Dinner digestions of Susan Sakash
Susan Sakash undergoes a partial digestion of the food and brain stuffs of Meet Me At The Table's first dinner.
Looking back at the first dinner party, I now see the dinner’s site and formalized aesthetic as a good example of where Berwick is at as an organization and where we are looking to grow. By many accounts, this dinner was a wonderful success (read Big Red and Shiny article ) but I personally struggled to see how the outcomes of the dinner brought us closer to two of our goals; namely, expanding our network beyond the arts community, and challenging us to reevaluate the ways in which the PAI program has been operating since 2005.
By holding our first dinner inside an artist’s private working studio, in one of the longest standing artist studio buildings in the country, the Berwick was conscious that we were working within a setting that was familiar to us as artists and curators, but perhaps not as comfortable for people outside of the art community. It was interesting to note, then, how the dinner guests were all artists or arts administrators (Kelly Brilliant, the Executive Director of the Fenway Alliance, a collaborating partner on the “Lumina” project along Huntington Avenue, actually got lost for 45 minutes trying to locate Brickbottom Studios and ended up turning around and going home!) despite many of the guests being new to the Berwick.
The guests’ comfort within the setting of an artist studio and their delight in knowing one another’s work, meant that the dinner conversation was very fluid and quick to engage with Sarah King McKeon and Hannah Burr’s aesthetic and conceptual presentation of the meal. So while there was a wonderful exchange of ideas throughout the evening, the conversation still felt very familiar and affirming. There was also a lot of positive feedback from the guests about the projects previously supported by the Berwick—and the congenial atmosphere of the dinner table did not bring out some of the Berwick's own dissatisfactions with those projects.
As an organization, we need to continue to push ourselves towards being more transparent about how and why we are looking to redefine the way that the PAI program approaches collaboration and conversation. I am eager to take what we gained from this first event in applying it towards the next dinner events.
Some Questions
I am committed to finding ways in which this project can help push the Berwick to our learning edge. If the Public Art Incubator program is committed to supporting public art works that want to actively engage with social spaces, the Meet me at the table initative has to find ways to activate the diversity of perspectives that create these social spaces.
How does true collaboration happen? Rather than holding a jury process that selects an artist based on their vision and then working to match that artist with a group or organization that we hope will share that vision, how can the Berwick act as a bridge-builder to bring in the collaborating partners at the earliest stage of a project? How can we address the imbalanced power dynamic that seems so prevalent in the public art process in order to bring participants to a more equal playing field? How does Meet me at the table represent that struggle (by privileging the artist’s perspective) and, moving forward, how can we learn from other models out there? What are the questions we should be asking to create an environment where collaborators feel as though their input is essential to the conversation?
In terms of shaping the structure of the Meet me at the table series, we are inviting guests to join us in tackling these difficult but potentially rewarding questions. Each dinner will be held in a locale that, together with the backgrounds of those assembled, will inform the direction that each conversation takes. This practice of addressing the same questions through the lens of different ways of approaching public art permits the guests, as well as the Berwick, to remain in the position of learners.