Which transparencies are good?

 

 

I work for a museum where professional artists, museum staff, and community members actively work together. Our projects are joint undertakings, where the process of collaborating is equally important to the art created, where hopefully shared decision-making and ownership of a project results, and equitable community change happens.

Now to get to the question at hand, the types of transparencies that I find to be useful are those which are not only about sharing information, such as where money comes from and how it is allocated for example, but rather those that help create active and multi-directional interactions amongst all those participating in a project to facilitate effective collaboration.

For example, let’s look at our collaborative project with artist Tania Bruguera, who launched Immigrant Movement International (IMI) in April 2011, initially conceived as a center for creative political actions and an international think tank for examining migration in the 21^st century. IMI programming was initially directed by Bruguera and QM staff, but its offerings and actions have been increasingly informed by discussions with Corona residents and neighborhood organizations. Their feedback meant that IMI has evolved primarily into a community center to serve the immediate educational and healthy living needs of Corona’s new immigrants.

Two years later, it was clear that IMI users were ready to be developed into active member-leaders. Among our responses were regular meetings for all workshop leaders to develop camaraderie, as well as combined workshop graduations that develop cross-pollinations amongst various workshop participants. These meetings led to developing our first educators retreat in June 2014 to ensure that all classes incorporate the artistic priorities and political values of IMI, and that educators, all of whom are volunteers and with varying degrees of experience, have a chance to learn from each other. These actions created a shared context around project goals and management.

Second, good transparencies provides participants with a real influence on the project throughout the entire process, not just in the research phase. People not only have their perspectives integrated into project definitions, but track them in real time, creating a circuit of accountability. To this end we created a Steering Committee of IMI users. Many of the Steering Committee members had limited formal educational opportunities, came from different cultural backgrounds, feared public political actions due to their immigration status, or just had not been in leadership roles before. In response QM staff, developed and facilitated “La Escuelita de Pensamiento Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña.” The Steering Committee participated in four full-day trainings that encompassed political education, organizational structures/decision making processes, and arts in activism. The process aimed to ensure we all had access to and understand the information, theories of change, assumptions, obligations, resources, and cultural concepts that each of the collaborators bring to the project. Beyond the escuelita, we also take IM members to other neighborhood organizations, give them opportunities to speak publicly, and offer additional trainings by outside facilitators. These actions help us move towards a dialogical transparency that will create the IMI of the future.

---

About the contributor: Prerana Reddy has been the Director of Public Programs & Community Engagement for the Queens Museum since 2005. She organizes screening, talks, festivals, and performances, a third of which are developed in collaboration with diverse local community organizations and cultural producers. She is also in charge of the museum’s community engagement initiatives which combine arts and culture with social development goals in nearby neighborhoods predominately comprised of new immigrants. Currently she is overseeingCorona Studio, a series of long-term socially-enagaged artist residencies in the neighborhood where the Musuem is located. She also co-curated the major exhibition Fatal Love: South Asian American Contemporary Art Now as well as Arte Útil Lab, an exploration of socially useful art in collaboration with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Reddy is one of the founding members of 3rd I NY, a collective that promotes emerging South Asian film and video, as well as a film programmer and board member of Alwan for the Arts, an Arab and Middle Eastern cultural center in Lower Manhatttan. Reddy holds a master’s degree in Cinema Studies, with a focus on documentary and visual anthropology, from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.