The Arts in the Small Community
Submitted by Steve on March 7, 2016
From Doug Borwick, posted to his blog Engaging Matters:
2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of The Arts in the Small Community project led by Robert E. Gard, and we invite you to celebrate with us! Robert E. Gard was a visionary in the field of community arts. While many people in the 1940’s and beyond were talking about “access” to the arts for people, typically, that meant that Everyman should be in the audience or the gallery to witness America’s finest artists.
Gard was clear that it meant more than this: that Everyman had a right to create, converse and critique. “In terms of American democracy, the arts are for everyone…” His entire career, beginning in the 1930’s when he worked with farmers in Upstate New York to write and produce plays about the experiences of their communities, to a speech he gave just before his death in 1992, was devoted to this vision.