What is Cultural Leadership...And Can it be Taught? | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

What is Cultural Leadership...And Can it be Taught?

By Caroline Woolard on November 11, 2020
Process Sketch, Caroline Woolard, 2019, Digital Image, Dimension variable ; Caroline Woolard
Caroline Woolard

Caroline Woolard (b.1984) is an American artist who, in making her art, becomes an economic critic, social justice facilitator, media maker, and sculptor. Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, Woolard has catalyzed barter communities, minted local currencies, founded an arts-policy think tank, and created sculptural interventions in office spaces.

Woolard has inspired a generation of artists who wish to create self-organized, collaborative, online platforms alongside sculptural objects and installations. Her work has been commissioned by and exhibited in major national and international museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and Creative Time.

Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. She is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow at Moore College of Art and Design and the inaugural 2019–20 Artist in Residence for INDEX at the Rose Museum, and a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Center for Cultural Innovation. You can learn more about Caroline's work on her website. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people agree that the dominant “art world”—a term that signifies all of the people and networks and organizations that enable the learning, discussion, making, presenting, and circulation of art—is not functioning as so many of us artists would like it to. And yet this realization—of the dominant art-world’s limitations—occurs during every capitalist crisis; every decade or so now, it seems. New art worlds were dreamt into existence by artists in 2007/2008 as well as in the long down-turn of the 1970s fiscal crisis. 

Initiatives of mutual aid, solidarity, and cooperation need not be unique to a crisis. In fact, these art worlds are dreamt into existence every week by artists and people who survive the daily crisis of being told that we are not valuable, that we should not exist, that we need to continually justify our own existence. How are these art worlds dreamt into reality? 

Let me begin by defining some terms, so that I am communicating more clearly. First, I define leadership as the ability to inspire people—whether that is two people, or two thousand people—toward shared vision and action. Cultural leadership, then, is the use of art, design, and intellectual achievement to inspire shared vision and action in the arts and beyond. 

Second, I believe that any strong vision and action gains its power and impact by being shaped by multiple perspectives, as each person who shapes it brings their experience and knowledge. It is for these reasons that I believe that the capacity to lead should be shared by as many people as possible. When many people are skilled leaders, it is not possible to stop a vision or action simply because a figurehead (one leader) is taken away or leaves. 

When the majority of people in a group are working to inspire one another toward shared vision and action, the group can be said to be leader-full rather than leaderless. This does not mean that the group cannot consent to particular roles, based upon expertise and experience. In my experience, the more leaders in a group, the more the group is able to identify roles and to delegate responsibility. 

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of The Movement for Black Lives, said, “This is a leader-full movement. I don't believe you can do anything without leadership. I don't believe that at all. I think there are many people leading this conversation, advancing this conversation...There [are] groups on the ground that have been doing this work, and I think we stand on the shoulders of those folks.” Leader-full movements, groups, and organizations are filled with people who have learned the humility to build upon existing work, to empathize with one another, to communicate clearly, to make a shared plan, and to delegate tasks and roles with one another, working toward a shared vision and action.

The work of building leader-full groups is always already a pedagogical project, because the skills of humility, awareness, empathy, communication, planning, and delegation are learned and relearned, 

within the context of urgent work, in community. If you have been in a self-organized group, you know how this works. You look to the person who is speaking with expertise, and you learn from them. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, radical educator Paulo Friere warns against a teacher who “confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students.” In a skilled leader-full group, the authority of knowledge takes precedent over the authority of rank or profession. 

On some level, we all know that we cannot transform the world if we do not simultaneously commit to transforming ourselves and each other. We know that we need to embrace our collective capacity for care and debate. So how can we learn to collaborate? How do we develop a musculature of shared decision making and of shared work? Over the past decade, I have become a kind of student of collaborative methods. In the process, I began to notice that many visual artists had developed methods of listening and group work. Since 2016, I have created in-person and online gatherings of artists to share collaborative methods. It’s now a website that anyone can go to if they want to learn more about these practices: StudyCollaboration.com

Cultural leaders ask: What are the art worlds that we want? Who do we want to be in community with? Where do we want our projects to go, after we make them? They then take the following steps to move from experience, to study, to commitment, to action and reflection.

1. Notice daily EXPERIENCES and ask: “Why is this the case?”

2. Begin a process of collective STUDY to understand these experiences. 

3. Make a COMMITMENT to something that will shape your decisions and actions.

4. Focus the INQUIRY on an area that feels particularly exciting and troubling and possible.

5. Determine what TIMEFRAME the work will take. Will it be a short-term project or a multi-year platform? What practices are necessary to sustain this?

6. Begin to EXPERIMENT with ways of gathering, materials, forms, resources, and ways of representing your inquiry as a project or platform.

7. Share the idea in PUBLIC for feedback, debate, and learning.

8. REFLECT upon this process, and return to #1.

Leader-full groups with culture in the foreground are groups where the capacities of collaboration between the arts beyond is encouraged and refined. Cultural leaders know that the struggle for imagination is a precondition to the struggle for justice, for life, learning, love in public. Cultural leaders know that all work is political. Cultural leaders organize with one another to lift up the arts, alongside all work that sustains life, all work that allows people to rest, dream, and be energized for the next day. Cultural leaders realize that cultural labor in the arts and beyond is always already aligned with service work, domestic work, sex work, agricultural work, healing work, educational work, spiritual work, social work, and all racialized and gendered labor. 

Artist-centric networks, organizations, and initiatives—in short, solidarity art worlds—are not only possible, they already exist. Allow yourself to sense the power of the spaces, networks, and communities created by artists around you, and allow yourself to dream into the art worlds that you want. 

Just as last decade’s global crisis transformed the art world, so now producers and critics are beginning to imagine what a post-Covid-19 art world will look like. What is the temporality of exhibits, installations, and biennials with little global travel, reduced capacity in all indoor spaces, and fear of contagion? One imagines, at the very least, we will be witnessing a re-localization of the arts, one combined with a new scale of intimacy of the kind only predicted by globalization boosters in the 1990s—now a conversation with a collaborator in Seoul truly is the same as with one around the corner. 

Whatever else this terrible pandemic produces, it may in fact lead artists and arts organizations to ask and answer the most basic questions anew: what are we doing and why are we doing it? The opportunity to consider such fundamental propositions are also the moments in which institutions like MoMA—whose only desire is to reproduce themselves—may not adapt, while local initiatives, those with collective power and the ability to transform nimbly, may emerge and perhaps harness the productive capacity of new groups and coalitions of artists.

On Topic is platform exploring the complex and lucid cultural conversations that represent the DNA of MCAD. If you like this essay, you can explore events, podcast episodes, and more writing.