Warning: Trespassers will be persecuted

We are artists. We are teachers and students. We are mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons. We are thinkers and we are doers. We are movers and we are peacemakers; but we are not whole. We, as a New Orleans community, share a love of second lines, plentiful drinks, sweltering humidity, and individual expression– no matter how outrageous it appears to an outsider. Yet at the end of the day we go home to separate parts of town, and they are hardly equal. The socio-economic rift in this city seems inviolable. We couldn’t say we knew it to be a different way, a better way. Now we are faced with a problem that has no precedent of solution. However, we come armed with a fervent love of our home, a zeal for creativity and innovation, and if our mere being here wasn’t proof enough, unbreakable spirits. The question that inevitably arises is how one might approach the community with a creative endeavor that is nonexclusive and accessible. Project coordinators wonder how to breach the wall that stands between the art market and art for art’s sake. While the coordinators may start out believing they are the ones giving the art, a greater reward from the community will end up theirs for the taking.
The PBS film Stranger with a Camera depicts an ignominious outcome of this artists’ dilemma. In 1967 when the murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor made international headlines, the nation found itself divided between those who saw Hobart Ison as a depraved murderer and those who saw his act as a justified struggle for dignity. Undoubtedly O’Connor’s intent was far from malevolent; to his film crew, family, and friends, the murder was a horrific shock. However, the residents of Kentucky’s Appalachia inferred implications of O’Connor’s work that he had evidently not taken into account, and thus his death heralded an unwelcome wake-up call to an already exhausted nation.
New York producer Francis Thompson hired O’Connor to assist in directing a film aptly entitled US (ITVS). The film had lofty ambitions for the portrayal of American life; the scope of American experience was to be captured in snapshots and reproduced for mass consumption. However, an extensive project such as this could hardly begin to encapsulate the feelings behind the picture and much less a comprehensive rendering of each community. O’Connor had embarked on a whirlwind tour of the United States with expectations of a newfound familiarity. Instead he found out there was much more that he didn’t know, and his ignorance would cost him. O’Connor and his film crew were more than outsiders; they were outsiders with a mission to transform a community without their permission. Lesson one of building community through the arts: Engage the community to best determine the needs the project should meet. Artists that attempt to include a community in their work or as their work must cultivate a willingness to change direction on a whim, even if the change compromises the artist’s original plan. A fundamental problem of the US project was that American citizens were largely uninvolved and uninformed about the making of the film. Despite the indubitably noble aspirations of the filmmakers, they obviously forgot their purpose of serving the community amid their rather myopic means of reaching it.
A similar parallel can be drawn to a number of case studies in the Art/Vision/Voice text. The piece “You Can Only Hear if You Really Listen: A Youth-Centered Community Arts Project Emerges in Urban Baltimore” epitomizes the trials an artist faces when undertaking such a communal venture. When Maryland Institute College of Art students began an art program for inner city children in Baltimore, the student leaders clearly had their own agenda. One leader insisted on a difficult contour drawing exercise that the youth did not appreciate, understand, and most importantly, enjoy. As attendance dropped and negative feedback rose, two other student leaders decided it was high time to put their own ideas aside for a moment and listen to what the kids wanted to do. Listen they did, and their efforts were rewarded. Once the art program catered to the youth, attendance grew steadily and an exciting burst of creativity was realized in their artwork. As one program director remarked at the semester’s conclusion, “When these kids say, ‘Can you feel me?’ They don’t just mean ‘Do you hear what I say?’ They mean: ‘Did you take in what you heard me just say and can you try it on for size, can you walk a mile in my shoes? Can you attempt to understand what I’m experiencing?’ And in a very profound way that’s what happened over the course of the semester” (Krafchek, et. al 29).
Additionally, artists working in a community often confront sensitive situations that require their utmost delicacy and attention. Hugh O’Connor walked into a hotbed of economic, political, and social issues without a proper introduction and thus was made to bear the brunt of their release. While his murder is not defendable in a court of law or most other American communities, the citizens of Letcher County, Kentucky found themselves disgraced by O’Connor’s presence and vindicated by his erasure. O’Connor went to Kentucky to reveal a blighted community to the world. To the Kentuckians, O’Connor’s camera posed a threat to the civility of their lifestyle and traditions without being acquainted.
This cultural confrontation occurred in another case study in Art/Vision/Voice entitled “Looking In/ Looking Out: Learning About Real Partnership in Watsonville, California.” In this example the student leaders of the community project met “a leased space in an old church. Inside, the main building is run-down with long, dark, windowless hallways, worn linoleum floors, bathrooms in need of renovation, and small classrooms jam-packed with desks, chairs, and students”(Mesa-Bains, Weiner 84). However, instead of photographing the dismal aspects of the school, the university students worked with the high school students to beautify their halls in a way that combined student expression and constructive social commentary. The final digital media product is palpable evidence of the bonds formed between the students and a new discourse of hope in Watsonville.
I am reminded now of my own experience with community building and art. I came to New Orleans with an idea, no matter how vague or inaccurate, of the culture, people, and places I would find here. I came as a writer, a voyeur no less, yet I sought my Muse along the balmy banks of the Mississippi, without the aid of locals, storytellers, or musicians. Ironically, I sought inspiration in places far removed from my ideas of New Orleans and not surprisingly my efforts failed. I couldn’t write here, couldn’t wrap my head around the teeming vibrancy of every street corner. I wasn’t listening because I thought I had already heard.
Hugh O’Connor tried to capture Appalachia but in the end it captured him. He lost because he wasn’t on the right side, or perhaps because there were no sides to join at all. As artists we are given an opportunity to break down the norms, the social and political barriers and just share our experience of life with each other. Each one in each community has some story to tell; the question now is will we listen?

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