Guest commentary: Oxnard — The Arts City of Ventura County

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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor

The city of Oxnard’s Art in Public Places (AIPP) Awards Committee has just reviewed some 50 proposals from local artists and art organizations and they will soon award about $150,000 in AIPP funds. The city of Oxnard’s Arts in Public places concept has been around for over 28 years, and for about 24 of those years it was nothing more than a secret slush fund for the old boy’s network that ran city hall like their private plantation and bank. It wasn’t until the community got seriously involved and scrutinized closely the fast and loose AIPP process that the city was forced to change the way they operated the review and awarding of AIPP funds. The fight for the past 5 years to get money directly into the hands of local artist has not been easy. Sisyphus comes to mind; a few activists pushing the proverbial boulders up the steep mountain, all the while many of the affected art and cultural parties play the safe institutional game of lap dogs to the new city hall power seeking favor. It is never easy to change the status quo.

Dramatic, substantive and constructive change materialized because the AIPP committee members push for specific institutional changes and demanded power sharing.  Out of this demand for shared power an Arts and Cultural Commission was created. The AIPP committee will formally become an Arts and Cultural Commission in March, 2015. The Commission will have relative autonomy to create a community lead and driven arts and cultural agenda continuing to foment the current arts renaissance in Oxnard that will introduce our city as a real and serious grass roots community managed and directed arts and culture movement.

With the formation of the Arts and Cultural Commission our hope is that more funds from the city  will be made available almost immediately to further the incredible arts synergistic  movement that is taking place now in Oxnard. Our goal at the Acuna Art Gallery, along with many of our arts and social justice community partners, is to have available at least $500,000 made available to artists and arts organization in fiscal year 2016-17.

Art is community safety; that is the new safety paradigm of the 21^st century! Many of us that work with marginalized, disenfranchised and at-risk populations have found that one of the most cost effective (in terms of saving on staffing, infrastructure costs, and the myriad of cost associated with traditional community safety models, i.e., Police, Probation, the courts and jails) deterrents to ant-social, destructive and criminal behavior, especially in our youth, is the early and universally available introduction of the arts into their lives. Art is transformational, it awakens creativity, curiosity and exploration; which in turn produces confidence, a  very real sense of self discipline, accomplishment and self worth. In kids that have very little of both materially and psychologically “capitol” art can be a dramatic game changer. In the 50 years or so that I have been actively involved in the both the arts and social justice struggle in poor and disenfranchised communities I have found that the arts is the universal key that can unlock  the most troubled hearts and minds.

We have witness incredible recent stories of impoverished and forgotten youth in Latino America, this county and the rest of the world being introduced to music, dance, theater and the visual arts and they are transformed from the genocidal collateral damage that incessant poverty reigns up poor children and youth throughout the world into remarkably resilient vessels of creativity, love and hope. These incredibly gifted youth were transformed through the arts and love; and these wondrous youth remind us; the often fearful, intransigent, jaded and foolish adults, that  art and love, represent two of the  greatest power in the human heart and mind.

So that is what this continued community arts and safety struggle is about; do we want to continue down the same horrifically costly police state (Oxnard now spends more than 90 million or 1/3 of its 200 million yearly budget on the cops) to address, mitigate, reduce and eliminate our safety fears and concerns in Oxnard. Or can we try using our minds and hearts, a lot more,  to help address the systemic pain, angst, sense of worthlessness and alienation felt by so many of our youth and adults living in poverty throughout Oxnard.

Our dear friend Father Gregory Boyle of Home Boy/Girl Industries reminds us, “that nothing stops a bullet faster than a good job”. We at the Acuna Art Gallery and Community Center agree with Father Boyle and add that nothing is more cost effective and universally successfully proven to be more transformational than the introduction of the arts into the lives of our youth and yes adults as well.  So we in the arts and social justice community of Oxnard have made some significant progress in the past five year, but like Sisyphus we may be anointed to kept pushing that massive boulder of fear, resistance and plain ignorance that is so deeply institutionalized in Oxnard, for the rest of our lives.  So we will until the day that the budget for arts is comparable to that of the current community safety apparatus, and that art is universally available to every kid and adult in the city of Oxnard.

— Armando Vazquez, M.Ed., is the executive director of The KEYS Leadership Academy@ Café on A in Oxnard.