Why does sustainability matter in activist art? When funding cycles are short, residencies are brief, and institutions often treat creative work as temporary or expendable, what does it mean to commit to change that lasts?

In this episode of Art Is Change, the sixth in our series on the building blocks of effective community arts practice, Bill Cleveland sits down with two legendary cultural leaders — Leni Sloan and Barbara Schaefer Bacon — to explore sustainability not as longevity for its own sake, but as ethical responsibility. From invisible lineages of community practice to the quiet power of relationships that outlast grants, they examine what truly endures when art engages deeply with communities.

Drawing on decades of experience as practitioners, funders, and advocates, this conversation 

• challenges conventional ideas of growth, impact, and institutional survival.
• asks whether sustainability lies in organizations, practices, relationships, 
• or something more elusive — trust, memory, and the transmission of creative values across generations.

If you are an artist, cultural organizer, funder, or community partner grappling with how to build work that matters beyond the life of a project, this episode offers hard-earned wisdom, moral clarity, and a powerful reminder: some forms of change are too important to be temporary.

NOTABLE MENTIONS

People

• Lenwood “Leni” Sloan – Activist artist, cultural organizer, impresario, and long-time leader in community-based arts practice; featured guest on Art Is Change.
• Barbara Schaffer Bacon
• – Former Co-Director of Animating Democracy, a national initiative advancing arts-based civic dialogue and democratic practice.
• Bill Cleveland
• – Host of Art Is Change and Director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community, with decades of experience in arts-based community development and cultural organizing.
• Liz Lerman
• – Choreographer, civic artist, and thought leader whose work has profoundly shaped community-based and socially engaged dance practice.
• John O’Neal
• – Playwright, performer, and cultural organizer; co-founder of the Free Southern Theater and founder of Junebug Productions, a cornerstone of African American community-based theater.
• M. C. Richards
• – Poet, potter, educator, and author whose writings on creativity, discipline, and teaching have deeply influenced generations of artists.

Organizations

• Center for the Study of Art and Communit– A national resource supporting artists, organizations, and institutions working at the intersection of art, community, and social change.
• Animating Democracy– A program of Americans for the Arts dedicated to advancing arts-based civic engagement, dialogue, and democratic practice.
• Americans for the Arts– A leading U.S. nonprofit organization supporting arts advocacy, research, and policy nationwide.
• Junebug Productions– New Orleans–based theater and cultural organization dedicated to artistic excellence, community engagement, and African American cultural traditions.
• Sankofa African American Theatre Company
• – Harrisburg-based community theater rooted in African American history, storytelling, and civic engagement.

Events / Concepts

• Day With(out) Art– An annual global action initiated by Visual AIDS, aligning with World AIDS Day to highlight the impact of AIDS on artists and communities through exhibitions, programs, and public dialogue.
• Community Cultural Development– A field of practice placing culture at the center of community life, social justice, and civic engagement; overview provided by the UMass Arts Extension Service, a long-standing authority in the field.

Historical / Lineage References

• Works Progress Administration (WPA) Arts Programs
• – New Deal–era federal programs that employed artists and embedded creative work in public life during the Great Depression; documented by the Library of Congress.

Acknowledgements

From FreeSound.org

Hello User: Bright Cheery Intro Music by jjmarsan -- https://freesound.org/s/476070/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Bosch’s Garden – Mythical Game Music for Fantasy and AI Projects by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/647212/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Project Nine - Time is of the Essence: Minimalist Tune by kjartan_abel -- https://freesound.org/s/662378/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

240625_2767-6_FR_Children_singing by kevp888 -- https://freesound.org/s/745207/ -- License: Attribution 

4.0custom_lexi_brain_blast_pew_sine_sweep_sound_V2_FINAL_06232025 by Artninja -- https://freesound.org/s/813190/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

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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. Why should activist artists and cultural organizers be concerned with creating sustainable change?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders.

So why does sustainability matter in activist art when funding cycles are short, residencies are brief, and institutions often treat creative work as temporary or expendable? What does it mean to commit to change that lasts?

In this episode of Art Has Changed, the sixth in our series on the building blocks of effective community arts practice, we sit down with two legendary cultural leaders, Lenny Sloan and Barbara Schaefer Bacon, to expl sustainability not as longevity for its own sake, but as ethical responsibility.

From invisible lineages of community practice to the quiet power of relationships that outlasts grants and funding cycles, we examine what truly endures when art engages deeply with communities.

Drawing on decades of experience as practitioners, funders and advocates, this conversation challenges conventional ideas of growth, impact, and institutional survival. Ask whether sustainability lies in organizations, practices, or relationships or something more elusive.

Trust, memory, and the transmission of creative values across generations. Interesting questions, interesting issues. So, on with the show.

So, Lenny, in our last conversation about the roles that failure and humility play in making and delivering really beneficial community arts programs, you told the story of a young girl who looked you in the eye and said, I don't want to be a part of this gig unless it's around for my little sister a year or two from now. And I think that statement, that position is at the heart of this week's question about sustainability.

What is it and why and when is it important, particularly where the conditions up front are.

I'm sorry, but there's six weeks here, there's eight weeks here. You should be happy just to do this thing in the community.

Should be happy to have you here for this time, which I believe is one of the great tragedies of work. With this kind of power, people ask, why should we think about this as something that should be sustainable?

I say, if your kid was in third grade and still didn't know how to read, and some poet came and turned the tide in the right direction, then would it be okay for them to leave after six weeks?

No.

This is your child's lifeline and that's happening all the time in this work.

And so the question is, knowing that the conditions mitigate against the potential for long term presence of this kind of work, how do we commit to sustainability? And the real thing is, if you're in change, Work. Does making the change matter?

Our work is like the Underground Railroad in that you weren't supposed to know that it existed, you were just supposed to benefit from it.

That we were moving people to freedom, but people were identifying themselves as freedom seekers and we were helping them in the pathway to their own personal freedom. And it didn't matter if we made it there with them, because we were passing them on to a safe house in another conductor.

And I see our work as invisible and intangible. And therefore, at times of plenty, we are highly regarded.

And at times of little, we are cast aside because there is no way to weigh in the impact of happiness, of self realization. It is why it's hard for us to advocate for ourselves. Meat packers union, they know how to advocate United Steelworkers.

They know how to advocate United Artists for America.

No.

And the other thing is we don't know our history and our lineage. A barber can tell you the whole history of his lineage. But do we go into a community and ask people, who was Liz Luhrmann or who was John o'? Neill?

We do not have a way of plotting pathway or success because we're always in search of new or new relevance, new audience, new canvas, new stage, new. And so perhaps in this Kali Yuga, which is Hindu for falling backwards into darkness, we don't even know where we're falling.

But understanding that been here before and we'll be here again.

The John o' Neill's of our time and the Liz Lermans were building on the digger art, which was building on the 30s art, which was building on the turn of the century art. So there is a map for us. We have to just focus that map.

But I think sometimes I was thinking about, there's several groups that our Humanities foundation is supporting.

One is called Guardians of History, and they've been doing the Black Festivals in Worcester, Massachusetts, to be sure that history is being taught and celebrated in that community for umpteen years. They need leadership transition because it's still a founder, director, and maybe being paid and maybe not.

But so when I think about sustainability, I don't want some foundation to come and say they haven't grown, they haven't evolved, they haven't. They have sustained their work in that community.

And I also think it's worth asking the question, what might be sustained at the outset of a project with the community? It's definitely worth asking what could be sustained at the end? And I think a lot of artists skip town before asking that question.

But I also do think about the Value of projects sustained in practices that were left behind, that have been adopted by community members that use them, share them. Started their own theater company, their own organized book reading group, whatever. There is spatial change.

We've got a lot of projects that have changed. Parks and playgrounds and greens places and pockets, parks and decided where dance can happen, where things can happen, happen.

People may not track the things that are still going on as a result of it back to that.

But then I also think relationships that were created in a project that continue and that multiply and that go out into a web leadership that is developed and moves on into other spheres. Arts extension service Our work was considered community leadership through the arts.

If somebody got involved in helping make the community Arts Council get going and then they ran for school committee, that was good. And then literally making space and skills for the arts and creativity that people are using.

So those are all ways that I thought it might not be the it. The project. It might be those people may take that into a hundred other places and spaces. So I'm not sure everything should be sustained.

Yeah.

And actually the nonprofit world suffers from boards of directors who have invested longer than the originating artists who think that their job is to keep the organization alive, even though they're just selling historic shadows.

This comes quickly to what I refer to as sole source versus sole source. S O L E Founder syndrome versus S O U L. The soul of that founder is in the organization, and they don't know when to get out of the way.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Here's the thing with sustainability. Everything you just described, Barbara, all those relationships that produce lasting impact have a trail, okay.

That dissipates, that people can't see, but.

They know that they trust.

And if they follow that trail back.

They will recognize that even though the play's the thing or the dance or the mural, after all is said and done, the creative relationships that have been produced can have even more value, more lasting power. And the individual and organizational trust that comes with that is a precious asset that you. You just can't buy.

And if you start out knowing this, you can actually craft a program with the goal of building the kinds of relationships that transcend the run of the show or the grand that ran out. If you recognize that these relationships are gold, then the work can become a kind of creative alchemy.

Bill Using that point about knowing our history, Rhea Ben, who has a Sankofa theater company in Harrisburg, an extremely powerful community theater comes out of Baltimore, which is out of the Philip Arnault Baltimore theater project 50 years ago. She may not know that, but she knows what to do when she gets in the theater with the community. That came down.

Maybe Philip's name didn't come, or maybe his building on the corner is not there anymore. But the body of work and the method of engagement and making work about community has come down through generations.

I agree, and I think about that way with John o'. Neill. His fingerprints are so many places he has never been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even if we've been talking, I realized that the 10 rules for story circles do exactly that thing.

They create this circle in which we can all operate with shared basis. I wanted to notice that. Bill, the first two questions use community arts. And your last question here uses community cultural development.

I know.

I was thinking about community cultural development in two ways. So there is work organizations, people projects that are really helping to raise cultural practices within communities.

And then there's community cultural development that we do. Community and economic development. And it's not like both are good or bad. Bad, they're different.

I think sustainability of a community making culture central to its development, whether that is economic, social, health, and well being wise, that's a thing. And there are community arts projects and how they are sustainable or. Or evolutionary in the community.

So you go on to a school and you see a really amazing residency. That's where the moral and ethical piece comes around to this idea of sustainability.

Because I believe that education that treats the human creative process as trivial borders on malpractice. It is not trivial. It is essential to learning. And that's where the sustainability piece really matters.

We would never do that with learning how to count or how to read and write. We wouldn't say, oh, this year we're going to dabble in learning how to spell.

There are some aspects of this circ, like schools and prisons and in health care, where there's a lot at stake, I think should be treated with special care.

That's my point about advocacy. We as citizens know how to advocate for potholes, for street lights. We do not know how to advocate for murals.

We do not know how to advocate for choruses or theater or music education as being the primary cognitive learning ability. We come out once a year in Washington on the budget day. Remember, the Day Without Art was the largest art event in the country.

Uh oh, we lost Barbara. So Lenny, while she's finding her way back, have to ask you another question.

When we talk about the necessity for a sustained cultural presence in communities and institutions, the questions of measurable impact always comes up, as it should. Since you've been both a funder and a practitioner. Can you talk about that?

Yes.

I do want to say that this notion of our relevance and how we measure our impact, we know how to measure learning disabilities, but we don't know how to measure aesthetic disabilities, how to deal with illiteracy. But the notion of not having an aesthetic core or aesthetic way of looking at the world didn't matter, right back.

In the 19th century. They didn't give creativity or the imagination a moment's thought when they crafted the educational canon.

And whether they knew it or not, they were aiding and abetting the autocratic impulses that were stirring then and as we all know, have persisted. Right.

And one of the primary focuses of the current authoritarian movement is to stifle and bury and push aside creators in this country. And it is not some haphazard budget saving activity.

And these guys know because all of their predecessors in East Germany and in Cambodia, all these places I've studied, that's the first place they go is they say these creators are dangerous, so let's, let's stifle them. And right now it's above and beyond proving that we deserve a line item in the budget. It's basically it's survival issue.

I would encourage your, your listeners with a quote from my dad who always said, you have to have turf before you can have turf wars. We only have any turf to war over. But we need to circle the wagons. We need to draw closer to each other.

I agree.

We need to become the four walls for each other right now so that we have that sustainability. We can be self sustainers through our collaboration and cooperation.

And Sloan, the irony is that of all the world's endeavors, we practice, the only one that doesn't need, you know, some big giant energy sucking AI data center to make it happen. It's right here with us. So what's at risk is the humans and their creative processes that right there in the trenches.

And this is an editorial opinion, but that's why I say let them have the building. The Kennedy Center's provenance was the inspiration and the integrity of the morals and the ethics of the artists who work there.

Yes.

It wasn't about the building.

No, not at all.

No, go for it. You can have the building or you can have your John Phillips Sousa concert. No offense.

We will take our essence and our inspiration and we will maintain our morals and our values. Yes. In the community. By not playing, not giving our core to be housed in an empty shell.

Thank you for that Mr. Sloan. Yes. Not giving our core to be housed in an empty shell.

Not allowing the arc of the moral universe to be sidelined by cheap attention grabbing headlines and griffs. Right? Or a half baked AI tune.

So Lenny, in our last episode when we were talking about humility, you talked about your encounter with the legendary poet and potter MC Richards where she smashed her beautiful pots because they weren't just right and you couldn't believe it. I wanted to share that I was also privileged to have learned something from her.

Yes, it was a craft conference at.

Penland in North Carolina and and some.

Of the folks attending were complaining that they weren't being taken seriously as artists and they went on and on about that. Da da da da da. And MC She's a powerful woman. She's quiet. But then she got up, she pounded the table and she said what the.

Fuck are you talking about?

You are the vessel. Some gallery, some award giver, some institution is not defining who you are in the world.

Be the work.

Be the thing you want to be.

Don't let them tell you who you are.

Your work will suffer as a result.

I have to leave you. I have to run off and do my 12 lines.

Thank you Sloan.

And thank you Barbara out there in the ether. And of course, thank you to all of you who have been listening. Before we close, here are three takeaways from this conversation.

First, sustainability is not always about keeping a project or organization alive. Often it's about what remains after the grant ends. Relationships, practices, leadership and trust that continue to shape communities in unseen ways.

Second, activist artists inherit a lineage whether they know it or not.

Our work is built on the fingerprints of those who came before us, and understanding that lineage can give us both grounding and courage in uncertain times like these. Third, in moments of authoritarian pressure and cultural erasure, sustainability becomes a a moral issue protecting the human creative process.

Imagination, expression and meaning making is not optional, it is essential to democracy itself.

Finally, please know that you can find a link to all six 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 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. And once again, please know this episode has been 100% human.