Episode 66: Arlene Goldbard - We Burn & Are Not Consumed

Arlene Goldbard

In this episode we talk to author, visual artist, educator, and activist Arlene Goldbard about her new book. In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does it Mean to be Educated. In it she explores her life's journey along with a camp of 11 angels that include James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Paolo Freire, Doris Lessing, and Jane Jacobs. 

Arlene Goldbard (www.arlenegoldbard.com) is a New Mexico-based writer, speaker, consultant, cultural activist, and visual artist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her books include The Wave, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future; New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Community, Culture and Globalization, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity. Her new book, In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated? was published by New Village Press in January 2023. Her essays have been widely published. She has addressed academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe and provided advice to community-based organizations, independent media groups, institutions of higher education, and public and private funders and policymakers. Along with François Matarasso, she co-hosts “A Culture of Possibility,” a podcast produced by miaaw.net. From 2012 to 2019, she served as Chief Policy Wonk of the USDAC (usdac.us). From 2008-2019, she served as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center. 

Change the Story / Change the World: A Chronicle of art and community transformation across the globe.

Change the Story Collection: Many of our listeners have told us they would like to dig deeper into art and change stories that focus on specific issues, constituencies, or disciplines. Others have shared that they are using the podcast as a learning resource and would appreciate categories and cross-references for our stories. In response we have curated episode collections in 11 arenas: Justice Arts, Children and Youth, Racial Reckoning, Creative Climate Action, Cultural Organizing, Creative Community Leadership Development, Arts and Healing, Art of the Rural, Theater for Change, Music and Transformation, Change Media.

 In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does it Mean to be Educated: An autodidact explores issues of education itself through essays and personal portraits of the key minds who influenced her. What does it mean to be...

Arlene Goldbard

In this episode we talk to author, visual artist, educator, and activist Arlene Goldbard about her new book. In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does it Mean to be Educated. In it she explores her life's journey along with a camp of 11 angels that include James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Paolo Freire, Doris Lessing, and Jane Jacobs. 

Arlene Goldbard (www.arlenegoldbard.com) is a New Mexico-based writer, speaker, consultant, cultural activist, and visual artist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her books include The Wave, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future; New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Community, Culture and Globalization, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity. Her new book, In The Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated? was published by New Village Press in January 2023. Her essays have been widely published. She has addressed academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe and provided advice to community-based organizations, independent media groups, institutions of higher education, and public and private funders and policymakers. Along with François Matarasso, she co-hosts “A Culture of Possibility,” a podcast produced by miaaw.net. From 2012 to 2019, she served as Chief Policy Wonk of the USDAC (usdac.us). From 2008-2019, she served as President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center. 

Change the Story / Change the World: A Chronicle of art and community transformation across the globe.

Change the Story Collection: Many of our listeners have told us they would like to dig deeper into art and change stories that focus on specific issues, constituencies, or disciplines. Others have shared that they are using the podcast as a learning resource and would appreciate categories and cross-references for our stories. In response we have curated episode collections in 11 arenas: Justice Arts, Children and Youth, Racial Reckoning, Creative Climate Action, Cultural Organizing, Creative Community Leadership Development, Arts and Healing, Art of the Rural, Theater for Change, Music and Transformation, Change Media.

 In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does it Mean to be Educated: An autodidact explores issues of education itself through essays and personal portraits of the key minds who influenced her. What does it mean to be educated? Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels.

 Order this Book @: Arlene Goldbard.com and New Village Press

James Baldwin is considered one of America’s finest writers.  He garnered acclaim for his work across several mediums, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953; decades later, Time magazine included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels released from 1923 to 2005.[1] Baldwin's work fictionalizes fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures. Themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class intertwine to create intricate narratives that run parallel with some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. 

Nina Simone: was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. 

Nina Simone @Monteau Jazz Festival (video)

Paul Goodman: was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature.

US Department of Arts and Culture: The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is a people-powered department—a grassroots action network inciting creativity and social imagination to shape a culture of empathy, equity, and belonging.

Dr. Ibram x. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning author of thirteen books for adults and children, including nine NewYork Times bestsellers—five of which were #1 NewYork Times bestsellers. Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor.

Golden Notebook: The Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel by the British writer Doris Lessing. Like her two books that followed, it enters the realm of what Margaret Drabble in The Oxford Companion to English Literature called Lessing's "inner space fiction";[citation needed] her work that explores mental and societal breakdown. The novel contains anti-war and anti-Stalinist messages, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and an examination of the budding sexual revolution and women's liberation movements.

Doris Lessing: was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".[2] Lessing was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, at age 87.[3][4][5]

Vaclav Havel: The unassuming man who taught, through plays and politics, how tyranny may be defied and overcome. Although a highly successful politician, four times head of state and the leader of one of the most famous revolutions in history, he was not a natural public figure. A sincere, impatient and humble man, he detested the pomposity, superficiality and phoney intimacy of politics.

Isaiah Berlin: Isaiah Berlin (1909–97) was a naturalised British philosopher, historian of ideas, political theorist, educator, public intellectual and moralist, and essayist. He was renowned for his conversational brilliance, his defence of liberalism and pluralism, his opposition to political extremism and intellectual fanaticism, and his accessible, coruscating writings on people and ideas. 

Marjorie Taylor Green, Jewish space lasers,

Waiting for Godot: is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives.[2] Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts"

Waiting for Godot at San Quentin Prison 1988: This documentary was made during rehearsals for the play "Waiting for Godot," by Samuel Beckett, which was performed in 1988 by members of the San Quentin Drama Workshop at San Quentin maximum security prison, Marin County, California. Swedish director Jan Jonson directed

A Culture of Possibility.  by Arlene Goldbard. "If we're going to end this fiscal madness and start rebuilding America, we're going to have to get creative! We need a tsunami of music, film, poetry and art. The Culture of Possibility shows us how creativity can take our story back from Corporation Nation, tilting the culture towards justice, equity, and innovation. I urge you to read this book!" Van Jones

Abraham Joshua Heschel (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was a leader in the civil rights movement.[1][2]

National Guild for Community Arts Education: Founded in 1937, the National Guild for Community Arts Education is the sole national service organization for providers of community arts education. We believe in the power of the arts to transform lives. Our work helps realize that transformation every day.

The Higher Ground Community Arts of Spiritual Practice: This is the text of Arlene Goldbards’s keynote address at the annual conference of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts. It was delivered on 3 November 2006.

Liz Lerman: Hiking the Horizontal: Coreographer, education, and all around heritic-change agent Liz Lerman offers readers a gentle manifesto to bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world. This is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media.

The National Conference on Religion and Race, held at Chicago's Edgewater Beach Hotel, 14–17 January...