I Wish I Had a Place Like This When I Was Growing Up: New Urban Arts and the Cultivation of Creative Practice

New Urban Arts

I

You may not notice it when you first enter New Urban Arts’ studio, but just above your head and to the right of the door, stenciled in dusty orange paint—resembling more the detritus of an abandoned art project than creed—are the core principles of the studio: risk, leadership, inclusion, connection, voice. They are flanked, on one side, by a white wall that serves alternatively as a gallery space and site of art making and, on the other, by a neatly presented collection of a dozen black and white student portraits, created annually by a photography mentor. In the space of less than ten feet, the studio tells a story. Walking into the space invites more stories and, importantly, encourages participation in the crafting of the next story.

In 2007, ten years after New Urban Arts first opened its studio in Providence, Rhode Island, across from three of the city’s largest high schools, I was fortunate to be invited to serve as one of two Artist Mentor Fellows. The position is adapted from the idea of the pedagogista, developed in the Reggio Emilia schools in Italy, and is explicitly tasked with attending to the learning and success of the Art Mentors, New Urban Arts’ primary teachers. Since I had served as New Urban Arts’ first board president, the invitation was poignant, for it allowed me to return to the program in a profoundly different capacity. Rather than focusing on the vagaries of governance and fundraising, being a Fellow allowed me to see how a series of questions and ideas had grown into a thriving community of practice.

Making the experience intellectually richer for me, concurrent to becoming a Fellow I was hired to build Rhode Island School of Design’s (RISD) Office of Public Engagement. This dual assignment speaks to our mission and what it may become, since schools like RISD are tethered to histories of service to industrial capitalism. Regardless of the efforts of individuals or even departments to create critical discourse, institutions tend to reproduce such histories even as they strive to establish a contemporary raison d’être. Still, a primary institutional commitment to preparing designers and artists for markets only attends to one facet of their lives and poorly prepares them to work in the world more broadly or to engage in public problem solving. In contrast, community arts programs, in part because they operate in cultural margins, can focus on multiple uses of the arts for mediating and intervening in critical human issues. By connecting the lived experience of those attending its programs with the practice of art making, New Urban Arts is able to prepare urban youth, as well as college student mentors, for reparative roles in their communities— as artists, to be sure, but also as educators, activists, and participants in broader coalitions engaged in community problem solving.

Happily, this dual assignment opens up new ways of thinking about teaching, learning, and public mission. If nothing else, working simultaneously in these institutions has provided counterpoint to my thinking about the arts and, perhaps more importantly, how we can see engagement with the arts—or, more widely, with creative practice—as a critical dimension to human development and social change. While New Urban Arts embraces an open and learner-centered approach to building a lifetime creative practice, RISD has a structured core curriculum and a discipline-based pedagogy. As someone who received an undergraduate education at RISD and helped establish the New Urban Arts’ principles in reaction to that experience, performing my jobs in alignment with the expectations of these divergent curricula and code-switching between their philosophical assumptions challenged, affirmed, and advanced my pedagogical assumptions about creative education in significant ways.

I do not like to prove things through the negative, but countless times while writing this essay, my words have drifted toward a critique of my own creative education. I should not be surprised. Since New Urban Arts opened its first studio...