Bill Cleveland

ART IS CHANGE: Strategies & Skills for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers

Arts EN ↓ 186 episodes

Can your art help dismantle injustice, shift systems, or spark healing in places like homeless shelters, emergency rooms, or city planning meetings? If you’re passionate about making a real difference through creativity, ART IS CHANGE (formerly known as Change the Story / Change the World) is your front-row seat to the real-world impact of art and social change. Hosted by author, musician, and researcher Bill Cleveland, each episode brings you deep into the lives and work of activist artists and cultural organizers who are doing more than dreaming—they’re transforming communities around the wo...

Author

Bill Cleveland

Episodes

13: Forget Pipe Cleaners: Why Real Cultural Organizing Is Not What You Think It Is – Part 1 24.11.2020 41:03

Episode 13: DIVA CATs Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes What’s A CAT? I usually bring a packet of seeds and give everybody some seeds. Because I think that that's what we're doing. Planting those seeds in our field, right, ... because we're growing things and that notion of working with people, collaborating conceiving things together, imagining things together and co- creating things toget...

12: STORY story 12.11.2020 20:35

Episode 12: Story story Check out the film version of Story story HERE And the book version HERE Transcript In the beginning there was a word, the word, a word, I don’t know but that word doing its best o state afloat at the confluence of time and space spinning at the hot center of the minds-eye vortex had no choice but to go forth and m...

11: Ida Oberman: Centering Love, Story, and Art for Social Change in a Public School? 27.10.2020 34:28

Special Thanks to Camila Guiza-Chavez for her beautiful performance of "Over the Rainbow" that introduces this episode. Threshold Questions & Delicious Quotes What is the role of the imagination in the development of the child? I think that now we more and more feel it, as particularly now, under COVID, when we're all pressed against our screens, how life-giving imagination is. And sometimes i...

10: How Activist Artists Like Milenko Matanovic Are Rebuilding Democracy From the Ground Up 14.10.2020 38:34

Threshold Questions / Delicious Quotes Why is our democracy struggling, What's wrong? Right now the default modality is that we are at our worst with each other. And that troubles me because we are robbing ourselves of the possibility to understand, first of all, the complexity of our time and second of all, to prepare ourselves for a future that would work for all of us. How can the process of co...

9: Art Isn’t Just Decoration—Cultural Organizing is Democracy’s Secret Weapon 30.09.2020 41:24

Episode 9: Erik Takeshita - Creative People Power Dear Listener: In this podcast Erik describes agency and connection as essential elements for emergence of creative people power. If you are interested in exploring this idea further here are two resources that might be of interest. Creative People Power Web Site & Report @ Springboard for the Arts Small Towns, Big Stories: Arts-based Community...

8: If You’re Not Letting Struggling Kids Make Art, You’re Missing the Boat 23.09.2020 35:28

Episode 7: Barry Marcus - Creative Culture Dear Reader: Barry Marcus' story about Creative Culture touches on a number of questions related to the impact that arts learning can have on youth development. One of these is how active art making can strengthen a sense of ownership and agency in young artists. If this peaks your interest you might want to take a look at : 23 Admonitions, Insights and I...

7: Sandy Agustin on Navigating the Art and Social Change Landscape (Activist Artist Spotlight) 10.09.2020 33:52

Transcript Episode 7: Sandy Agustin - The Navigator Sandy Agustin: Why do you want to change? Why do you want to change? Now? What do you all hold true? What do you see as missing? It's asking the right questions, finding really generous and generative questions. And when people get stuck, sometimes we push, and we name what's hard. Sometimes we just shake it up and we have to move around. We have...

5: Love at the Rivers Edge: How One Activist Artist Bridged Race & Place With Shakespeare: 26.08.2020 34:31

Threshold Questions and Juicy Quotes: Can collective creation change settled world views? I mean, there are a couple of Mexican families in Brussels. They're no black folks. So, I would always kid that I was like, you know, that's a cute little house, and if I bought that, I'd be okay. Like, yeah. You know, for some of those students, this was prayerfully life changing in how they see folks and co...

3: The Gunrunner for the Arts: L.O. Sloan’s Half-Century of Thriving as an Artist for Change (Part 2) 12.08.2020 34:22

THRESHOLD QUESTIONS AND DELICIOUS QUOTES ?Many older monuments are being challenged these days for for their distorted representation of history. What challenges confronted this effort to create a new monument to an an important but forgotten story? Well, the Department of General Services told us to do that you are going to have to get the vote of the House, the vote of the Senate, the endorsemen...

2: The Gunrunner for the Arts: L.O. Sloan’s Half-Century of Thriving as an Artist for Change (Part 1) 21.07.2020 24:59

This week we'll meet activist/performer/impresario and historian Lenwood O. Sloan, a man whose extraordinary career has unfolded like a half century-long social change musical. THRESHOLD QUESTIONS AND DELICIOUS QUOTES ?What defines a "gunrunner for the arts?" "I try to take things that already exist, and through positioning and repositioning to create magic, you know, to motivate, but performance...

1.: How Art and Social Change Shaped My Life 17.07.2020 38:07

Bad home, Drugs, and prison. A predictable story? Sure, except when you throw in the National Cathedral choir, a geodesic dome, and the stubborn belief that art can save the world. This is the first episode of a podcast produced by the Center for the Study of Art & Community called Change the Story, Change the World . (n ow called ART IS CHANGE ) My name is Bill Cleveland. In this first episod...