Art of citizenship

by Kathryn Gallien, from Scope Magazine, winter 2013

One hundred fifty students registered to vote in it.

More than 100 people from town and campus crammed into it for a forum on a proposed change to the city’s charter.

Dozens wrote in its journal about revisions they’d like to see in the US Constitution.

An intent crowd sat shoulder to shoulder on its benches to watch and discuss election-night returns.

Skidmore classes and committees met in it.

And throughout the fall, visitors gathered in it to hear speakers or ventured in quietly and alone to read copies of the Constitution and contemplate ideas of collective government.

The “it” is We the People, a Tang Museum exhibition to be entered into both physically and in the spirit of citizenship renewal. It opened in September and quickly offered a bit of respite from politics as usual, helping visitors re-engage with the Constitution and with their local and national governments. We the People is art at the intersection of American history and contemporary politics.

Artworks have transformed the Tang’s Payne Room into a living lab for participatory citizenship. Nari Ward’s wall piece We the People, depicting those iconic words in thousands of shoelaces, evokes “the relationship between the individual and the collective—that sense of government of, by, and for the people,” says the Tang’s associate curator Rachel Seligman ’91. Allison Smith draws on images from American quilt-making—a populist activity epitomizing working together for a common good—in her From Many, One, From Anyone, a work created for this exhibit that drapes a bank of windows with sheer curtains digitally imprinted with traditional patriotic patterns. And setting the scene for town-hall dialogue and debate are Francis Cape’s Utopian Benches (2011), with their accompanying brochure “We sit on the same bench.” Since each is a replica of seating used by communal societies such as the Shakers, they function both as furniture and as conceptual art invoking American traditions of free speech and egalitarian discourse.

Co-curators Seligman and Ian Berry (the longtime Malloy Curator recently named to the Tang’s Dayton Directorship) hope that visitors find the setting conducive to contemplation and perhaps a reconsideration of what it means to be a citizen. The show, which runs through April 7, also provides pocket-sized copies of the US Constitution.

What would you add to the Constitution?

That question, posed inside the gallery, is inspiring visitors to embrace their right to free speech in spirited and thoughtful written responses, which gained added resonance during the fall election campaigns. Entries included “Get rid of the electoral college,” “Repeal the Second Amendment,” “Automatic voter registry on one’s 18th birthday,” “Marriage equality in all 50 states,” “Abolish lobbying,” “Only public funds can be used in elections,” and “Constitutional amendment on the right to vote—a notable omission.”

Indeed, says government professor Beau Breslin, who inspired and consulted on the exhibition, “The right to vote is not affirmatively granted in the Constitution.” It is, however, “guaranteed, especially in the 15th Amendment,” he explains, adding that “ours is the only constitution where protections of liberty are expressed in the negative—‘Congress shall make no law’—because the founding fathers saw rights as endowed by their creator” and therefore not needing to be granted by a government.

Breslin is delighted with any opportunity to help US citizens reconnect with their Constitution, a document that he says “animates and regulates our lives in very meaningful ways on a daily basis.” He notes that while the vast majority of Americans think the Constitution is important, few are able to name a single thing it says—a sad commentary on what he notes is “the longest enduring constitution in history.” He says, “Our relationship with the Constitution is direct, but unfortunately we tend to look at it through a prism of political institutions.” Rather than approaching it through “the Supreme Court or what Congress or the President says the Constitution is,” he advocates “engaging with it in a creative way, directly, one-on-one.”

In March he’ll nurture that one-on-one engagement in an event he describes as crowdsourcing a constitution—tapping into the collective intelligence of many citizens to write a document for our times. “You can change it any way you want,” he says, and points out that while Madison wanted it to endure over time, Jefferson famously opined about the lack of a sunset clause and suggested perhaps every generation should write its own constitution. “In our crowdsourcing moment we are basically doing what Jefferson wanted,” says Breslin. “Let’s find a way to reflect 21st-century values. Our results may be very similar to the original text, but I doubt it.”

David Goroff ’14, a government major working with Breslin on the event, embraces the op­portunity to heighten awareness of the Constitution. Yes, there are parts he would revise—currently “the legislative process breeds inefficiency and inaction”—and he notes that the document has endured precisely because of “the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow it to be interpreted elastically so as to change with society.”

Not your forefathers’ politics

With Facebook and Twitter and 24-hour TV, the political landscape seems dramatically different from that of previous generations. But what hasn’t changed is the excitement of those participating in the process for the first time. A lot of students came to fall election events inside We the People. In October faculty offered an “informed voter” panel on a broad range of issues. The student Spanish Club followed with a panel on issues important to the Latino community. On the other side of the election was “The Return on the Returns: Two Different Views” by Erica Seifert ’02, a senior associate with the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner consultancy, and Benjamin Clarke ’01, a political consultant and freelance writer. In the middle, the election-night gathering bore a seriousness that belied the balloons and pizza and presidents-head Pez dispensers, as students lined the beautiful, simple benches to watch returns coming in on large TVs tuned to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Government professor Ron Seyb opened with a talk about what to look for in the swing states. He also encouraged students to tweet their thoughts and predictions on Twitter’s #skidelection2012. (“Just a mix of old school fun and new technology,” tweeted one.)

“My job was to help students look at the returns in a more informed way, to know what states were being contested and how they were being contested,” says Seyb. In the process he hoped to give them a better understanding of the electoral college, “because I think that’s still fairly elusive to a lot of students, and understandably so.” Noting that “spaces make a difference in how we assimilate and think about things,” Seyb was pleased to see the event held inside an

exhibition devoted to American politics. “You don’t see that very often,” he says. “It’s a less sterile environment; it shakes things up a bit to be able to look around and say, ‘This is about politics.’”

Spring semester events (see tang.skidmore.edu) feature two faculty discussions about the state of civil society, hosted by sociologist John Brueggemann in February. Breslin’s constitutional crowdsourcing is up in March. And Seligman has lined up a guest lecture by Jeffrey Clements, whose book Corporations Are Not People proposes a 28th Amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision and specify that Constitutional rights exist in people but not corporations. In fact, that sentiment was given ample attention in the exhibit’s wish list, with entries such as “An amendment to define ‘person’ as a living breathing non-corporate organic fully human entity.”

Among the fully human entities taking part in the exhibition so far, perhaps none have been more enthusiastic than those availing themselves of a new-voter registration drive cosponsored by the Saratoga County League of Women Voters. Eighteen-year-old Randy Cuevas ’16, a freshman from New York City, found the process easy and rewarding: “For once, I feel like I have a voice and I am contributing to society by voting for who I believe will positively impact our country in all aspects possible.” Like many students, he registered to vote in his college hometown of Saratoga Springs.

Rebecca Schwartz ’14 was a volunteer at the drive. “I wanted to make sure my peers had the opportunity to register to vote,” she says. “A lot of students just turned 18 or 19 and hadn’t yet registered, and this election was so important.” She shared the excitement of the 150 first-timers who signed up, and she adds, “It was awesome being inside an art exhibit that was based around the Constitution.”

That’s the kind of one-on-one citizen-with-Constitution encounter that Breslin hoped to inspire. And while tweeting and crowdsourcing—against the back­drop of a giant “We the People” written in shoelaces—may not seem like your forefathers’ political process, one has to suspect that America’s founders would be gratified if they could see what’s afoot in the Tang today.