What We Made

Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation

Tom Finkelpearl
What We Made
Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation

Tom Finkelpearl

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five soCial vision and a CooPerative CoMMunity

Project Row Houses rICk lowe, artIst,

and mark J. stern,
Professor of
soCIal hIstory and
urban studIes

in 1993 the artist Rick Lowe led a group in founding Project Row Houses,
an organization that has since become an important player in the develop-
ment of Houston’s Third Ward by renovating a series of shotgun houses
and translating them into an art and community center; by expanding the
campus to provide housing for single mothers; by acquiring, renovating,
and reactivating a historically significant ballroom; and by building new
affordable housing. An early inspiration for the project was the interpre-
tation and depiction of row houses by the Houston-based African Ameri-
can painter John Biggers. But the original twenty-two shotgun houses on
a block and a half were only the start: the organization now extends six
blocks and includes forty properties. It is an artist-led nonprofit corpo-
ration, but it is also the Row House Community Development Corpo-
ration, an affiliated but separate corporation that has designed and built
low-income housing units.
In general there is no hesitation in the rhetoric of Lowe and others at
Project Row Houses to ascribe social goals to the endeavor. The website
proclaims that the project is “founded on the principle that art—and the
community it creates—can be the foundation for revitalizing depressed
inner-city neighborhoods.”1 But it also claims an aesthetic dimension in
architectural preservation and innovation, the ongoing creation and pre-
sentation of contemporary art projects on site, and, most relevant for this
book, the notion that there can be an aesthetic of human development
and action. (For further discussion of how this project plays out in the
unique environment of Houston, see the conclusion.)
In the following interview Lowe narrates the genesis of the project,
starting from an impetus to do something substantial and effective within
the African American community. Like many of the examples in this
book, the project unfolded slowly, as did Lowe’s own understanding of 133
exactly what he was doing. It was only after the project was under way
that he began to understand it in terms of Joseph Beuys’s notion of social

lowe and stern

sculpture.
As in the interview with the artist Harrell Fletcher and the planner
Ethan Seltzer (chapter 6), it is interesting to see how Lowe and the so-
cial historian Mark J. Stern differ in approach even as their interests over-
lap. Not surprisingly for an urban studies professor, Stern is interested in
measuring social phenomena; he has worked, for example, to develop a
“revitalization index.” But his observations based on this index are simi-
lar to Lowe’s in many ways; their methods represent different routes to
similar ideas. Even as he speaks the language of the social sciences, Stern
is profoundly sympathetic to the arts. As a pragmatic observer of the city
who can produce quantitative charts of social networks, he is suspicious of
standard measurements of the effects of the arts and argues for an under-
standing of arts groups as “irrational organizations” that should not be
measured by orthodox benchmarks.

rick lowe is the founder of Project Row Houses, a multidecade experi-

ment in social action, preservation, community development, and pub-
lic art. He has participated in exhibitions and lectured nationally and
internationally and received the 2000 American Institute of Architec-
ture Keystone Award, the 2002 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humani-
ties, the 2005 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Governors
Award, the Lenore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change in 2009,
and other awards. He was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University in 2002 and
has served in Houston as a member of shape Community Center, the
Municipal Arts Commission, and the Civic Arts Program and as a board
member of the Greater Houston Visitors and Conventions Bureau.
mark J. sTern is a professor of social welfare and history and the co-
director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
The coauthor (with Michael B. Katz and Michael J. Doucet) of The Social
Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (1982), Stern cofounded (with
Susan Seifert) the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of
Pennsylvania, which since 1994 has studied the role of community cul-
tural providers in improving the quality of life in urban neighborhoods. In
2006 he again collaborated with Katz on a book, this time a social history
134 of the United States in the twentieth century, One Nation, Divisible: What
America Was and What It Is Becoming.
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

The following conversation took place at Mark J. Stern’s office at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania in November 2004, with follow-up discussions by phone
in July 2005.

Tom Finkelpearl: Can we begin by talking about the genesis of Proj-

ect Row Houses?
rick lowe: As I speak about it in hindsight, I can say how Project Row
Houses evolved and how these collaborations happened. But back
there looking forward, I didn’t have a clue about collaborative art. I
knew that I was interested in work that pushed beyond the bound-
aries in terms of social engagement, beyond what we call “political
art.” Early on I was doing art that was political—billboard-size work
used as the backdrop for political rallies. It was socially engaged on
one level, but there was a leap that I felt like I needed to take to
figure out how to make art that wasn’t created in a way where the
audience stood back, but where they were actually engaged. One
sure way to engage people is to find something bigger than you are,
beyond your capacity, and it forces you to build some kind of re-
lationship to others to move the project forward.
I was interested in issues of low-income African American com-
munities—how to contribute, using creativity, to help transform
some of the conditions of the environment. Blight was a huge issue.
I was also thinking about the community brain drain. Everybody’s
always leaving, and nobody’s coming in. I thought of myself as a part
of that brain drain. The resources that I had accumulated over time
were not going back into the neighborhood. So how do you pull
those things together?
The first step in the collaboration was with a small group of art-
ists. I had interacted in groups before, but not with the specific pur-
pose of trying to figure out how to address these issues in a low-
income African American community. Once I hooked up with those
artists—there were seven of us—we began to explore the possibili-
ties for bringing our work into the community, and that was exciting
for me. But no one had the know-how or the energy at the time to
figure out how to build a structure through which we could make
 ourselves available. I was the most active in this community, so it 135
kind of fell on my shoulders to figure it out.
mark J. sTern: The character of the engagement with the community?

lowe and stern

rl: Yeah. To figure out a situation in which we could bring our resources
into the community.
TF: Rick, when you say “the community,” are you talking about Hous-
ton’s Third Ward?
rl: We were talking about how to do something in an African Ameri-
can community in Houston, not any specific place. But I was think-
ing specifically about the Third Ward because I was doing volun-
teer work there, and I had done these installations there at this
little place called shape. The name was one of those acronyms that
didn’t exactly fit: Self Help for African People through Education.
TF: Were you already living there at that time?
rl: No, this was in 1990 and 1991. I was living on the west side of town.
As we started to think about this, I was on a bus tour organized by
shape with a group that was looking at dangerous places, places
that needed to be torn down and dealt with. We passed these little
shotgun houses, and that was the first time I thought about the
houses—you know, the scale of the houses, and how as artists we
could utilize those houses as a way of reflecting something to the
community. Of course, in the beginning we didn’t have resources or
the long-term vision of the collaborative process that could build an
institution or create systems with sustainability. We were just think-
ing about doing some kind of guerrilla art project that would hap-
pen and then we’d go away.
As time went on in my researching possibilities in the area, I
came across Joseph Beuys and his idea of social sculpture, which he
defined as the way in which we shape and mold the world around
us. This was interesting as a potential kind of work. And there was
something about those houses that was hauntingly reminiscent of
John Biggers’s paintings. Biggers was a senior African American art-
ist in Houston who died three years ago. I started looking at Big-
gers’s paintings and trying to understand the houses from that point
of view, until I realized there was a possibility there that went be-
yond a temporary act of guerrilla art. At that point I realized it was
going to be something that was way beyond me as an individual,
bigger even than the seven of us artists, so I started planting the seed
and telling people what the possibilities were.
136
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

Rick Lowe (left) with the artist Dean Ruck in 1993 during the beginning of
the renovations and rebuilding of Project Row Houses. Photograph by David
Robinson. Courtesy of Project Row Houses.

mJs: So was there an “aha” moment? Or did the idea build over time?
rl: There were a couple of “ahas.” The first “aha” was simply seeing the
houses with this community group. We were talking about tearing
them down, and we all agreed that this would be the correct course
of action. But after looking at Biggers’s work and really thinking
about it, I drove to that corner again one day and looked again, and
all of a sudden I thought, “Aha! Wow! Look at that.”
mJs: There’s a value there.
rl: Yes. I just remember standing there. It was a rainy day, and the roofs
get a little purple and it’s a beautiful sight. So there was enough of an
indication that something was there that I was able to drag people
over there and talk. And the other artists got involved and excited
as well, which gave me more confidence to talk about it and be en-
thusiastic.
mJs: Interesting. You know, before I was working in the arts, I was essen-
tially doing research on urban poverty. One of the things I was work-
ing on in the early ’90s was an essay that argued that the idea of
the underclass was about reinforcing boundaries between “us” and
“them.” The way I got involved with looking at the arts was around
the fact that too many people were wanting to tear things down.
 There are all these neighborhoods in Philadelphia that people only 137
look at as deficits—that are defined just by the negative. But there
are all these other dimensions of those neighborhoods that get oblit-

lowe and stern

erated when we just apply that negative label to them. Part of our
work in the arts was to say that there are resources and assets in
these neighborhoods that are invisible or below the radar, and see-
ing these assets was our motivation. So it’s interesting that at the
same time, in the early 1990s, your engagement came out of thinking
about what these neighborhoods were like, but also reflecting on the
objects themselves. The houses themselves were part of your moti-
vation.
rl: Right. And it’s also about not only thinking about it abstractly. As
creative-minded people, we all do that. We all look probably ten or
fifteen times a day at something and think about what it could be,
what values may be underneath. But then there’s that other difficult
step to actively engage and try to uncover and reveal those things in
a way that moves either yourself or other people to action, and that’s
the difficult part.
TF: Rick, quite frankly, you may look at things ten or fifteen times a
day and see potential, but that is a tremendously optimistic out-
look. Others might look ten times a day at the problems that the
city presents and get depressed. But even for the most optimistic
and active person, as you say, there is a difference between seeing
potential and activating it.
rl: It’s frustrating for artists like myself who enjoy doing that, when you
can’t make this kind of work happen in other places and other envi-
ronments, because you can only take the first step. You can only look
at it and use that creativity to envision what the possibilities might
be, but there still has to be that other level of really tangibly tear-
ing into it, pulling things out, bringing things to it to make the value
actual instead of just latent or conceptual. It’s frustrating when you
can see it so clearly but can’t make it happen. I have had situations
where I can see the potential, but I can’t pass that understanding to
the people in the community. It’s a struggle to empower others to be
able to see it. That is where the collaboration, the coalition building
comes in.
But with Project Row Houses it was so easy, for some reason. Once
the core of seven artists got excited, we went to DiverseWorks,
which is an alternative art space in Houston, and talked to people
 138 there and dragged them over to see, and they got excited. They were
the ones who gave us the idea or planted the seed that it could be
sustainable and not just a one-time project. So from them it went to
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

the nea. We drafted a proposal talking about how we were going to

rehab these old houses and bring artists in from all over the country
to do work in this low-income African American neighborhood, and
so on. It was kind of a far-fetched proposal at the time, but there was
a quality about it that resonated with people quickly. The folks at the
nea saw something interesting, so instead of throwing the proposal
out when they realized we hadn’t even gotten any kind of agreement
on the property, they sent us a letter stating that they were inter-
ested in the proposal, as a way of giving us leverage to negotiate with
the guy who owned the property. You know, they actually became
participants, in a sense. The owner was an architect living in Taiwan.
Once I was able to fax him a letter from the nea saying that they
were interested in the project, he became interested, and we got a
lease-purchase agreement.
We were able to start with a small group of artists—basically the
seven of us and a few others from the DiverseWorks circle—to clean
and clear the site. And then folks from the neighborhood started
coming. At this point, as I said, I had no idea how to go about build-
ing a collaboration, to reach the goals. But the one thing that was
very obvious was that if we were going to do it, it wasn’t going to be
just us doing it. It was going to take a broad group. During that time
I started to really see my role as an artist as trying to uncover the
meaning of the place and creating opportunities for people to give
that meaning a place to live within the project in reality. And so it
went from children in the neighborhood to church groups, museum
groups, corporate groups, and a wide range of other professionals
with technical expertise, from architects and historians, to attor-
neys, to people who conceptualized programs. For sure, all the pro-
grams of Project Row Houses didn’t come from me. They came from
inviting people who are really good at developing programs—giving
them the space to be involved and see what the possibilities were.
mJs: So there were really two kinds of engagement: a community en-
gagement that was about involving people who lived in that physi-
cal place, but also an engagement process that brought in folks with
whom you wouldn’t necessarily work as an artist, but whom you
needed to actually make it happen.
 139

lowe and stern

Amoco employees from across the United States participating in the first large-
scale volunteer effort at Project Row Houses, organized by Amoco Torch Classics,
a program for the corporate Olympics. This effort renovated the exteriors of
sixteen houses in 1994. Photograph courtesy of Project Row Houses.

rl: I see that duality all the time, especially in terms of the audiences
for Project Row Houses. There is the need for people inside the com-
munity to benefit from what we’re doing on a service basis. But at
the same time we realized that Project Row Houses was also intended
for people outside the community to participate, to benefit from
the opportunity to interact in a different kind of environment. For
example, we’d have a group from the Mormon Church come and
do a volunteer day. Some of these folks wouldn’t otherwise have an
opportunity to be engaged on a grassroots level with low-income
African American folks working on something that is a positive ex-
perience. There’s that engagement that both sides benefit from, the
service part, but also the resources coming in from outside.
mJs: This relates to the work we’ve done in Philadelphia in terms of ex-
plaining to the funders how community arts work. There’s this as-
sumption that, when you say “community art,” it works like commu-
nity health or community development. There is a common notion
that community art centers should essentially serve their local area,
like you could draw a line around whom they serve. And one of
our big findings was that most of the audience for community arts
140 programs in Philadelphia comes from outside the neighborhood
in which a given center is located. Originally the arts funding pro-
grams were upset about this observation. But if you’re an artist and
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

your only engagement is within this limited geography, you feel like
there’s something missing.
rl: Yes.
mJs: Part of our lobbying in Philadelphia was around saying that “com-
munity arts” doesn’t mean grandmothers with coloring books in
their front yards. We’re simultaneously about community activity
and serious art. And if it is about art, then people involved with it
don’t want to say, “I just do it between Third and Fifteenth Streets.”
It’s been simultaneously trying to figure out how these networks
operate—and how you get this depth within community but also
the connections across a region, or across an entire city. Empirically
trying to figure that out has been a challenge. It’s been trying to ex-
plain to a wider audience that one of the unique values of commu-
nity arts is that they simultaneously can engage local communities
and networks of people that are nongeographical.
rl: That’s true. I think people are missing the point when they say that
you can’t really talk about community-based art in a critical sense
because it’s just about that community. I mean, if it’s community-
based art, from my standpoint, it’s a community-based activity that’s
trying to identify some kind of higher order or existence of activi-
ties that is not only beneficial for the folks inside the community but
should be of interest for people outside the community if they want
to better understand the elements that create life and vitality within
these communities.
TF: Rick, have you ever seen the charts that Mark has made that visual-
ize the web of interconnectivity in community arts activities?
rl: I haven’t.
TF: They look like spider webs. We’re looking at a couple of them here.
Mark, can you explain what we are looking at?
mJs: Well, these are really two network diagrams we’ve done based on
work we were doing on community arts. For the first one, we inter-
viewed fifty-five artists and asked them about organizations with
which they had connections. No big surprise—you can see the aver-
age artist had connections with five different arts organizations over
the previous year. The chart gives you a feel for both the range of the
networks and the fact that there are these connections people don’t
 141

lowe and stern

Mark Stern’s research has shown that the nonprofit arts sector can help build
social networks. This graphic is a visualization of how networks grew in a
Philadelphia neighborhood over a three-year period, and it is these charts that
Stern and Lowe discuss in the interview. 2002. Courtesy of the Social Impact of
the Arts Project, University of Pennsylvania, and Mark Stern.

even know they have. The other drawing is of institutional connec-

tions for ten arts organizations we were following, connections with
other kinds of organizations, both arts and nonarts. We did another
survey this summer of artists in which the whole sampling strategy
was based on getting one artist to refer us to other artists. The study
was based on developing networks of artists. I think we ended up
with sixty-five different contacts coming out of just one artist who
referred us to three people, and those three people referred us to
nine more people, and those nine referred us to twenty-seven, and
so on. One of the big emphases of this work has been these vertical
and horizontal networks and the recognition that you’ve got to have
both to do what we call community building—which is building out
within a community, and building from the communities out.
rl: Was there a connection between the diversity of the connections
and the success of the institutions?
mJs: You can see that certain organizations aren’t as likely to have crises,
either because of luck or because they’ve created networks that
bridge resources, like the link you made with the Mormon Church.
One of our big “aha” moments was when we ran into this group of
essentially faith-based community arts programs that just had a cer-
tain vitality to them. We realized that they were Roman Catholic–
based. And in town—I don’t know if this is the same everywhere—
if you’re involved in the Catholic Church, you’re embedded in a
network that crosses boundaries, that links suburbs to the city and
142 spans communities. For example, Norris Square Neighborhood
Project up in Kensington, a low-income Latino area, can easily con-
nect with eight or ten suburban Catholic colleges and universities.
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

When they call on students from those colleges, there’s a set of re-
sources that they can pull into the neighborhood based on the pre-
existing community. Other organizations are more intentional in
terms of saying, “We’re going to build this network out.”
rl: I know a lot of smaller, particularly African American groups that
are really trying to control their identity, and so they don’t allow too
much verticality in terms of the way they reach out. There’s a cer-
tain kind of limitation in terms of resources and the connections
they make. It becomes very insular in the way they allow themselves
to be seen and talked about. They limit their social networks; they
don’t allow anyone to be critical of them, because, you know, they’re
within their own little sphere of activity. But when you start going
more vertical and going out, it kind of forces that organization to
look critically at itself. That’s one of the things that arts and culture
can bring to community-based projects—that kind of verticality.
mJs: Right. And boundary pushing. The boundaries between groups are
shifting and complicated.
rl: I deal with that all the time in terms of how to allow Project Row
Houses to maintain an identity as an organization that’s African
American–centered but, at the same time, exposed and open to cul-
tural views and outlooks from all over. And I see that some African
American organizations are somewhat resentful of that.
TF: Some organizations are based on a horizontal interconnection first,
as I think yours is, and others are based on a top-down structure
first, and then reach out to the community. The top-down structure
starts with a well-connected, rich, politically savvy board of trustees
that oversees the activities of an executive director, who in turn
manages a staff who might choose to work with local community
groups. This is different from an organization born from and based
on a horizontal coalition.
rl: Yes, this is certainly a different way of working, and I think
community-based collaborative art can reflect these two structures
as well. There are artists whose most significant contribution is con-
necting the art world to the community rather than fostering the
interconnections within the community. I’m not completely against
that idea, because I think there is some benefit in creating work
 that’s about educating on a grassroots level. That’s an important way 143
of working. But my inclination, my sensibility, is about helping cre-
ate collaboration and interconnection among the core populations

lowe and stern

that I’m working with, but in a way that maintains and reinforces the
importance of the vertical connections.
mJs: In our work we discovered that the one unique feature of cultural
engagement is that it really operates across boundaries of race and
ethnicity and also across boundaries of neighborhoods. Based on
our analysis of participation, we’ve established that people from
outside poor neighborhoods who are involved in the arts of those
neighborhoods are a key component of overall civic participation.
It’s precisely those neighborhoods that have high levels of this cross-
participation across boundaries that, over the course of the ’90s and
into the early twenty-first century, have done better in terms of
poverty reduction and population growth. We have a measure that
we call our revitalization index, which combines population growth
and reduction in poverty. There’s a fairly significant correlation be-
tween neighborhoods with a lot of this outside participation and
positive numbers in that index. The vertical connections are critical
simply because of the lack of resources in these neighborhoods, and
you need to get those connections up to different social classes and
particularly to different institutions. Now, I will say that the char-
acter of the connections between more established cultural orga-
nizations and community-based ones is, in our view, a weakness in
terms of the overall cultural system, at least in Philadelphia. Those
connections are overlaid with tensions around social class, race, and
ethnicity, and that seems to be a barrier. That is an area where we
really see a deficiency in terms of the overall network or ecosystem
of culture in Philadelphia.
Part of the new urban reality is that diversity is connected to vital
neighborhoods. It used to be that you saw mixed neighborhoods as
essentially an indicator of some problem. Forty years ago in Phila-
delphia mixed neighborhoods were considered mixed from the time
the first African American moved in to the time that the last white
person moved out. Today it’s different. Now people see diverse
neighborhoods as a key part of the city landscape. We can demon-
strate in neighborhoods that arts activity is the leading indicator of
diversity, and that those together are also the indicator of neighbor-
hoods that are undergoing revitalization. That’s on a more abstract
144 level. But it is connected to the fact that arts programs are able to
take a particular place and draw resources and people from all over
the city. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a panacea in the sense that all
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

you have to do is put a couple of arts programs in a poor neighbor-

hood and it’ll be transformed.
TF: It’s my impression that by far the most diverse place in the Third
Ward is Project Row Houses—economically, racially, and profession-
ally. You might bump into an architect; you might bump into a kid
in an afterschool program. Rick, you live there and I don’t, but when
we drove around the Third Ward it didn’t seem like a particularly di-
verse neighborhood.
rl: Yes. Mark’s right in the sense that one of the ways that arts and
cultural institutions add value is by providing an opportunity for
people to come and contribute to a neighborhood’s diversity. So
much development of urban neighborhoods is being driven by land
values, and it’s causing a demographic shift. So the question is, do
we have to allow the shift in demographics to take place as it’s hap-
pened in the past, where one group comes in and the other moves
out, or can we create opportunities for a kind of staying period for
this diverse population?
mJs: It gets complicated, because in a certain way Project Row Houses
both becomes an engine for change in the neighborhood and at-
tempts to be a stabilizer of that process.
rl: Yes.
mJs: Can you simultaneously cause property values to go up and also
structure the program so that people who are in the neighborhood
have an opportunity to stay put? Is that part of your agenda?
rl: Well, the rise in property values in the Third Ward probably would
have happened with or without Project Row Houses. The neighbor-
hood would have been earmarked for gentrification because of its
central location. Before we came in, the Planning Department had
already replanned the property as if the houses were gone. So some-
thing was going to happen with or without our intervention. We
could have taken a different approach and said that we would take
a stand to fight gentrification, any kind of diversification, any kind
of change. We could have been more horizontal in our commu-
nity building. And you know, there are still people in the commu-
nity who feel that way. But I knew it would be a losing battle, and
I also just felt that seeking diversity was the right thing to do—in
 145

lowe and stern

Jesse Lott (far right), one of the founders of Project Row Houses, speaks to
Regina Agu, an artist from Houston, 2010. In the background left Hadeel Assali
(facing camera), founder of Houston Palestine Film Festival, talks to two visitors.
Photograph by Eric Hester. Courtesy of Project Row Houses.

the sense of trying to instill a community based on desegregation

culture.
mJs: Our research showing that neighborhoods with lots of arts organi-
zations tend to see their poverty rate go down over time immedi-
ately raises the red flag of gentrification. But I often say that there
are five neighborhoods in Philadelphia that have been hoping to
gentrify in the last thirty years. There’s kind of this New York or
Chicago model of gentrification, where overheated gentrification in
really hot cities destroys communities. But there are a heck of a lot
of cities where gentrification happens over a period of thirty or forty
years if it happens at all. Jane Jacobs talks about gradual versus cata-
clysmic change.2 You’ve got to have slow change. If you don’t have
any change, the neighborhood’s really in trouble. So the choice isn’t
between the way things have always been versus overnight change;
the issue is, can you ensure that the process of neighborhood change
has some duration?
rl: That’s right.
mJs: In Philadelphia now there are places where people are saying, “We
want a diverse neighborhood, and we’re really going to build col-
lectively to get that.” But there are probably more neighborhoods
146 where it has just sort of happened. South Philly is the classic ex-
ample. It used to be that South Philly was predominantly white, and
if an African American family moved across the line into a white sec-
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

tion, there would be a cross in front of their house or rocks through

their windows. Then, over a fifteen-year period, the Asian American
population started increasing. It wasn’t like, “Oh, great, the Asians
are here!” There was some tension, but changing it from a black-
white issue to a three- or four-race issue complicated it enough that
at least the first Asians weren’t getting rocks through their window.
They helped blur the boundary. Now we’re working with an Afri-
can American group on the traditionally African American side
of South Philly. The folks who run the community arts center are
Catholic, and their parish now is maybe 40 percent Vietnamese and
20 percent Mexican alongside the African American congregation,
and it’s stretching them.
rl: That’s a really good point, that there is some middle ground be-
tween things staying the same and a total community makeover. I’m
interested in creating a social collaboration to extend that period of
transition to allow for all kinds of social dynamics in the process.
I like the notion of the triangulation that occurred in South Philly
with the introduction of the Asian Americans. Every place has to
move on one way or another, whether it’s through decay or some
kind of positive growth experience. The key is just how we interact
within that space of development.
mJs: Artists can’t do everything, but they can help with diversity. They
can complicate a process that comes with a lot of pressure to flatten
and simplify. Like the tendency to just put the label on a “decaying”
neighborhood. I think there is a fit between arts diversity and con-
temporary cities. A lot of the assumptions about what is valuable
in a city and how to visualize a city are up for grabs now. It’s a par-
ticularly important time for the role of art and artists in cities—not
only because this makes for hot cities that rich people want to live
in, but because all the residents of a city are looking to come up
with new value, or value in different places. I think that this is a par-
ticular point in the history of American cities where the artists have
the ability to challenge categories and provide a space where there
can be ambiguity, where neighborhoods can be complicated. This
seems like a unique moment. In Philadelphia up until fifteen years
ago, if you tried to violate the color line, you were going to be sub-
 ject to violence. And there’s nothing like violence to uncomplicate 147
an urban transition. But we’re at a different point now, where people
are willing to try out diversity, both intentionally and by happen-

lowe and stern

stance, and that provides an opportunity for artists to be inserted
into urban community life in a way that’s really good for neighbor-
hoods.
rl: I’ve been working on this idea of what role artists and arts and cul-
tural organizations should play in terms of community develop-
ment. This is part of a project with Miguel Garcia at the Ford Foun-
dation. Market developers’ interest in community development is
profit-driven. They don’t care who gets served; they don’t care who’s
paying. And then you have community development corporations,
which do have an interest in who gets served by the development.
Now, Project Row Houses has a cDc, but what role does it play? As an
arts and cultural institution, Project Row Houses has the role of try-
ing to look into what values come out of these developments from a
human standpoint: What does the development project mean? The
cDc says it needs to serve low-income populations, but what does it
mean if a development serves low-income populations in relation to
market development of high-end real estate? I want to explore what
it means and create opportunities for meaningful dialogue. To me
this is where arts and cultural institutions come in from a different
angle.
TF: Would you say that the diversity at Project Row Houses is partially
created through collaboration? Project Row Houses has attracted all
these different kinds of people who have different expertise, differ-
ent socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, et cetera. But even in
this collaborative community spirit, all the vertical and horizontal
interconnectivity, there is one person at the center who is particu-
larly important as a catalyst for the interconnection. You are the in-
stigator. It is usually one person who has the “aha” moment and then
gives the opportunity to everybody else to be interconnected in all
these different ways.
rl: I think the way that a project develops will often look like the person
who instigated it. If I had dropped out of Project Row Houses, or if I
drop out in the future, the kind of diversity that it expresses will cer-
tainly shift. There would be different people with different notions
of what kind of diversity is necessary.
mJs: We’ve tried to emphasize that the networks operate on a differ-
148
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

Housing designed by Rice Building Workshop, Rice University School of

Architecture, 2006. These buildings were designed by students and built as
low-income rental housing. The low tan building at the far left is now the Project
Row Houses Laundromat. Photograph by Danny Samuels. Courtesy of Project
Row Houses.

ent level from organizations. Project Row Houses is a combination

of what Rick brought to a situation, how Rick was embedded in
social networks, and a certain kind of luck to pull it off. When you
look at community arts projects in Philadelphia, I wouldn’t say as a
group they’re successful all the time. Probably a third of them are in
financial crisis right now, and a third of them are having arguments
between the executive director and the artistic director. Someone
once said to me that artists are good at dealing with adversity be-
cause 90 percent of the stuff you try is a failure, so you don’t get
discouraged easily. And one of the problems is that funders are not
really interested in failures. So Project Row Houses is one success. In
Philadelphia we have Lily Yeh—everyone knows Lily from the Vil-
lage of Arts and Humanities, a community-based arts organization
that she founded in 1986. She was a professor at the University of
the Arts in Philadelphia. The Village’s mission was to use the arts as
a strategy for community revitalization in the immediate neighbor-
hood, which was a poor African American neighborhood in north
Philadelphia. Her chief strategy was building public art installations
and sculpture gardens in parks in the neighborhood. In a sense part
of it is luck when you get a person, a setting, and resources coming
 together to create a success. One of the drawbacks of this happen- 149
ing in the arts is that there’s this notion of genius out there. We tend
to take the geniuses and sort of draw a circle around them and say,

lowe and stern

“Wherever that person goes, there must be genius happening.” But
talent is just one of the ingredients.
TF: In fifth grade we were studying crystals, and one assignment was
to make a supersaturated solution by adding lots of sugar to boil-
ing water—more sugar than water can hold at room temperature.
Then we put in a piece of string and let the solution return to room
temperature. Sugar crystals formed on the string. This is a metaphor
for what you’re saying. If the situation is right, crystals form on the
string. There would be no crystals without the string. So when the
social situation is—
rl: Saturated with possibilities.
TF: —then if the right string goes in there, you get Project Row Houses
or the Village.
mJs: And artists are occupationally trained to take risks. Rick and his col-
laborators saw the situation as a set of opportunities that an invest-
ment banker or someone working in the cDc wouldn’t have seen.
So the contribution of an artist in that situation, I think, has to do
with seeing the world differently and also being a risk-taker of a cer-
tain kind.
TF: Yes, and it is important to stress how little people thought of the site
of Project Row Houses. Far from recognizing a supersaturated solu-
tion of possibility, the establishment was getting ready to clear the
site.
rl: I would also like to add that I think we live in a time and place in
which, when you talk about art, you’re talking about some kind of
product—even in terms of community-based art. There needs to
be a product to point to, whether it’s a successful community-based
project that’s sustainable or a short-term project. But another part of
me is rooted in this idea that there is a certain value in community-
based projects that just explore and ask questions. That in itself can
be a successful process that may not result in a product. It can allow
questions to be put on the table that have not been asked before. It
becomes, in its own way, art for art’s sake—asking the questions for
the questions’ sake, not for the sake of the product. Would that sat-
isfy a funder?
mJs: It’s so funny, I find myself falling into the same role that traditional
150 art producers fall into sometimes—a role that I’m critical of—when
they say, “Well, I can’t explain it; that’s for the critics. I just make the
work.” So here I am saying kind of the same thing, “Well, I just want
f I v e   s o C I a l v I s I o n , C o o P e r at I v e C o m m u n I t y

to go through this process and do it. I can’t explain it” [laughs].

We got started on our work in reaction to the economic impact
of the arts movement that was trying to reduce all of the value of the
arts to the multiplier effect in terms of restaurants and tourism. We
were saying that this flattened the arts, didn’t take into account the
depths of art’s potential for transforming communities and improv-
ing the social environment generally. I think as you get a feel for that
depth, you can actually come up with ways of measuring that allow
you to represent it to a wider population. You’re self- consciously
trying to say you can do a community arts project that has a social
mission, but also an aesthetic, emotional aim. Project Row Houses
has that kind of depth, and I find that really impressive. Maybe part
of the artist’s thing is to have strands that you’re always trying to
pull together in the right form. And the challenge is, how do you,
at a particular moment, pull them all together in a way that really
works? I always wonder why one person can write one great novel
and then eight bad novels. When all of those things fall into place,
you have something wonderful. When I hear you reflect on Biggers’s
paintings, there’s a sense of ambition that isn’t something you can
reduce to a twenty-slide PowerPoint presentation. That’s part of the
cultural challenge in terms of how you relate to the community de-
velopment types. If you lay that out in particular settings, they’ll
say, “Oh, God, we have an artist in here! Why are we talking to this
artist?”
rl: I have heard that ikea determines a price for a product, and then
they have their designers design to that price. You know, to make
sure that the product is affordable. Anybody can design something
nobody can afford. So put the economics first. And when most
people engage in a discussion of value—not just in the arts but in
other community work too—it starts from the notion of economic
impact. At the beginning I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough
to know that that’s what I was supposed to do with Project Row
Houses. One of the challenges is to know that in reality economics is
a big part of it, but to not allow that to guide the development of the
work, to keep other principles at the forefront. Oftentimes too a lot
of the creativity is spun out in resistance to the economics, because
 you can’t afford the standard way so you have to do it differently. 151
And those spin-offs are really where the juicy, exciting stuff happens,
for me.

lowe and stern

TF: Mark, you have said that using an economic model for these arts
organizations isn’t often the most apt, that it’s more like a social
movement.
mJs: Sure. The dominant model that’s used to judge organizational suc-
cess in the arts conforms to orthodox organizational standards like
economic stability, successful marketing, clarity of the staff organi-
zation, and stability or moderate growth. A social movement model,
on the other hand, is built around the motivation of people involved
in the group. In fact we’ve called a lot of these community-based
arts organizations “irrational organizations,” because they lack those
more orthodox benchmarks of well-being, but they essentially make
up for that in the motivation and engagement of the staff and the
participants. It’s our experience in working with arts organizations
that these irrational assets are probably a better standard by which
to judge their success than orthodox organizational standards.
Part of the reason we got into making this distinction was that
there’s a tendency on the part of policymakers and funders to think
that unless an organization grows and becomes more orthodox, it’s
not succeeding. While growth and development are desirable out-
comes for some organizations, that shouldn’t be our only standard.
If an organization is on mission and providing the services that were
its goals, it doesn’t have to meet these kinds of standards of growth
and development—you know, a kind of upward-mobility model—
to be judged a success.