History in the remaking: continuing its artistic engagement with a complex local past, the 2002 Spoleto Festival once again featured a controversial brand of community-based work - Report From Charleston

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney

Thanks to the sporadic inclusion of an art component within the Spoleto Festival, Charleston, S.C.'s annual celebration of avant-garde performance, music and theater, the city has become a laboratory of sorts for experiments in public art. The project began in 1991 with "Places with a Past," curated by Mary Jane Jacob [see A.i.A., Nov. '91]. She commissioned a selection of respected international artists to create public installations dealing with Charleston's hidden social history, especially as it pertains to slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. Though well received critically, the show ran into trouble with the festival's administration, leading to the removal of Nigel Reddin, the general director from 1986 to 1991, and a hiatus on art projects for six years. (Reddin was reinstated in 1995, continuing to run the festival while also serving as the director of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York.) The second set of art projects, in 1997 [see A.i.A, Dec. '97], was less confrontational in its approach. Curated by John Beardsley, it took the garden as a model for public art and presented work that focused on the restorative properties of nature and the region's garden tradition.

In 2001, Jacob came back to Charleston and the Spoleto Festival with the first installment of a three-part program titled "Evoking History." Coorganized with Tumelo Mosaka, a young South African who recently graduated from Bard College's curatorial studies program, this new chapter reflected Jacob's own evolution since "Places with a Past." Inspired in part by criticisms of that project's disconnect from Charleston's non-art audience, Jacob has become a leading proponent of what has come to be called "community-based art": a permutation of public art that envisions artists as catalysts for social action within disenfranchised and disadvantaged communities. In projects such as the 1992 Chicago-based "Culture in Action" and "Conversations at the Castle" (part of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta), she has explored an approach to art in which community outreach is privileged over the expression of individual artists' visions, political engagement over traditional esthetics, and the encouragement of dialogue over the creation of art objects.

In Charleston, phase one of "Evoking History" (May/June 2001) included three projects involving local communities, spearheaded by artist leaders. Theater director Ping Chong and playwright Talvin Wilks created Secret Histories, an original play woven from the personal stories of encounters with racism experienced by five local women. Artist and educator Lonnie Graham's Heritage Garden Project was an educational garden created at a local elementary school that enlisted students to plant vegetables indigenous to Africa as a reference to Charleston's history of slavery. Graham also led two other projects--an installation in a former plantation house and the placement of painted memorial stakes in the unmarked African-American cemetery at another former plantation turned museum. For the third project, writer Neill Bogan collaborated with Charleston artists, educators and writers to explore the relationship of monuments and history in a series of community gatherings, installations and workshops. Jacob ruefully admits that it was a stretch to incorporate more festival-like elements into these projects, including a boat ride for participants and a celebratory dinner.

For phase two of "Evoking History" (May/June 2002), Jacob wanted to return to somewhat more conventional art projects. She invited five internationally known artists who have not previously been associated with community-based art to create installations throughout the city. Similar in this respect to "Places with a Past," though much smaller in scope ("Places" included 18 artists or artist groups), phase two was given the subtitle "The Memory of Water/The Memory of Land." Artists were asked to consider present-day Charleston in relation to its maritime history and colonial past. The result was a series of installations in diverse locations that included two plantation museums, a pair of derelict houses and the vacant lot surrounding them, a theater which was also a venue for the concurrent music festival, and an abandoned lighthouse.

In keeping with Jacob's preoccupation with the community and dialogue, these art projects were part of a larger package that included workshops, forums for local and national "stakeholders" (an evolving group of individuals sympathetic to the project's goals), an educational Youth Fellows program with local teens as docents, a boat ride, a communal meal and, eventually, a publication based on the installations and discussions.

In "Evoking History," as in her earlier public art projects, Jacob created a format that sounds wonderful on paper (something that no doubt contributes greatly to her ability to attract generous funding from sources like the Warhol Foundation, the Ford Foundation, AT&T and the NEA) but is more problematic in practice. Despite the fact that she invited artists with excellent track records as creators of site-specific installations, only two of this season's projects were fully successful, and of those, only one really fulfills the mandate of "Evoking History": in Jacob's words, to "initiate ideas and communication across race, gender and ethnicity" and listen "across cultures and communities as a way to engage these conflicted histories."