Creating the city: An interview with Antonia Darder and Pepón Osorio

Abstract

Today there is a lot of discussion about creative economies and how cities are the engines driving growth in a variety of industries. But cities are not merely rows of buildings, or sets of laws, such as zoning ordinances or parking regulations. A city is, rather, a set of dynamic experiences that we all participate in as co(labor)ators. As a way to explore issues of urban spaces and art, the authors organized a public dialogue on issues pertaining to arts, community, identity, education, and policy with two leading artists/educators/activists: Pepón Osorio and Antonia Darder. The interview is wide ranging and brings into focus voices and perspectives often left out of policy debates concerning the politics of art, art education, and activism in urban environments. The authors of this article then propose four core principles drawn from the dialogue that can guide policy reforms for the arts in urban schools. Such principles argue that policy must be made from within the creative commonwealth of cities rather than above or outside it.

Today there is a lot of discussion about creative economies and how cities are the engines driving growth in a variety of industries that are based on the development of information capital and immaterial labor for growth. ¹ PreK-16 arts education has been recruited to play a key role in developing the skills, competencies, and knowledge necessary to foster creativity as a marketable attribute for tomorrow’s workforce. As arts educators and researchers, our work is situated around questions of the urban and life in cities. Because of this, we felt it imperative to critically consider the connections being consolidated around cities and creativity. The purpose of this article is to highlight salient points about the arts, arts education, and urban spaces that were discussed during a public conversation (interview) with internationally known scholar/activist Antonia Darder and artist Pepón Osorio. To help us understand the complex matrix binding together creativity and cities, we were eager to hear from two important voices from the front lines of urban arts and education that might be useful to public policy.

As a way to explore issues of urban spaces and art we organized a public forum in the spring of 2016 in downtown Dallas, Texas called “Creating the City: A dialogue on Contemporary Art and Education in Urban Spaces.” Our goal was to engage with community members, local art teachers, and city leaders to collaboratively examine the relationship between the arts, arts education, and the city. We, along with other faculty and students at the University of North Texas (UNT), hosted a day-long event of artmaking and conversation with support from various partners, including the Jo Ann and Dr. Charles O. Onstead Institute for Education in the Visual Arts and Design, the University, and the UNT System.

To organize “Creating the City,” we felt it was important to articulate, at least for ourselves, a tentative conceptualization of the relationship between creativity and the city. We were interested less in creativity as an individual and entrepreneurial skill than as a collective event. As opposed to educational theorists such as Ken Robinson who repeatedly call for schools to promote creativity in order to further economic growth and entrepreneurialism for the 21^st century, we wanted to explore an alternative notion of creativity that is not reducible to instrumental, economic ends. ² In our minds, creating is a participatory, collective action that happens between people, materials, and environments, and thus exists in excess of any individual’s creativity or talents. It is often unpredictable, unscripted, spontaneous, improvisational, and therefore surprising. It is a shared happening that no one necessarily owns or directly controls and is thus part of a commonwealth that always partially escapes becoming property of a “creative class” or an engine of “creative industries.” ³ To create something is not necessarily to express a skill or an individual talent so much as to open one’s self up to unforeseen, collective/collaborative possibilities. If individual creativity in K-12 schools is often linked to growing certain economic sectors fueled by immaterial labor (including software development, management, digital utilities, and the service sector) then collective creativity is linked to democratic openness to difference, political rebellion, and social experimentation. ⁴ As Michael Peters aptly summarizes, there is creativity for human capital development and creativity for what he refers to as co(labor)ation, which is linked to intensifying what is held in common rather than what is privately owned and operated. ⁵

While not often discussed, this alternative notion of democratic creativity is inherently linked to cities. Cities themselves are not merely rows of buildings, storefronts, or sets of laws such as zoning ordinances or parking regulations. A city is rather a set of dynamic experiences that we all participate in and spontaneously co-create. Or, as Andy Merrifield argues, cities are places of encounters that are open-ended, dynamic, relational, and constantly in a state of formation, deformation, and reformation. ⁶ City time is the time when things happen, when bodies co-mingle, ideas flow, sensations circulate, and politics erupt. As such, cities are dialogic encounters between various actors (material and immaterial, organic and inorganic). We could even say that a city happens when and where dialogic encounters happen, are taken up, and stabilized (temporarily of course) into various material, political, and social manifestations. The city thus provides the infrastructure for growing creative economies but also the common linguistic, social, and intellectual co(labor)ative encounters that could lead to creative rebellion. ⁷ Our event, “Creating the City,” was designed to highlight the work of arts educators in adding to and shaping these dialogic, co(labor)ative, creative encounters.

In addition to celebrating the work of arts educators in creating the city, we also wanted to highlight the significant contributions of children to the voices that constitute the dialogue of a city. Thus, children were busy creating a city of their own throughout the daylong event, which was held on Dallas’s Main Street in a former retail department store that is now home to the University of North Texas (UNT) System. They began at 10 a.m. that morning with an empty, open-framed cube threaded with wire into which they could hang their works of art. Throughout the building’s lobby there were art stations set up where children explored five interlocking questions concerning the city:

Who is in a city?

How is a city created?

How do we get around in a city?

What is in a city?

What do cities need?

University art teacher candidates facilitated the stations, which hummed with activity as children and their families created sculptures, drawings, paintings, cut-outs, and folded constructions. Each element was then hung within the oversized cube, thus creating an additive installation that, like all cities, grew in unpredictable and surprising ways.

The children created a city out of and through a dialogue—not a dialogue that was spoken so much as enacted. Here, dialogue was verbal and visual, linguistic and gestural. And in this sense, their kinetic installation was an inaugurating gesture for that evening’s main dialogue, which was also dedicated to the exploration of these same questions: Who is in a city? How is a city created? What do cities need?

In order to help think through these questions and to theorize the relation between creativity, arts education, and cities (as dialogic, creative, and contested places), we brought together two well-known artists/educators/activists: Pepón Osorio and Antonia Darder. They were interviewed by David Herman, Jr., a doctoral student in art education at UNT. Mr. Herman was chosen to lead the dialogue because of his extensive, 15 years of professional experience in visual art and social justice education. As co-founder and creative director of Preservation LINK, Inc., a community-based arts education organization headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Mr. Herman has worked with numerous urban communities, schools, and museums to empower youth through the visual arts.

Pepón Osorio has worked with well over 25 communities across the U.S. and internationally, creating installations based on real life experiences. His work has appeared in El Museo del Barrio, New York; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Whitney Biennial at Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Sao Paulo Bienal, Sao Paulo, Brazil among others. He also received a John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation Fellowship and was honored with the 2008 Legacy Award from the Smithsonian Institute Latino Initiative in Washington, DC. Currently, Osorio is Carnell Professor in the Tyler School of the Arts at Temple University, and he was recently nominated by President Barack Obama to serve at the National Council for the Arts (NCA).

Dr. Antonia Darder is the Leavey Presidential Chair and Professor of Ethics and Moral Leadership at Loyola Marymount University’s College of Education. Her book A Dissident Voice: Essays on Culture, Pedagogy, and Power encapsulates her many scholarly and creative projects over the last 30 years, weaving together poetry, visual art, and essays that confront class oppression, racism, sexism, and discrimination with courage, passionate determination, and love. Dr. Antonia Darder has been honored for outstanding service to the Latino Community from El Centro de Acción Social. She also has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a national Kellogg Foundations Fellowship, the Social Justice in Education Award from the University of New Mexico, and an Outstanding Book of the Year honor from the American Educational Research Association.

The following is an edited excerpt of the interview that took place at “Creating the City.” It offers points of view that are not often included in or referenced by policy decisions. In the spirit of our emerging philosophy of creativity within cities, we conceptualized the interview as an encounter between artists, activists, and educators in an urban place both inside and outside of a formal, academic setting. The transcript presents us with new primary source material for further reflecting upon the need to think policy from within the creative commonwealth of cities rather than above or outside it.

Interview

Herman: First, both of you have come to the field of art and art education from social activism and/or social work backgrounds. How does your history of community engagement inform your understanding of education in and through the arts?

Osorio: There was a woman, her name was Evelina Antoinette, who was a pioneer political activist in the South Bronx that I met when I moved from the island of Puerto Rico in 1975 to the Republic of the South Bronx in New York City. I came across her because my aunt, who was also an activist, knew her. She was working with an organization called United Bronx Parents. It’s an organization that grew out of the Bronx, but also interconnected to the Young Lords in New York City. You can imagine a Puerto Rican coming from the island who might not have that kind of political awareness, and processing a lot to decolonizing himself. As I got to New York City, I began moving and dealing with people that were powerhouses when it came to activism. I began to understand that by creating interruptions you begin to understand or have a greater learning experience for what situations are.

For me, the learning experience is about shifting knowledge, shifting experiences, and placing them back to the origins of the resources, where they come from. That’s basically what, for me, is the learning experience from the community. It’s really about how you shift resources and how you change the existing model by actually utilizing the same mechanisms that are imposed on you. For me, that’s actually part of education.

Darder: I can’t think of any aspect of my development, whether personal or political, that exists outside of my being born a colonized subject to the United States. Puerto Rico continues to be colonized and continues to suffer from colonization in ways that most people in the United States seem to be completely unaware of, except for those who follow this issue. As a consequence, I have had to deal with a great deal of pain and anguish tied to the fact that my mother did not fare well under colonization. Some of this I associate with her being sterilized at 19 years old after my sister was born. The craziness and struggle she underwent, coming to the United States as a poor single mother, and thinking that leaving Puerto Rico and coming to the States was going to fulfill some kind of dream turned out to be, for her, more of a nightmare. In fact, what she found was racism and economic inequality in every aspect of her social and material life. Growing up, we lived in many different rooms (not homes); this moving back and forth created in my mother incredible angst, frustration, and rage. If you understand Franz Fanon’s work correctly, Fanon would affirm that this is actually logical: given the impoverished conditions under which people are expected to survive, it is logical that people would experience either this kind of rage, or a numbing frustration.

I came to an understanding of what art represents through a different kind of dialogue with the world—given that for me art became fully linked to a sense of survival. When I didn’t have any place else I could express my struggle or express the anger or rage I felt inside, I could take that blank paper, and I could transform it in whatever I wanted it to say through the use of color, lines, and images. It was a little place in my life where I experienced a sense of freedom. Art actually provided me a place where I could feel free, when often I felt so absolutely powerless and constrained in my life, particularly within moments in my schooling.

In my work, I try to remember that all our histories—although often we don’t take our histories very seriously—yet, all our lived histories, to one extent or another, affect who we are as human beings, whether we be educators, artists, or whatever labor we carry out in the world. For example, when I was a little girl in first grade, about 6 years old, my teacher asked us to paint a picture of who we were going to be as adults. I—this very poor barrio kid, supposedly uncultured—painted myself as a painter, painting in Paris. Where did I get this idea? Who knows! I must have seen an artist in a book or something and felt that I wanted to be an artist. As kids living in tough material conditions, we were always just trying to survive, while there was all this negative stuff going on constantly around us. So in this instance, my white teacher came up behind me and when she saw my picture, said, “What’s that?” I’ll never forget it; she seemed upset with me. So, I said, “I’m painting in Paris.” To which she replied, “I didn’t ask you to paint about a hobby. I asked you to paint about what you were going to do for a job, like a nurse or a teacher or something.” Hence, from very early on, I received the message that some people have the right and privilege to do art, and people like me simply did not.

What I’m trying to say is that our relationship with the arts—that of poor working-class people of color—is often different to that of more affluent communities. What I came to understand from my life experience is that this difference is strongly connected to the different ways we are positioned in the world. So our experiences and relationship to art are, in a real sense, shaped by the privilege and power that people either have or do not have over their lives. When I became involved in community activism and working in community development, for example, the arts began to take on a new meaning. I began to understand the potential of art as a medium for empowerment. Art then became more central to my consciousness as an activist, in that it provided me a place in which the struggles of subaltern populations to survive could be better understood and dealt with. And as an educator, I also began to see art as a necessary and significant component to the education of children from oppressed communities.

Herman: What is urban? Can you, based on your experiences, flesh out what urban means for you in your work?

Darder: So much of how we experience the urban has to do, again, with who we are. If you’re a poor, working-class kid of color, then your experience of the urban is very different from that of a kid who’s living in a rich high-rise in an urban setting. So it is not surprising that it would also be very different in how our communities think about urban life. These differences are clearly at work in how, for example, an urban planner looks at the issue of gentrification and how they think of planning out communities. Generally speaking, their gaze is more centered on making sure that certain people are able to conserve and enjoy the privileges linked to their wealth and power in society and those who might interfere with the pleasures of their privilege be excluded. This is an unjust aspect of the urban that is typically hidden in mainstream discourses that support the gentrification of the urban—which usually is also accompanied with the fracturing and displacement of poor working-class communities.

So, it’s very different for those of us who grew up in particular communities where, as a consequence of the mainstream politics of the urban, we witnessed and experienced our communities pulled apart—our histories pulled apart. I want to just note here, that history is not just what we read in books; history is the very essence of our cultural existence as a people, and culture is what we ourselves create organically, in order to survive, grow, and thrive in the world.

I think understanding the notion of urban in more complex ways has to do a great deal with our ability to comprehend the urban through a dialectical or relational sense of the world. There is an underlying relational dimension of power that shapes the materiality of the urban. Hence, we have to understand the political and economic structures of urban inequality as encompassing both sociocultural and material spheres of life. All of these elements are part and parcel of how we must conceptualize the urban in our work as artist, activists, and educators. Rather than trying to make of the urban category some kind of neat little reified definition or construct, the opposite—messing, complex, fluid, ever changing, and multi-dimensional—is what we most need, especially at this time. Yet, this critical or more humanizing understanding of the urban is, in fact, the opposite of what we find in our neighborhoods and schools today, both of which are being destroyed by neoliberal policies of privatization and its market-place ideology. There was a time when we thought of the urban as indicative of a possible place for the expression of the commons. This democratic political principle of participation has been undermined. The urban has been now rarefied into an exclusionary fixed notion, where the urban has now little to do with our humanity and everything to do with the exercise of capital.

Osorio: I can only explain it from the place that I am. I feel very comfortable in an urban environment, and what I usually look for is a multi-layering of experiences happening all at the same time, where I cannot be a citizen that is a straightforward single person.

Herman: What are the possibilities for an art teacher when they consider an urban art education?

Osorio: Education needs to be de-centralized. The notion that education can only be received in an institution has to be re-examined. We need to de-centralize schools in a way that knowledge can live and be exchanged in multiple places. This notion of understanding education or art education only from the institutional place—in the public school and within higher education—there’s something wrong with that because it’s constantly altering.

Darder: I think part of what happens is that the notion of learning, too, has become rarefied so that learning is linked to a fixed core curriculum—a curriculum anchored on the knowledge privileged by the elite. Learning—learning considered legitimate—is seen as only taking place within the school. This contrasts fundamentally with a critical sense that sees learning as happening all the time—our kids are learning all the time—wherever or in whatever environment they find themselves. Unfortunately, the learning that takes place outside the classroom, especially for poor working-class kids of color, isn’t considered legitimate or relevant knowledge, and, as a consequence, is systematically marginalized.

What is particularly unfortunate for working-class communities of color is a deficit sense that permeates education and society about “the other.” As if we don’t have any worthwhile intellectual culture; or that our culture is more of a problem to our children’s learning than an asset. This deficit logic reinforces that idea that when our children enter the classroom door, they should leave everything they know—their cultural knowledge—behind. Knowledge outside the mainstream culture of schooling is generally considered not to have any real worth with respect to teaching and learning. This debilitating deficit perspective is one of the most problematic epistemological elements at work in the production of structural inequalities in both education and the arts around the world—in that it deems the wisdom and aesthetics of “the other” inferior or invisible. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that education and the arts are important arenas of struggles. What I want, however, is a truly humanizing conceptualization of education and the arts, which extends beyond the classroom and beyond the mainstream culture of schooling.

I also continue to be a strong proponent of the belief that society has a responsibility to its children; and that the society has a responsibility to create opportunities that include art education in the schooling of the most oppressed students. It should not be an optional part of the curriculum, but rather art education should be mandatory to the curriculum. Research shows us that, for example, even when we look at some of the recent neurological research, the arts—whether they are tied to music, visual arts, or dance movement—pedagogical art activities have a positive impact on children’s learning across the curriculum. So, when children, students, and especially youth participate in the arts in consistent ways, what we find is that they develop a more multi-dimensional way of understanding social phenomena and a greater capacity to engage not only with the subject matter of their schooling, but also more imaginatively with the complex conditions they encounter in their world.

Engaging the significant role of the arts to education should be important to any program that seeks to address the growing and expansive concerns of the urban today. This should provoke us to ask and contend more seriously with the underlying purpose of education? From my perspective, education should and must fundamentally be about emancipation—-about the freedom to participate in the forging of our collective future as human beings and cultural citizenships. It must then contend with our individual and collective struggles for liberation. It calls us to reinvent educational processes that truly create opportunities for all young people to understand themselves as empowered and free historical beings; to experience and evolve in their social agency, in ways that teach them to know that in community they can transform the difficult conditions that persist in their world.

Herman: What is the thing that links your poetic work, your artistic work, with your scholarly work? What is at the core of what you do with your work?

Darder: I firmly believe that everything that I create artistically or poetically happens in my body. I say this, because I perceive my body as being in constant relationship with the people and world around me, no matter whether if I’m speaking words, painting images, composing a song, or writing a poem. Perhaps it is this way for me because I never had the opportunity to study art formally in art school. Instead, I started painting as a consequence of my engagement in the world; as a means to express, uncensored, my experiences and struggles; in a sense as a historical necessity.

At times, I think about why I write theory as I do; why so I engage with the notion of liberatory education as I do today. Without a doubt, I engage educational issues as I do because I am a socialist and, as such, believe that structural changes and the redistribution of the economy are imperatives of liberatory work. Education with respects to the arts and beyond must be linked to overcoming those structures, policies, and practices of inequality that reproduce conditions of social oppression, political domination, and economic exploitation. This perspective is grounded in a very deep sense of justice; however, this sense of justice isn’t in me only as an individual. It is, in fact, part of a collective politics that is born from a deep yearning for freedom and justice—a yearning I have seen within people wherever I travel in the world. That essence of collective yearning for liberation can be found in my paintings. This essence sits at the heart of my theory-making. If my teaching, my activism, or my scholarship doesn’t engage forthrightly with the profound political questions of our time or it is not grounded in the dialectical relationship that exists between our lives as individuals and our lives as collective social beings, then I will fail to be in integrity with my own ethics of struggle. My art is no different in this respect. All of these constitute powerful forms of expressions—expressions of both the personal and the political.

Osorio: This is really interesting. The whole process of making art and using methodology, for me, comes down to this: the more that you think that you’re engaging others, it’s really about yourself. It’s an extremely selfish kind of a statement, but it’s really about yourself.

I just finished working on a project called “Reform” where I gathered many people from the community of North Philadelphia to go into a closed school, with the permission of the school district, to gather a lot of materials from a classroom and bring them to the Tyler School of Art, where I teach. We transformed the entire classroom. It was nothing but repurposed materials from the school. At the end of the day, I realized that it was really about me trying to understand whether my education, my own personal education, had been worth it.

Darder: I think that part of the struggle that I’ve faced in the past, whether it be in the academy or dealing with people who come into our communities to supposedly help us, has been that often there exists a split or a duplicity between what people are willing to do for themselves as individuals, and what they are willing to do in the interest of community. What I seek to do in relationship to my decolonizing work is explore how we can break the commonsensical belief that we exist only as individuals? I recognize that such an epistemological shift is difficult, because for many people it is tough for them to grasp this concept, due to their conditioning to think of themselves as individuals and atomistic beings. I actually do not believe that we exist solely as individuals. This is a hegemonic fallacy perpetuated by the hidden curriculum. I truly believe this is a delusional belief, which conveniently permits capitalism to thrive in the interest of the few, as so many suffer. This is why I cannot think about the arts in education, without bringing to bear the question of social class and its inextricable relationship to racism, sexism, homophobia, ablism, and so on.

Similarly, this prompts us to consider the role of ideology for both the production and access of opportunities to producers. Again, this calls for a distinct way of being and seeing the world. It signals the need for a decolonizing epistemology to guide our work as educators in urban settings. Similarly, we need to critically infuse a decolonizing epistemology in our work as artists. This decolonizing approach supports our capacity then to engage intimately and humbly with the struggles of subaltern communities. As critical educators, building an ethics of intimacy and humility further nourishes our ability to identify and engage with the suffering of oppressed communities. This signals a ways of engagement that can humanize us and also open the way for our dialogical participation, in community—participation not as oppressor/oppressed beings of contradiction, but as emancipatory historical subjects of our own destinies.

Moreover, one of my great frustrations related to educational policy in the arts today is how anti-community structures of neoliberal policies and practices have worked in opposition to the well-being of poor and working-class students of color in this country. Accordingly, student participation in the arts is predominantly reserved for a few talented individuals and the arts as reproducts created by an elite few, rather than viewing the arts as an essential component of cultural life within communities. Therefore, rather than recognizing the arts as a necessary component of good education and in the interest of urban city life, art continues to be seen as some kind of an add-on or frosting on the cake—a nice activity for children when there is money but not as a necessary and serious pedagogical intervention in urban educational settings.

In many ways, part of the struggle related to public policy is that we have people making decisions about the education of our children who don’t necessarily give a damn about the needs of our communities. To what extent are we, as educators and community people, willing to work together towards establishing an emancipatory movement of the arts, a social movement, a political movement for the arts, that links the suppression of the arts to other social issues and concerns, in ways that allow us to come to the table not as individuals, but as communities willing to fight for our children’s right to their cultural and artistic expression?

Osorio: I’ll tell you this much. What I have been thinking about in the past minute is about disruption, and the role of the artist disrupting the system. I’m thinking of Tania Bruguera and I’m thinking about a couple of other artists that have no problem with creating some sort of disruption. I’m thinking also of people, artists, who are interested in social policy, but they’re more… They have been forced to become administrators and not practicing artists, right? This corrosive kind of situation, I think that this is what Antonia (Darder) was talking about, and artists like myself, who identify ourselves not necessarily with policy, but with people that are completely disenfranchised, which is another kind of approach to the art world.

Darder: A number of times, the term “chaos” has been used today. I think that what we must develop as educators, artists, and activists is an understanding of chaos as a virtue, as a good thing—affirming that in order to truly create a democratic society we must be able to embrace chaos in that it portends a social and political place from which we can create anew. There are those of us who believe that to have true democratic life we need to be able to be comfortable with chaos. We need to be comfortable with the incomprehensible, because if we genuinely seek change, often we need to be able to go through the chaos from which change emerges. This is why I firmly believe that art is an outstanding means from which we can express emancipatory political struggle. In fact, I believe that one of the reasons art is so repressed in schools, especially within working-class communities, is that art stimulates, nourishes, and cultivates a sense of freedom, agency, empowerment, and possibility, the more that art becomes a part of students’ everyday life.

If building a sense of empowerment among working-class populations—those whose lives continue to be shaped by histories of genocide, slavery, and colonization—is feared, then it is not surprising that so few opportunities for art education exist within urban schools. I say this in that supporting the imagination, curiosity, and creative spirit of our children can be seen, inherently, as a political act, with the potential for transformative change.

Similarly, I believe that so much of what we’re struggling with here has to do with how we, as critical educators, become genuinely comfortable in the face of the incomprehensible? How do we take the comprehensibility of injustice and transform it into what currently may well be the incomprehensibility of a just future? Or how do we come to understand that many things seem incomprehensible precisely because of our conditioned injustice? So how then can we take that which appears incomprehensible and make truly comprehensible, through creating new spaces for the expression of freedom and for understanding that there are truly many ways to be human in the world?

Reflections on arts education in urban schools

A series of issues were raised in this conversation with Osorio and Darder that revolve around the complex relationship between the arts, community, identity, and education. What was perhaps most inspiring about the dialogue was the recognition of the need for a new, post-colonial, multi-layered methodology for urban arts education—an approach that does not shy away from the contradictions and ambivalences of city life so much as embrace them as opportunities for creative mash-up, political disruption, and shared struggle.

Urban arts education is not simply about how to use the cultural resources of cities to expand an arts curriculum. Nor is it simply about asserting the right of all students to an arts education. While both are necessary, our discussion seemed to yearn for more. Emerging between voices in this dialogue is also the intonation of a reconceptualization of the city as arts education, or at least as a space where arts education can, and in fact does, happen as a creative and dialogic encountering. The critical sociologist and theorist of the city Henri Lefebvre once argued that the city is a supreme work of art. ⁸ We would like to extend this line of argumentation and suggest that we emphasize the city as a dynamic form of arts education that emerges through the social choreography of gestures, the rhythms of traffic, the atonal music of rising and falling waves of sounds, the colorful splash of vibrant visual and material culture, and the potential for constantly new styles of being that emerge through conflict and dissent.

Recommendations for policy and arts education in urban schools

What would it mean for arts education policymakers to think of the city as a supreme form of arts education? First and foremost, it would mean that the city is not shut off from the arts curriculum in urban schools. Instead, the official curriculum would draw upon the multi-layered, contradictory energy of the city to transform itself. Again, this is not merely an additive approach wherein familiar “urban” content (such as graffiti, hip-hop, and flash mobs) is included in specific lesson plans. Rather, what we see emerging in the background of this dialogue is an urban arts education that is urban in its form—one that does not make strict distinctions between the inside and the outside of the school, one that directly expresses the dynamism of city life in all educational activities, one that defines itself in relation to struggles facing a diversity of voices, lives, and histories, one that values disruption, chance encounters, and even chaos as part of the creative process.

Secondly, the participants seemed to call for a bottom-up approach to policy design that would begin with and honor the struggles of communities, their creative capacities, and the aesthetic intensities of city life. Similar to educational policy researcher Pauline Lipman, Darder and Osorio emphasize the need for critical policies that are “nonreformist reforms” in urban schools. ⁹ For Lipman, nonreformist reforms focus less on fixing individual, piecemeal, isolated problems and more on the need for large-scale transformations of institutional life. From the interview, we draw some conclusions that point towards four core principles to guide any nonreformist reforms of arts education in urban schools:

Activist Participation in Creating the City: Policy should encourage teachers to encounter the creative, urban communities of their students. Such encountering would enable teachers to reject simplistic notions rooted in romantic idealization or deficit thinking. Drawing inspiration from Osorio’s artmaking methodology and Darder’s activist work, creating the city means that teachers work to acknowledge their existence in the urban cityscape in ways that reveal what enables and constrains the lives of their students, and leads towards co(labor)ative encounters.

Promotion of Democratic Struggle and Creativity Through Art Making: Art does not have to have political content to be political. Rather it is in the co(labor)ative gestures of students and teachers working together to create the city, to invent new ways of being, new styles of existence that contains a radically political core. As Darder recalls, the mere gesture of allowing a child to draw a vision of her future that might fall outside of stereotypical assumptions concerning the relation between identity and social location can have a powerful effect on how that child perceives the self and the world. In this memory, the struggle for democracy is not found in the waving of flags or in protest but in the fundamental capability of a child to question the order of who can and cannot act, who can and cannot become an artist.

Honor the Shifting and Contradictory life of the City as the Basis for Urban Arts Education: As Osorio argues, the city itself is a kind of informal arts education that has its own aesthetic qualities, its own intensities, speeds, and layers. A truly empowering arts educational policy would take up this aesthetic of city life in all its ambivalences and contradictions in order to create the city under the sign of democracy, de-colonization, and a multi-layered understanding of the cityscape.

Provide Opportunities for Unpredictability in Arts Classrooms: If the arts education provided by the city is to be the platform for urban arts education in schools, then a key feature of this arts education is the surprise, shock, and potentially destabilizing encounter with unpredictability. Such unpredictability cannot be pre-planned, objectively measured, or economically instrumentalized. It resists becoming a scripted part of a lesson plan, and it resists formal capture in a rubric. Rather, unpredictability swarms from within the encounters that happen between people, things, and environments. Arts classrooms in schools should be places where such unpredictability is allowed space and time to potentially happen, where it can be witnessed, and where it can be honored as a means without predetermined ends being ascribed to it. Engaging with this potentiality becomes a way in which students exercise their agency, open themselves up to what is common, and acquire a sense of self.

Who is in a city? How is a city created? How do we get around in a city? What is in a city? What do cities need? These are not simple questions, and we can only hope for an arts education that picks them up, wrestles with them, and, in the process, becomes a place within schools where creativity can once again be aligned with the collective event of inventing the city anew.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Office of the President of UNT for funding the Creating the City event.