Challenge Day Reflections: Arts & Culture, LT'20

Arts & Culture Challenge Day
January 9, 2020
By: Willie Pugh, LT’03

Challenge Day Reflections, written by LT alumni, are designed to help you stay connected to the LT curriculum, sharing highlights and resources from our content-rich Challenge Days. We hope you enjoy these monthly updates!

You can access the agenda for this day here and pre-work here.

Reclaiming Space for and through Culture

Matt Remle (Lakota), Co-founder, Mazaska Woglake; Inye Wokoma, Artist and Filmmaker, Wa Na Wari and LANGSTON Board Chair

Matt Remle discussed working with Clear Sky Youth to produce a film aimed to help people understand why Licton Springs should be a historic preservation site. By engaging youth in this project, he accomplished something very significant: he gave knowledge and skills to the next generation to become cultural warriors. Thanks to the leadership of Matt and his colleagues, Licton Springs was designated landmark status in September 2019, making it the first outdoor historic preservation site.

Through Inye Wokoma's story of how Wa Na Wari was established, he gave me a different point of view on place. Wa Na Wari means "Our Home" and houses the Seattle Black Community Story Project. While Matt talked about place as a reverential and sacred space, Inye presented space as a vessel to hold our culture.

Community is a space for people with a shared history and future to gather. This is particularly important for African-Americans, given the history of Africans being ripped from their communities and dumped here in America. Somehow we survived with dreams. These dreams would become the houses, the streets, the families, and the groups that would make up the Central Area. I was a resident of the Central Area.

Resources:

Read about Matt Remle and his team's hard work to win landmark designation for Licton Springs here.
Learn about Wa Na Wari and how it has become a gathering place for artists for black art and history here

Regional Perspectives
Brian Carter, LT'18, Executive Director, 4Culture

Brian presented data from a study from ArtsFund on the Social Impact of the arts. Through his presentation, he answered several questions: 1) Who gets to go to the arts? 2) Who doesn't get funded? 3) What are the benefits of art? 4) How could a cultural interaction help me do my job better? 5) What does Brian do? 6) What can you do? 7) Are there any arts programs that particularly stand out to you?

Resources:

Understand how taxes support arts, culture, heritage, and preservation throughout King County. Read about 4Culture's Revenue Sources here.
The ArtsFund Social Impact of the Arts Study frames a new way of understanding the public value of the arts in King County. How are arts advancing community priorities and positive outcomes for participants and non-participants alike?

Bridging Communities: Intersections of Corporate Culture and the Arts
Priya Frank, LT'15, Associate Director for Community Programs, Seattle Art Museum and Chair, Seattle Arts Commission; Jessica Rycheal, Creative Director, Multidisciplinary Storyteller and Visual Artist; Tim Detweiler, Manager of the Expressions Program, Amazon Corporate

Tim Detweiler made the point that corporations do care about being supportive of the arts. Amazon employees have quietly put forth very specific support for individual art projects. Amazon itself has quietly underwritten a multitude of art projects as well. There was a question about whether the political posture of an artist would have a bearing on the art that Amazon supported. Tim said that it is almost impossible in today's climate to have an artist whose political inclinations are not part of their art.

Jessica Rycheal emphasized the importance of owning your identity as an artist. Be confident enough to say, " I am an artist."

Resources: