Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

One problem with trying to find peace is that we war within ourselves. Instead of organizations and individuals working together, they work at odds ends and never come to a middle ground where both and everyone gains. It is the principle that “if we raise the cultural waters, all the institutional boats will raise together.” Today, we live in a world where the warring has gotten more sophisticated and deadly. Peace is not an easy road. History has shown us that peace is sometimes possible but history also shows us that the princes of peace are also sacrificed for local hatreds and gains. In our time, Kennedy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, others have died because they wanted peace “in our time.” Government sometimes do it with the dollar. So it has been with cultural organizations.

WAR WITHIN OURSELVES

     Abe Lincoln (and others) have stated “An organism which wars within itself is doomed.”  This is a dominant message of Carl Sagan’s recent program COSMOS. The idea comes painfully home when, after having successfully brought art into the community with a sincere dream of Malraux’s Museum–Without-Walls becoming actuality, our museum’s budget was cut by city, county, and state.  On a national level, a cry goes up (in the New York Times) to STOP FUNDING ARTISTIC CIRCUSES.  “Since the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities were founded in 1965, their appropriations have grown from $2.5 million each to $158 million are the arts and $151 million for the humanities.  Yet, both agencies have also been sailing dangerously off course.”

     Museums are a part of the community’s warring against itself, taking from the arts to pay for the police and firemen, as if this action will insure a better quality of living.  As if improvements in creature comforts- food, shelter, clothing-will increase our sense of justice, our appreciation of beauty, our capacity to love.

      Museums must broaden our knowledge of why the arts are important to survival.  The arts are forces fulfilling human need and human destiny: reason combined with imagination, not reason warring against imagination.

     The arts, works themselves, artists and their representatives, must educate the public as to the worth of a museum in a healthy community.  Museums, as a representative of artists, must educate those agencies who fund the arts.

     The other day, in a barber shop, I heard a treatise against man’s need to go to the stars (if man were meant to fly, etc).  Images of the Egyptian god, Khonsu and Assyrians Asshur, Mercury, the messenger of the Greeks, and other creatures dreamed up by the early Christians, came to my mind.  I remembered seeing them in the hall of the gods from my early days at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.  But for my neighbor in the barber shop, there was no hall of the gods when he was young, no dreams of flight, not even flight of the imagination as he grew older.

  G. B. Shaw said it this way: A picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. This is a sad statement about our culture, to have individuals who have not learned to see. There are those who can gain insight from the natural world around them. But they are exceptions to the norm.

  Museums can give sight to the sightless and, by extension, popularize the arts so that they are tools to cope with life. But for the arts to prosper, a system of programs to popularize excellence must be worked out and implemented.

  Let's begin with a program for children. In our small town in Arkansas, there was a minimal offering of art classes in the schools and nothing for the gifted and talented young artist. Two pilot programs were started. One was in an elementary school, working with the PTA, and the other was with an alternative school for young people: students who had been thrown out of all the standard educational establishments. The idea was simple: begin with one's self, drawing portraits and then expanding to other people and ideas. The instructor worked with these young artists, employing a minimum of formal instruction in the lesson. A few simple concepts were formed, such as, think where you are and where you are going and the rest is easy; your head is not a tool box; when you get in trouble, circle the wagons; first you shoot the arrows and then you paint the targets; there is no such thing as a free lunch; and, when all the rules are learned, there are no rules. The emphasis in the classes, or workshops, was on the WHY of art, not the HOW of making. HOW became an outcome of WHY.

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THE MARVELOUS

SOFT-MAGIC

MYSTERY-MAKING

POLKA DOT

SATURDAY ART WORKSHOP

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       The program worked. Excellence came out of the sessions. The best artists in our area and the young artists themselves took pride in what was done and the program was expanded to the museum. Students came to the museum to take classes. The program emphasized the best in work and the best young artists participated.

     Many museums have some program like this for young artists geared to the best of the best. But many times, the museum and the young artists are the only ones who know about it (along with a few school administrators and art teachers). How can one offer a program and also make the community a part of its growth?

We asked the best in the community to help. People came and sat as models and talked about how they became who and what they are. Politicians, writers, clergy, poets, artists, mothers of young artists, business people and interested public, anyone who would pose and talk about themselves participated. With the help of young people (experts on what not to call the program), we came up with the title The Marvelous Soft Magic Mystery-Making Polka Dot Saturday Art Workshop. A title that was too long to remember but hard to forget.

   Has it worked? It's too early to tell. But we do have 22 volunteers, 15 models from various walks of life and 80 students from a fifty mile radius of the museum. Will this turn attention to the museum as an important part of the community? No, not in itself, but the reaching out, the knowledge that the museum must help to change social, economic and cultural prejudices, as well as influence artistic education, is a beginning. Corporate funding and community philanthropy to the museum have increased in the last two years. Sufficient financial stability has been realized to allow for future planning.

   Our museum, although successful in some areas, still has to work at selling the idea that THE ARTS ARE A BASIC SERVICE. Our friend from the barber shop has not stepped through our doors, but somewhere in the community he has had to stumble over our programs.

  Art museums can use the efforts and works of artists to counteract the warring within ourselves and foster growth and prosperity within a whole society.