20/20

20 Years 20 Artists 

Celebrating Twenty Years of Working Classroom 

January 19 - February 16, 2008 

Working Out 

by Lucy Lippard 

Twenty years ago Nan Elsasser founded Working Classroom, now moving into its own building in Albuquerque. During those two decades it has become a force for the arts and progressive action in New Mexico. The name Working Classroom is a good description of its unique function. Sure, all classrooms are supposed to be places where students (and teachers) work. But a classroom that works, in both senses, is sadly rare. 

Working Classroom also works out––gaining muscle as it moves beyond its center. It teaches its students skills few adults can boast––how to conduct oral history interviews and archival research on family and local history–– activities that bind people to place and commit them to responsibility for what happens there. It sends them out into the world (and into some arts worlds) where their examples will be doubly significant because of the art world’s biases toward white male artists. 

The artists in this exhibition prove that need not be so. They include several famous names and even a MacArthur awardee. They come from Haiti, China, Mexico, France and the Navajo Nation, as well as from our own African American and Hispano communities. Their visions are crucial to our futures. Artists are consciousness-raisers. They frame what people see. If they all came from the same places––geographically, and in life––the arts would be dull and monochrome. 

These artists have given support and strategic tools to young people who might never have considered a vocation for the arts, as well as to those who have been discouraged from even thinking about such a life (or even thinking). Best of all is the advice, contact and role models provided by these working artists (as well as actors, community activists and others) who (to quote the website) “promote peace, tolerance and respect for human rights at home and abroad.” 

So Working Classroom is not only a place where public art, performances, and educational projects are produced, but a place where idealism is taken for granted. Its bilingual phone-answering-machine message offers a clue to the organization’s emphasis on diversity. (They can be forgiven for not also translating into the area’s seven Native languages, though they serve these often “historically ignored” communities as well.) 

These ideals are central to the arts of the twenty-first century. They are the results of struggles that took at least half of the 20th century, struggles that are not yet won. 

These artists do not only make good art. They look at context, meaning, and effect. When the Working Classroom students go out into the world, they act in films, go to art school or law school, win awards and scholarships, attend national youth conferences. Hopefully, they will never forget where they came from and will in their own turn become community arts activists changing other lives as their own were changed by Working Classroom. 

Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator from the United States. Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics, and place, and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants in criticism. She has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine.