In conversation with Susan Hill, artist
Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World's Frontlines
A long-time community arts advocate recounts the efforts of artists world-wide (from Soweto to Belgrade to Watts) to resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and re-stitch the cultural fabric of their communities.
William Cleveland is the founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Mr. Cleveland's 25 year history, producing arts programs in cultural, educational and community also includes his leadership of the Walker ArtCenter's Education and Community Programs Department, California's Arts-In-Corrections Program and the California State Summer School for the Arts. His book Art in Other Places chronicles 22 model programs developed by artists and community development service providers in 17 American communities.
Mr. Cleveland serves on the boards of Partners for Arts Schools and Students, Sarah Elgart Dance Company, Geese Theater Company, Art In the Public Interest, and as a panelist and consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Cleveland is an advisor for Partners for Livable Communities' the British American Art Association's International Arts and Education Initiative and the Urban Arts Institute. He is also a member of the UCLA Artsreach Advisory Committee, and works as an associate of the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Susan Hill served for two decades as California's Director of Artsreach, which partnered with California's statewide creative fine arts program, Arts In Corrections. At Artsreach, she initiated, designed and sustained arts programming in the California Youth Authority facilities in southern California collaborated in the design and implementation of continual multi-disciplinary programming in 17 adult state prisons. The nine-member improvisational theatre company she founded, especially trained for Youth Authority constituencies, was recognized as "Best Practice" by the Rand Corporation, and nationally acknowledged as one of the top national violence prevention programs for violent youth. Artsreach actively participated in community arts initiatives with high risk communities within Los Angeles after the 1992 Uprising, creating a variety of programs publicly accessible for youth under the name Peace Road, and Ceremony of Thunder. Currently she is working more creatively than administratively, in classrooms with college art students, with young children in inner-city Los Angeles, and in illustrated correspondence with pen pal children in Malawi, Africa.
