For the Common Good: A Community Arts Leader Interview with Allison McGuire
Andy and Allison McGuire. Award recipients at the 2019 Oskaloosa Chamber and Development Group Annual Banquet and dressed in costume to represent historical Oskaloosian figures at the event as board members of the Oskaloosa Community Theatre.
Back in 2017, I had the very good fortune of meeting Allison and Andy McGuire, two talented and community-centered theatre-makers from the George Daily Community Auditorium in Oskaloosa, Iowa (population 11,463). The Auditorium had just been awarded an Arts Build Communities grant from the Iowa Arts Council to create Home Again, a multimedia variety show to explore and share the many stories of the Oskaloosa and Mahaska County communities. During that project collaboration (I was the Iowa State University liaison for the Arts Build Communities grant), I learned so much from Allison and Andy about effective and creative project management, out-of-the-box community engagement, and was reminded of just how hard theatre-makers and community arts leaders work. (There are few nights off.) The Daily Auditorium’s motto is: Give more than you take. Work together. Make everything count. Share what you can. Lots of little builds an awful lot. Many of us strive for that and few of us get close. Allison and Andy exemplify it.
This week, you’ll hear from Allison and next week, we’ll connect with Andy, Allison’s partner in life, art, and community. Allison thoughtfully explores all of the nebulous complexity that makes up community-based art, gives wonderful glimpses into her day-to-day life in Oskaloosa, and provides some incredibly important and beautiful insights into creating effective and inclusive creative community work.
Allison McGuire has been involved with the Auditorium since 2014 and works as the Development Director. She has been an adjunct music instructor and opera stage director at Central College and William Penn University. She led the Oskaloosa High School Drama program from 2017 to 2021 and sits on the Oskaloosa Main Street board. Before relocating to Oskaloosa, Allison taught for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. She was a Young Artist Stage Director at Opera North in Lebanon, NH and an Assistant Director at Opera Omaha. She earned her M.M. and B.M.degrees in Vocal Performance from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Millikin University.
Photos shared at one of the Mahaska Memories Roadshow events in 2018 as part of the Arts Build Communities grant. These events collected photos and recorded people's stories about their experiences living in Mahaska County. The Roadshow collection was the basis for the production of Home Again.
Who are you in 10 words?
A person who asks questions through writing, staging, and teaching.
What are your creative rituals?
Because so much of my creative work and community arts work involves coordinating and collaborating with other people, my schedule is different almost every single day. I actually really like that, and I think I work better that way, but who knows? 2021 will be the first year since 2010 where I haven't been juggling 7-11 different patchwork jobs, so maybe I will get the chance to find out soon!
Due to this uncertainty in the day-to-day, the closest thing I have to a creative ritual is how I try to spend my Sundays to be in the best headspace possible to take on the week. I try to spend my Sunday living my best Old World aristocrat life – reading and drinking coffee for most of the morning, followed by making an excellent breakfast (I love breakfast) and a walk or bike ride if the weather allows.
The ritual that gives the day its name in our house (Big Salad Sunday) comes later. I love taking the uninterrupted time in the kitchen to make something that takes a long time to prepare but very little brain work. All day, I look forward to listening to that week's "On Being with Krista Tippett" while I make something nourishing with my hands. My favorites are a spinach salad with roasted vegetables and chickpeas covered in a super-garlicky dressing or a roasted salmon niçoise salad.
There's usually something juicy and invigorating on HBO on Sunday nights, so we typically end the day with a new episode there or watch a movie neither of us has seen. We watched the CNN docuseries The Movies during last spring's "stay at home" and have been trying to make it through all the movies on that list. I have been amazed at how refreshing it is to watch "quote-unquote" old movies. Frankenstein, 42nd Street, the 1932 The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, The Trouble with Harry, and most of the Mission Impossible movies have been my surprise favorites.
Cast and production team of Home Again, a multimedia variety show based on the stories and experiences of Mahaska County community members.
What community rituals do you value?
There used to be quite a few. We'll have to see now as we return to the public sphere! In the past, I have loved Oskaloosa's Eggs and Issues community forum, which happens at Smokey Row every other Saturday between January and March. I value the opportunity for public discussions where people can speak directly to their representatives.
Another is the Jam Session night in our annual Oskaloosa Music Festival, organized by a violist who grew up here. He brings his friends back for two weeks each year to play music in the community and offer a strings camp for local students. For the Jam Session, they head to Smokey Row in jeans and sightread all night, taking requests. The place is packed to the rafters. It's not the kind of night where you sit quietly and only listen to the music, but the energy in the room is electric.
How do you merge your creative work with your community work?
The levels of this particular seesaw are in constant fluctuation, grayscale Venn diagrams with hazy, shifting boundaries. I can't point to anything I do and say, "I made that." My degrees are in Vocal Performance. I'm a director and a teacher, and my actual nonprofit job is fundraising and organizational development.
I may be the interpreter and the vessel, but it's someone else's song.
I may have a question to investigate through staging a work. Still, it's the actors' perspectives and the artists' designs that point the way to glimpses of discovery that perhaps even the author didn't even see.
I can offer hands-on practice alongside my knowledge and experience, but the student has to decide to receive the lesson and shape it in a meaningful way.
I'd say my creative work is research, relationships, and product delivery. Sometimes that makes me feel outside the label of "creative work," and I have to pull myself back from trying to control everything about a project to feel I "made" something. My artistic practice has to do with listening, processing, connecting, and helping my collaborators express their experiences and ideas. That isn't so unusual, but it just happens to be primarily intangible and always fleeting in teaching and live performing arts.
So, even in what I'd consider my individual creative work, a community component is intertwined from the beginning. But I didn't always see it that way when we first moved to Oskaloosa. Now, in the finished sandcastle of a successful project, I can't tell which grains of sand were packed by my hand.
(This is a long-winded way to say that I don't have any good answers for the ways that nonprofit arts work and personal creative work and social practice intersect. Just "living the questions!")
Allison was chair of the Art on the Square committee for Oskaloosa Main Street in 2021. She organized Oskaloosa’s very first Window Art Walk, "Art Blooms Here," of murals blooming with flowers, plants, and blossoming trees. Thirty businesses in the Oskaloosa Main Street District had a window painted with a beautiful, colorful, temporary mural.
How do you approach your community work creatively?
In Oskaloosa, Andy and I have been lucky enough to be welcomed into volunteer community development roles outside the scope of our jobs. After a few years of trial and error exploring how someone with my background can be helpful in these roles, I have a handful of ideas I try to keep in mind:
Focus on being a connector and thinking holistically about who should be involved but hasn't been invited.
Practice radical hospitality. My job is to create the environment for people to be their best selves. If they are having fun and feel part of something great happening in the community, they will do amazing things and bring others along.
The job title is not what's important. It's everyone's intentions and willingness to collaborate that have to match. Sometimes we equate what a person does for a living with the volunteer committee they should join. It can work well when the person loves what they do, and the volunteer work allows them to stretch and grow, but it can also be a burden for them. People are multi-faceted, and many are looking for ways to be more themselves by doing something unrelated to work. (Assembling groups with significantly different life experiences but matching intentions has been a game-changer in my work. It's become my #1 priority because the ideas are better, and it's a lot more fun.)
Work to identify, assess, and accept the risks. I have an unattributed quote on my bulletin board at work. It says something like, "Collaboration is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but in the end, it means being willing to risk something with your friends." Risk is definitely a part of it. I think many volunteer community groups unconsciously allow themselves to get bogged down with busywork. Sometimes the players are doing community work solely to represent their business or achieve their personal end goal. In that case, the risk of doing something differently will always be too big for action.
The “always” is important there, because I’m not saying that all of our ways of doing community work need to be disrupted. I’m also not saying that if you’re hesitant or want more information before committing, you’re doing community work for selfish reasons. That’s not it at all.
I do think that the successful groups are ones where people can get on the same page, do the work that’s going to meet the community need even if it means finding a new way forward, and ultimately take the leap together. Creatives in the performing arts are used to existing in that state, finding consensus even where there's disagreement and designing their way out of corners. Eventually, in a show, everyone sinks or swims together in a much more public way than most other professions. I think one of the ways I can help in community work is to facilitate that experience for others.
600 Mahaska County Kindergarten and 1st Graders before seeing a professional touring production at no cost to their families and school districts. This happens annually with different grade levels, and the Geroge Daily Auditorium are even able to reimburse bussing through our generous sponsors!
How has that changed in the last year?
Overall, I think it's brought these ideas into sharper relief. Everything had to be done differently, so there wasn't the same resistance to trying something new. I hope that we can keep a bit of that attitude as we navigate these unknown waters on our way to whatever comes next!
To mention something specific, a newer group in our community is the Arts and Culture Roundtable. It was formed to be a once-a-month meetup for arts and culture workers to keep up to date on successes, challenges/opportunities, and calendars. We call it a "no notes" meeting.
We still met every month, either online or outside, during COVID's most disruptive time. Still, with no events on the horizon, the meetups became much more about sharing and supporting. Then one of our members suggested that we incorporate a creative project into our meetings, which has been a fantastic inclusion. Our group gets so busy making experiences for other people that we rarely sit down and create as a healing practice for ourselves. I think the forced stillness during COVID has led many of us to make changes in order to take better care of ourselves.
Set up from filming Journey On!, a 10-episode children's TV show Allison and Andy produced during Summer 2020. Some were filmed through Streamyard with campers. The other segments were filmed at their house.
How has serving as a community arts leader impacted you?
I’ve certainly shed more tears than I ever expected. In all seriousness, I can’t think of a way it hasn’t impacted me, for good and bad. Perhaps the most profound changes have come from the questions it’s forced me to ask about the blurred lines around “gatekeeping vs. quality” and “making vs. facilitating.” Those thoughts are constantly evolving, and they’re not always pleasant realizations about myself. To be a community arts leader, I’ve had to unlearn many of the attitudes I internalized while earning my degrees.
What has been your hardest community lesson?
This spring, I finally read psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He received a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work on decision making. I wish I’d read it 10 years ago.
The difficult lesson I’m taking away from his decades of research, combined with my own experiences, is that the work I’m doing may have an impact, but I likely won’t see it fulfilled. It’s a cycle that will ebb and flow, and I will see it erased and have to find a way to begin again.
Humans think we’re rational creatures, but our brains use two “systems” of thinking, and the more rational system is lazy and lets the intuitive system do most of the heavy lifting. I meet many folks who say they love the arts, but they’ve internalized our cultural message that art is “decoration” and therefore an extra cherry on top – the thing you get only when there’s crumbs left over.
Because of this bias, the folks leading community organizations ask for a tremendous amount of data and oversight before even trying to incorporate arts and culture because the very idea goes against their intuition that the arts could truly impact community development. (This confirmation bias is one of the reasons the National Endowment of the Arts is one of the most transparent and well-managed parts of the federal government, compared to, say, the Department of Defense. It’s something the NEA should be proud of, but the representatives’ distrust is an excellent illustration of this psychological phenomenon.)
Humans can only judge an idea by first knowing what it would be like if it were true. Then we decide whether to believe in it or not, hopefully by consulting data. In the case of art and community development, I think a quote from Carmen Maria Machado is relevant. “You can’t recognize what you’ve never been taught to see. You can’t put language to something for which you’ve been given no language.”
So much of what I do in my day-to-day life is pass on the language. And it is effective and creates change, but it happens slowly, person by person. And I think that’s how it has to be. That’s the only way I received it -- it certainly didn’t happen in school.
We’ve been in Oskaloosa 8 years, and just as we could start to see that language reaching critical mass, COVID hit. I want to be optimistic that we can pick up close to where we left off, but some days it feels like starting over.
I’m not a patient person, and I like to see results (don’t we all?), so this is really tough. Still, I can recognize the small, medium, and large successes that have already happened in this community, going back decades, way before we were involved in this work. Combined with our collaborators and colleagues and everyone who did this work before us, these wins will eventually contribute to a change in the public mindset. We’re taking up the mantle from others, and there will need to be many more after us, and that’s how it should be, because the way humans shape and share culture will always be evolving. There is no end, no hard stop, to this work.
Haunted Village, a drive-thru haunted house on Halloween 2020 collaborated by Oskaloosa High School Thespians/Drama, Oskaloosa Community Theatre, and Nelson Pioneer Farm.
What has been your most fulfilling community moment?
This time, right now. Because right now, when I’m in a community group that’s talking about an opportunity that involves artists, I know it can happen. It could be an idea that’s been discussed for years, but this is the first time since I’ve been here that there are enough local artists who see the benefit and are willing to participate and build something from the ground up. Many of these artists have been our students or collaborators on other projects, and I’m just so happy that they’ve chosen to stay involved and step up and lead in community work. A handful of people can’t make it happen alone, there’s too many directions to go. We need a coalition. Plus, I’m a social person, and I like having friends…so I selfishly need them to want to stick around for my own mental health.
James and the Giant Peach by Pasek and Paul, produced by Oskaloosa High School in Spring 2020, directed by Allison McGuire, set design by Andy McGuire.
What tips might you have for artists who want to dive into community work?
This is more of a request: performing artists – there’s a place for you in community work, if that’s where you want to be! It might take a bit more discovery and collaboration, and it can be hard to watch all those visual artists making amazing public art and not knowing where you fit in, but we need you! Show up, ask questions, listen, then pitch your ideas, and make something. Whose voice can you amplify? How can you bring people together? What can you help your community feel?
What would you like your community to understand about the arts and artists?
Artists are humans, just like you.
Art is for everyone, not just people under 18. “Survival is insufficient” (Star Trek: Voyager and Station Eleven). To stay human, we have to do more than just survive.
Felicity, a committed and frequent theatre student. Top photo is from Musical Theatre in summer 2014.
The bottom photo from summer 2018 is from a two-week production that she designed and set that she built as a rising freshman.
What tips might you have for communities to better support artists?
The message that you are valued for the thing you do but not for the person you are does a lot of damage. You begin to feel like a (in my case, singing) dancing monkey. We need to find a way to let people be themselves and be welcome without bartering for acceptance through work. Yes, the creative young people I see leaving are doing so for educational or work opportunities, but beneath that is the quiet knowledge that they can’t be who they are when the pressure to maintain the status quo weighs so heavy. It takes so much energy to publicly be yourself when you are perceived as different, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.
What motto or creed do you live by?
There are people who want to control something and people who want to make something. Make something.
Connect with Allison at development@georgedaily.org , on Facebook, and learn more about her and Andy’s creative work at Unfinished Ink. Learn more about the work at George Daily Community Auditorium on their website and on Instagram.
Allison with Gabe, a young theatre student, while filming Journey On!
Like learning about the ins and outs of being a community artist or a community arts leader? Check out interviews with artists Akwi Nji, Catherine Reinhart, Jordan Brooks, Reinaldo Correa, Kristin M Roach, Rami Mannan, Jill Wells, Kaleb Stevens, and Anna Jinja Kees, and interviews with community arts leaders Amber Danielson, Andy McGuire, and Jennifer Brockpahler.
Have a phenomenal community artist or an inspiring artist leader to suggest? Comment below or email jennifer@whatsgoodproject.com.