Victor Davson is Founder and Executive Director of Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, New Jersey, which helps young and emerging artists develop their artistic talents as well as their business plans for becoming professional artists.
In the context of sustainability, where people often talk about the three E’s, one of them is equity, which for us at Aljira is about access. In other words, we can’t imagine what we mean by a sustainable society without better access for all citizens. At Aljira, we focus on providing access for artists of all backgrounds to meaningful arts opportunities as well as access to a support system for emerging artists.
One has to look at the arts community as an eco-system and recognize certain facts. One truth is that large major institutions make up 25%, maybe 30% of that system, but they consume about 60% of the resources. The groups within the eco-system that have the weakest infrastructure are the small to mid-sized groups, and these groups are oftentimes overlooked because they’re less able to demonstrate their value. They have less resources and therefore most of their resources go into the programmatic piece and rarely do they have the means to build those organizational components so critical to institutional sustainability.
Aljira fits in the small to mid-sized category for arts organizations in Newark, and I think there’s a kind of texture that small to mid-sized organizations bring to the table that tells you something important about the community. I think that there’s a way of connecting the arts with issues that are relevant to community in the way that we try to do. In fact a recent New York Times article said that Aljira was also a community development organization. I had never thought of ourselves as a community development organization, but in a sense, if you stick around for 24 years and you’re presenting art and culture where nobody else is doing it, in a sense you ARE doing community development. And since we don’t have a lot of money, it is all done on the “scent of an oil rag.”
Aljira also acts as an entry point for a lot of the emerging new talent. A place like Aljira can discover new talent because we’re working on the ground in our community. From the time you leave college to the time you exhibit your work at a major show or get a major grant or commission, who nurtures you as an artist? That’s the gap we fill here. We provide the nurturing, we provide the safety net.
Our EMERGE program, which has served over 200 artists, grew out of the difficult times I faced when I graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1980. The question on my mind then was, “Now what?” You learn to make an object, you’re an artist now, you swim or you sink. So given that personal experience, I created Aljira as a young artist myself to help other artists establish a network of support and to show them that they need a business plan, they need a teaching plan – they need to plan for their long-term success.
Initially, I thought the lack of access, particularly in the commercial art market, was an issue of race, but I’ve since come to believe that it’s bigger than race and that it most certainly includes gender as well, so I have tremendous empathy for the experience of women artists as well.
I believe, because my father taught me, that if you can make an impact on a few dozen kids and REALLY make an impact, this is the most substantive, important work you can do – it’s more important than herding thousands of kids through a turnstile at a museum. And at Aljira, the kids that are being impacted, they’re heading into a difficult world, a complicated difficult world, and I think it’s my job to arm them with the right tools and the support they need to navigate that world.
Photograph by Barbara Beirne
