Opinion: while community arts as a descriptive term has certainly declined, its legacy can still be found in various initiatives and projects
As a researcher, art historian and evaluator of a particular kind of art practice called socially engaged art, I am often met by the general public's uncertainty as to what this kind of art is. In contrast the term community arts is a familiar one and is used regularly to describe a wide variety of art practices taking place in and with particular communities.
Community art is defined as any work of art or art project that emerges from a community which consciously seeks to increase the social, economic and political power of that community and in doing so often challenges the dominance of the establishment, and the need for collective community action. Despite this, the Arts Council seems to have retired the term. For example, their latest strategy document Making Great Art Work 2016-2025 contains no reference to community art.
So, what happened to community arts? To answer this question, we must look back to the early 1970s and 80s. Sandy Fitzgerald, a key figure in the community arts movement in Ireland, observed that this was a time when the traditional art world of museums and galleries, and the particular voice with which they spoke, was of little interest to communities struggling with a housing crisis, and rising inflation due to the oil crisis of 1973 and 1979.
Throughout this period, community arts initiatives developed across the country. An organisation called City Arts (formally Grapevine Arts) became known for its street theatre programme. The North City Centre Community Action Programme (NCCAP) was formed to resist the destruction of Dublin's north inner-city communities. They staged an arts festival called The Inner City Looking On and supported grassroots theatre. Galway’s Macnas produced high quality street spectacle, while Waterford’s Ciotog produced and toured community theatre.
In 1984 the establishment of Creative Arts For Everyone (CAFE) as a coordinating body for community arts following Ireland’s first conference on the topic at Dublin's North Star Hotel. This meeting helped articulate if not define community arts as "encouraging critical thought in both the participants and audiences of the work and validating the idea that ordinary people can have an active role in building culture." It rejected the notion that ordinary people could only consume professional art made by professional artists.
In 1985, the Arts Council responded to the growth of Community Arts commissioning a research project to help better define and map different activities considered as community art. Over 114 different projects are reported to have applied.
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From RTÉ Archives, Tommie Gorman reports for RTÉ News on the 1986 Sligo Community Arts Festival
But despite all of this activity, community arts, at least in name, declined from the late 1990s onwards. One contributing factor was the question of how it was defined. Community artists had often resisted defining the term too much because there was much less Arts Council funding to draw from than for more traditional art forms such as theatre or the visual arts. As Sandy Fitzgerald observed, artists could be reluctant to define their work as community art because they did not want it associated with the socialist or Marxist politics that had underpinned it, particularly in the UK.
The drawback of all of this was that community arts became a stand-in term to describe facilitated art workshops as well as more grassroots initiatives. Coupled with the Arts Council’s interest in broadly defined notions of ‘access’ to professional art, this shifted interest away from ideas of cultural democracy and community activism to ideas of ‘participation’ in art.
However, ‘participation’ is not the same as community arts. As community artists have pointed out, it is not just the participation of communities that must be considered, but where and how decisions are made. In other words, the community should have a central voice in how a project's themes and budgets are managed. As the term community arts disappeared, it was replaced by socially engaged art, a term arising from the established art world to describe similar practices involving non-artists working with professionals in the late 1990s.
The need for critical reflection and evaluation of such work remains as relevant today if it is to survive.
Another contributing factor was the closure of the City Arts organisation. In 2001, 21 staff were laid off when the organisation closed to undertake a two year review. By 2005, the Arts Council had withdrawn its annual funding. Some argued that CityArts had descended into "irrelevancy" by then, becoming more concerned with theory rather than action. Ohers point to projects such as Tower Songs, which worked with community members in Fatima Mansions and Dolphin House, Rialto to make visible their experiences of urban regeneration such as the transition from tower block living.
While community arts as a descriptive term has certainly declined, its legacy can be found in initiatives such as the Arts Council’s Creative Places programme and Create Ireland’s Artist in the Community Scheme. At best, art projects produced within these streams work closely with communities to achieve shared social and artistic aims and at worst they risk co-opting the ideals of community work. Whatever the case, the need for critical reflection and evaluation of such work remains as relevant today if it is to survive.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
