FORWARD: Issue #8: Civic Health
Fostering Civic Relationships
Artist Philippa Pham Hughes mounted a work of "social sculpture" in which art helped foster civic conversations. Photo by Mark Gjukich, courtesy the artist.
300+ Kentuckians have passed through Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange's leadership cohort, building an engaged leader network throughout the state. Photo by Taylor Killough.
Work done by artists and arts entities to help individuals and groups cultivate relationships across differences to build a healthier civic life.
Read on to discover a Kentucky organization creating a network of engaged problem-solvers, theater bringing together Northern Irelanders to articulate their needs and understand their rights, rural Minnesota communities rehabbing art-focused spaces for community gathering, and a 'social sculpture' in which art helped foster civic conversations in Michigan.
Kentucky Rural–Urban Exchange
By bringing community leaders to small Kentucky towns, the Kentucky Rural–Urban Exchange (RUX) builds bridges and creates a network of engaged problem-solvers.
Location: Kentucky
Date: Founded in 2014
Artists: Various
Partners: Communities across Kentucky
Over the course of multiple weekends, Kentuckians come together to exchange stories. Through developing a greater understanding of each other’s issues, the group engages in a prototype of how to build a healthier civic life for their state. Each leadership cohort is together for two years and commits to four Community Intensives. The 2024 cohort had 48 participants from 23 Kentucky counties and sectors, such as agriculture, education, and health care. They met in Campbellsville and in Owensboro, during where this community conversation took place. Photo by Taylor Killough.
The Kentucky Rural–Urban Exchange’s formula for successful bridge building is as simple as it is elegant.
Over the course of multiple weekends, Kentuckians from rural and urban counties come together in different configurations for “intensives,” where they exchange stories of what makes their communities tick, map community assets, and explore ideas unique to their communities and regions. But more importantly, they experience the culture of the group they are in that weekend—listening to community elders, sharing locally produced meals, making music together, and dancing. Through developing a greater understanding of each other’s issues, the group engages in a prototype of how to build a healthier civic life for their state.
“At the center of building strong relationships that are durable over time and across difference, people need to share a meaningful experience,” says Savannah Barrett, RUX co-founder. “And in Kentucky, people are deeply connected to traditional culture. Culture is a sort of shared language, particularly through music and foodways and storytelling and dance, that folks are familiar with and that they feel at home in. It can be a shortcut to remove barriers of racial or economic or geographic difference.”
So visiting a Bosnian mosque, square-dancing, eating a traditional meal prepared from local ingredients, and other cultural experiences are key; but culture has value beyond this realm, too, says Barrett. “We also use cultural strategies throughout our facilitation of the leadership curriculum and in our work with communities, because we recognize that really rich immersive experiences in place create the right conditions in the brain to facilitate openness and change.” Storytelling circles and narrative stages (a form of public conversation that was first developed at the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival) are among the creative tactics that RUX employs to promote creative thinking.
At the center of building strong relationships that are durable over time and across difference, people need to share a meaningful experience.
— Savannah Barrett, RUX co-founder
The cohort enjoys dinner and a performance by local musician Hannah Coomer at Homeplace on the River during Campbellsville Weekend Intensive in 2024. Since RUX’s creation in 2014 as a project of Art of the Rural, an artist-run nonprofit devoted to promoting healthy rural conditions and healthy images of rural life, more than 300 Kentuckians from 65 different counties have passed through its leadership cohort program, building an engaged network of leaders across the Bluegrass State. Photo by Taylor Killough.
Cohort members Bayley Amburgey, Tom Morton, and Rae Strobel during Owensboro Weekend Intensive 2023. Photo by Taylor Killough.
Shaelyn Bishop (foreground), Hannah Matangos (left), and Bernard Clay (right), at Clay Hill Memorial Forest during Campbellsville Weekend Intensive in 2024. Photo by Taylor Killough.
Jon Cherry & Dan Wu in conversation at the Golden Thread in 2024. The Golden Thread is RUX's annual forum gathering leaders from various sectors to foster unity across cultures and communities in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Photo by Tyler McDaniel.
But the impact of cultural forms on the participants goes even deeper.
“You’re two days into this really intense cohort experience with 50 people from across the state,” Barrett says. “You've probably been challenged. You’ve heard conversations that have frustrated you, maybe challenged what you believe about Kentucky. And then you find yourself square-dancing at the end of a really long day. In square dancing you have to look your partners in the eye or you'll get dizzy. And you have to touch them. It's a part of the work.”
Since RUX’s creation in 2014 as a project of Art of the Rural, an artist-run nonprofit devoted to promoting healthy rural conditions and healthy images of rural life, more than 300 Kentuckians from 65 different counties have passed through its leadership cohort program, building an engaged network of leaders across the Bluegrass State.
As Barrett explains, the impetus for getting Kentuckians together in these ways came from social and economic changes in the state in the 1980s and ’90s. As many of the industries upon which people in the state relied, from manufacturing to coal mining, faced lean times, they began moving in search of opportunity—from rural regions to cities; from one of the state’s many self-consciously distinct regions to another; across ethnic and racial borders. This mingling, which Barrett likens to shaking a snow globe, produced confusion and tension, as well as richness.
“RUX began from a simple belief: that if Kentuckians from different regions and backgrounds could just meet each other and share a meaningful experience, they’d find more in common than in contrast,” Barrett told the University of Louisville Magazine in 2024.
The cohort enjoys a performance by Elijah Eke at the Little Loomhouse during Louisville Weekend Intensive in 2023. The impetus for getting Kentuckians together in these ways came from social and economic changes in the state in the 1980s and ’90s. Photo by Tyler McDaniel.
The RUX experience exposed me to a bigger Kentucky community, one that made me feel more connected to my Kentucky identity.
— LaToya Drake, former leadership cohort member
Producing a Kind Generation performs during the Golden Thread in 2024. Photo by Tyler McDaniel.
Each leadership cohort is together for two years and must commit to four Community Intensives during that time. The 2024 cohort had 48 participants from 23 Kentucky counties and sectors, such as agriculture, education, and health care. They met twice last year, in Campbellsville and Owensboro. In 2025, the cohort will return to Campbellsville and will also visit Morehead and Pennyrile.
“RUX was a safe space to engage, and my relationship to the state and my community was transformed in the process,” says LaToya Drake, a program coordinator with Kentucky’s Nutrition Education Program and former leadership cohort member. “The RUX experience exposed me to a bigger Kentucky community, one that made me feel more connected to my Kentucky identity.”
From integrated learning across the Kentucky community college network and new hotel developments in eastern Kentucky to improved civic troubleshooting in host communities like the town of Horse Cave and Muhlenberg County, the program has paid rich dividends.
The concept has traveled all the way to Minnesota. In 2019, funding from the McKnight Foundation led to the planting of the RUX concept in the North Star State. Intensives have been held in Saint Paul neighborhoods and the small city of Winona as well as the White Earth Native Nation.
The Playhouse
A theatre in Northern Ireland brought together deadly enemies from the era of the Troubles to make theater together based on their personal stories. Today, it uses art and creativity to address the nation's current issues: immigration, citizens' rights, climate change, and more.
Location: Northern Ireland
Date: 2023–2024 (pilot program)
Artists: Various
Partners: The Playhouse (Derry, Northern Ireland)
Kathleen Gillespie, Anne Walker, and Paddy McCoey at a rehearsal for a performance in Rotterdam. The Theater of Witness (ToW) approach aims to open hearts of audiences to humanize "the other" and bridge divides. Photo by Chris Byrne, courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
The Playhouse in Derry (aka Londonderry), Northern Ireland, was one of the most prominent arts organizations to address the deep psychic wounds left by the Troubles—the three decades between the late 1960s and 1998 when Catholics battled Protestants, British forces went on a war in the region, and some 3,500 people were killed.
In 2009, a decade after the Good Friday Agreement that had ended the conflict, the Playhouse leadership brought in American theater innovator Teya Sepinuck and her Theater of Witness (ToW) approach, in which, as ToW’s website explains, “true stories of people whose voices haven’t been heard in society are shaped into original theater and films performed by the people themselves. The performers share their own true stories of trauma, marginalization, resilience and transcendence. The purpose of this work is to open the hearts of audiences to humanize ‘the other’ and bring people together across divides of difference.”
The Playhouse invited people on all sides of the conflict, Republicans and Loyalists, security forces and victims, to make theater together based on their personal stories of the conflict.
In a video on the Playhouse’s website, former IRA member Anne Walker describes how the process brought her to an understanding of, and friendship with, people on the other side. (One such firm friendship is with Kathleen Gillespie, whose husband was murdered by the IRA in 1990.) “For me, Theatre of Witness was a very cathartic experience that changed my life and changed my views of people who were once enemies,” Walker says. Hearing these raw and unvarnished stories, the theatergoing public was exposed to points of view and lived experience of people they may have once demonized, prompting self-examination.
Photo by emmett2 / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
"We Carried Your Secrets" (2009). Photo by Declan Keeney, courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
The end of "I Once Knew a Girl" (2010). From left, Catherine McCartney, Ruth Moore, Anne Walker, Therese McCann, and Kathleen Gillespie. Photo courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
For me, Theatre of Witness was a very cathartic experience that changed my life and changed my views of people who were once enemies.
— Anne Walker, former IRA member and participant at The Playhouse
Former IRA member Anne Walker (pictured in “I Once Knew a Girl,” 2010) says the Theater of Witness process brought her to an understanding of, and friendship with, people on the other side. Photo courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
A significant number of people who took part in these cathartic productions and learned Theater of Witness techniques at the Playhouse have gone on to form a separate entity, the Theatre of Witness Network, and the Playhouse has moved on to address different concerns.
“Our society is becoming more and more diverse and we have many more issues to deal with,” says Kevin Murphy, the Playhouse’s CEO. “Simply having a just, fair, rights-based society, for example, is much more to the fore now than conflict issues based on religious identity. Gender rights, equity, economic rights, civic engagement—all of those things are where social justice comes into the picture these days.”
These concerns prompted the setting up of That’s Powerful, an initiative that the Playhouse describes as “a new project that explores the interface between civic dialogue, social change, peacebuilding and art making.” It aims at “providing participants with a greater understanding of lived experience and how that informs rights-based issues, developing civic discourse around cultural and societal issues, and nurturing abilities and skills in the creative arts and rights-based change making.”
Performer Vincent Coyle, "Release" (2012). Photo by Chris Byrne, courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
Paddy McCoey performs in "Release" (2012). Photo courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
Syd Trotter and William McKee playing around in rehearsal for Release (2012). Photo courtesy Teya Sepinuck.
That’s Powerful’s pilot program emphasized youth.
In May and June 2024, the That’s Powerful team came to an elementary school in Donegal for a four-week project in which creative visualization was used to help the kids articulate what well-being means to them. They did written work on the topic, took part in a range of creative activities, and then produced a shadow-puppet show based on the feelings and experiences around well-being that they had articulated earlier.
Then, in collaboration with Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland, the initiative brought young people together to examine the connections between climate questions and disability justice; it ended with the participants producing campaign signs made from recycled materials.
The third component of the pilot project was a 16-week collaboration with Playtrail Youth Forum and BUD Club Youth Provision, two organizations that work with youth who have disabilities and special needs. The result was a music track celebrating BUD Club on the occasion of its 10-year anniversary, and exploring what the organization means to its members.
In each case, the young people involved co-created the projects with Playhouse staff; they chose the topics they wanted to address, and how to shape the creative end of the project.
[It's about] giving people a voice and listening to their voice and providing a space for them to have agency. ... That's a fundamentally democratic thing, and it's fundamental to your well-being, too.
— Kevin Murphy, Playhouse CEO
The final report on the pilot project includes quotes from participants underlining how working with the Playhouse gave them the confidence to become advocates on these issues. “There was an increase in confidence in terms of their voice, explaining the artistic process, and linking that to activism,” said one of the adult youth workers who partnered with the Playhouse team. “The biggest thing young people can get out of decent youth work is gained confidence.”
“It's about people's voice,” says Kevin Murphy. “Giving people a voice and listening to their voice and providing a space for them to have agency in what is being created. That's a fundamentally democratic thing, and it’s fundamental to your well-being, too. What we did in 1992 or even in 2010 has shifted, because the needs of people in Northern Ireland have shifted.”
Activate Rural Learning Lab / Department of Public Transformation
Five rural Minnesota communities work to rehab buildings into creative, art-focused spaces for community gathering.
Location: Minnesota
Date: 2023–2025
Artists: Various
Partner: Mellon Foundation
Activate Rural site visit to the city of Mahnomen for the Manoomin Arts Initiative in 2023. One of five Minnesota projects in DoPT's Activate Rural Learning Lab, Manoomin Arts, on the White Earth reservation of the Ojibwe, is planning an arts-focused space. Photos © Department of Public Transformation.
For Department of Public Transformation (DoPT), an artist-led nonprofit focused on increasing connection and engagement in rural communities, civic participation can’t happen until something is done to reweave the fabric of social life.
“Research shows that social isolation brings the breakdown of civic life,” says Ash Hanson, creative executive officer (CEO) of DoPT, headquartered out of The YES! House in Granite Falls, Minnesota. “If we don’t have places to gather or to meet our neighbors, then the social fabric just can’t exist.”
In smaller communities, those gathering places are often absent or minimal, “a couple of plastic chairs in front of a gas station,” she says. “We have to invest first in places where we can build social connection and cohesion, before we can ask people to step into civic dialogue or civic leadership.”
This is the thinking behind the Activate Rural Learning Lab, one of DoPT’s flagship programs. It’s working to support local leaders in their efforts to revitalize underinvested spaces in towns with a population of 10,000 or less and turn these rehabbed locations into arts-and-creativity-oriented community gathering places.
Operating as a cohort opportunity, small-town municipalities, tribal community leaders, or nonprofits, including art centers, preservation societies, and cooperative restaurants or groceries, apply to participate in the program and gain access to financial resources, coaching, workshops, and technical assistance. The program is funded by Mellon Foundation, which provided resources to rehab spaces such as former churches or schools, commercial buildings, former cafes, or theaters. Over a two-year period, a core group of local artists and other community members work with Activate Rural Program Director Sarina Otaibi and other DoPT staff, in person and virtually, to move their plans forward, gaining help with issues like budgeting, marketing, setting up web sites, event planning, and more.
These three photos are from an in-person workshop from Activate Rural's 2024 public workshop series at The YES! House. The YES! House, a DoPT project, is a creative community gathering space and evolving economic development concept in Granite Falls, Minnesota.
One of DoPT’s flagship programs, Activate Rural's Learning Lab works to revitalize underinvested spaces in towns with a population of 10,000 or less and turn these rehabbed locations into arts-and-creativity-oriented community gathering places.
Through the program, small-town municipalities, tribal community leaders, or nonprofits, including art centers, preservation societies, and cooperative restaurants or groceries apply to participate in the program and gain access to financial resources, coaching, workshops, and technical assistance. The program is funded by Mellon Foundation, which provided resources to rehab spaces such as former churches or schools, commercial buildings, former cafes, or theaters.
The program’s first cohort, representing five Minnesota projects, has just wrapped up its Learning Lab work, and the projects are in various stages of completion.
- Mni Sota Arts, a Native arts organization in Redwood Falls, is restoring its headquarters and gallery space for shows, gatherings, and discussions.
- Rusty Rock Community Guild, in Buhl, is fostering creativity, connection, and a sense of belonging by activating multiple places.
- Manoomin Arts Initiative, an Indigenous artist-led creative community development organization based in the White Earth Nation, is renovating an arts-focused space where artists can exhibit, create, teach, and sell their work.
- Reclaim Community, a nonprofit in Jasper focused on economic revitalization, is refurbishing Bauman Hall, a downtown commercial building, for art events, film showings, musical performances, and community gathering space.
- The Spring Grove Cinema, in Spring Grove, recently reopened in its new incarnation, which includes a gaming room and a student center developed in collaboration with the town’s K-12 public school.
In an effort to bring the lessons and perspectives of the Learning Lab to a wider public, DoPT is hosting an ongoing series of Activate Rural Public Workshops, face-to-face gatherings open to the public in the five towns, in which Learning Lab participants and DoPT staffers discuss their work together. These are bolstered by virtual workshops open to a national audience and highlighting similar work in other Minnesota communities.
Creative endeavors are accessible for people. An art workshop or quilting event gets them into the space and connected to others.
— Sarina Otaibi, Activate Rural Program Director
At an Activate Rural site visit to Spring Grove Cinema in 2024. The cinema recently reopened with a gaming room and a student center developed with the town’s K-12 public school.
In a 2025 "Letters of Love" workshop at The YES! House with JJ Kapur, participants were served Singaporean dishes cooked by JJ's father, followed by a discussion on historic love letters, after which they wrote love letters to anyone of their choosing. JJ then hosted a public event where workshop participants shared their love letters aloud, between JJ playing Beatles songs on guitar. According to a Facebook post from The YES! House, "It was a week full of learning new meanings of love, writing, and sharing that vulnerability with the community."
From beginning to end, art and creativity play important roles in these efforts at reviving (DoPT’s preferred word is “activating”) these public-facing spaces.
“Art is inherently creative, and you need creative problem-solving to figure out how to tackle these really big projects that a lot of times take a lot of capital,” says Sarina Otaibi. ”And creative endeavors are accessible for people. An art workshop or quilting event gets them into the space and connected to others.”
Otaibi calls these opportunities “transformational” at the civic level, because “when citizens are engaging with an art form in a space devoted to creativity, they can begin talking to each other about possibilities—possibilities in the space, and possibilities for other spaces in the wider community. It spills out in a ripple effect.”
When citizens are engaging with an art form in a space devoted to creativity, they can begin talking to each other about possibilities... It spills out in a ripple effect.
— Sarina Otaibi, Activate Rural Program Director
DoPT and Southwest Initiative Foundation hosted a gathering at The YES! House in downtown Granite Falls, MN, on April 3, 2024 to honor and celebrate the contributions of many local and regional supporters.
CuriosityConnects.us / Hey, We Need to Talk!
In Michigan a Washington, DC artist mounted a work of "social sculpture" in which art helped foster civic conversations.
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan / Washington, DC
Date: 2024
Artists: Philippa Pham Hughes, Ouizi (Louise Jones)
Partner: Jenna Bednar, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art
Hey, We Need to Talk! provided public programming in the form of a “Common Sense Diner.” Hughes and her colleagues invited citizens of differing political persuasions to sit at an eight-person table in the gallery, eat a meal, and respond to prompts intended to get conversation rolling. Photo ©Philippa Pham Hughes, courtesy the artist
Hey, We Need to Talk! is an exhibition title that conveys artist Philippa Pham Hughes’s sense of urgency about our political divisions as well as her commitment to the ideal of civil conversation as a way out of poisonous polarization.
The exhibition—a collaboration with the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art (UMMA) and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy—centered on her adaptation of the concept of “social sculpture,” as first articulated by the German conceptualist Joseph Beuys. For Beuys, every aspect of life is part of a gigantic work of sculpture shaped by everyone, and so every aspect of life can be approached creatively.
Hughes, a Washington, DC–based artist and civic leader, sees social sculpture in terms of a space that harnesses the transformative power of art to provide an environment for “honest, courageous, common-sense conversations.”
For Hey, We Need to Talk!, that Ann Arbor space began with beauty: lush wallpaper depicting all 50 state flowers, designed by Detroit artist Ouizi (Louise Jones) and symbolizing the flourishing of civic and community life. Hughes divided the exhibition space into four zones for holding conversations, each named for one of the aspects of that ideal of flourishing: Community, Dignity, Sustainability, and Beauty. For each of these four divisions, she chose artworks from the museum’s collection as conversation starters.
Among them, for example, were a black-and-white photo by Carl Weese of an abandoned drive-in theater whose sign read “God Bless America,” and a surreal print by Doug Webb, American Dream, depicting a racing yacht making its way through a giant bathtub while a desert landscape looms in the background.
Photos by Daniel Ribar, courtesy Philippa Pham Hughes.
Hughes and her colleagues invited citizens of differing political persuasions to sit at an eight-person table in the gallery, eat a meal, and respond to prompts intended to get conversation rolling.
The lush wallpaper in the Hey We Need To Talk! exhibition space, designed by Detroit artist Ouizi (Louise Jones), depicts all 50 state flowers, symbolizing the flourishing of civic and community life.
To Hughes, who was UMMA’s Visiting Artist for Art & Civic Engagement in 2024 and also taught a course on political polarization at the university’s Ford School of Public Policy, the exhibit was only fully activated when people were engaging in those common-sense conversations.
To that end, Hey, We Need to Talk! provided public programming in the form of a “Common Sense Diner.” Hughes and her colleagues invited citizens of differing political persuasions to sit at an eight-person table in the gallery, eat a meal, and respond to prompts intended to get conversation rolling.
Hughes began with trust-building, asking the participants to tell personal stories prompted by the four concepts of flourishing illustrated in the exhibition—“Tell a story about a time when you felt a sense of Community / a moment when you grasped Beauty,” and so on. “And I specifically told them, “she says, ‘We're not here to debate about politics. We're here to understand one another as human beings.’"
I specifically told them, 'We're not here to debate about politics. We're here to understand one another as human beings.'
Hughes divided the exhibition space into four zones for holding conversations, each named for one of the aspects of that ideal of flourishing: Community, Dignity, Sustainability, and Beauty. For each of these four divisions, she chose artworks from the museum’s collection as conversation starters. Photo by Daniel Ribar, courtesy Phiilippa Pham Hughes.
The twice-weekly group meals saw more than 120 Michiganders from a range of backgrounds take part. The point was to use an art-focused space to “have conversations and form connections in a world where many people refuse to talk to each other,” says the artist. Photo by Mark Gjukich, courtesy Philippa Pham Hughes.
Then, however, she moved on to asking a big question: “What does it mean to be an American?”
“That conversation opened up a lot of different topics: immigration, gun rights, freedom. And that's when it started to feel more political. But I always tried to keep it from becoming a debate by bringing it back to ‘What is your personal experience?’"
The twice-weekly group meals saw more than 120 Michiganders from a range of backgrounds take part. The point was to use an art-focused space to “have conversations and form connections in a world where many people refuse to talk to each other,” as she told UM’s University Record in October 2024. “We can’t even begin to solve societal problems through policy if we don’t talk to each other.”
We can't even begin to solve societal problems through policy if we don't talk to each other.
— Philippa Pham Hughes
The exhibit, which wrapped up in February 2025, fits comfortably in Hughes’s lengthy efforts to use art more effectively in civic engagement. Under the banner of CuriosityConnects.us, she’s run several similar programs in the nation’s capital over the past decade. Around the Table, which took place at De La Cruz Gallery in DC, is another example of an art exhibition in which artworks sparked in-gallery conversations.
As for the Common Sense Diner meals, Hughes admits there was some awkwardness at the outset, but connections were quickly formed. “[By the end], people are exchanging numbers,” she says. “It’s hard to get them to stop talking. It works. Even people who never go to museums or are skeptical about the process… I think the artworks create the openness to have these conversations.”
[By the end], people were exchanging numbers. It's hard to get them to stop talking. ... the artworks create the openness to have these conversations.
— Philippa Pham Hughes
Photo by Neil Kagerer, courtesy Philippa Pham Hughes.
Hughes admits there was some awkwardness at the outset, but connections were quickly formed. “[By the end], people are exchanging numbers,” says the artist. “It’s hard to get them to stop talking.” Photo by Daniel Ribar, courtesy Philippa Pham Hughes.
FORWARD: Issue #8
Civic Health
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