Necessary to note the Zoom visit we had with Jack Becker, yesterday. Rayn, Pam and Victoria took advantage of the occasion to meet with a very well known figure in the Public Arts world. He used to publish a magazine which we followed through its different transformations. From presenting objects/sculptures, originally small in scale and very impersonal but which lent themselves to being enlarged into architectural-size pieces, to community-related processes which may eventually translate into large works fit for public spaces, Jack really served his readership well and kept it educated. Now, he is retired but still volunteers with the magazine, at this point in a digitalized format. He also donates time to organizations like ours. And when I asked him if he would consider coming to Charleston to meet with city folks and ourselves to promote our particular type of in/with community art work, he did not say no!

This emboldened me to ask him if we could envision a two-step strategy where our group would meet again on Zoom, with him, to specifically prepare a visit here, to Charleston. In my mind, this would give us all, and particularly Victoria, time to contact local people susceptible to work long-term on the development of TINYisPOWERFUL. For example, I was very interested to hear him speak about a proposal he made to some art group which, instead of spending its good money on an outdoor sculpture, should start a local outreach, long-term community program! This is what I thought the Charleston International African-American Museum could do here, instead of an expensive building. I even remember asking Gwylène to imagine what such a program would do to the city! Amazing I suppose. A full Reparations campaign. An example for the nation and the world, really! To refrain from massive, symbolically mighty, architecture and choose quieter work at the grassroots level for as many years as it takes to exhaust the pile of money collected to build the museum! Would so much money ever be raised for an in/with community effort, even exemplary? Funders, mostly corporate, demand mighty projects to sustain, to co-opt, their corporate culture don’t they?

Anyway … I think Jack Becker is going to be our next visitor of importance, after Marty Pottinger and Francis Whitehead, three and two years ago.

And now, I believe I am more optimistic than yesterday morning, BEFORE the Jack Becker meeting. At the time, when I entered the Zoom space for the creative sync, there was Victoria. She appeared to be very stressed. I did not ask her anything, of course. But when Rayn arrived, and when we brought up the topic of Collective/Community Care, the Care Culture, I seized the occasion to tell her, very simply that, within a context of Care, I may have been less hesitant to ask Victoria how she was doing. ” …’cause – I said – if you think I did not see you were having a hard time, you are wrong …!” She smiled, then. She was a bit relieved too.