Marty Pottenger & the City Employees of Portland

In this and the next installment of the Harmony Project News, Arlene Goldbard introduces three more women artists who have had successful community collaborations: Marty Pottenger, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and Rene Yung.

Previous newsletters have touched on the range of collaborative projects and the reasons for collaborating. Now it’s time to talk about building relationships. Without a foundation of trust, partnership can’t work. So how do you establish that firm grounding for a collaboration?

Theatre Artist Marty Pottenger

Go as a learner, not the center of attention. Seek out natural leaders as allies.

City Water Tunnel #3 was performance artist Marty Pottenger’s breakthrough project, garnering an Obie, major press, and European and U.S. tours. It focused on one of the world’s largest public works, a New York City tunnel conveying drinking water to the city from upstate reservoirs. Construction began in 1970 and is projected for completion in 2025; in between, there are generations of human stories.

Pottenger’s organizational partners in City Water Tunnel #3 were Local 147 of the Tunnelworker’s Union and New York’s largest municipal agency, the Department of Environmental Protection. Their interviews, archives, and stories were the raw material Marty drew on to craft this solo multimedia show.

Marty told me that when she works with bureaucracies like unions and city agencies, at first, her presence is often unexpected and may even seem unwelcome to rank-and-file participants, who may have “a real deep social understanding that art is not important, that it’s frivolous, that only economically privileged people are involved in it.”

Typically, she said, “I find out what their traditions are, and I go to the cultural events of the group that I’m collaborating with. I go as a learner, a  respectful learner.”

When she began getting acquainted with the Tunnelworker’s Union, she found out that they were having a once-a-year memorial service for people who had died building the tunnel.

“I got this beautiful picture from one of the engineers of a tunnel shaft, and I made a Memorial Mass card—the memorial was held at a Catholic church near the union hall. I printed them up myself, got them laminated and cut them. I just did what it took. It said, ‘like tears, the rain falls mixed with our grief,’ and ‘In Memoriam, St. Barnabas, 1993.’ The union leadership was in a tough battle to win the election; they positioned themselves at the door and handed them out to the members coming in.”

As this demonstrates, Marty’s key question for entering a new partnership is this: “How can art help this situation?” She asked herself, “What could make a difference here to people to really remember that we’re honoring these people, to remember the worth of the work they’re doing?” The answer must “fit in with the culture and not draw attention to myself—which is also the thing that people think of artists, that they have to be the center of attention.”

Much of Pottenger’s work has focused on the themes of work and value. Her own personal history illuminates the connection: she was one of the first women in Florida to join a construction union, working first in the Mason’s Union and later as a carpenter.

Arguably, her life as an artist shines a different kind of light on the undervaluation of socially important work. In any complex setting, she says, it’s essential to get allies.

Since 2007, she’s been based in Portland, ME, for Art at Work, a partnership with the City of Portland to demonstrate art-making as a valuable, cost-effective and sustainable tool to strengthen cross-cultural understanding, enhance communication, raise morale and increase understanding and cooperation between city agencies and the public.

In Portland, Marty explained, “I met a lot of people and identified for myself the people that people followed, which are not necessarily the people in charge. I asked a lot of the officers on the street something like, ‘Who do you respect on the force? Who do you look to?’ And people kept mentioning this one person. And then I make a point of meeting that person and talking to them about the project.”

A key practice, Marty said, “is to be very clear with myself about the goals that I have, because the goals speak to people: to recognize the work that’s being done, to appreciate the labor, to make visible the invisible. If it’s said plainly, these are things that people can get behind.”

Portland Police Create Art with Marty Pottenger

Members of the Portland Police Department wrote the poetry and did the photography for the calendar as part of Marty Pottengers Art at Work project in Portland, ME.

Using visual art, performance, poetry, photography, video and audio, ART AT WORK has succeeded in fostering a culture of creativity that has directly involved over 60 police officers and other city employees and 30 local artists.

City employees have created 200 original artworks that have engaged over 25,000 people in the region and reached over a million through local and major media outlets. Their posters, photographs, prints and poems hang in galleries, city parking garages, lunchrooms, recycling centers, police stations, libraries, conference rooms and maintenance shops.

Police Chief Talks About the Power of Poetry

In this moving video, Portland’s Acting Police Chief Mike Sauschuck talks about the ways that Marty Pottenger’s Art at Work projects have changed community attitudes towards the men and women on the police force and have built staff morale over the past four years.

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Next time, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women and visual artist Rene Yung share their advice for cultivating working relationships.