What do you get when you have a community that wants access to art and can’t get it? And, what if that same neighborhood already includes artists who don’t have a connection to the community?
That’s precisely the conundrum Drexel researcher Neville Vakharia found facing West Philadelphia’s Mantua neighborhood.
Using a joint grant from Lucy Kerman, vice provost of university and community partnerships, and the Office of Research, Vakharia and his team of students from Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and the College of Arts and Sciences recently embarked on a yearlong study of the arts in underserved areas.
“We really set out to address this issue of what is the role of arts and culture in these neighborhoods,” he says. “One of the big things we heard is that yes, residents want and need more opportunities to engage in cultural activities.”
And while there are artists living in the studied region, unlike in other areas of the city that have benefitted from an artistic presence, “they don’t know how to connect with the neighborhood,” he says. “They want to stay and have a long-term impact, but part of why they don’t stay is they don’t feel engaged. They were actually doing their art elsewhere because they didn’t have the community connections.”
He adds: “Hopefully our findings can be shared with the community so that they know arts are part of the picture, and so the residents will know they are part of the larger civic agenda.”