Annual Gatherings

History of Projects
Back in 2000, American Festival Project (AFP) Annual Gathering was the Central Appalachian Project. Over 40 artists from around the country were invited to Eastern Kentucky and hosted by volunteer families in their own homes for a week. Many collaborations and projects came out of this gathering, some conceived and produced within the week, others extending for the next four years, among them was Suzanne Lacy’s work with Elkhorn City.

After it's initial two-year AFP phase, the community leaders of Elkhorn City as an economic engine for increasing tourism, engendering civic pride and creating public space/park where none had existed, adopted Lacy’s project. These specifics multiplied from a river walk into a town mural. Since her project began, a local resident has returned from ‘the big city’ and founded a theater troupe, staging “The Kentucky Cycle” as it’s first production.

Martha Bowers did a project with youth during the same week as the residency, culminating in a demonstration for greater students voice in government and educational decisions, complete with powerful drawings and posters visually articulating the problem and the possibilities for change.
And John Malpede’s The Kennedy Project began there as well, culminating in RFK/EKY.

Over the last four years, AFP secured funding for RFK/EKY production, planning and residency visits as John imagined, researched, planned, helped write grants and brought the massive project to life. On repeated visits to the area, he built the relationships one at a time with the hundreds of community members all over Eastern Kentucky who participated. The project successfully collaborated with multiple community partners, becoming integrated in classroom curriculum at many of Eastern Kentucky's educational institutions. In the end, for me, it was the relationships that were the fuel and center of this (I believe) first-ever progressive historical recreation.

Mission Transformation
In 2001, during a gathering of over 60 national community artists in Upaya, New Mexico, AFP initiated a transformation that began with examining it’s core mission. By 2002 there was consensus that the ‘working mission’ would focus on developing, documenting, advocating for and strengthening the practice of community arts work that was purposely engaging social issues:

The American Festival Project is a collection of community-centered arts practitioners joined together in a movement to utilize culture and the arts in an imaginative and brilliant pursuit of social justice. The Project believes in the inherent value of cultural identity, cultural diversity, cultural exchange, and in the need for both excellence and a workable aesthetic in the field of community-centered arts.

Through its wide-reaching network, and its various creative and educational projects, the AFP uses its resources to assure that the arts and culture remain an integral part of daily community life and that communities of all sorts explore and practice thoughtfully a creative exchange of ideas, narratives, and visions as they work toward a better and welcoming future.

Projects that would serve as focal points in future Annual Gatherings would be chosen either by theme-based (class, race, urban, rural, etc;) or by methodology (historical recreations, community development, locally-initiated, professional/community, story-circles), with the goal improving both skills and theory in the field.

The Gatherings would provide an opportunity for artists, cultural workers, educators, community members and invited guests to come and meet together over several days, participating in an actual project as that year’s Gatherings case study. It would bring a national focus to the artist(s) and communities we visited, allowing an in-depth learning exchange between local and national participants. Over the course of two years, through the generous and critical support of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, in particular, we were able to achieve our goals.

AFP Annual Gathering 2003 Knoxville TN
We decided to enact our mission by organizing Annual Gatherings that would each focus on particular community arts project(s) and/or practices. Knoxville was the first new model. There, through the reports and analyses of over 40 community partners, a group of over 60 artists and cultural workers from around the country learned about Carpetbag Theatre’s four years of amazing work in the heart of Knoxville’s Black community.

With several years of funding from AFP, The Literacy Project had put community arts to work as a critical tool in addressing core issues of literacy and immigration. Over the four days, we were able to discuss and reflect on the complex challenges that multi-year African-American locally-based community arts projects face as they deal with visibility, politically driven economic empowerment zones, racism, under funding and the increasing burdens of inequity.

We held our Gathering at Knoxville College, one of the South’s historic Black colleges. Its once beautiful campus is now in progressive deterioration; entire dorms empty, windows broken, fountains dry. Eating in the dining room with a welcoming staff and a determined group of part-time work/study students, served as a powerful example of the forces Carpetbag has to face as well as the strengths they have to draw on as they continue the hard and rewarding work ahead. We sang and danced, talked, sang, killed palmetto bugs and didn’t sleep for the entire time. My life was changed.

AFP Annual Gathering 2004 Whitesburg KY
Over 40 key artists and 8 partnering organizations contributed to the success of the Art & Democracy conference.

Partnering organizations:
Helping AFP to disseminate the Art & Democracy “CALL” to their member artists and organizational affiliates were: Animating Democracy, Alternate Roots, Appalshop, National Voice, Center for Arts and Culture, National Performance Network, and Kentucky Arts Council

Organizational affiliations of participants in the Art & Democracy:
Adult Literacy Through the Arts, Alternate Roots, Appalachian Media Institute, Appalachian Regional Commission, Appalshop, Bridge Project, CAPP Resources for Social Change Institute, Carpetbag Theater, Center for Art and Public Life, Center for Rural Strategies, Community Arts Network, Community Land Trust, Dance Theater Etcetera, Factor X, Federation of Communities in Service, Ford Foundation, Global Exchange, Haw River Festival, Holler to the Hood, International Latino Theater Festival of Los Angeles, Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Los Angeles Poverty Department, Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, National Performance Network, Network of Ensemble Theaters, New World Theater Youth Initiative, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pangea Theater, rePublicArt.org, Santa Clara Pueblo Reservation, St. Anthony's Foundation, Teen Project, Terra Moto Inc., Theater Communications Group, The Kitchen/NY, Transart Foundation, Virginia Forest Watch, Women Playwrights International

Participating Community Arts Educators:
The Gathering also included professors who are taking the lead in introducing the work of social change and the arts into their organizations, curriculums and administrative structures. Jan Cohen-Cruz (NYU), Bob Leonard (VT), Patty Raun (VT), Catherine Graham (McMaster University), Suzanne Lacy (Otis College), Maureen Mullinax (AMI School), Robert Gipe (Southeast Community College, KY), Louise Smith (Antioch College), Doug Borwick (Salem College), Amy Marshall (Eastern Kentucky University), Joyce Ogden (Spalding University), Caron Atlas (NYU), Norman Frisch (NYU), and Martha Bowers (NYU).

Possible Future Annual Gatherings

• Week-long gathering in Tijuana/San Diego for an overview of the twenty years of border arts that have been produced in the area. Choosing three projects to focus on, each with a very different origins and methodologies. Four possible examples might be: a. local unfunded grassroots response to an immediate situation b. a nationally-funded project produced by a major institution serving the area c. an artist-initiated project that did not involve community members d. an arts project that was used to directly affect or influence policy and/or public opinion.
• Week-long gathering centered in Whitesburg KY that focuses on two multi-year community arts projects that encapsulate very different methodologies, goals and processes. A. Harlan County/Southeastern Community College B. Elkhorn City's different arts projects and groups that have become a part of a cultural tourism initiative.
• Week-long gathering at Emerson College in Boston MA where AFP member Robbie McCauley has been teaching and working with community groups. One of her goals is to use her student's course-work to structure a long-term institutionalized challenge to the current and systemic isolation between poor urban surrounding communities and the universities

Reflections and Ruminations
By Marty Pottenger (AFP)