The Big Canvas: Exploring emotional ties to art, community

Citizen blogger Christine Cavalier took part in The Big Canvas discussion held Oct. 6 in Narberth. She found a group of people willing to listen and share their ideas on how best to fund arts and culture in the Philly region.

by Jodie Chester

Published Oct. 29, 2008, 2:47 p.m. ET

Ah, Narberth. Land of 25 mile-an-hour streets, gargantuan stop signs, and commissioned theme songs. My husband and I, along with our young kids, enjoy the Fourth of July celebration in Narberth each year. Throughout the summer, we happily pack the car with pails and shovels and drive to the one-big-huge-sandbox park. Narberth is Main Line Middle Class Upper Crust Division at its best. Take a drive out there once in a while to see how the other half lives.

The night of Monday, Oct. 6, I was sans kids, sans minivan. It felt light and almost unnatural having nothing but me, my notepad, and my new digital SLR. The streets were dark and quiet. Main street Narberth can get "suburban rowdy" at times (not anything like the flavor on South Street at any given moment of any day), but it was too early for the Narberth karaoke crowd. I drove around the one-way grid of avenues and found a parking space on the street next to the borough building. This would be my first visit to the building, although I've walked past it numerous times in search of coffee and snacks during park outings. This night I ended up walking around it one more time because the main door was bolted. A sign by the side door directed Great Expectation participants to take the elevator to the second floor.

Waiting for the elevator, I could hear the echoing voices of participants upstairs asking if they were in the right place. The room for the Great Expectations meeting was enormous, perhaps designed to hold every Narberth citizen for town-hall meetings. Chairs were set up in rows and in two big circles in opposite corners of the room. There was a refreshment table filled with cookies, cheese, fruit and those ubiquitous boxes of coffee (which weren't marked decaf; at 8 p.m. at night, I steered clear of them).

The regular faces from the Great Expectations crowd were there, headed up by Chris Satullo. About 25 participants were there, mostly women aged 55 and up. There were two or three stand-out younger people scattered around.

I've blogged one other Great Expectations Big Canvas events. I participated in the forum discussion with one group. This time around, I decided instead to concentrate more on listening and photoblogging with my new digital SLR camera. Still a bit shy as a photojournalist, I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible with the camera. The crowd didn't seem to mind that I was shooting away. I also took video with my advanced cell phone, but I'm not sure this crowd understood what I was really doing. More likely it appeared to them as if I was taking too long to focus my point-and-shoot camera.

This session was run a bit differently than the first one I attended. Instead of gathering ideas, this session was a review of the four categories that came out of the ideas gathered in the first few months of the forums. The four "Approaches" are as follows: 1. Extend the Arts Experience. 2. Nurture Children's Futures. 3. Build the Creative Economy. 4. Foster Quality of Community (see Alletta Emeno's great post for the rundown on each of these categories).

The current sessions were to concentrate on the value of the four categories individually, and participants were asked to frankly discuss with each other the pros and cons of each. Afterward, they were asked to order the categories by preference (Side note: Chris Steinmeier has a great post on how the order preference has been changing along with the greater world economic woes.)

After a presentation about the goals of the Big Canvas project, Mr. Satullo and Mr. Harris Sokoloff did a skit where they pretended to adopt one approach and paint a human picture of it while debating with each other over the virtues of each theory. Mr. Sokoloff started out with Approach Number 1. He presented it passionately, as if it were a world view. Next, Mr. Satullo introduced Approach 2. In typical debate style, Mr. Satullo told Mr. Sokoloff to "get real" and that Approach 2 will be the choice of those who care about the future enough to invest in educational programs. Mr. Sokoloff responded with "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He placed his hand mockingly on his chest and said, "Bleeding heart. For the kids. ... But what is the first thing that gets cut in hard economic times? ... Programs for kids. What we need to do, is build the creative economy (Approach 3)." After he pleaded the case, Mr. Sokoloff looked on with a smile as Mr. Satullo waxed poetic about Approach 4. "Part of what makes life worth living is ... being part of a community. ... Everybody is an artist somehow. ... You might sing in the shower, you might be part of an Irish step dancing group, something. Everybody ... is a part of the quality of life."

The back-and-forth banter between Mr. Satullo and Mr. Sokoloff held the audience captive and brought about more than a few laughs. With little time alotted in the schedule for the participants to read through the abundant reading material, this "fleshing out" the four approaches helped them place themselves politically, fiscally and perhaps spiritually into the appropriate category.

It was then that I noticed something profound that I had missed the first time I attended a Great Expectations forum. This act of humanizing the four approaches, I realized, wasn't simply to save time. It dawned on me that Great Expectations isn't asking people for only their logical decisions or financial savvy; the project wants to discover citizens' emotional ties and deep-seated beliefs about what makes life worthwhile. A very daunting and significant question, indeed. The organizers are attempting to collect elusive and ethereal data, and yet they've managed to corral the basic tenets of an entire extended city community. That is truly quite worthy of respect.

After the detailed descriptions of the four approaches, Mr. Satullo put up a slide about ground rules for the discussions. I looked around and wondered who would be the troll in the audience. Like Narberth itself, the audience seemed unusually polite. I know quite a few trolls on the Internet, and they'd rip this place up, I thought. Thankfully, this was real space and not cyberspace. Still, it is always a good idea to let participants know what is expected of them.

The audience broke into two groups and took their seats in the circles of chairs in the opposite sides of the room. I was elated to hear some of the participants mention an online presence or central database for arts and culture events, seeing that the 'Internet' wasn't mentioned by anyone but me at the last forum I attended.

The concentration level was high; people listened and shared their views as if it were a graduate school class. They were quite sincere and invested in the conversation. Although some participants were animated at times, predictably no cage-match-of-the-trolls fever broke out. There was certainly a flurry of activity around the snack table at one point, but the participants found their seats and continued the discussion quickly after.

Posters filled with comments were stuck up along the walls and windows, a la Great Expectations fashion. If Mr. Satullo does anything right, he definitely keeps someone typing up the hand-written information he gathers at these forums. People worked hard and gave him some great insights.

As the meeting ended, I was sent home with a plate of cookies. The organizers were thoughtful enough to bring a huge roll of plastic wrap and proceeded to hand out the catered goodies from the table. So that's another bonus of attending. Not only can you go to a place where your voice will be heard, but you can get some chocolate chip goodness in exchange for your hopes and dreams for the Delaware Valley. That, my friends, is the best deal in Philly. Try to attend a Great Expectations event. You won't regret it.