art sanctuary
I founded Art Sanctuary in the summer of 1998 to bring creators of the best of African-American arts and letters to speak, lecture and perform in a venue in the black community. Black artists create great work, and even, as in the case of hip-hop, entire new art forms that spur global industries, but the best of these artists are too rarely seen in the inner city.
This series has created a model for making that happen. The first half-season, from January to June 1999, featured great artists: writers John Edgar Wideman and Terry McMillan; jazz musician Monette Sudler, hip-hop recording artists (and Lauren Hill back-up musicians) The Roots; poet Sonia Sanchez; a concert pianist, documentary filmmakers, fine artists and the photographer Don Camp. Each season since, the offerings have been just as fantastic, and an integral program of educational projects has been put into place. The 2005-2006 season featured A Full Year of Sonia, a living, breathing, singing, shouting homage to Philadelphia's own poet and activist, culminating in small groups across the city reading, celebrating, and being changed by Sonia's poetry.
Art Sanctuary has a solid base of non- profit funding, and it has made amazing progress in creating a sophisticated membership of individual donors. We began with eight dedicated trustees, and now Managing Director Danielle Ayers and I have the help and support of a wonderful nineteen-member board of trustees.
The place, by the way, is the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark Building. In 1968, the Advocate hosted the city's Black Power Conference; in 1974, the first women priests in the Episcopal Church were ordained there. Today, the Advocate is a small, but active and activist, congregation that houses an after school program, a soup kitchen, social worker, food cupboard, clothes closet and summer camp. It also gave birth to the Advocate Community Development Corporation, a now-independent non-profit real estate developer that has built or renovated more than two hundred units of housing in the neighborhood. Art Sanctuary has been made possible by the church's generous sharing of its building, a six-story French Gothic cathedral hung with spectacular murals of black history and struggle.
What seemed clear to us right from the start was that in order to work, an arts series in North Philadelphia had to be like the old Good and Plenty: it had to be good and it had to be a lot and we had to do it now.
Our strategy was to:
1. get the series up with a bang;
2. build and fund a skeletal staff to run the program;
3. create an extraordinary lecture series from scratch for that first half season (for which Art Sanctuary won Philly magazine's citation for best lecture series!);
4. build a small, but devoted, membership as well as liaison relationships with cultural groups throughout the region;
5. and then begin to form small, top-quality educational initiative models that would leverage the artists' visits into community-transforming and -enhancing opportunities.
The visit by historian and former Southern Christian Leadership member Vincent Harding is a perfect example. For this visit, we solicited a 40-page curriculum, written by Drexel University historian V .P. Franklin, about kids and youth in the Civil Rights movement. This is the stuff everyone refers to obliquely, but that most folks-including teachers-do not know in sufficient detail to teach to children. So, we moralize at them instead. This curriculum has been shared with tutors at the church's after school program, teachers in high schools and middle schools, youth mentors. To deepen and spread the impact of this and other visits, we've partnered with the Arts Charter of a local high school. We've also collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Drexel University, the Afro-American museum, the Board of Education's Office of Curriculum Support, Project H.O.M.E., the Center for Literacy, the Free Library and several others.
Our model has been to start each phase on a shoestring, with volunteers, part-time helpers here and there, and advisors in addition to our director, as the best way to get the wider community to see and believe the excellence that can spring up in North Philadelphia-and help nourish a region. Once each phase has begun, our job has been to fund it adequately to develop and grow. We have done that with our stellar North Stars after-school teen program, and with the Celebration of Black Writing, which we took over in 2002 with 500 participants and have built to a four-week program with 5,000 participants. We believe that education-to old and young, at basic and advanced levels, across class lines-puts the power of the artists' presentations at the center of people's intellects and emotions. It teaches creativity and hope, slipping them under the skin and into the brains of as many as possible where it will raise IQs and E.Q.s. (Emotional Quotients) because art is not a luxury.
Lorene Cary, Founder
www.artsanctuary.org
