After reviewing the slideshow, many thoughts emerged for me when considering the way in which my perception and means of interacting with community based arts has changed over the course of one semester. For starters, I wanted to analyze the term genealogy and what exactly that means for community engagement and the arts. I had never really seen the term used outside of the context of creating a family tree or exploring genetics/ancestry. I understand that it can serve a broader purpose when stitching together a timeline or lifespan of an idea or concept: however, genealogy I think serves as a great term for community engagement through arts. When we visited Esperanza on the class field trip, one of the things that these kinds of projects prove to me is the weight of familial relationships and cultural ties within the artistic community. Esperanza I realize, was a place for creative placemaking, a term I was not familiar with prior to this class. However, creative placemaking or social practice in art, to me, was the only way in which community engaged arts could define itself as community based. I think any kind of art that is trying to make a statement (and succeeding) is inherently engaging some kind of community, small or large.
Issues that have been impacting my life and the ones around me mainly revolve around environmental issues. One of the pressing issues that affects the agriculture community in California is the State’s distribution of water. Now a tactic that the State Government has had for many years is to take water from Northern California and send it down to the South. The south is in need of water as they do not get enough to support themselves, but the issue is a bit larger and encompuses the states refusal to create more reservoirs to store water to be used during the dryer months. But the main issue is that the focus is uneven and falls heavily on the side of sending it to the south instead of distributing it evenly so farmers in all regions but mainly central and southern california have the proper amount of water to grow their crops. California is one of the leading states in the production and exporting of agriculture products due to our vast and wide scale of geological environments, but ...
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