Synopses & Reviews
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Art and Upheaval turns a world eager for hope and good news onto the fact that everyday around the world there are artists daring to speak truth (and beauty!) to power in ways that build understanding and reconciliation where there were previously only hardened hearts and ruin."
David Griffith, author, A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America
"Through the eloquent telling of stories of ordinary people daring to speak out, fight back and take action, Bill Cleveland shows us the most precious gift innate in all of us, the power to imagine and create. The act of creation can heal our deepest wounds and turn crisis into opportunity."
Lily Yeh, artist and founder, Barefoot Artists and The Village of Arts and Humanities
"Another insightful set of observations from a master storyteller. In his new book Cleveland deepens our sense of how human imagination and creativity sit next to upheaval in the ecology of meaning."
Jennifer Williams, artist, founder, The Center for Creative Communities
Praise for Art in Other Places:
"An important addition to the expanding body of work on community arts... Cleveland has collected heartwarming stories from deeply committed people who should be our role models."
Lucy Lippard, writer, critic
"This book and his work in other places show not only concern for the human condition, but how we can improve it."
Jonathan Borofsky, artist
Bill Cleveland is a pioneer in the community arts movement and one of its most poetic documenters. Activist, teacher, lecturer, and musician, he directs the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Previous works include Making Exact Change and Art in Other Places.
Review
Expert praise for Art and Upheaval"For some readers, this book could be used as a how-to manual for organizing a variety of arts projects responding to crisis, but for a much broader audience, Art and Upheaval will serve to validate the importance of artists working outside artistic institutions. In Cleveland's words, these artists "
are doing this to rally or to bring order, to educate and inspire, to entertain, to heal, but most of all, to tell the storythe hidden story, the story denied."
John Kreidler, Grantmakers in the Arts Reader: Volume 20, No. 1, Spring 2009
"Each of the groups Cleveland profiles started small, but grew to provide essential safe space where communities could come together and heal. Community art offered a way forward: a chance to acknowledge and confront painful histories, to begin to resolve current conflicts, and to imagine a different kind of future."
Brooke Jarvis, Yes! Magazine
"Cleveland gets down to gritty detail by documenting the censorship, government-sponsored arson, and institutional apathy that have threatened these outposts, as well as the specific historic moments that sparked them. All told, these are success stories against the odds. Art and Upheaval makes clear that where "monetary compensations, legal wrangling, formal apologies, condolences, and all other cultural frameworks often surrounding disasters and tragedies" stand little chance of repairing the spirit in the wake of killing unrest, public art just might."
Josie Rawson, Public Art Review
"Clevelands writing about artists in far corners pulling together and creating moral centres for healing and political reconciliation is sometimes ponderous but couldnt be more relevant now that we have a global leader in Barack Obama who has made community-organising the centrepiece of his presidency. It may be that we have outlived the long period of ethical (and aesthetic) neutrality in our culture, now that politics is finally catching up with art."
Suzi Gablik, Resurgence Magazine
"The book is superbly written. After a brief introduction explaining his journey, Cleveland jumps into the artists stories. The chapters interweave the larger political dynamics with the personal narratives of the artists, providing background on the family and cultural contexts that helped shape their identity and actions. All too often stories of social-change actors concentrate on the actions of activists and are devoid of the larger political and social context. Cleveland does a masterful job of linking the narratives across the personal, community and societal levels."
Craig Zelizer, CommunityArtsNetwork
Synopsis
Artists in communities in crises the world over are working to resolve conflict, promote peace, and rebuild civil society. Here are six remarkable stories of artists in Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, the United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, who heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and re-stitch the cultural fabric of their communities.
Author Bill Cleveland is an activist, teacher, facilitator, lecturer, and director of the Center for the Study of Art & Community. He is the author of Art in Other Places, which explores the emerging community arts movement in the United States.
Synopsis
Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six communities devastated by war, repression and dislocation.
Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and restitch the cultural fabric of their communities.
Art can be a powerful agent of personal, institutional and community change. The stories in this book have valuable implications for artists, academics, educators, human service providers, philanthropists, and community leaders throughout the world. The artists documented in the book have generated new technologies for advocacy, organizing, peacemaking, healing trauma and the rebuilding of community. Creativity is our most powerful capacity, and it can mitigate and heal our most destructive tendencies.
Synopsis
Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six cities devastated by war, repression, and dislocation.
About the Author
Bill Cleveland, Director of the Center for the Study of Art &Community, is an activist, teacher, facilitator, lecturer and writer.