The Cal State San Bernardino Community-Based Art program has been named 2015 Partner of the Year for Job Corps from the Inland Empire Job Corps Center Recreation department.
The art program – which was formally honored at the Job Corps Community Relations Council holiday luncheon and awards ceremony in December – also received several certificates from U.S. Congress members, state senators and the mayor of San Bernardino for its work.
Annie Buckley, associate professor of visual studies at CSUSB, founded the program in 2013 to expand access to art in the community. “We feel fortunate to have the opportunity to do this rewarding work with our community partners,” she said.
Community-based art is an approach to making, teaching and learning art that directly engages the community in the process. Dozens of students, interns, and volunteers have taught more than 40 eight-to-10-week sessions to more than 400 community members. Sites where sessions are held include: Job Corps, Our House, Engage, Waterman Gardens Boys & Girls Club and three California state prisons.
“All of our community partners have an expressed interest in bringing art to their programs,” said Buckley. “Our community-based art classes, projects and programs are based on a philosophy of collaboration, interdependence and mutuality.”
Howard Gaines, former community resources manager at the California Institute for Men, contacted Buckley about potentially fulfilling the requests of prison inmates for an arts curriculum. The program began with eight CSUSB teaching interns facilitating four different classes and has since expanded to include two other state prisons.
“I feel inspired to accomplish something, to be creative and make art,” said a CIM participant.
Throughout the program, students examine the ways that social, cultural, and economic forces impact access to and understandings of art. Students actively participate in changing the current paradigm by teaching art at sites with little access to it. The design of this program varies depending on the needs and population at each site as well as on student interest and course requirements.
“It’s thinking about art as not merely as an object but an interaction, an experience,” Buckley said.
In 2014, she launched “Pollinating Kindness: Good Deeds Anonymous,” a community-based art project that uses acts of “kindness as the material for the art,” Buckley said. As part of CSUSB’s 50th anniversary, the university’s Office of Community Engagement collaborated with her to come up with the “50 Acts of Kindness” campaign based on Pollinating Kindness. Through the art of message-bearing paper butterflies, students, faculty and staff are given the task to pollinate kindness on and off-campus by doing good deeds for others. Buckley said she had been moving toward a point where her art and community work merge.
“There has always been some form of art that was community-based or participatory, versus art being solely something to look at to appreciate. More recently, there has been a move toward participatory art having an activist aspect attached to it,” she said. “The Pollinating Kindness project came out of that.”
The author of several fiction and non-fiction books, Buckley currently serves as a contributing editor, as well as previous art editor, for the “Los Angeles Review of Books.” She is the curator of the traveling exhibition, “Bridging Homeboy Industries,” which features work by three artists associated with the acclaimed gang intervention program in East Los Angeles.
Visit the CSUSB Community-based Art program website
for more information. Also visit the Pollinating Kindness: Good Deeds Anonymous website.
Set in the foothills of the beautiful San Bernardino Mountains, CSUSB is a preeminent center of intellectual and cultural activity in inland Southern California. Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2015-2016, CSUSB serves more than 20,000 students each year and graduates about 4,000 students annually.
For more information about Cal State San Bernardino, contact the university’s Office of Strategic Communication at (909) 537-5007 and visit news.csusb.edu.