Revised Pages Finding Voice Revised Pages THE NEW PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP series editors Lonnie Bunch, Director, National Museum of African-American History and Culture Julie Ellison, Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan Robert Weisbuch, President, Drew University The New Public Scholarship encourages alliances between scholars and commu- nities by publishing writing that emerges from publicly engaged and intellectually consequential cultural work. The series is designed to attract serious readers who are invested in both creating and thinking about public culture and public life. Under the rubric of “public scholar,” we embrace campus-based artists, humanists, cultural crit- ics, and engaged artists working in the public, nonprofit, or private sector. The editors seek useful work growing out of engaged practices in cultural and educational arenas. We are also interested in books that offer new paradigms for doing and theorizing public scholarship itself. Indeed, validating public scholarship through an evolving set of concepts and arguments is central to The New Public Scholarship. The universe of potential contributors and readers is growing rapidly. We are teaching a generation of students for whom civic education and community service learning are quite normative. The civic turn in art and design has affected educational and cultural institutions of many kinds. In light of these developments, we feel that The New Public Scholarship offers a timely innovation in serious publishing. Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina, edited by Amy Koritz and George J. Sanchez Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project, Buzz Alexander The Word on the Street: Linking the Academy and the Common Reader, Harvey Teres For the Civic Good: The Liberal Case for Teaching Religion in the Public Schools, Walter Feinberg and Richard A. Layton Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching, Sarah Ruffing Robbins Finding Voice: A Visual Arts Approach to Engaging Social Change, Kim S. Berman Revised Pages Finding Voice R A Visual Arts Approach to Engaging Social Change Kim S. Berman University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Revised Pages Copyright © 2017 by Kim S. Berman Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2020 2019 2018 2017 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Berman, Kim, author. Title: Finding voice : a visual arts approach to engaging social change / Kim Shelley Berman. Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2017. | Series: New public scholarship | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030458| isbn 9780472053667 (paperback) | isbn 9780472073665 (hardcover) | isbn 9780472123315 (e-boo k) Subjects: LCSH: Art and society. | Art and social action. | Art and society— South Africa. | Art and social action— South Africa. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global). | HISTORY / Africa / South / Republic of South Africa. | ART / Study & Teaching. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies. Classification: LCC n72.s6 b475 2017 | DDC 701/.03— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030458 http://dx.doi.org/mpub.9256315 Cover illustration: Making a Paper Prayer print at Artist Proof Studio. Photo by Debbie Rasiel, 2013. Revised Pages For my life partner, Robyn van der Riet, and to my mom, Mona Berman, and my sisters, Lori, Cindy, and Hayley, who are a continual inspiration Revised Pages Revised Pages Acknowledgments R Thanks go to all the friends, colleagues, and collaborators who have enriched my life and made the publication of this book possible. It has been an en- lightening journey filled with remarkable individuals and communities. I am grateful for the guidance and wisdom of my doctoral advisors, Lara Allen and Pamela Allara. For their patience and resilience as readers and editors, I am indebted and thankful to Marcia Leveson, Robyn Sassen, Pamela Allara, and Mona Berman. I am grateful to the series editor, Julie Ellison, for her belief in me and for directing me to the University of Michigan Press. I thank the Press’s editorial director, Mary Francis, editorial assistant Jenny Geyer, and Kevin Rennells for their support and guidance, as well as the insightful anonymous readers and reviewers of my manuscript. I am grateful for the continual support of my colleagues in the Visual Art Department at the University of Johannesburg and at Artist Proof Studio. I thank the institutions and funding organizations who have supported this research, my students, and community engagement projects: the Uni- versity of Johannesburg, the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture, the National Research Foundation, the South African Department of Arts and Culture, the South African Development Fund, UNESCO, the Ford Foun- dation, and the many donors and partners that have supported Artist Proof Studio, Paper Prayers, Phumani Paper, and community engagement at UJ. Professor Michelle LeBaron generously invited me to be part of a group of visiting scholars on arts and social change at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study at Stellenbosch University. Susan Sellschop, a friend, mentor, and collaborator who has accompanied Revised Pages viii • Acknowledgments me on the journey as a trainer and inspiration to so many South African crafters in South Africa, sadly passed away on February 16, 2017, before the release of this book. She will be missed by us all. The journey represented by this book is a result of many collaborations with family, friends, colleagues, and students in South Africa and the United States. My deep gratitude goes to all the individuals in this book who so gen- erously consented to share their stories that continue to change lives. Revised Pages Contents R Introduction: Mapping the Journey 1 1 Methodologies and Methods of Change 9 2 Building an Arts Organization: Artist Proof Studio 21 3 Engaging Government Policies: Phumani Paper 73 4 Engaging the Academy 107 5 Assessing Arts for Social Change 135 Conclusion Renovating Democracy: Voice and Resilience 177 Appendix Making a Paper Prayer: Workshop Structure 187 Notes 191 References 207 Index 219 Plates following pages 72 and 106 Revised Pages Introduction Mapping the Journey R The basis of this inquiry is how the visual arts contribute to positive social change. Finding Voice represents the notion that the visual arts are an expres- sion of the aspirations of people in their hope for a more just and democratic society. It emphasizes the power and potential of collective voice in the visual portrayal of historical injustice and the envisioning of a new paradigm in which to move forward. This book, then, values the notion of voice as key to agency and the responsibility to act. The specific focus of this book, in post- apartheid South Africa, necessi- tates a multidisciplinary approach straddling the fields of arts education and developmental studies and requires examination of the sociological, political, historical, and cultural aspects of society. As there is no comfortable disci- plinary home for such an investigation, this book crosses disciplinary bound- aries, drawing on diverse concepts and understandings in order to enable the creation of a space that is able to explore, invent, imagine, or reject certain traditional notions. These concepts are akin to the practice of art-making, in that they can question the “givens” and imagine new possibilities. In this way, art, or visual voice, can be a pathway to navigate transformative ways of becoming. The following questions animate my inquiry: 1. How can creative strategies respond to imperatives for democratic change? 2. How can collectives organized around creative activity effectively re- spond to social trauma? Revised Pages 2 • Finding Voice 3. To what extent do current government institutions impede or facilitate art and culture in fulfilling potentially transformative social roles? Answering these questions involves innovations in design, methodology, im- plementation, and evaluation. Finding Voice values co-cr eation, community participation, and citizen action. In this exploration, I feature the visual arts as a mode of knowledge that requires keeping ourselves reflexively open to diversity and to the unexpected, in order to discern those elements that do not fit into our theories or dominant codes. This book proposes a primary role for activists who move beyond traditional theories of social justice to advo- cate new frameworks that are responsive to current social and political needs, through learning from the history of social activism through the arts and then building on those approaches. As activists and facilitators, we explore contexts or conditions that facilitate the emergence and maintenance of new possibilities of meaning and action. Voices and stories from the field provide a bottom- up approach to unlocking some of those theories and