ITAC4, The Fourth International Teaching Artist Conference:
The Global Workforce of Creative Instigators
By Eric Booth (Co-Founder of ITAC)
Many conferences are good; they meet the expectations of attendees. Many conferences are … less than good; they don’t. And sometimes those expectations start low. Many conferences must adhere to a formula that a membership expects; the content must vary (somewhat), but the structure must feel the same, and the pleasure of such conferences is the in-between times with colleagues in casual and intentional meetings. I have been to a few overtly bad conferences, and only one that was truly hateful—that’s a story for another essay. Those who were there, you know which one I am talking about.
A few conferences are great. They exceed expectations, even when expectations were high. ITAC4, the Fourth International Teaching Artist Conference, was one of those. Only 241 delegates were selected from the 600+ who applied, half from the host country, the U.S., and half from 28 other countries—a total of 300 attended counting presenters and staff. The first ITAC in the U.S. Space limitations kept it small, in our conference home, Carnegie Hall. With the two other New York co-hosts, Lincoln Center Education and DreamYard, their Planning Committee worked for a year to design a three-day gathering (with four optional pre-conference daylong workshops that delved into the work of a particular New York program) to craft a sequence of experiences that embodied the ways good teaching artists learn; indeed, most of the planners were teaching artists. Let’s repeat that—a conference for teaching artists by teaching artists. Only at ITAC.
Why was ITAC4 so strong? Why did many proclaim it was the most powerful convening they had ever attended? The answer is good luck, good planning, and a few mysteries.
LUCK
The main piece of luck was that Carnegie Hall was able to co-host the conference in their space. The world’s most famous brand name in the high arts welcomed teaching artists into its embrace—the sheer power of this metaphor radiated through the days. Delegates who work in the direst slums, in tense refugee camps, in remote forest villages, as well in less stressed communities but with different goals and cultural norms, and in other U.S. cities, were treated with genuine respect, with honor and gratitude, with eager curiosity, as fully equal colleagues. The temple of high arts opened its doors to generously house and celebrate the widest possible gathering of agents of universal artistic capacity at grassroots levels. Because Carnegie Hall has such deep commitments to community work (you may not realize that they have, in my view, the most pioneering education program among major arts institutions in the U.S.), the welcome felt celebratory, even grateful, with no taint of condescension or “noblesse oblige.” This embrace embodied the vision of a possible future in which the privileged arts fully recognize and join a wider definition of “the arts” that includes the participatory activities in communities and schools. There may be no righter place on the planet to make this statement right now than Carnegie Hall—the home of ITAC4.
The other two hosts rounded out this message. Lincoln Center Education is known as the founding place of teaching artistry, offers enormous programs, and is pioneering the most advanced teaching artist training in the world with its Teaching Artist Development Labs. And DreamYard, based in the South Bronx (the economically-poorest Congressional district in the U.S.), has created an extraordinary community-informed creative learning center with social justice infusing every aspect of its DNA. For ITAC4, the hosting was the message.
We were lucky in the quality of those who applied, leading to a selection of delegates so experienced and dedicated that any of them could have led a strong workshop—the 69 selected to present did lead great sessions, and the rest of the delegates shared their knowledge and experience abundantly in all the in-between session time. So there was no innate hierarchy of “the special ones” who were invited to present, but rather a clear sense of a community of equals who were sharing in sessions and outside of sessions and all the time.
In an ironic way, ITAC4 was lucky in its timing. The rawness of the political and social issues in the U.S. was so evident that those concerns and priorities had to be addressed, amplifying the sense of the conference’s relevance and consequence. In easier status-quo times, the conference would not have had such an urgent sense of social change in its atmosphere. The issues of racism, sexism, social inequity, xenophobia and violence that U.S. teaching artists deal with every day were palpably present, enabling the U.S. delegation to show its grit and guts—the best in us was available to share, because we are forced to address the worst of us.
GOOD PLANNING
Let’s note where these good planning choices came from. An ITAC4 Planning Committee was gathered with representatives from the three co-hosting organizations. It was mostly made of younger people; it was diverse; and it was mostly made of teaching artists. It is idiotically rare that teaching artists get to design a conference—the very workforce relied upon for their expertise in designing and guiding learning experiences. They got to design this one, and their feel for the shape, flow, and content contributed profoundly to the experience within it. To get a sense of the many sessions and the flow of the days, look here (http://www.itac-conference.com/conference/itac4/digital-conference/?mc_cid=098b535c33&mc_eid=e9afab89de) The theme they selected—artist as instigator—caught the right feel and became a reference point that arose frequently throughout each day. The presentations selected adhered to the ITAC 50-50 principle (50% of the delegates and the presentations come from the host country, and 50% from other countries).
The artworks presented emphasized the key themes. Nick Demeris surprised the conference at the very beginning with a whole-conference improvised musical composition. Spoken-word artist Lemon Anderson performed pieces that rang with the realities of New York life, and Samantha Spies (Associate Artistic Director) from Urban Bushwomen danced the story of one of the nation’s most influential social justice arts organizations.
In terms of conference planning, ITAC4 added a number of new features that hadn’t appeared at previous ITACs:
Livestream: much of the conference was livestreamed on the Internet (including videography by students who were trained at DreamYard), with hundreds joining from far away, including from viewing parties. To get a sense of one such event, created by a delegate from Ghana whose visa was refused at the last minute, for no reason, by the U.S. embassy, watch this short video he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtJM3_b0Xe8
Preconferences: Four options were offered to delegates, different possible ways to spend the day before the conference in a one-day intensive that shared the best of a particular body of work. This deeper dive balanced the speedy horizontal nature of the conference itself, and helped delegates get to know a group of colleagues before the conference began, which made for a sense of connection from the beginning of the big conference.
Collective project: Teaching artist Yazmany Arboleda led a collaborative art making project that many delegates cited as their most meaningful memory. Delegates were asked to bring a piece of fabric that had a connection to a community they come from, and a handwritten statement about the cloth and its origin. During the conference days, the delegates sewed these fabric swatches into a giant ITAC flag that was presented at the final session, and will grow and travel to many countries, adding community voices from around the world, before it appears at ITAC5.
The Global Timeline Project: The first ITAC Global Project is an online gathering of our collective history as a field. Events that mark advances for teaching artistry in various localities are all posted to one timeline, so we can see our history as it has been unfolding around the world. (http://www.itac-conference.com/the-global-history-timeline-project)
The ITAC Collaborative: ITAC will now be more than a conference every two years; it will go all year round. The new Collaborative was announced along with an invitation offering ways people can join in forming its initiatives, and in proposing projects that will be funded. During the conference, delegates were exploring natural partnerships that might launch a project the ITAC Collaborative could support with funding; this added the energy of extending the connectedness of the conference long beyond the brief days in New York.
MYSTERIES
And there were some mysteries that added to the success of ITAC4.
One was the pent-up readiness of this field to come together. I noticed this around the semantic issues concerning the term “teaching artist”; because a range of different terms are used in different countries, there has always been a gap in our coming together, creating some sense of separateness between the delegations from different countries, partly because they identify with different names. But at ITAC4, the semantic separations were gone. The different terms were used, but the labels didn’t create separation. I was able to state in the opening session, “Never again will we let superficial labels keep us from identifying as the one global community we are.” The ITAC4 timing was somehow right to shed the old shells of separate identity, and stand as one. The how and why of this timing is an interesting subject for speculation, but there was clearly a sense of hunger to start joining hands across boundaries.
Another mystery was the way people related to one another. Usually, when colleagues from within a country meet together, there is an inevitable element of status negotiation. It can look like egotism, or it can look like competitiveness, but it is a natural human habit, even in a field as generous and benign as teaching artistry. But this doesn’t happen at ITAC. I theorize a couple of reasons for this. Given the breadth of the backgrounds present, connecting with people becomes the predominant energy, and issues of status fall low in priority. The complexity of cultural status doesn’t translate across cultures—how many fancy professional development workshops a U.S. teaching artist has given doesn’t hold meaning for a teaching artist who works in New Guinea rainforests or with a survival-focused Palestinian community. With the armor of ego diminished, and the culturally-defined structures of status set aside, professionals meet as people, as artists, who share life priorities, and that makes for powerful connecting and meaningful exchange.
The biggest mystery for me was the sense of accrued learning from previous ITACs. It seemed clear that this ITAC built on the successes and learning of the previous three. The quality of the conversations, the speed of getting started, the sense of picking up where we left off seemed clear to all those who had been to all the previous ITACs—but that’s only about eight people. How does this happen when so few repeat attendance, yet the momentum of the conference seems to steadily build, now over seven years? Each of the ITAC conferences has asked a fundamental question; here is how I have seen the ITAC inquiry build:
ITAC1 (Osl0 2012) = Do artists who work in community and education settings around the world, and who label their work by different names, have enough in common to think of themselves as a single global field? The answer was a clear yes, accompanied by a kind of astonished recognition of a something hidden in plain sight becoming evident. Read this essay to find out more: [http://ericbooth.net/the-worlds-first-international-teaching-artist-conference]
ITAC2 (Brisbane 2014) = Do these artists want to connect and work together? What might we do together if we could? The answer exploded forth with a burst of imagined projects—17 on the last day—that artists hungered to begin with one another across boundaries.
ITAC3 (Edinburgh 2016) = How far does our practice reach? How radical can our practice be? The answer surfaced a breadth of courageous commitments that permanently expanded our own understanding of the size, scope and ambition of our field.
ITAC4 (New York 2018) = What do we instigate? Where and how do we choose to create change? The etymological meaning of instigate is to penetrate—what status quo, what unacceptable social norm, do we puncture by creatively activating others? The answers came from open wounds of our current social struggles in the U.S. and those in other countries, and from the courageous belief that the intolerable brings opportunity rather than despair.
In reflection, delegates don’t agree on which features of the conference had the greatest impact. I asked about twenty, and found no consensus. Some found their biggest impact in the peaceful sewing project, sitting side by side with others from around the world sharing the stories of their work. Others found their gems in particular workshops that affirmed and/or extended the work that they do. Many cited particular keynote speeches as their highlight, and interestingly, the three keynotes had about equal numbers of enthusiasts. More than a few told me that just being inside this professional community, engaging with so many inspiring people from so many places so intensively, and finding connections everywhere, was their resonant take-away.
The three keynote speeches crystallized, at least for me, the message of teaching artistry at this time in the U.S.. These keynotes are available to view online—go to http://www.itac-conference.com/conference/itac4/digital-conference/ and scroll down to the video records that list the timings of the speeches. These will be edited into stand-alone videos soon. I will distill the core message of each that jumped out to me, that boldly presented our cultural wounds and our artists’ response. Please watch the whole recordings of them, since I will be missing so much of the richness they shared.
The Day 1 keynote was given by Aaron Huey, the National Geographic photographer and Internet activist and entrepreneur. His talk came right after I had kicked off the conference, reminding the delegates that they are part of a global field of artists who expand their artistry to engage directly with people in educational and community settings. I compared us to leaves on an aspen tree amid a gigantic global aspen forest. Aspens are actually just separate trunks emerging from a shared root system—just as teaching artistry across the world manifests as different practices but shares values, practices, and even spirit. I was able to announce our first global project (a global timeline of the history of our field) and the Collaborative that will fund international project work by delegates—so we began with a sense of agency and opportunity.
Aaron began by sharing about his eight years documenting the lives and realities of the Oglala Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation South Dakota, which Huey refers to as Prisoner of War Camp #344. What began as a magazine reporting assignment became a passion as he lived with and became family with them. He came to realize that by telling their story in mass media, even telling it faithfully and well, he was part of the problem of a system that has disempowered, dominated and decimated their nation. He reconceived his role as an artist serving to report the truths of a community, and created a transparent platform where their stories, unfiltered, could be embedded in major media. This expansion of his artistic mission and his identity as an artist struck me hard, as it did many others. How do artists who have grown in circumstances of privilege and gained purchase in major media use that power to amplify the unheard voices of communities, rather than interpret and put them on display? This is exactly the teaching artist’s ethical challenge—how do we use our artist’s skills to give authentic voice to those who have not had it? In the early years of teaching artistry in the U.S., teaching artists did not reliably serve in that capacity. There was egotism and condescension in the work of many, which was generally not present in the work of those called “community artists.” Over decades, this understanding of service, and the use of one’s art-self in direct work with participants in schools and communities, has evolved for teaching artists; it makes sense that the semantic distinction between labels of “teaching artist,” “community artist,” “social practice artist” and more, now do not divide but instead clarify different areas of expertise within the same vocation.
Huey then introduced his work with Amplifier (https://amplifier.org), where he and his initial collaborator Shepard Fairey have distributed millions copies of protest artwork (“We the People” is the most famous) that has appeared in resistance movements around the world; they have now expanded the site to invite community artists to present their protest artwork on a platform that shares it widely. Amplifier allows the traditions of art designed by the “talented” and “celebrated” few (we were in Carnegie Hall, after all, where the very fewest are presented) to become art designed by the many. Teaching artists take that idea and multiply it more than anyone else. They are the designated work force to do that, to enter the places where people live, particularly places where people are structurally disempowered, and they activate the artistic potential. In my writing, I always state that the job of an artist may be to make stuff that speaks with strength, but the number one job of a teaching artist is to activate the artistry of others.
Amplifier’s newest project, called We the Future (https://amplifier.org/campaigns/we-the-future), recently launched as a social justice curriculum in 20,000 K-12 classrooms in the U.S. It celebrates the stories of young leaders ages 14-28 who have started their own social justice programs and have created eloquent images and text to tell their stories.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Chief of Program and Pedagogy at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, delivered the Day 2 keynote speech. Joseph called forth the instigator and activist in each delegate. He asked us speak aloud the names of our teachers and then our students, urging a sense of lineage in the slow “choreography” of achieving social and racial justice. He shared key ideas from his own work, inseparable as artist, teacher and activist, in “liberatory pedagogy”—“using your words to get free.” He asked, “Can we design freedom? Can you will love into being through the force of your creative life or practice?” He challenged these teaching artists who had come from around the world to gut-check the courage in their work: “On a scale of zero to Harriet Tubman, where does your work fall?” Quoting architect/urban plannerTeddy Cruz, he made an unequivocal demand of the field: “To stay neutral is to be complicit with the institutions that have perpetrated what is ethically and morally wrong. Today more than ever, we as artists and educators need to take a political position against what is ethically and morally wrong…Where is our public imagination?” Not only artists but also institutions must take a political position. He challenged our fierce investment in aesthetics (“What a people think is good, beautiful, and true”) and in drawing forth the aesthetic expression of others.
Liz Lerman, Day 3’s keynote speaker, named many things we knew but had never seen with such clarity. She spoke of the long journey of her work from the high arts perspective to discovery of the richness of art making in community. She has lived the ways these separate endeavors feel negated by the other, and how unwilling the “high” arts are to live on a horizontal continuum in which institutionally celebrated art and community art are both valued and even connected. She strives to bring them together in a humane, ethical, fair, just exchange. In the current culture, Art with a capital A is good, and community art is not really good or important. This leads to an “Arts” industry separate from joyful participation in the disciplines that the vast majority of people have competent expression within. In addition, Lerman believes it leads to extraordinarily lazy ideas of excellence in the high Arts sector. Looking across an art form’s continuum, in the perspective that includes the “Arts” and the community arts, she sees three things that matter, whatever the context, in determining value. 1. People are totally committed to what they are doing. 2. People know why they are doing what they are doing. 3. Something is revealed. The artist must make sure others understand that something significant is going on—and might even have to explain something, even though that is not what modern art likes to do. “On this question of revelation,” she said, “we have to find more strategies to get more and more people to participate.”
Finally, Lerman challenged teaching artists to think ethically. She and Marc Bamuthi Joseph bring four quadrants of considerations to their work: aesthetics; individual accountability; social responsibility to our circle of contact and influence; and the institutions and systems we work within. They believe in a values chain among those four quadrants of influence, holding the ethical perspective that we wouldn’t raise one to the disadvantage of the others—wouldn’t, that is, leave one of the four behind as we create change in another. Lerman identified a time recently when she had failed to keep this balance, and said she regretted her ethical mistake. Many people told me that her admission of a failure was one of the most empowering things they had ever heard in a speech. Her courage brought forth our courage to champion a culture that honors, ethically, the creative work of all individuals, and celebrates the creative brilliance of the community and of the masters of a discipline.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Each of the previous three ITACs has concluded with an unresolved final chord. All the energy and sprouting of new connections ended without any structured way to keep it going. The farewell tears were those of gratitude but also of loss, the sense this brief global utopia was going to evaporate. Not so with ITAC4. ITAC4 ended with construction materials and plans to build across the two years to ITAC5 in Seoul, South Korea.
There will be a flag. The collective creative project of making a large ITAC4 flag culminated in its presentation to the delegates in the last session. But the flag will live on. A portion of it will travel to many countries, like the Olympic flame, to gain their passport stamps of new swatches, and will be raised at ITAC5. The flag- hosting countries will also create their own community flags, each patch of personally-significant material added to comprise a big flag of their local teaching artist community. These many large flags will be shipped to Seoul to be assembled at ITAC5, a world flag of teaching artistry.
Perhaps most promising, the ITAC Collaborative is underway. Led by Collaborative Manager Madeleine McGirk, the Collaborative will build a communications network for the global field. It will support two funded projects that connect ITAC4 and ITAC5, and will be presented at ITAC5. As of this writing, 18 teaching artists from eight countries have committed to serve as Catalysts, to actively build the global field. If you have read this far into a long essay, you are probably realizing that you too are part of this emergent community, and that you want to become a member of the ITAC Collaborative, to stay informed about activities and news. To do so, contact Madeleine at: madeleinemcgirk@hotmail.com.
At ITAC4, Marc Bamuthi Joseph asked, “Where is our public imagination?” You know the answer. It is rising in you, now. It is conjured in the work you do with participants. It is in the work of instigators like us around the world who embody and bring forth the possible. Shakespeare describes the artistic power of our workforce—the power to build communities, as well as the power we now gather to build a global workforce of artist-instigators under the name of ITAC:
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.