We are surrounded by division, more rancorous than any time in most of our lifetimes. Can art and beauty help us?
The aesthetic experience is one of the most profound, awe-producing aspects of our lives, yet art is too often depicted as nice, pleasant but perhaps unnecessary. We commonly leave a powerful social tool on the table.
In every culture, throughout time, humans have looked to nature and created art, assembled beauty. I believe beauty, whether natural or created, is an essential part of the human condition. Recently, I helped facilitate a part of a convening, Baltimore: The City of Accessible Art. Participants who became disabled later in life spoke of questioning whether they wanted to continue to live at all with their new disabilities. They said that art saved them, showing that they could live with beauty still.
Art is stronger than many of us acknowledge.
What happens when we experience beauty? We now know much more about what goes on within the aesthetic brain. Neuroaesthetics shows how the brain is affected in ways that make both nature and art important for the wellbeing of individuals and communities.
We experience awe and empathy. Dance, theatre, music, visual arts have been used to ease post-traumatic symptoms of veterans, abuse victims and child soldiers. Art and nature calm, heal us, providing balm for the wounded soul.
Whose Beuaty? Affluence and Poverty
We have often shut art off, acting as if art and the aesthetic experience was something to be cloistered in museums, a privilege attained by those who have the means and the leisure to study it in particular intellectualized ways. We do not equate poverty with beauty. If beauty is a universal and necessary part of the human condition, who are we to say who gets to have it?
Pretty is a regular part of middle- and upper-class lives. They assume that their spaces have public art, their homes and their lives are decorated with that which pleases them. And when they don’t, they have codes and homeowners’ associations as recourse.
Art is a fast-growing tool in the luxury housing market—one can now buy a beautiful home with a curated art collection, inside and outside. Maryland’s Bozzuto Homes was an early leader in the movement, incorporating art and artists in their designs more than a decade ago. Now they have an art consulting arm for home and business buildings.
As with museums, it has also long been assumed that the poor do not get to have beauty. The history of low income housing and social work has excluded art, not knowing how useful art could be.
Families Living in poverty are six times more likely to rent their homes than are more affluent families (Pew Research) so they have less control of the outside spaces. Landlords of lower income housing have not invested in public art. That work has been taken up by community groups and nonprofit organizations in cities such as Detroit, Loa Angeles, Durham, Baltimore and, most notably, in Philadelphia. Organizations are working to make beauty and the wonder it can inspire more accessible. Philadelphia Mural Arts has worked with communities to create more than four thousand artworks. In Baltimore, Parks & People is working toward turning brown fields into enough parks that everyone is within walking distance of one. Baltimore A City of Accessible Art is the lead of a national movement to create accessible spaces and experiences.
Art Where You Live
The oxymoronically named “Public Housing” is in the middle of an important paradigm shift. Much of our “public” housing was built quickly and cheapy as possible after World War II, to house returning veterans and address substandard housing. The professional field had an internal journal, Cost Cuts, that showed how to do that. The “units” were not meant to be pleasant, much less beautiful. Even by the developing brutalist aesthetic of architecture of the time, they did not look like homes
Now, much of that housing stock is falling down. Cities are demolishing them, replacing them with mixed income housing, in an effort to address isolated pockets of poverty. It is a historically novel approach. Mixed income is not how most Americans live. Most Americans live near people who are like them in race, income and education, either by choice or forced market conditions. Statisticians use zip code as a good indicator of wealth or poverty because the patterns are remarkably stable, becoming more so because of reversing family patterns: More than half of Americans already live within an hour of extended family, particularly true for those with a high school education or less. Pew Research found that 3 out of five did. In many older cities, a working-class community is actually a grid of extended families who have lived near each other for generations, so disruption is particularly hard. Now this trend is actually growing, with more people moving to be closer to their families of origin — middle class families are starting to act like working class families. Culture then is not a soft, vague concept—in family and neighborhood cultures there are hard differences for mixed income housing projects to overcome.
Developers are replacing old, affordable but dilapidated housing stock with prettier mixed social class housing with different price points. Some tenants will receive subsidies, but the built environment will not indicate who.
Inclusive aesthetics play an important role. Traditional gentrification is a dramatic aesthetic takeover. Research interviews have shown that some new young people who move into cities see themselves as “pioneers” on an urban adventure. They do not mean to fit into historic communities that already have cultures with icons and rituals. They mean to change them. Of course, that places the original residents (again) as expendable. Working class neighbors are necessarily suspicious –-gentrification has forced them out of their homes and communities before. They have resisted even bicycle paths because they bring outsiders into the neighborhood, because they know their location is attractive. Working class neighborhoods are called “inner city’” because they are close to the city center. It was not unusual that redeveloped city centers—in Baltimore, DC, Nashville, Richmond—were all made from condemned traditionally Black neighborhoods. The challenge is to stabilize the community before it changes too much, before it over gentrifies, so that legacy residents can be comfortable in their own communities.
Art has been used as a tool in the traditional gentrification process. It was not uncommon for artists to move in first, to live and work in substandard buildings. Their art and related events draw others and make the communities more attractive and accessible. Some developers have fostered the waves, creating temporary art spaces for artists to hasten the waves of change.
Increasingly developers are skipping the residential artist stage, bringing in art and artists without the artists being homesteaders, to attract middle class neighbors while keeping the neighborhood comfortable for the legacy residents.
What happens when residents of different backgrounds share art experiences?
The most innovative developers of affordable housing are beginning to incorporate shared art experiences to unite communities.
Working class folks may have less control of their built environments and the outside areas around their homes but they do control the inside of their homes. Working class families routinely incorporate art and music into their everyday lives, spending more per capita than middle class families. Regardless of race, they use it to live. The homes into which I have been invited are filled with music and visual art. Aesthetic creativity is highly valued, and it shows. The arts, along with sports, are areas in which working class communities have met fewer obstacles to excellence. Theirs is an agency that is useful in building community.
Popular culture regularly pulls from that fertile working-class creativity, so many middle-class people have an affinity for those art forms that originated in the working class—hip-hop, jazz, Latin and country music, food, street art, language and fashion. (I promise that I will write about social class and intellectual property issues in another post.) For now, it means that there are common pleasures, and if properly handled, working class creators and original audiences have an agency that creates a type of equity that may not be there in other types of spaces.
Art creates a safe zone, where we can do otherwise dangerous things
In 1964, the West Bank Jazz Society was founded in Baltimore, a city that was (and, to a large extent, still is) segregated. Love of live jazz concerts by primarily Black artists drew people of different races and backgrounds to sit down and listen together. Sitting for hours in the same spot was revolutionary and the friendships reverberated into other parts of city life.
Experiencing art together facilitates community building. Having common physical and emotional experiences together becomes a way of forming bonds, of making community. Community Placemaking is the human centered design of buildings and spaces. Creative Placemaking brings aesthetic experiences into the human centered design. Aesthetic experiences create safe spaces for conversations and interactions that might otherwise be fraught with group anxiety. Sharing an aesthetic experience can quickly bring people together, in hours rather than weeks or months by crossing brain areas. Your negative attitude toward the other group and the love of music at the same time do not sit well together. Joining in with the other group, hearing their sighs or gasps while you feel the same, joining them in laughter and applause, are all community building. Together, we become aesthetic communities as we feel with our fellow audience members.
An important bonus: Art, by definition, is protected speech. Imagine the possibilities!
