As an introduction to this blog post, I will be writing about Stewardship as a key to the values of the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC), the community we serve, and to the cultural sector at larger because of its ethical and aesthetic dimensions.
To begin let me contextualize TPAC and Tucson a bit. TPAC is the designated local arts agency (LAA) that serves the city of Tucson and Pima County. Tucson is the second largest city in the Arizona and the metropolitan region’s population recently topped one million this year, of which 40 percent is Latino and Native American.
Pima County is the largest county in the state (which is bigger than the state of Connecticut) and is one of four Arizona counties that border Mexico. It is the home to two Native American tribes – the Tohono O’Odham and the Pascua Yaqui Nations; and numerous small towns and ranches.
Against this background, Southern Arizonans are mindful of the Sonoran desert that we live in, its heritages, its power, and its profound beauty and how these qualities informs the social imaginary that operate here. How taking care of the land and our relationships to each other are grounded in the ethos of stewardship.
I have written elsewhere that: “Stewardship is the responsibility for taking care: taking care of property, finances, the needs of others, taking care of something that one does not own…Cultural stewardship concerns itself with tending the work of imagination, the realm that embodies both the aesthetic and ethical experiences of being in community, in relationship to one another.”
Yet the complexities of “…of being in community, in relationship to one another” of “taking care”, are many and mirrors the fluid nature of culture.
My charge as director is to serve the broad public that includes the small, mid and large budgeted organizations; the white gloves and the anarchists; the hermetic artists and the community artists; the cultural tourists and the neighbors…You get it, the “We” as in “We the People”.
Paying attention to the broad context of “We” is not always easy, especially in the era of privatization of the pronoun “We,” which is so often reduced to a meaning of me and my friends and not the secular “We” that includes people you don’t know — slippery for sure.
Stewardship offers us a way to deepen our understanding of the meaning of “We,” of TPAC’s work and our understanding of the organizations we support.
Stewardship produces a set of questions that guide us in our charge to serve the public: “How is an organization a good steward of its financial resources? Of its management systems? Of its community call? Of its responsibilities as a cultural bearer for a group? How is an organization a good steward of the catalytic apparatus that empowers talent and community?
To understand stewardship, we need to engage the ethical and phenomenological ways of knowing an organization’s purpose, its soul and its context. For artists, stewardship is tethered to ethics and imagination, how concerns and composition make art.
Stewardship and the responsibilities of a LAA in Southern Arizona’s context is very charged. Arizona’s current social/political landscape is toxic.
The shooting of January 8 prompted a great deal of community reflection on civil society. Prior to the shooting and with the passage by the Arizona Legislature of Senate Bill 1070, the anti-immigration law, and House Bill 2281, the ban on ethnic studies in Arizona High Schools, the chilling effects of these laws upon community expressions is being felt and a growing atmosphere of intolerance towards cultural and political differences is present.
These laws reflect the animosity toward difference that is being stirred in Arizona and risks undermining our diverse civic landscape by prompting intolerance, incivility, and cultural misunderstanding.
TPAC faces this animosity through our public programs on civil society; through advocacy activities about the power of art to imagine our plurality — the ways we live, work, and play together, with all it paradoxes, warts and compassions; our support of arts-based civic engagement projects vis-à-vis the P.L.A.C. E. (People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement) Initiative and our polices and commitment to cultural equity as modeled by the exemplary San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grants program.
