Art Like Bread

“Some people work without a public relations man/and do their best work, babe, out of sight…”
—Lou Reed, “No Money Down”

When I was in college in Sarasota, Florida, a group of six artists called the Performers Workshop Ensemble came through my school for a week-long residency. They were involved in poetry, theatre, and particularly in new music composition. I discovered that they were a collective based in Urbana, Illinois, and they taught as a group at the University of Illinois, despite only one of them drawing a faculty salary. (They split his money amongst them.) They also staged various plays, concerts, and poetry readings around town.

I spent some time in their orbit in Urbana, mostly writing performance-art pieces, and I learned a great deal from them. But what I mostly learned is how vital a community of artists can be to a mid-sized town. They cultivated an audience through education, classes, and workshops, and eventually became an indispensible part of the culture. Arts organizations in big cities are always snagging grants to work on diversity and outreach. But the “glass cube” around the arts in these cities is very hard to shatter. Part of this has to do with the sheer number of organizations competing for attention and funding, but it also has to do with big cities’ preference for glamorous, high-ticket events that tend to alienate large segments of the population.