Community Arts

Millennials live differently than previous generations of Americans. We stay single longer. More of us have student debt and are self-employed, freelancers, and members of the growing gig economy. According to Randstad’s research on the workplace, more than half of Americans will be self-employed by 2025. More than 40% of gig workers will be millennials, a figure that will likely grow given the size of the generation and its youth. Millennials are the largest demographic in American history. We are the future.

THE FRONT, a gallery and performing arts space that serves the communities of San Ysidro and Tijuana, sits on a busy thoroughfare only a few hundred yards from the busiest border land crossing in the Western Hemisphere. A program of Casa Familiar — a social service organization that operates senior and affordable housing to health services to youth programming in facilities scattered in and around San Ysidro’s well-loved Beyer Park — THE FRONT was opened in 2004 as a passion project for artists living and rooted in San Ysidro, the southernmost neighborhood of San Diego.

It started in Fall 2016, when Staten Island Arts — the local arts council for the fifth borough of New York City — was approached by Kerry McCarthy and Michele Kumi Baer of The New York Community Trust, Betsy Dubovsky and Laura Jean Watters of The Staten Island Foundation, and Karen Rosa of the Altman Foundation. This group of concerned funders had observed that Staten Island’s arts programming audiences weren’t racially diverse, and came to us seeking to partner on a program that would thoughtfully address the issue.

As New York City was bracing for weeks on end in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, wreaking devastation throughout the city and a wake of still unaccounted trauma, we turned to our communities for support, for understanding, for validation and guidance to navigate our way through quarantine into a future that looks and feels very different. And, creativity was core to this.

Introduction

John Ton, Robby’s Arc. Photo courtesy of author.

In a corner of the reading room in a public library near downtown Brooklyn, an artist/educator guides a group of children through the process of grinding up insects with a mortar and pestle and then using a muller to mix the resulting red powder with water. “By crushing the cochineal beetle,” she says, which lives on cacti in arid regions of Mexico and is still used as a natural food coloring for ketchup and many other processed foods, “medieval and early modern artists could produce this wonderful red color for their paintings.”

Main streets in rural Colorado are getting a jolt of creativity and economic vitality thanks to an innovative partnership between the State of Colorado, philanthropic funders, local leaders, and a nonprofit housing developer. The Space to Create Colorado initiative, launched in July 2015, is transforming rural communities throughout the state by providing affordable housing/workspace as well as community spaces for creatives.

“Art in the public realm activates public space for its intended democratic purpose,” noted Anne Pasternak, former director at Creative Time and currently director at the Brooklyn Museum in an NEA interview.

It’s Friday night. A Netflix subscriber is sitting on their couch, scrolling through an endless feed of entertainment options. They pass by the next episode of Stranger Things, skip over the Marvel movies, shrug at Friday Night Lights. Finally, they land on the latest environmental documentary film release. They grab their blanket and popcorn and eagerly press play.

Adults age sixty-five and above are currently the fastest-growing segment of the US population. In 2016, there were 47.8 million individuals age sixty-five and over in the United States (US Census Bureau 2017), and this number is expected to more than double by 2060. By 2040, nearly half of older adults are expected to come from diverse racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds (Vincent and Velkoff 2010; Johnson, Rodriquez-Salazar, et al. 2018). San Francisco’s population of older adults is higher than the national norm.