Press
Auditioning for Office
Progressives want artists to take the political stage
-Martin Brown, Utne
ARTISTS ARE NO strangers to progressive politics. In the United
States,however, the word liberal has gone the way of loose-fit
corduroys and well-funded public schools. Activists working in
creative fields have since been struggling to stay both inspired
and involved. Political organizers on the left are anxious to
find fresh ways to motivate their base.
Answering the call, the Chicago-based Creative America Project
is recruiting and training artists to run for local office in
2006. "We need to elevate creativity to a national value and
priority," explains Tom Tresser, the nonprofit's lead organizer. "All
people should be able to create, invent, and contribute to their
fullest ability."
Creative America's training sessions, which began in January
and are scheduled throughout 2005, cost about $75 a person and
run for two and a half days. The goal is to teach organizers
and candidates how "to run for local office -- using grassroots
progressive strategies --as a creative person." This involves
building a base of support, selling creativity as a way to solve
problems, garnering media attention, and soliciting financial
support. Workshops with titles like "Paid Media Basics" and "Creating
Alliances and Producing Events" are held in conjunction with
poetry readings and open-ended brainstorming sessions.
"Creativity and the ability to reinvent yourself is the American
promise and fuels our ingenuity, acceptance, and drive to innovate," Tresser
says. Ideally, artist-politicians will understand that to foster
such traits, American society must remain open-minded and tolerant.
In practical terms, that means using public office to fight for
the First Amendment, church-state separation, better public schools,
the right to same-sex marriage, and reversing the income gap
between rich and poor.
A former Shakespearean actor and theater manager, Tresser began
to wax political in 1990, when the far right was attempting to
eliminate public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA). The MacArthur Foundation sent him on a six-city tour "to
see what was going on with artists across the country, and what
they were doing in the cities to speak up for the arts," he says.
Upon returning home, according to the Chicago Reader (Dec.24,
2004), he started an organization called Greater Chicago Citizens
for the Arts, which fused political and creative work to register
voters and endorse candidates for local, state, and national
office. The group disbanded in 1994.
"Nothing's changed, really, since I started talking about this
in 1990 and went around the country in 1991 and 1992 to talk
to arts groups about why they needed to organize to fight the
right," Tresser says. According to author Richard Florida, though,
America's economy has changed since the NEA was last targeted.
In the book The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic, 2002), he
estimates that 38 million Americans now use creativity in their
professional lives to propose new solutions to problems. The
Creative America Project believes these "creative workers" can
be organized around a new class consciousness.
"Artists are a great underused resource in civic life," notes
Creative America board member Kathie deNobriga. A theater director
and founding member of the Atlanta-based arts and social justice
organization Alternate ROOTS (www.alternateroots.org), deNobriga
was elected to the city council in Pine Lake, Georgia, in 2002. "So
much of what you might try to do [creatively] is hampered in
the political arena by the strings of government," she says.
But "we need imagination…we need creativity…we need people who
can work well with other people. I feel like my arts experience
prepared me to do all this."
TELL ME MORE In 2005 the Creative America Project is planning
to hold training sessions in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago
Champaign Madison/Racine Cheyenne Phoenix and San Francisco For
more information visit www
creativeamerica us.
