Spending the past month with Professor Epstein, Alyssa, and my fellow students in Democracy and the Arts here in Washington DC has been extremely valuable to me because it has shown me how easily accessible much of our government is. Beginning after our meeting with Tina Smith, a group of students decided to explore the Senate office buildings. We entered six different offices and were welcomed each time by staffers of the Senators. We were showered with offers of food, gallery passes to watch the impeachment trial, and, most surprisingly, contact information for the scheduling office for each staffer, which many students made use of to assist with their policy proposals.
My personal followups with congressional offices have been equally as open. Representative Betty McCollum’s tax policy staffer was willing to talk on the phone about my proposal, and that discussion yielded significant changes to the scale of my proposal about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s impact on arts funding. I additionally have a meeting scheduled on Friday with Senator Klobuchar’s tax policy staff, who I anticipate will be extremely helpful in making further revisions.
The greatest change to my attitudes about government has been direct a result of this, with it being abundantly clear that congresspeople care about their constituents thoughts, opinions on issues, and opinions on them. This accessibility will undoubtably spur further civic action in my lifetime, when policies I agree or disagree with are discussed. I historically looked at letter writing campaigns as ineffective and wasteful ways for government to convince people they were being heard. However, now I know that meeting and speaking to congressional staffers, who will actually engage with your own thoughts, is possible.
At the same time, beyond my realization that I can shape government policy, my civic identity has remained largely the same throughout this course. Most of our meetings, experiences, and discussions have been regarding art in whatever form it takes and its curation, funding, and practice. While I believe art is an important part of any culture as a way to express views of the day and to express political feelings, it is also my belief that the most important functions of government are unrelated to the arts. Government’s largest functions, be it containing pandemic diseases, running the military, providing a social safety net, or maintaining a justice system, are typically what I think of as the role of government.
I know many would push back against my views of what my civic identity is; however, I view a civic identity as the combinations of beliefs in market forces, human rights, and public policies which shape why and how we participate in democratic government.
The greatest link between democracy and the arts which have appeared to me during this course is the way art can be a commentary on democratic government to support social movements, oppose military conflicts or abuses of power, or to provide humor and entertainment. This is certainly not the view of all the institutions we visited. The Arts Education Partnership and the many government supported museums, like the education department at SAAM, would be the first to point out that the government can provide education to students who will see many benefits to their academics and mental health as a result. This is certainly valid and true, but teaching art is far from the only way that students and adults can exercise their minds and improve their mental health. I would argue that art is unlike any other form of government commentary in its ability to reach the wider public and invoke emotions strong enough to spur further action.
One major discussion our class had, largely in the past few days after seeing Pilgrims and visiting Anacostia has been about the gentrification which has occurred throughout much of the DC area since the uprising after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and the growing divide between rich and poor both in terms of privilege and access to art. Several times it has been suggested that arts organizations are somehow responsible to try and prevent gentrification from happening by locating themselves in certain locations and not others, and I want to push back against this. Some would argue gentrification is as simple as goods like land and buildings being put to the highest value uses through the market. I would argue this is disingenuous because many are not economically secure enough to participate on equal footing. This problem however isn’t one for arts organizations to deal with.
If the American public, and by extension our government, doesn’t want the abusive type of gentrification that has happened in DC over the last 50 years to happen, then a stronger social safety net should be established. If the public doesn’t care, then it is not the responsibility of individual artists to stop producing art in areas they believe will cause gentrification. After spending a month in the district I have never seen a situation I believe would not have benefited from more arts funding, and I think if people have an opportunity to create art in an area and choose not to out of fear of causing gentrification, they are doing themselves and their communities a disservice.
I am further convinced that, if economic disparities were far less severe than they currently are, that people moving into neighborhoods that are different racial, ethnic, or social groups is not something to be opposed. If the new people to an area value living there more highly than the people who currently live there, and are willing to compensate the current residents as such, there is no reason in my mind not to allow people to live where they choose, assuming no one else wants to live there more.
As I reflect on this class, one thing I must note is that I don’t exactly know what the class was about. When applying for the class I was expecting lobbying on behalf of the arts to be the main goal, but that view quickly changed when it became clear that most students in the class were musicians and we were going to be learning about the arts. When the trip began, I was unsure what I would get out of the trip, but I was expecting to learn about the role of our democratic government in funding and supporting the arts in the ways a political science class would. While the class was definitely not that, we covered such a diverse range of topics, from the local community in the DC area to the ways government funding effected art exhibitions that, without looking at the course goals it is not clear how I would describe the class. Anyone along for our site visits would have noticed that whenever our class was asked what we were studying I averted my eyes out of fear I would be asked directly and would be unsure how to answer.
Despite focusing mostly on whatever topics the class was most interested on in a given day, I feel I learned a lot from this class. I learned about the accessibility of government, I learned what I believe to be valuable skills about how to interact with public officials, I learned how numerous and diverse opportunities for careers are in the arts, and by extension in other fields, and I learned much more about views of diversity, other cultures, and gentrification than I had encountered previously. Learning how to navigate a larger city, and how to live around and with new people, the first time I have had to do that since beginning college, has been extremely valuable to me and made me more confident as a student and as an adult.
The memories of what I have learned in this class, like all others, may fade with time as I move into future parts of my life, but I hope I will never forget some of the experiences I have had like dancing at the front of a performance at the Kennedy Center, visiting the Supreme Court during oral arguments, and visiting the senate during their Impeachment Trial. Most importantly I know I will never forget the people I have met on this trip and now have the privilege to call my friends.