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In This Issue
• From the Executive Director: Recognizing Artists As Workers
• Mixed Relief: SWAN Day Play about Women of the WPA
• Tell Us About Your SWAN Day Event
• About WomenArts
From the Executive Director
Recognizing Artists As Workers
It is always exciting at this time of year to hear from people who are organizing SWAN Day events for next month. As the calls and emails come in, I am often struck by how hard most women artists work. We put in long hours for under-staffed non-profits or juggle several part-time jobs along with childcare duties. In spite of this, the general public seldom considers artists as "workers," and we tend to be overlooked in conversations about the economy.
In his recent State of the Union speech, President Obama said that two million Americans had been hired as a result of his economic stimulus programs. He spoke proudly about hiring construction and clean energy workers, teachers, cops, firefighters, first responders, and correctional officers. He did not mention artists.
Thanks to Americans for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts did receive $50 million of stimulus funds last year for arts jobs in spite of strong Republican opposition - but that's only enough for a maximum of 2,000 jobs at $25,000 each, and it is a miniscule percentage of the total Recovery Act package of $787 billion.
To put this in perspective - the California Department of Corrections received $1 billion in federal stimulus funds, i.e. Congress allocated 20 times as much money for prison officers in California as they did for all of the artists in the country. Do the guards really contribute that much more to our economic potential?
During the Great Depression of the 1930's the U.S. government paid more attention to the needs of artists. In 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched an economic stimulus program called the Works Progress Administration (WPA) with a goal of giving people "self-respect and self-reliance" by giving them meaningful jobs.
The WPA provided jobs to approximately 40,000 artists at its peak, including many of the best artists of the period, such as Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Nevelson, Langston Hughes, Orson Welles, and Arthur Miller.
Zora Neale Hurston's WPA Legacy
Zora Neale Hurston worked on the WPA Folklore project, recording folk songs and stories in the black communities of Florida and preserving oral traditions that might otherwise have been lost. The recordings are now available online in the Florida Memory State Library and Archives. (See www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife/
sound_hurston.cfm#)
It is amazing to hear one of the finest writers of the Harlem Renaissance singing these songs as part of her government job during the depths of the Great Depression. Alice Walker once wrote that Hurston's great gift was to show her people "relishing the pleasure of each other's loquacious and bodacious company."
In the link below, you can hear Hurston describe and sing the song Halimuhfack. Even though it is a scratchy 75-year-old recording, you can still hear that pleasure and her loving attention to the details of cultural expression in her community. www.floridamemory.com/Collections/folklife/mp3
/hurston/halimuhfack.mp3
Organizing in Your Community
As President Obama calls for $30 billion more for jobs stimulus programs, what can we do to make sure that Congress puts artists to work again as part of our country's recovery?
Many of you are already taking the first step by organizing SWAN Day events in your community that raise the visibility of women artists and stimulate discussion about the value of the arts.
If you would like to do more on this issue as part of your SWAN Day event or later in the year, WomenArts has compiled resource materials about the WPA and suggested activities. (See www.WomenArts.org/wpa).
As you will see in the sidebar, the members of NewShoe created a play about the women of the WPA for their SWAN Day event, and they have agreed to share it with others for free public readings. We encourage you to create and share works that express your views on the role of artists in the recovery.
Also, check out Art & the Public Purpose: A New Framework at www.newculturalpolicy.org. A group of 60 arts activists met with White House representatives in May 2009 and then developed this excellent five-point manifesto about ways that artists could participate in our country's recovery.
Since many of you are in book groups, we wanted to recommend two books that really bring the WPA programs to life - Susan Quinn's Furious Improvisation about the Federal Theatre Project, and David Taylor's Soul of a People about the Federal Writers' Project. For those of you in WITASWAN film-watching groups, there is a film version of Soul of a People, and another film about the period by Tim Robbins called The Cradle Will Rock.
Let's hope that seventy-five years from now, our descendants will be able to see that even though times were hard in 2010, we still wrote plays, made films, sang, danced, painted, and most of all, we enjoyed each other's "bodacious company."
If you have comments about this article, please contact us>>
We always love to hear from you.
Martha Richards, Executive Director
WomenArts
Tell Us About Your SWAN Day Event!
We are looking forward to the Third International Support Women Artists Now Day/SWAN Day celebration on Saturday, March 27, 2010 and the surrounding weeks, and we hope you will join us.
We are looking for SWAN Day 2010 events to feature in our upcoming newsletters and press releases. If you are planning a SWAN Day event, and you have not already posted it or contacted us about it, please be sure to post your information on the WomenArts Calendar or send us a paragraph describing what you are planning to do along with the date, time and location.
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Eudora Welty
WPA Press Agent
Mixed Relief
NewShoe Shares A Play
About Women of the WPA
WomenArts is collaborating with NewShoe and Cherry Lane Theatre to do a special SWAN Day event in New York designed to stimulate more discussion about federal arts funding.
NewShoe, a group of playwrights and theatre directors in New York, has created Mixed Relief, an original one-act play that weaves together voices of women artists of the WPA and contemporary women playwrights. Our joint SWAN Day event will feature a reading of their forty-minute play followed by a panel discussion led by WomenArts Executive Director Martha Richards. It will take place at Cherry Lane Theatre on Monday, March 22 at 7 p.m.
MAKE A RESERVATION>>
Free Script Downloads
NewShoe has agreed to make the script and sound cues available for free downloads from the WomenArts website for anyone who would like to organize a free reading in their community. If you would like to have a panel discussion after the reading, WomenArts will provide a set of questions to guide the panel moderator.
Although NewShoe will retain all copyrights for Mixed Relief, you can download the script and sound cues for free. No royalties will be required, but you must agree to give the playwrights proper credit in your publicity materials and playbills.
To register for your free download, please click here>>
More about the Play
Mixed Relief is historical fiction. The playwrights of NewShoe did extensive research on three writers who worked for the WPA, Eudora Welty, Dorothy West, and Anzia Yezierska, and then they created speeches where the writers describe their work.
NewShoe members also interviewed three diverse contemporary playwrights, Kara Lee Corthron, Cassandra Medley, and Ruth Maleczech, about their work and their thoughts on government arts funding. The verbatim comments of the contemporary writers and other historical figures are interspersed with the fictional monologues of Welty, Yezierska, and West. The play is written for a total of 8 characters, but some double-casting may be possible.
For more information about the characters in the play,
please click here>>
Thanks to NewShoe
WomenArts is grateful to the members of NewShoe for sharing Mixed Relief. We send special thanks to Suzanne Bennett for the concept and dramaturgy, to the playwrights Jill Campbell, Marya Cohn, Dana Leslie Goldstein, Michele Aldin Kushner, and Andrea Lepcio, and to the sound designer Lauren Rosen. Alex Aron, Allyn Chandler, Teresa K. Pond, and Barbara Rubin also helped develop the script. |
