artist residencies where story-circle skills remained available to the community and were reactivated years later during a local crisis.
• Serbia: Major case study in Cleveland’s work on artists responding from within communities experiencing authoritarianism and war.
• Cambodia: Referenced as another setting where local artists’ long-term cultural knowledge and commitment shaped recovery from genocide and dislocation.
• West Georgia: The rural region where Lovelace describes entering a conflict over a plantation-themed tourism project and helping local Black students and residents reclaim their history as artisans and culture-bearers.

Key Concepts & Practices

• Outside Artist: An artist entering a community where they do not live or share the full history, relationships, risks, and cultural knowledge of local residents.
• Shared Leadership: A practice in which visiting artists contribute particular skills while local participants retain meaningful authority over purpose, process, interpretation, and outcomes.
• Cultural Humility: The discipline of entering another community as a learner and guest rather than assuming that artistic expertise confers knowledge of what the community needs.
• Creative Capacity: The relationships, confidence, practical skills, and local leadership that allow community members to continue adapting and creating after a visiting artist departs.
• Lightning-Rod Role: Lovelace’s description of an outsider sometimes being able to absorb political pressure or surface a conflict that insiders cannot safely raise themselves.

Acknowledgements

From FreeSound.org

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Art Is CHANGE is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

Hey there. Can an artist from outside your community be an effective creative change agent inside your community?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland. In this episode, we're presenting another in our series on the building blocks of effective community arts practice.

Now, when I say we, I'm referring to myself and my partners in crime for this endeavor, namely activist, poet, performer, teacher, creative change agent Dallas Lovelace and educator, author, art and democracy animator, and sage cultural advisor Barbara Schaefer Bacon, both of whom have been making and supporting arts based change work well, forever.

In it, we'll be exploring and debating what skills, strategies and practice we think will be most relevant to artists who are working to build caring, capable and equitable communities in these troubling times. In this show, we'll be asking, can outside artists make meaningful contributions to sustained community change? And if so, what does it take?

This was my question, so I'll jump in. When I wrote Art and Upheaval, there were so many rich stories of artists who are making a difference in so many different ways all across the world.

And then I started to ask the question, when this works, how does it work? There are so many different ways creative change making has shown up, and one of the predominant ones was the outside model.

Often outside artists coming to communities that were perceived to be in need of change, often with the assumption that they didn't have the necessary cultural resources to respond to that need.

And of course, there were artists whose work rose up in response to issues and opportunities inside their own communities, and also hybrid situations inside and outside. And much of this work resulted in positive change. But my ultimate question was, long term, what's the impact?

And that's where the rubber met the road, particularly in places dealing with long term issues like the impact of war, indigenous dislocation or genocide. Serbia is a good example in the middle of Slobodan Milosevic's reign of tyranny and terror.

When I asked Diana Milosevic from Dot Theater, how did you decide to do this, to fight back? And she said it was the same decision that the plumber down the street and the baker down there made, which was, this is.

This is not acceptable and we have to do something because it's in my backyard, it's happening. I'm just a citizen trying to make a difference. I happen to be an artist, right?

And I'm just taking my Talent and resources and trying to jump into the fray here. And that. That led me down the path of every single one in that book, where people who were.

Of the communities in which they worked, and the most important part of it is that just the stories tended to be longer, to be honest with you, because for the most part, they never left. Now, that said, one of the things that I learned coming out of that was I did ask the question, so do you ever work with outside artists?

And they said, yeah.

And actually, when someone from outside came in, we knew the most value they could bring because they were visiting our living room, they were coming into our community. And so we actually created a kind of leverage for someone that didn't have to learn everything from scratch.

We could host them in a way that really helped them make a difference. So that was the impetus for this question.

I'm really eager to hear, Alice, if you have reflections on artists who've come to Atlanta or come to your neighborhood and how that has interacted with your work, or what you've seen, left behind or last or linger. Because I have a slightly different perspective. Than Bill,

I don't think that all outside artists attempt to make some lasting impression. It's not a part of the agenda. I think there's like, some specialized situations that happen when artists see themselves as part of that.

And I can only reflect back on myself because I was often the outside artist, especially here in the south, where when I started doing as an individual community based art, it was the practice of the state arts agencies to use me as a tool of multiculturalism, which meant that I found myself quite often in community where there was a 1% or 2% black population, where there was very few people who looked like me. And that way, I definitely was the outside artist. But different places that I was in required different things of me.

And because I worked with young people a lot, one of the ways that I saw that I could not reform a town, but I could create my work with the youth in such a way that it opened their world, made them question the place they were in, and it pushed them to, even after I left, to continue to ask questions and to grow.

So I would focus on them when I was with youth, and I would try to help them see beyond where they were and open them up to a larger world of knowing not. And I use this all through the vehicle of poetry and creative writing. Because I would not allow them to use popular culture in my classes.

They could not make any reference at all to popular culture.

Everything they did had to be grounded in their own experience, which allowed me to talk to them about authentic things and to keep our conversations very authentic and not hypothetical or going out into the what if world. And I did that many years and it was very rewarding because I think in that way I did not have mass long term effect.

But I always had young people who came back to me. Five, 10, 15, some. Now 30 years later, going sixth grade, third grade, you walked in the door. My world changed, my vision of everything changed.

And for me that is a part of that long term impact.

But then I also think about when I went down to this little town called Evans, Georgia, where the political right in that town saw me as a weapon they could use against the arts and against the community. And by calling me a witch, calling me all number of other things, inadvertently, we both became a part of a deep change in that community.

So that by the time that experience was over, it had gone across two states, it had gone through newspapers, through, through conservative radio interviews. It had gone into this incredible place. A couple of things happened that I think made long term effect.

One was that state arts agency that funded that particular area that I was in. And the program that brought me there had never given that program more than one year funding. Year to year.

They changed their policy and gave them three years funding in a row. So they changed the entire way. They engaged with community groups that were bringing in outside artists.

The people who were right wing politicals who had started this because they thought it would be to their advantage, found themselves ostracized by the entire community, called out even their state representatives. That there were over 50 letters to the editor telling all their business, all their behind the scenes.

And I always, when I look back at those letters, the last letter that they found printed in the two newspapers up there was one from the people who started this. And it started off we have been made to look like fools in our community.

And the editor responded, he said, indeed, you have made yourself look like fools. So for me that was like a long term impact that I had helped.

Because I stood up to those attacks in a way that allowed the community then to come circle around me. And I was not of their community, but they certainly came and they protected me and I protected them. And I think we all want.

So it's so it's not always as simple as it sound and it's not always an immediate A to B to C kind of a trajectory. And sometimes that that long term impact can come in some kind of strange ways.

Yeah, you're right. Absolutely.

And for anyone interested in hearing much more of that incredible story, Alice tells it in our episode number 23, which we will link in our show Notes. Okay, Barbara.

I do, I feel like artists that come and organizations and I'm thinking a lot about residencies, urban Bush women, John o', Neill, Liz Lehrman, and they come with humility.

They come with a spirit of inquiry and a sense of accountability and imagine what they will co create or share leadership for and yet bring their very specific skill sets and talents and sometimes that artistic standard for the work that helps elevate everyone. Not that it didn't exist, but those people are finding the leadership in their community.

When I think about all of the touring that happened out of Apple Shop with the Festivals project, when I think about Cedar artists who, you know, got a job and no job description and just were let loose into all kinds of communities and neighborhoods and lots of things came of that and some things really, I think have survived.

I really appreciated Alice pointing out the ways something may have made a difference, which is not like the organization is still stuck standing or that particular mural is still on the wall, but it is much more so, I think artists who really do come to find out what the context is in which they're working, what are the unnamed challenges that they can lift and find a way and leave the creative skills behind. In Lima, Ohio, urban Bush women, John o' Neill and Michael Rhode all did residencies there. They all used Story Circle at some level in their work.

When there was a crisis five years later, they called back some of those artists to give everybody some renewed training to facilitate the conversations that the community needed in the high school and otherwise, that it was a talk about memory, muscle memory of resources and a broad. I feel like I have seen lots of example. I will say I have seen damage done.

I have seen artists come in from here who really don't get the culture there and don't respect local leadership and don't draw people in but compete with or label things. Labeling, I think, is one of the ways a lot of damage is done. So I do think it can be either harmful or sort of. One stop was nice. That was nice.

It's not going to happen again, but that was nice. And I don't think we can be generalized. I don't think it's either or I.

Don't either, particularly given my all work in prisons where I was definitely an outsider.

But when I talk about Serbia and Cambodia, and particularly in those circumstances which were all crises and if you have the ability to choose between the people who are in the crisis and people who know very little about the crisis but have something potentially valuable to share. My main thing is, and that's the reason I asked the question, what does it take for someone from the outside to contribute?

When you just described three practitioners who have spent decades and decades understanding the difference between a partnership in my community that I live in and a partnership that I am now a guest in, and how those protocols are very different,.

Is that the best of the artists that we're talking about that I have enormous respect for have the same human impulse to want to parachute in and save the day. So.

So after Katrina and after a whole host of other events, we would get calls at animating democracy from artists involved with us saying, how can you get us in there to help? What can we do to get there? Because we can help. We can do it. And your analogy, it's really like being a consultant.

It's the same question, why do we need a consultant? Like, what are they here for that we can't do ourselves?

What makes them effective in doing the something that is a catalyst for good versus harm and danger?

Yeah, absolutely.

And the black community wasn't buying it. So the humanities council, could I find anyone to go down there? And somebody gave them my name.

And I guess they said that she's crazy enough to go down there. And so they called me, and I said, yeah, I'll go down there. And I roll into this little town.

And then before I go into a town, I read all their newspapers. I read everything I can find about them to try to understand where I am going.

And when I got there, this woman who picks me up, she proceeds to tell me about, this is where our black people live. This is where. And she talks about them in this term, which even put me more understanding of what culture I was in.

And they wanted me to be in the schools because I guess I was supposed to convince these black people that this was a great thing, this economic development thing.

But of course, what I did was that I started teaching this course for the kids called Literature is History, which used literature to actually talk about all of the gifts that enslaved Africans brought, that no one's born a slave. People were enslaved. They came with the culture, and this is what was brought. These are the gifts that were brought.

And how those gifts were used by others, that was beyond us. But this is the gifts we brought.

And it started to causing some problems because the white kids went home and said I was talking too much about the greatness of black people. And so they came to me and they said, you should tone it down. And I said, why? And they said, because the white kids don't like it. These school.

These schools were 15% white, and the other 85% were black students. So I went back and I doubled down on my class.

And to make a long story short, by the time that we finished, they brought in the city leadership to my classes. I still taught the same classes because that was the truth of that place. And.

And I wasn't trying to upset anybody, but I wasn't going to tell a lie about where they were. And in the. And the kids took over the school at the high school, demanded everybody would have to sit in on the classes.

And then at the end of it, it was actually the high school students who formed a guard around me and escorted me out of town because they said, Ms. Lovelace, you might have some repercussions. So they escorted me to the state line.

But what happened was they totally rewrote that entire project, and they finally understood that they could not move forward without the support of that black community, and that they had to listen to what they wanted. And so the entire thing became an artisan village, as opposed to this tour, the slave thing.

They totally rewrote the plan for it, and it turned out to be very successful. Much more successful, I think, than the original plan that they had. I don't.

It was probably not the smartest thing I ever did, but once I got there, I understood that's what I was being. Because sometimes an outside artist can be the lightning rod that someone inside cannot be.

And so you enter into a situation and you say, okay, I have to balance this, but I have to be willing to take some of the fire so that the people who live here don't. But I also have to protect the people who live here for whom I am here for. Because you can't be there for everybody.

And it would be a lie for an artist to tell themselves that they're there for everybody. You can't be. So I had defined who I was there for, what I could do for them. That would help them then make some sense of the situation they were in.

And then they're the ones who went to the leadership and said, okay, we're going to make some sense out of this. We came as artisans. We did not come as slaves. So we won't allow you to define us as slaves.

If you're going to do this, you're going to define us as what we came as artisans, as skilled people who brought gifts to you. And you have to be that lightning.

And the irony is we are in that moment again in this country. People are saying, I think we need to tone our history down. The edges are too sharp. They make me uncomfortable.

I don't know if I could sit in this seat. And actually, what you just described was, I think, also a quintessential moment of bravery.

And right now we have these same things happening where people are trying to take some paint and paint over some stuff and change words and edit books, and it's actually harder to get a handle on it. It's going to take a major effort to put back what was, what was taken away.

But at the end of the day, what I believe is that what I would call is the full story will, in fact be empowered. I believe that's a true thing. When you try to take something away, that's true and most people know it, you can't put it back in the bottle.

I don't think. Alice and Barbara, I would also say that the bottle that we have just filled is really bubbling. It's very effervescent.

I think there may be some fermentation going on. And I really want to thank you both for jumping into this with all your brain cells firing.

I thoroughly enjoy being in this conversation. It's a privilege.

Yeah, I really enjoy this.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Pleasure.

And thanks to you, our listeners. And I hope that this building blocks of effective Community Arts Practice series has been as enlightening to you as it has been for me. Given that.

Before we go, here are three things I've taken away from this conversation. First, community change is not something an artist does to a place. It's something we do with the people who already call the place home.

Whether you're an insider or an outsider, lasting change begins with listening, humility, and genuine partnerships. Second, being an outsider isn't necessarily a disadvantage.

Sometimes an outside artist can ask the hard questions, absorb the political heat, or create space for conversations that local people can't safely initiate on their own. But that only works when the artist arrives as a guest, not as a savior.

And then the goal isn't simply to leave behind a mural, a performance or some kind of program. The deepest impact is measured in relationships, in new capacities and in the people who continue the work.

Whether you are a Native or a visitor, if the community is stronger and continues growing as a result of what you have done there, then I think you have done your job. Finally, please know that a link to all nine episodes in this series can be found in our show. Notes.

Artist Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Arthur Theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the Maestro.

Judy Munson Our text editing is by Andre Neve, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235. So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word.