Today we continue our Building Blocks of Effective Community Arts Practice series with two longtime fellow travelers: activist poet and cultural organizer Alice Lovelace, and educator, cultural policy leader, and Animating Democracy co-founder Barbara Shaffer Bacon.

Together we wrestle with a question many artists are asking right now: Should we prioritize safety—or bravery?

Drawing on decades of experience—from the culture wars of the 1980s to today’s debates over censorship, public funding, and democracy—they explore how artists can respond with creativity rather than fear.

Three reasons to listen

• Creative courage takes many forms. Bravery isn’t only public protest. It can mean telling difficult truths, creating work without waiting for permission,

• Healthy cultural ecosystems make courage possible. Artists, organizations, funders, and communities can build networks of mutual support that allow creative work to flourish even during periods of political and economic uncertainty.

• Artists possess tools society needs right now. From improvisation and storytelling to visioning and collective imagination, the very skills artists practice every day may be among our most important resources for helping communities navigate uncertainty and build a more hopeful future.

Notable Mentions

People

• Alice Lovelace: Poet, educator, Executive Director of ArtsXchange, and longtime leader in community-based arts, cultural organizing, and social justice.
• Barbara Shaffer Bacon: Cultural policy leader, educator, and founding co-director of Animating Democracy, widely recognized for advancing arts-based civic engagement and cultural policy.
• Lenny Sloan: Beloved community arts advocate, cultural organizer, and longtime colleague remembered as one of the inspirations behind this conversation series.
• Maynard Jackson: Atlanta's first African American mayor, remembered for expanding civic participation and public investment in the arts.
• Shirley Franklin: Former mayor of Atlanta whose administration continued significant investment in the city's cultural infrastructure.
• Robert Peters: Mashpee Wampanoag artist, writer, and cultural leader whose work integrates Indigenous traditions, storytelling, ceremony, and community healing.
• Roberta Uno: Founder of New WORLD Theater and one of America's leading advocates for culturally specific and community-based theater.

Organizations & Initiatives

• Center for the Study of Art & Community: Producer of ART IS CHANGE and advancing arts-based community development and cultural organizing.
• ArtsXchange: Atlanta-based interdisciplinary arts organization dedicated to community cultural development, creative leadership, and social justice.
• Animating Democracy: National initiative advancing civic engagement, community development, and social change through the arts.
• New WORLD Theater: Groundbreaking multicultural theater that elevated artists and communities of color while reshaping American theater.
• Public Art Network: National professional network supporting public artists, public art programs, and civic arts leadership.
• Arts on Prescription: An emerging healthcare movement integrating arts participation into medical care through clinician referrals and social prescribing.

Places

• Atlanta, Georgia: Principal case study illustrating strengths and vulnerabilities of long-term community arts ecosystems.
• New Bedford, Massachusetts: Example of a city where artists, government, and community organizations have built a collaborative cultural ecosystem.
• Alameda, California: Home base of host Bill Cleveland and the Center for the Study of Art & Community.
• Minneapolis, Minnesota: Referenced as an example of a deeply interconnected community arts ecosystem.

Key Concepts & Practices

• Arts Ecosystems: The interconnected relationships among artists, organizations, funders, institutions, and communities that collectively sustain creative life.
• Cross-sector Collaboration: Partnerships linking artists with public health, education, environmental justice, youth development, and community planning.
• Creative Commons (Community Sense): Bill Cleveland's metaphor describing artistic communities where collaboration, mentoring, reciprocity, and mutual aid become cultural norms.
• Arts on Prescription: A growing international practice in which healthcare professionals prescribe arts participation as part of treatment for physical, mental, and social well-being.

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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. Now, these days, truth telling can be very costly. Given this, should activist artists be pushing back or laying low?

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.

Along with my colleagues, activist, poet, performer, creative change agent Alice Lovelace, and educator, author, democracy animator, and sage cultural advisor Barbara Shaffer Bacon, we'll be exploring and debating what skills and strategies we think will be most relevant to artists who are working to build communities and rebuild democracy in these troubling times. And given these tumults in today's show, we're asking if artists should prioritize safety over bravery. So, Alice, welcome.

What prompted you to ask that question?

I actually was reflecting back on the 80s when there was so much chaos swirling around the arts community. Strom Thurman, with all of the things that were going on, here is Senator.

So that's what it's all about.

It's about soaking the taxpayer to fund, that is to say, pay for garbage such as pictures by Robert Mapplethorpe, a known homosexual who died of AIDS and who spent the last years of his life promoting homosexuality.

The nea, when they were pulling artists grants. Lots of lawsuits going around. Artists under attack physically as well as financially.

Arts agencies closing down entire states, closing down their entire arts structure.

And I think about that period and I think about how we met that moment and persevered and tightened our belts and kept right on pushing forward with the things that we believed in and standing up for the things that we felt were important that we were not going to be intimidated by. And then as in a conversation about this moment that we're in.

In addition, the programming was out of control with rampant political propaganda, DEI and inappropriate shows. We, they had dance parties for, quote, queer and trans youth. That wasn't working out too well.

They had a Marxist, anti police performance and they had lesbian only Shakespeare. Oh, we're bringing our country back so fast.

And there was all of this talk about being saved and being safe.

I'm not saying that people should go out and expose themselves to danger, but I know that you have to live by what you believe in, because if you're not Living by that, then you're not being who you are and who you were called to be. And that's the same for an arts organization, that this is a time that calls for some bravery.

Like I've heard a lot of people say, oh, the NEA is like, really?

If you apply for a grant from the NEA and you do a program that's going to be focused on gay people or immigrants, they may come and take your money away. And my position is like, let them try. Come.

Because if I don't test that, if I don't push against that, then isn't that the same as me saying, yeah, I'm giving into it?

And I'm trying to figure out how, in this moment, do we have the courage to stand up to this point of bullying and still be true to what we say we are and to do what we say we do?

Totally. But what do you think?

I think that an additional bravery, which I saw reflected a lot in the two days of the conference that I was at, was speaking truth to power in terms of resources and funders, artists saying, believing in social justice is good, but not enough. Intention is good, but not enough.

Here's what we really need, because you are counting on us, and we are one small personal disaster away from not being able to do this work. We really cannot operate as though we are not on the fine line on the shoestring.

The second kind of bravery that I heard were a number of public artists and organizations were stepping out without an invitation, not waiting for the right competition to come, the right public art call out. One Vietnamese American artist in particular has been on an amazing trajectory to develop public works and public spaces that reflect her community.

And I really was moved by her, and she's very clear about a vision that should happen.

Hi there. I'm Ngoc Tran Vu. I go by Tran. I'm based in Boston in the US and I identify as a 1.5 Vietnamese American multimedia artist and cultural organizer.

It has really been truly community created and led.

So it's part of a greater commemoration initiative that involves the the healing Memorial, public art that will travel, oral history, preserving of community narrative, and then the activation of communities through workshops to education and the arts and the culture. All of these components creates this commemoration initiative.

Thinking about the theme of healing and what that means for a community that have, you know, been through so much.

And there's another artist who has been working for 25 years to get a set of bronzes that depict Chinese Americans in that neighborhood. And he absolutely was persistent.

So bravery as persistence and bravery as stepping out without an invitation are two things I just really want to hold up.

Yeah, boy. So I get all a militant and itchy when I think about how passive the cultural community can be. I've always had a kind of.

I don't know if you want to call it anger, but certainly impatience with that. Don't rock the boat. Sit on the sidelines, see if the crumbs will come. Thinking posture. And I'm not even talking about political stuff.

I'm just talking about the position of culture and the life of American society, period.

You know, the artists entertain us from time to time, and if we need somebody to pay attention to something, they can come up with some good color scheme for it. It just drives me completely crazy. I'm more in the realm of, okay, we're marching forward into the breach. And actually, that's our job.

Not everybody, certainly not every artist. But having the creative power, being a transforming force, honoring the legacy of our.

Of all of our disciplines going back thousands of years, this art making is not a nice to have. It's something that allowed humans to survive and to persevere. One of the mantras around the resistance is block, bridge, build.

Block the bad, bridge the difference, build the future. And that is a creative process. If artists are absent from that part of the equation, that, I'm sorry, a PowerPoint is just not going to cut it.

And especially when you're trying to imagine something that doesn't exist yet or builds off something that is toppled, and you can't just get the glue out and start trying to put the pieces back together. You have to envision something. And I think everybody's capable of doing that.

But if you have some people that have a few extra muscles in that realm, put them to use. It would be like saying, oh, wow, we have a plague. Where are the doctors? Oh, what do we need doctors for? What do we need artists for?

Are you kidding me? So this is what we're called to do, I think.

And the people who have the capacity and the passion and the understanding of the stakes for them and the community they care about, then you make the decision to step forward. That's a good decision. I think knee jerk reactionary progressives are just as dangerous as reactionary reactionaries. But we have to be thoughtful.

Bravery takes multiple forms. And as you said, bravery is defined by the individual and the life experience of that particular individual and what they would normally do.

And it's not like we all have to challenge the system.

But I think when something starts making you police your own speech, swallow your own truths, where there are places and circles where you feel like you can't say what you really believe, then I say we are in a dangerous situation, all of us, because that is kind of acquiescence that weakens the entire system.

So when I see artists, individual artists, swallowing their truths or saying, I just won't say it like that, or I'm going to change the way, yeah, it could, I want to say to them, you can only be you one time. You only have one life to live. This is yours. You don't. Why would you let someone make your life smaller, make your voice smaller?

And I think it makes us smaller. And being brave does not always mean challenging the power. Sometimes it means challenging yourself.

And it's not something that you say, sometimes it's just something that you simply do. Someone who's ostracized, when you go and quietly speak to them and say, I'm standing in circle with you, that's an act of bravery.

We need to figure out, and I agree, build each for ourselves, organizations and individuals, what is the line for us that we're not willing to let them push us over, when we'll stop and we'll stand and we say no, because the arts do have a right to exist. And what the NEA is doing and what's coming out of the national humanities in small ways being mirrored across the landscape of funders.

And I fear that, I fear if we don't stand up and articulate for ourselves how far we'll go and what we'll fight for, that we'll be pushed as far as they want to push us.

I also wonder if, as in other phases of our history, in terms of funders, funders who perhaps do see the arts and the role artists play in a democracy, in free speech, in standing to power, they're moving to fund work that is supporting democracy, but might not really be listening to themselves and saying, yeah, the arts belong in that pool of work. I also think, in the same way that we say bravery is self defined, safety also is and so we don't.

We don't know how much time you give to the work, given what else might be happening in your family or how vulnerable they feel feel, or how much you're needed in different ways and in different places in the community. All of that is in the safety bucket that has to be balanced in terms of personal choices that need to be made every day.

It's what I'm seeing is people defining and doing the work they need to do. So it's not like every day they wake up and say, how am I going to stand up for democracy? How am I going to stand up for the arts?

They're actually saying, what is the work that we need to do or we best can do and that I can see my way through or I have the partners to do it with. There was so much pride in the pride activity that took place in New Bedford while we were there.

The free expression of pride and lesbian and trans folks on a street with a drag show in an old chapel that is now a theater that for them represented everything about the distance they had come as a community.

The Y was the sponsor that the city is sponsored, that the mayor was promoting, and everybody in on the street was just doing the thing they needed to do to communicate.

Public Guy, you're reminding me of. I've learned at the foot of so many people who are so much further down the road than I have ever been.

I'm thinking about the folks in Serbia and Yugoslavia and Cambodia, in Northern Ireland, and they were very clear. They said, look, sometimes I need to disappear because I need to be here to fight another day. So I know how to disappear. I have that skill.

Other times, I need to be the nimble trickster. So we will make our presence felt, and then we will transform ourselves into something that they don't recognize. We will speak in codes.

We will invent new languages. That's what we bring to the table. It's not just standing there and taking the bullet.

It is, in fact, being smart, strategic, creative, and manifesting power in a multitude of ways. And I just. I think about the folks at DA theater in Serbia.

They could take over a public square and hold an audience for 30 minutes and then disappear and have people with guns running around wondering where the hell they went. And that model is there for anybody. You don't have to be a monolith in the way that you respond to these things. And you can be creative.

You can be innovative in ways that turns the table and changes the narrative. The thing that's happening in Our Streets is a cruel, brute force narrative that is very clumsy.

And if anybody's out there with the resilience and flexibility to move through this, it is the creators in the community. And it works. It works. There's a history of it all across the world in these circumstances.

Yeah, yeah.

When I think about the gorilla girls, that's what they were famous for.

Yeah, that's beautiful.

And during the AIDS epidemic, the ones that would come out human.

Act up.

Act up.

Yes. Yep.

Yes, yes, I agree. I want to see some of that.

We're pretty focused on the political reality that we're talking about here.

And yet so much of the work in the community arts realm and sphere is putting things on the map, making things visible, bringing attention to things erased history. And it's not all focused on this political moment. As Alice reminded us at the beginning, we've always been in the moment.

There's been the moment forever. But I do think that community arts has really helped.

So many different artists in so many different communities have really helped to not just have new imagination and new vision, but to also see absence and to see what could fill it or to bring other people to see what they want there. And so it's more than responding to the political moment and particular kinds of power. I think it's so much more at so many levels.

Healing was another huge part of our conversation over and over again as people were gathered and telling their stories and self care in that somewhere between our safety and our bravery and what that means and what that looks like and looking out for one another in our ecosystems, which I think is another piece of the healthy going back to the first conversation.

Healing, self care and community building are revolutionary acts.

My last comment. Self care cannot just be about getting a massage, knowing when you need to go and take a mental health break from the work.

They say that success is the best revenge.

When I think about the arts itself and I think about bravery and I think about that statement, why don't we have group insurance, that insurance insures artists? Why don't we have those tools that will spread across our community? Because this is also an act of bravery to even begin to organize these things.

Or an act of bravery because it says we are valid and unto ourselves a profession and we demand the right to control. Doctors would not let a mail carrier come in and write the code in a hospital. Why should you come and write the code for us?

So to me, that's another form of bravery.

To take control of your destiny, to take control of your field and say Unapologetically, oh yeah, we are organizing for insurance, for fair wages, for all of these multi tool things that put artists truly in danger, truly endangered.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

The irony of Serbia is that all those things you just described in the middle of a dictatorship, they had all those things, they had health care, they had public housing that was subsidized and it's just because it was a socialist country. And then it transitioned into a dictatorship. But all that social safety netsy is still there.

So all the artists that I met, I said, how do you do this? How do you do this? And they said, well, you know, the state is actually supporting our revolution.

You never know how the story is going to go, especially when your assumptions get in the way. And I think this is particularly true these days. And another true thing is that we're going to finish up here.

Before we go, I'd like to reinforce a few things that showed up in our conversation. You know, after listening here, I'm thinking that perhaps we began with the wrong question. The choice isn't really between safety and bravery.

I mean, sometimes it is. But I think the real question, the nitty gritty question, is what kind of courage does this moment ask of each of us?

First, there's the courage to remain true to your voice. Alice reminds us that braver can be as simple and as difficult as refusing to let our fear make us smaller than we are.

Second, there is the courage to persist. Barbara's stories are filled with artists who didn't wait for permission.

They patiently built relationships, claimed public space and advocated for their communities for years, even decades. And finally, there's the courage to imagine artists have something every healthy society needs.

The ability to see beyond the world as it is and help others see the world as it could be. Perhaps that's the deeper lesson. Bravery isn't one thing. It's moral courage, institutional courage, and creative courage working together.

And when those forces of courage are rooted in relationships, they become more than acts of resistance. They become acts of creation. Finally, please know that you can find.

A link to all of our conversations.

About the building blocks of effective community arts practice in our show. Notes Art is Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscape spring forth from.

The head, heart and and hand of the maestro, Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OUC235.

So until next time, stay well, do.

Good and spread the good word.