ARTS ELSEWHERE: The School of Social Work at the University of Washington recently reconnected with the historical formation of the field, that is, with what we would now call its nascent “interdisciplinarity” in the arts. The late 19th century reformers who sought something other than a charity model to address the social ills of their day—unregulated factories, juvenile justice, the experience of immigration, race and gender prejudice, the health and housing of the poor, you name it—founded “settlements” in cities around the United States to craft sustainable and “neighborly” ways of addressing these issues. Importantly, artistic activity was central to this vision of social transformation. Settlements supported painting, story-telling, museums, theatre, parades, and more, arguing that access to such forms of expression and community building should be an essential, hardly ornamental, element in the life of U.S. citizens.
That might be grand language, but it seemed important to remember when I was writing a book called Lines of Activity on the role of the arts at the Hull-House settlement. And it seemed important to remember a decade later at a symposium at University of Washington that was trying to re-integrate the arts into the vision and clinical practice of social work now. Emily Conbere, the central organizer, is working to establish Matt’s House, an outreach effort that will use the arts in suicide prevention and to help youth to address the effects of teen suicide in their families and their communities. The symposium attracted a varied audience of young people, social workers, historians of social work, as well as civic leaders in the arts who brainstormed together about what it takes to rebuild an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the arts and social work.
As part of our charge to facilitate art research in the laboratory culture of the university, ARC is holding a series of what we are calling “charrettes,” opportunities for faculty artists and scholars to share work-in-progress with a trusted group of audience members. Our first charrette featured the work of UCB choreographer Lisa Wymore and her partner, Sheldon Smith, as they assembled a first iteration of “Apparatus,” a piece that will premiere at ODC in the spring of 2011. Juxtaposing Antonioni’s classic film “L’Avventura” with live re-enactments of selected scenarios that were projected in real time next to the original film; the piece strategically confused the relationship between the live and the mediated, the spontaneous and the scripted, the original and the copy.