Budgets frozen. Institutions wobbling. Political earthquakes everywhere. In the middle of all that, many artists and cultural workers are stepping straight into the messy moral world of community change.

This episode is the fourth in our special series where we're unpacking the building blocks of effective art and social change practice,

This episode we explore: 

• What happens when “good intentions” aren’t enough?
• What do we owe the communities we hope to serve?
• And how does an artist even begin to understand the ethical weight of their presence in places carrying trauma, tension, or long histories of power imbalance?

Notable Mentions

People

• Bill Cleveland – Host of Art Is Change and Director of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.
• Leni Sloan – Activist, performer, impresario, and cultural historian.
• Barbara Schaffer Bacon – Educator, author, and longtime arts-and-democracy leader.
• Confucius – Philosopher quoted on the cultural health of society.
• Carol Bebelle – Co-founder of Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans.
• Roberta Uno – Director and cultural organizer referenced via Project 2050.
• Judy Munson – Composer for the series' theme and soundscapes.
• Andre Neppe – Text editor for the series.

Organizations

• Center for the Study of Art & Community – Producer of Art Is Change.
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – Federal arts funder.
• Mid Atlantic Arts – Regional arts funder.
• Kennedy Center – National cultural institution.
• Junebug Productions – Community-rooted arts organization.
• Ashé Cultural Arts Center – Cultural organization founded by Carol Bebelle.
• UMass Project 2050 – Intergenerational arts and social justice project.
• Freesound.org – Open-source audio effects platform.

Events

• Pennsylvania Arts Residency Shutdowns – State-level budget freeze causing all residencies to wind down.
• California Gerrymandering Ballot Vote – Referenced political event affecting democratic institutions.
• White House East Wing Renovation – Described as symbolic cultural destabilization.
• Northern Ireland Peace-Sector Encounters – Experiences working in sectarian communities.
• Prison Songwriting Class – A pivotal ethical moment demonstrating the power of creative work.

Publications / Texts

• Confucian Canon – Referenced philosophically regarding art and society.

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Change the Story / Change the World 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. Budgets frozen, institutions wobbling, political earthquakes everywhere.

In the middle of all that, many artists and cultural workers are stepping straight into the messy moral world of community change.

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Artist Change, where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. This episode is the fourth in our special series where we're unpacking the building blocks of effective art and social change practice.

At a time when democratic values are under pressure and authoritarian forces are on the rise, we believe that artists have a critical role to play, not just in resistance, but in helping to build the caring, capable and equitable communities that democracy requires. Now, in our last conversation, we explored the question of self care for activist artists, what it means, and why it matters.

In this short episode, we explore what happens when good intentions aren't enough.

And how does an artist even begin to understand the ethical weight of their presence in places carrying trauma, tension, or long histories of power imbalance? In it, you'll hear stories from the triage room of community practice.

Artists shaken awake by the unintended consequences of work that seemed inspirational.

The prison songwriting class, where a single creative moment became a life or death sentence and a reminder that art trivialized by society is still potent enough to heal or harm.

Once again, I'd like to welcome my partners for this series, namely activist, performer, impresario, historian, and creative shape shifter Lenny Sloan. And educator, author, art and democracy animator, and Sage cultural advisor, Barbara Schaefer Bacon.

We jump into the conversation in the middle of Lenny's description of the ripple effects funding cuts and budget log jams have been having on the arts community in his state of Pennsylvania.

All residencies were told to start winding down.

Oh, my goodness.

The Arts Council gets NEA money, gets Mid Atlantic money. It's state money. We have no state budget bill. We have no county budget because we have no state budget. Because we have no federal budget here.

In California, we're going to vote to gerrymander the hell out of the state. It's this equivalent of my leg is.

Is caught in a bear trap. I can't open it. I gotta take the leg off and.

Maybe we'll put it back together again.

When we get home.

You live with the bear trap?

Yes, exactly.

All right, here we are in this.

Moment of amazing American and world history. And we are in the second round of our efforts to talk about the characteristics of art and social change work that are most important to its success.

And in this round, we have three questions.

The first of which is the one that I'm most obsessed with, largely because I feel like it gets skipped because everybody assumes that good intentions define good work. So the first question is, what are the moral and ethical considerations in community arts work? I'll open the floor.

I'm sure you both have something to say about this.

I follow Barb because she's been out in the triage room.

The first things that came to mind increasingly in the last five years, I was hearing about people who were participating in community arts projects.

Not necessarily the artists leading them, but sometimes artists engaged in them, who were fearful of being traumatized, being re traumatized, dealing with oppression that was built into the systems and the approaches that were being used in what felt right about community engagement, but still carried some uninformed or unconscious colonial structures. So I guess I'm saying that in relation to a lot of projects that were being done by good people were had good goals and intentions.

But I think that in the era of Black Lives Matter and people being more aware and more informed on their own, there was a lot of red flags being thrown up and saying, I'm not sure where we are right at this minute. I'm not sure how I'm feeling at this minute. There's just a lot of need for check in.

And so this question of moral and ethical, where you begin, I think has come up a lot.

I think that the question of morals and ethics lay at the heart of the concept of community engagement. Because whose morals? Who's that?

Is it an implied moral on a community, or is it a consciousness that rises up from that community which might be stagnant? And therefore your job is first you have to frame, measure the morals and ethics of the community in which you are engaging.

And then you have to marry your morals and ethics to that community. It might not be the fitness, it might not be the time for. And so the listening process. Communities are perpetually emerging organic things.

And you have to be able to constantly ask yourself, what's going on here? What do I bring? What do I challenge? Is good, right? Timely? And where are my growing ethics and morals? In a crisis world, how do I inject myself into?

Do I inject myself? Do I seep into? Am I absorbed by or do I absorb the community?

So there's a lot of questions that are like priming the canvas questions before you even begin to try to put on. Put on your time.

So I'm going to go even further back. But when we did our training, this is the most important question. We engaged people with before they even entered into the training.

So the question wasn't, where are you and what's going on there? It's who are you and what's going on with you and what are you bringing and how will you wield it?

We live in a world that trivializes creative work to the point of silliness, which means it has no perceived power whatsoever. In fact, in some cases, it's considered a place saver for the serious stuff that happens outside of it. It's not even an hors d'.

Oeuvre.

But if you are a practitioner with this thing that we do, this art making, and you know.

Very differently, this is powerful shit.

You know, it can get people's attention, it can change people's minds, it can change the way people think, it can affect them physically, it can dramatically impact how a community interacts with itself. It can do really great things and it can do terrible harm.

So some of our artists, I think, who have been raised up in a society that diminishes and trivializes the potency of the creative process, are not wholly aware of the enormous power there gives. I sometimes liken it to Maui, the Polynesian trickster with superpowers who ends up slowing down the sun by mistake.

So an important part of our community arts training curriculum have been stories about the unintended consequences of apparently successful programs.

Art programs that brought creative inspiration and power into the lives of prisoners or vulnerable kids or elders who literally crashed out when it disappeared from their lives when the grant ended.

Billy I have carried around, I think, all of my adult artistic life a quote from Confucius which says you can tell the condition of a man's kingdom by the state in which you find the arts there. Our kingdom will triage as measured by places that we held sacred, like the Kennedy Center.

And so when these places, rituals, paradigms, icons, way showers, road signs of the kingdom are in jeopardy, the whole kingdom is in jeopardy. All these museums are filled with the art and artifacts and hearted. Remember, the king was or the ruler was, but the artifacts.

So we are now dismantling the very artifacts. The wrecking all on the east winning of the White House is more than a renovation. It's a dismantling of iconography.

It is completely the metaphor for it all.

And that dismantling, abrupt, instant and irreversible is like those seven and eight point earthquakes.

I was just going to go back to give us the simplest form here for a minute.

Basically, most of the the definitions point to morals as being those internal personal beliefs that are Shaped by experience, culture, the things that we've talked about a lot, especially in our first connection. And ethics being the external, the codified principles from a community or profession or a society. So do we. Is.

Is that the frame that we're using here?

Actually, I will say, because of the kind of work we do, it's impossible to move those two things apart from each other. And the place I learned this was inside the prison system. So you're the delivery system. Your classroom is your sacred space.

Your students are making up their mind whether to trust you or not. And they think you're here to teach them how to make a song.

And you're there bringing something that's so powerful that some of them may, in fact, have their lives changed by it.

Yeah, Billy, I think our best work happens at the intersection of those two things. Yeah, but you can miss the intersection beyond the road, and you can suddenly realize that you have been commoditized.

Yes.

Or self. Commodity.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

So the guy that taught me this, I probably told this story a hundred times, but it was a songwriting class, and I was new to it, and.

People were doing great.

And this guy came in, and he's one of the guys that was doing great. And he just came in and said.

Mr. Bill, I almost did not make it this morning.

And I said, I'm glad you're here.

That's terrific. I'm glad you're here. And he said, no, that's not what I'm talking about. And the hairs on the back of.

My neck went right up. He said, look at me. And I have to say, it's a place where you do not look people in the eye a lot.

And I looked at him, and he had tears in his eyes, and he said, look, I wake up every morning deciding whether to continue.

And this class is one of the.

Things that gets me out of bed and makes me decide that I want to live another day.

And.

And I almost did not make it this morning, and it just twisted my head around. You wake up in the morning, you go, God, do I want to go down there and do that today. It's always a hassle.

And then all of a sudden, you realize, holy shit, I'm bringing something powerful, special, sacred, potent into a place, a terrible, terribly toxic place. And it is, in fact, potentially saving lives in the most humble way.

And so when artists came into our community arts training, I would tell that story, and I would say, we live in a world that trivializes the work that we do. Do not do that to yourself. You have something incredibly powerful here.

And if you do not carry it with responsibility, understanding its power, then you have the potential to unintentionally do harm.

Now this brings me back to your question about morals and ethics. Because you have the power as long as you remember that it comes through you and not from you.

Yes, yes.

The moment you start thinking it's yours, they got you. And now you are not on a moral or ethical pathway.

Absolutely and absolutely. And they will tell you. And actually that songwriter was telling me, you brought some sustenance in here with you. It came in here with you.

It helped make this a sacred space. So be careful with it, with what's happening here, because it's not you, it's us.

That brings me back to a point that when as soon as Lenny, you said it's the intersection of the morals and the ethics and you build it, they're not so separate.

And I think about a lot of community arts projects and community arts organizations that really are operating with a philosophy of community arts in their fiber. And what they do is often create a space that everyone can live by a set of agreed on morals and ethics, or they become evolved into that.

And then when you step out of the circle, it's like the world slaps you back in the face and says, the world hasn't changed, but you were able to create this really fine place where it was in balance and, and where those things could be practiced.

And I sometimes we talk about the artists practice, but practiced in a different sense here when we're talking about morals and ethics, I think is important. But I do often see that the artists and organizers and cultural activists, they can say, let's do it this way. Is this the way we should do it?

What else do we need to change to do it and feel good here? And many groups out of New Orleans do it this way.

Carol Bebel at the Oxford Cultural center said her organization was a perpetually emerging organization because it had to emerge with the community and its needs and its ethical changes.

That the world, that that's the better world is the world where we all are fully in possession of our humanity and that we can count on each other to recognize it.

I think in the fight and the struggle to be able to gain that and not to Just gain it in word, but to gain it in form and content, that we can't lose the fact that the ultimate thing is that we really need to all sit in the circle.

And so in a certain way, the extent to which we are able and willing to extend our concept of we, of who we're talking about, when we say we, I mean culture is the place that defines us. It's also the place that heals us. That's why you take pain and you can transform it into power. It's through the healing process.

And all of those things are a part of being inside, of a willingness to be empathetic and compassionate inside of how it is that we expand our concept of wheat.

And when its issue was homelessness, they had to embrace that theme. And when it was hunger, they had to embrace that theme.

And they had to be ready not to preach, but to teach and to be willing to learn from all of these changing fears which impact your morals and your ethical vision, that community and your place and time. When is it your time to step into the center of that?

When is it your time to be a wall, a buttress, catalyst, or kick in the butt, or a guest family member to be deeply rooted in and reflective of?

Yeah, every time I went to Northern Ireland, it was one of the most loving spaces I've ever been in. But, boy, did they make it clear.

It'S dangerous for you not to be a guest here.

Do not imagine you are a part of this community because you have no idea. And it's the same with being inside the prison. You have no idea.

So in the joint and in Belfast, everybody said you need to be very clear about that.

And that actually leads us to this other question, which is humility, which we'll take up in our next session, where we'll tackle the question, what place do failure and humility have in a successful community arts practice? So thanks, guys, for solving our questions about the moral and ethical dimensions of art and change work.

And under 20 minutes before we close, here are three things to tuck in your pocket from today's conversation. First of all, art carries real power, whether or not the world acknowledges it. Creative work can sustain, disrupt, or wound.

Treating that power lightly isn't humility. It's a risk. Also, community ethics aren't something you bring with you. They're something you learn inside the room.

Your morals meet their morals, and the work happens at that volatile intersection. And finally, you are never the whole story. You're a guest, a catalyst, a carrier of something sacred.

But the moment you believe that power comes from you rather than through you. The work goes sideways.

So next week we take the conversation into failure and and humility, two essentials that shape every community arts practice long before the masterpiece appears. So Lenny and Barb, thanks for sharing your wisdom and listeners, thanks for sharing your ears. We will see you next week.

Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community or theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the Maestro. Judy Munson Our text editing is by Andre Neppe, 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. Once again, please know this episode has been 100% human.

Sam.