But our primary objective was to capture the phenomenon of art-making, as opposed to studying to people who passively participate in the arts, and by the end of the study we had come to realize that most of that kind of activity happens in places that you wouldn't normally think of as art spaces, even though many of the participants were professional artists, professionally trained individuals, or people who had some sort of relationship to the so-called formal arts. So, ultimately, I think our definition had more to do with the settings in which these activities took place rather than with the type of person who engaged in them.

PND: Well, let's talk about that. Who are these people and what kinds of activities are they engaged in?

AW: It's anything from writing poetry in your spare time and giving a reading in a coffeehouse, to community theater, to singing in the choir at your local church, to participating in drumming circles or painting classes in the park. It's also things like quilting clubs and amateur photography clubs and ceramics clubs; there's a whole range of folk art and craft production going on out there. It's visual artists who have gone to the Art Institute or who have an MFA or BFA but who haven't yet mounted a gallery show; they may not be making a living with their art per se, but they nevertheless maintain an active arts-making life. The one discipline we didn't look at in detail was dance, but that was only because our resources were limited. We know that there are all sorts of folk dance groups and other dance-related activities going on. So it's a huge range of activities, and it's spread across many different genres and disciplines.

PND: The study focused on adult participation in these activities in the Chicago metro area. Based on what you've learned, would you say that this kind of activity is generally confined to urban areas, or is it more widespread than that?

AW: We think it's widespread, for a couple of reasons. We ventured into the suburbs a bit — we had one case study in a suburban community — but we also regularly went out and collected events flyers and audited advertising in suburban newspapers, and it was clear from our informal surveying that these kind of activities were happening everywhere.

There were also a couple of formal surveys done — the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which was published in 1997 by the National Endowment for the Arts, and a second, in 1998, by Americans for the Arts. Both found fairly widespread participation in the arts. In fact, if you extrapolate from their findings, you could reasonably argue that there are millions of people involved in arts-related activities. So, despite the lack of hard evidence to support the claim, we think the appeal of the informal arts is widespread.

PND: Outside of a love of art, do participants in the informal arts have certain traits in common, or are they as representative of society as you might expect?

AW: Oh, they're very representative. In our sample, they tended to have more education — almost all were high school graduates and many were college graduates — and they tended to be more civically engaged than the average American. But in terms of their demographic profile, we found that participation was distributed evenly among genders, among racial and ethnic groups, and socioeconomically.

PND: Tell us about the study's methodology.

AW: We used a basic ethnographic approach. The research was conducted by myself and two other ethnographers, with help from two volunteer ethnographers, over a span of about two years, which is probably a little longer than most ethnographic studies these days. Do you know what I mean by "ethnographic"?

PND: No. Tell us.

AW: Okay. In the old days, anthropologists would document culture in what we call a "holistic" fashion — the intent was to look at all aspects of social life in a particular group. It's a qualitative research methodology that's actually pretty systematic now. But at its core is something called participant observation, which means that the anthropologist/ethnographer tries to be "in" the situation, tries to experience social life as the study participants are experiencing it.

So for us that meant actually going and participating in the activity with the group we happened to be studying. For example, we would join the drumming group in the park, or help stage a production in a local theater, or play music with a community ensemble, or sit in with a quilting group and learn how to quilt. And by doing those things, we got a better sense of the real experience that participants in these activities were having. At least, that's the theory.

After that, we systematically interviewed key participants in our case studies. Then we combined that participant observation with a fair amount of quantitative data. Because this is urban anthropology, there are lots of public documents available. So we researched the history of the informal arts, and we also audited local newspapers to see how frequently this stuff appeared in them. Finally, toward the end of the study period, we designed a survey that was sent to everybody in the case studies, about three hundred people, and we got a 54 percent response rate, which is pretty good for a self-administered survey. That gave us additional quantitative data to complement the data that was coming from the participant observation and the interviews.

PND: What kind of quantitative data?

AW: We asked questions about different aspects of arts participation, in addition to standard demographic questions. We asked people how much training they had, and how they first got interested in the arts, and whether their participation in the arts led them to interact with diverse people, and did they see it benefiting their lives. The study really was focused on the social impact of this kind of experience, rather than on the aesthetics of art practice, so we had three sort of overarching questions we wanted to answer: The first had to do with what, if anything, participation in these kinds of activities leads to in terms of interaction across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. The second had to do with civic capacity, specifically, what kind of civic skills, if any, people acquired as a result of their participation in these kinds of activities. And the third was concerned with the relationship between the informal and more formal arts.

PND: Well, let's talk about your findings.

AW: Sure. I just want to mention that the results of the quantitative survey will be available sometime in early July at Princeton's Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Web site.

But back to your question. The first thing we wanted to learn more about was whether participation in the informal arts actually bring people together across social boundaries. And what we found is that indeed it does, in very interesting kinds of ways. In the twelve case studies we did, we found that participation in the informal arts was particularly salient in bringing people together across age and occupational boundaries — in fact, in practically every single case study we did, there were people from a wide range of occupations coming together in that particular activity. In the drumming circle, for example, there were secretaries, janitors, lawyers and other professionals all sitting next to each other and drumming every Friday evening in a park on the north side of the city. It's the kind of thing, when people hear about it, that they want to be a part of, and I have to say it was pretty amazing to see the diversity of occupations represented in our study.

There was also great age diversity in the groups we studied. In particular, we saw lots of situations in which older people participated side-by-side with younger people, which is something we tend to overlook. Given the demographics of our aging population and the generational divide that exists between younger and older people, we feel that informal arts settings are among the few places in our society where younger and older people can come together.

The same is true of gender. Sports activities, the other major leisure-time activity of people in this country, are often valued because they bring people together across ethnic and occupational boundaries. But they're far less effective at bridging gender boundaries; you don't often see gender-integrated softball or soccer teams, for example. So I think it was very interesting for us to see gender boundaries being crossed in our case-study groups.

The situation with ethnic and racial boundaries was a little different. Because of Chicago's long history of residential housing segregation, there was much less racial integration in our case studies. For example, three or four of the groups we studied were located on the city's South Side, which traditionally has been an African-American neighborhood, and we saw fewer white people traveling to that neighborhood to participate in arts-related activities.

The other thing I would say about our findings with respect to the bridging of boundaries is that the nature of the relationships formed through participation in these sorts of activities was different. It wasn't just that people were coming together to do something and then going their separate ways, as is often the case in the workplace. Instead, what we found is that people were actually forming very solid social ties based on their strong passion for their art and making art. That passion tends to forge a common bond between people that allows them to see past social boundaries.

PND: What about the second question, the role of the informal arts in building civic capacity? How did you define capacity in this context?

AW: Well, what we were particularly interested in were the skills needed for civic renewal and engagement — organizational skills, community-building skills, that sort of thing. And what we found is that yes, these kinds of informal arts scenes were sites where people acquired important types of skills in this regard. At the most fundamental level, just allowing people to express their creativity made them, by their own admission, better problem-solvers, in that they learned how to bring that creativity to problems related to their art-making.

They also tended to be more tolerant of differences, as I've mentioned, both because their participation in an arts-related activity tended to bring them into contact with a more diverse group of people than they might otherwise interact with, and because the very nature of informal arts means that you have to be willing to include people with a wide range of skills and abilities in your group. I mean, in order to survive, most of these groups have to be as inclusive as possible.

I'll give you another example. I never played a musical instrument — I mean, I played violin in high school, but I'm not a musician by any stretch of the imagination. Yet I joined an Asian ensemble as part of my participant observation assignment, and they were very tolerant of my musical incompetence; in fact, anybody could come to their rehearsals and join in. They would just weave instruction into the way they ran the rehearsal in a very clever, inclusive kind of way. The same for the church choir groups we studied. I mean, obviously if they hear somebody in the congregation who's got an outstanding voice, they'll go out and recruit that person. But anybody in the congregation could join. So there was a sort of broad inclusivity, based on toleration for difference, in all of these groups, and that led us to the conclusion that important civic skills are indeed fostered by these kinds of activities.

PND: And the third question, about the nature of the relationship between the informal and more formal arts?

AW: Again, very interesting. The relationship between the two isn't linear; there's a lot of back and forth and interaction along different nodes. We found, not surprisingly, that a high percent of the informal artists in our study attended events in the formal sector. We also found that the kind of work that goes into informal arts production, the innovation and creativity that often attaches to those kinds of activities, often bleeds into the formal arts sector — the informal arts play a kind of research and development role for the formal arts that is often unreported and underappreciated.

Let me just add that by the end of the study we realized that, if we had more time, we would have liked to do more research on the role played by small and medium-sized community-based arts organizations as sites where this kind of interaction between the formal and informal takes place. There's some fascinating stuff going on that we didn't really get to explore, and it would have been nice to do more research in that area.

PND: Do you have any plans to pick up that thread down the road?

AW: No, I don't think so, at least not at the moment. What we're looking to do now is to find ways to apply our findings to the work that we've been doing in the area of community development. We don't have funding yet, but we're hoping to apply what we learned to a variety of initiatives and projects, including mixed-income housing development.

PND: In Chicago specifically?

AW: Actually, this kind of thing is happening around the country. What you're seeing is more and more developers moving away from building public housing that segregates low-income people and building mixed-income housing that combines low-income residents with more affluent folks. What we're interested in looking at is how you get people living next door to each other who may be from entirely different socioeconomic situations to interact. How do you bring them together and create community? Given the results of our study, we think using the arts and arts programming to stimulate this kind of interaction is a natural.

PND: What are some of the other policy implications of your work?

AW: Well, one of the recommendations we make is for the public and private sectors to devote more resources to creating and improving access to the places and venues where people engage in these kinds of activities — places like parks and libraries and community centers. That's critical. One of the major problems for informal arts groups is that they have to move around all the time. Either they lack a dedicated space, or they're subject to the whims of the municipal budget process. I mean, these kinds of activities are always the first thing to be cut at crunch time. But if cities in this country, particularly small and medium-size cities, are serious about reinventing themselves as desirable places to live and work, they're going to have to recognize the value of these kinds of activities and invest in them.

Second, we argue in the report that we, as a society, need to recognize the informal arts and make them more visible — we need to legitimize them, in effect. You know, a lot of people won't even self-define as artists. They'll say, "Oh, we don't do art, we're just amateurs," as if there's some sort of stigma attached to the term. Why? Why should that be? My own feeling is that if we came up with ways to give arts practice more visibility, if we valued it more, folks involved in these kinds of activities would have a better sense of themselves, would participate and be more active than they already are in their own neighborhoods, and would contribute more to the life of their cities and regions.

You know, it doesn't take a lot of money to give legitimacy to this kind of activity, and we think formal arts institutions are the place to start. In fact, as a result of our study we recommend that formal arts institutions and advocates for the arts initiate the process of building targeted alliances with informal artists and arts groups, recognizing the value that they bring to the field and the larger community. Instead of perpetuating the divide between "us" and "them," formal arts institutions should be encouraged to view all arts-related activity as existing on a continuum and that by helping to strengthen the informal arts, they'll also be strengthening their own end of the continuum. That's a difficult concept for many of the larger arts institutions, which tend to be very focused on their own needs. But I think they — as well as the rest of us — will be better off in the long run if they do reach out and try to bridge some of those divides.

PND: To the extent that these kinds of activities are funded, what did your study tell you about the funders?

AW: In large part, they are not private foundations. The parks department subsidizes the stuff that happens in the parks, the libraries subsidize the stuff that's happening in libraries, churches provide space to many groups for free or next to nothing, and so on. Toward the more organized end of the spectrum, some groups will qualify for grants from public-sector agencies like the Illinois Arts Council. But if you don't have 501(c)(3) status, which many of these groups do not, you're not likely to qualify for funding from the public or private sector. For the most part, they survive on voluntary labor and any membership fees they might charge. Theater groups are a little bit different, in that they typically charge for performances.

PND: Are you concerned that the very nature of informal arts practice might change if these kinds of groups were able to attract more funding, whether public or private? Wouldn't it require them to focus more on things like reporting and revenue generation, to the detriment of things like spontaneity and informality that make them attractive to people in the first place?

AW: I guess there's a danger in that. But I'm not sure what informal artists themselves would say. I mean, again, it depends on where they fall on that continuum we've been talking about. For example, I don't think giving small theaters a little more funding is going to change their character.

Instead of funding the groups themselves, maybe the thing we should do is support their space requirements. In Chicago, for example, the parks are a hugely important locus for this kind of activity, but the Parks Department spends most of its money on planting more flowerbeds and putting up fences, rather than on subsidizing and increasing space for these activities. All most of these groups want is a room or a moderately competent instructor to drop by once a week — I mean, there are so many wonderful professional artists here in Chicago who would be happy to spend one day a week sharing their knowledge and passion with one of these groups. And again, I don't think it would change the character of the group.

Look, in our society we tend to think that it's always about money. But after learning about these groups and seeing them in action for more than two years, I can tell you that it's not only about money. It's about recognition, and stability, and valuing these activities for all the things they contribute to the health and vitality of our communities. We need to understand that, and to understand that we're all better off in an environment in which these groups are encouraged and flourish. That's the crux of it.

PND: And that's also an excellent note on which to leave it. Thanks for speaking with us this morning, Alaka.

AW: Thank you.

Mitch Nauffts, PND's editorial director, interviewed Alaka Wali in May. For more information on the Newsmakers series, contact Mitch at mfn@fdncenter.org.