FORWARD: Issue #5: Housing
Imagining New Solutions
Karla Mosley as Zébra, chanteuse and hostess of The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe, an experimental, participatory theater production, asks, “What can artists and the artistic process offer housing policy advocates and community members?” Video courtesy Mark-n-sparks.
What’s the biggest obstacle to finding solutions to America’s housing crisis? According to the results of one workshop facilitated by housing advocates, it’s “a lack of imagination.”
A deficit of imaginative vision leads to strategies and tactics that fail to engage and energize—and that failure re-installs the status quo. Enter artists, those specialists in imagination. By helping advocates and communities see issues in new ways and craft fresh answers, artists increase the fund of options for activism and success.
In a highly collaborative theater piece put together by artists in California and Minnesota, and supported by a national housing-advocacy nonprofit, imagination was unleashed in the forms of song, storytelling, games, audience participation—and zebra costumes. The goal: freeing minds to find new ways to meet housing needs. And in an underserved community in California, multiple organizations teamed up for an artist-led initiative that gathered data about residential displacement and created a mural, a book of poetry, a video, and a citywide symposium—all in aid of a policy initiative that made a difference.
Read on for examples of artists unleashing new visions of possible housing solutions.
The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe
Imagining new housing solutions
Locations and Partner Organizations: Mixed Blood, Minneapolis; Syracuse Stage, Syracuse, New York; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, Los Angeles; MIX Center, Mesa, Arizona.
Artist Role: An experimental, participatory theater production asks, “What can artists and the artistic process offer housing policy advocates and community members?”
Result/Impact: The production revealed how artists can creatively engage with public policy, and how artistic imaginings can be tools for advocacy. As a result of the play, participants uplifted their own relationships to housing and offered both immediate and long-term solutions to housing insecurity, from sustainable rehabilitation communities to local connections to mutual aid networks.
Karla Mosley as Zébra, chanteuse and hostess of The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe. Photo by Rich Ryan, 2021, courtesy Mark-n-Sparks.
“You have to get unsettled to get unstuck,” says Los Angeles theater artist and cultural organizer Mark Valdez. Even before the pandemic upended American life in 2020, Valdez felt unsettled by issues affecting underserved Americans—homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in particular.
Valdez collaborated with ashley sparks, a California-based theater director and cultural organizer, to conduct workshops across the US with housing advocates, activists, policy makers, developers, and government officials. According to participants, their biggest challenge was “lack of imagination.” Imagining is precisely what Valdez and sparks do. “The skills that you have as a theater artist are actually superpowers for solving community problems and creating spaces for people to have hard conversations,” says sparks.
In collaboration with Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, and NEWHAB, a national housing advocacy networking organization, sparks and Valdez wrote and directed The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe (TMBHM for short). The immersive, participatory production asks: What can artists and the artistic process offer housing policy advocates and community members?
The play integrates statistics, torch songs, the idea of time travel, and interactive games and conversations led by actors costumed as zebras, to brainstorm—with audience members—imaginative ideas for solving the nation’s housing issues. “The play gets personal, even uncomfortable,” Valdez says, as the audience answers questions like, “Do you know anyone who has lost their home?” and engages directly and via text with performers and each other.
“It’s done very gently,” Valdez adds, “but moments of discomfort open people up to experience something different and get unstuck.” This goes for the housing advocates and policy makers involved in the play’s generative process as well as the audience members on any given night. “We bring people through a creative process for tapping into their own imaginations, to experience a transformation in outlook and thinking,” he says. “People who are not familiar with housing policy," confirms sparks, "I think they come out of the show with a lot of curiosity and questions and want to learn more about housing issues.”
We all agreed at the end that housing is a human right.
—Audience member
“We all agreed at the end that housing is a human right,” said one audience member after witnessing the production. “The stories within our circle were as moving as the play overall,” says another audience member quoted on the play’s web site.
Audience members gather in a break-out discussion group. Photo by Rich Ryan, 2021, courtesy Mark-n-Sparks.
Learnings from the production […] have illuminated ways in which artists can creatively engage with public policy, and how radical artistic imaginings can be utilized as tools for advocacy.
The pandemic challenged the team with supply chain issues and organizing via Zoom. Only recently have live performances been scheduled. Learnings from the production, however, have illuminated ways in which artists can creatively engage with public policy, and how radical artistic imaginings can be utilized as tools for advocacy.
Hanna Pepper-Cunningham performs. Photo by Rich Ryan, 2021, courtesy Mark-n-Sparks.
Hanna Pepper-Cunningham and Bruce A. Young perform. Photo by Rich Ryan, 2021, courtesy Mark-n-Sparks.
As a result of the play, participants uplifted their own relationships to housing and offered both immediate and long-term solutions to housing insecurity, from sustainable rehabilitation communities to local connections to mutual aid networks.
—Lamisa Chowdhury
Karla Mosley as Zébra, chanteuse and hostess of The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe. Photo by Rich Ryan, 2021, courtesy Mark-n-Sparks.
“As a result of the play, participants uplifted their own relationships to housing and offered both immediate and long-term solutions to housing insecurity, from sustainable rehabilitation communities to local connections to mutual aid networks,” says Lamisa Chowdhury, managing director, NEWHAB. In Valdez’s words, participants got unstuck. “Before, we were always knocking on doors,” he says. “Now, advocates and policy makers call us. They see art as a tool to advance their work and want us to be a part.”
Before, we were always knocking on doors. Now, advocates and policy makers call us. They see art as a tool to advance their work, and want us to be a part.
—Mark Valdez
Staying Power
Public narratives shape housing policy
Location: Richmond, California.
Artist Role: A collaboration generating community arts interventions to help prevent displacement.
Partner Organizations: Safe Return Project, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and RYSE Youth Center, in collaboration with the Othering & Belonging Institute and Evan Bissell, Othering & Belonging’s Arts and Cultural Strategy coordinator.
Result/Impact: The project prompted review and implementation of the Fair Chance Access to Affordable Housing Ordinance and led to multiple symposia, shifting the frameworks of cultural, political, and economic power on an institutional level.
Staying Power mural in process. Photo by Yomani Mapp.
Like many historically low-income communities of color in the Bay Area, Richmond has experienced deindustrialization, concentrated poverty, mass incarceration, and a lack of affordable housing. Richmond is also in the early stages of gentrification—a process that usually results in long-term residents being displaced. “Planners call these ‘wicked’ problems,’ says artist, researcher, and educator Evan Bissell, “because they’re so tangled up together, with seemingly no solution. But art can speak to the universal impact of displacement by attending to all of these things.”
Richmond Citywide Housing Symposium workshop on the Fair Chance Access to Affordable Housing Ordinance led by Tamisha Walker of Safe Return Project. Photo by Evan Bissell.
Art can speak to the universal impact of displacement.
—Evan Bissell
Poem from youth poetry workshop held at Monterey Pines housing complex led by Ciera-Jevae Gordon. Photo by Ciera-Jevae Gordon.
Richmond Citywide Housing Symposium relationship building activity. Photo by Evan Bissell.
In 2016, three community organizations—Safe Return Project, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and RYSE Youth Center—in collaboration with the Othering & Belonging Institute and Bissell, its Arts and Cultural Strategy coordinator, launched Staying Power. The project combines resident-driven cultural strategies, policy development, and community organizing to produce public narratives, community arts projects, and a comprehensive plan to prevent displacement.
The Staying Power Fellowship—a six-month program for six Richmond residents impacted by the housing crisis—anchors the project. With Bissell’s guidance, the Fellows used an arts-based research method “to allow for new data, in the form of peoples’ personal stories and experiences, to come forward,” he says. That research—including informal gatherings and special-invitation dinners, surveys, and creative workshops—led to a youth poetry workshop in an affordable housing site, a know-your-rights mural in both English and Spanish highlighting key housing victories in California, and a poetry book based on resident interviews (by Richmond Poet Laureate and Staying Power Fellow Ciera-Jevae Gordon), as well as a video of Staying Power poetry.
The mural prompted a review of the The Fair Chance Access to Affordable Housing Ordinance, limiting what landlords or affordable housing agencies can ask about a potential tenant’s criminal record, which had been previously on the books and was then implemented. The Fellows also presented their poetry and policy proposals to the City Council, and distributed policy fact sheets and a report outlining a comprehensive housing strategy (watch the video of their presentation at the 2017 meeting, starting at 4:06:25). The Othering & Belonging Institute and seven cosponsoring organizations held a citywide housing symposium that hosted 12 workshops on 12 housing justice policy options, drawing more than 100 attendees.
Staying Power mural, 23rd Street at Ohio Ave, Richmond, California. Photo by Owen Bissell.
Detail of Staying Power mural showing key points of the Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, which had been passed but not implemented before the mural was installed. Photo by Evan Bissell.
Staying Power mural community paint day. Photo by Evan Bissell.
Art shifts the usual frameworks of cultural, economic, and political power—what’s valued—in a city, on a deep level.
—Evan Bissell
“Art shifts the usual frameworks of cultural, economic, and political power—what’s valued—in a city, on a deep level,” Bissell says. Building on their past successes, the Staying Power Fellows continue to learn residents’ stories and histories, and reflect that sense of belonging in art projects in which residents can see themselves. Most recently, they’re identifying and setting priorities for a community-owned development enterprise to increase home ownership among low-income people of color in Richmond.
FORWARD: Issue #5
Housing
© COPYRIGHT 2022 - FORECAST PUBLIC ART ISSN 2768-4113