My Teachers
Colin Mercer
Cultural Resources and Cultural Mapping
In 2013, The Guardian called Colin Mercer “one of the most influential figures in cultural policy research over the past 25 years”. Although his legacy reaches much further back, I first encountered him through his 1996 book The Cultural Planning Handbook: An Essential Australian Guide (co-authored by David Grogan).
By the early 1990s I had worked in the cultural sector for 15 years. I had come to believe that expecting a rapidly growing sector to be sustained by senior levels of government was a dead end and the only sustainable path forward I thought was integrating culture into how we think about cities and city building. I returned to school to complete a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning naively believing I was embarking on an entirely new field. Rather I found there was a substantial body of work dating back decades.
Cultural planning in its modern form had emerged in the 1970s in the United States with a seminal role being played by Harvey Perloff at the UCLA School of Urban Planning. One driver was dissatisfaction with previous narrow economically driven strategies linking culture with the physical regeneration of downtown cores.
Colin’s work built on these origins but brought forward two ideas that I thought were revolutionary. The first was the idea of cultural resources. First, it was an unapologetic embrace of culture as a resource or an asset – no “arts for arts-sake” here. But a resource for enriching all facets of our individual and collective lives – social and civic, as well as economic.
Then he said stop thinking about culture in the categories defined by government and funding agencies; instead ask the more democratic question “what do communities value and consider cultural resources”. These resources or assets were both tangible (‘things’) and intangible (‘stories’). Cultural mapping was the methodology to ‘take account’ of these resources in communities and to spatially map them.
A self-described communist, Colin saw cultural resources and cultural mapping as a subversive strategy to free culture from its capture by ‘metropolitan elites’. He believed cultural resources and cultural mapping were tools for ‘cultural citizenship’ in two contexts. The first was challenging understandings of citizenship outside homogeneous nation states. The second was ‘citizenship as agency’ underpinning our collective commitment and shared purpose in society.
I am extremely proud that he contributed two chapters in my book Rediscovering the Wealth of Places: A Municipal Cultural Planning Handbook for Canadian Communities published in 2010.
The Cultural Planning Handbook (1995) by David Grogan & Colin Mercer
Featured in the Guardian obituary 2013
Vincent Tovel
“If you only have arts, you don’t have culture; you need (at least) the arts and heritage before you have culture”
Vincent who died in 2014 was a dear friend for close to 30 years and far and away the most widely read person I’ve ever met. He was a Rosedale Red Tory whose uncle was Vincent Massey, our first Canadian-born Governor General, but related through his mother to George Grant, author of Lament for a Nation, the 1960s polemic in what Grant foresaw our inevitable integration with the “will to power” of the American Empire.
Vincent was a long-time board member of the Canadian Conference for the Arts but wrote a submission to the Federal Government co-authored by John Volmer (a past President of the Canadian Museums Association) proposing establishing a Canada Council for Heritage to parallel the Canada Council for the Arts. The failure to act on this recommendation I believe left out a critical dimension of cultural policy in Canada, not missed in countries with mature cultural policy such as Australia. Creative Nation was a hugely consequential national cultural policy first adopted in 1994 and updated regularly since.
I first met Vincent through my first job as a Historical Interpreter and 19th century footman at The Grange, a historic house in Toronto and the original home of the Art Gallery of Toronto later the Art Gallery of Ontario. When I became Executive Director of the Ontario Museum Association (OMA) he spoke at several museum conferences. But I am most indebted to him to his contribution to the Ontario Heritage Policy Review.
I had left the OMA to join the Ontario Ministry of Culture to be part of an amazing team for this policy initiative that established a “cross-government” Ontario Heritage Policy. Here heritage was ‘the living context – both natural and cultural, tangible and intangible from which we draw sustenance and meaning in our individual and collective lives. Heritage is not about the past, but the continuity that connects past present and future.’ I owe a huge debt to him in helping frame these ideas.
But as a wise friend he also warned me early on that if I expected the Policy to result in wholesale change in policy and programs, I would be inevitably disappointed. Instead, he said if you can articulate a vision and frame a set of principles, that will be the legacy of the initiative. I was too young and foolish to understand this, but in hindsight it has been a core belief that has guided my work over almost 50 years.
CBC Still Photo Collection/Robert Ragsdale
Carol Tator
Diversity and “Democratic Racism”
Carol Tator is a leader in the field of diversity and anti-racism as an academic and consultant. She developed and implemented policies to dismantle systemic racism in Canadian institutions, including the media, the police, the education system and the arts.
Together with Frances Henry and Winston Matthis she authored a series of studies of racism. In 1999 they published Challenging Racism in the Arts in Canada. Case Studies in Controversy and Conflict a series of case studies in which racial minorities pushed back on the failure of cultural institutions to reflect the demographics of their ‘host’ societies.
A core concept in their work was “democratic racism”. Britain could not ignore its Empire, and the United States could not ignore slavery, but Canadians could hide behind a liberal discourse of “diversity, immigration and multiculturalism” which acted to obscure rather than reveal structural racism in Canadian society.
Canada’s public sphere – our public institutions and media – are remarkably “white” and profoundly not reflective or representative of the staggering racial diversity of Canada. An anecdote I sometimes use to speak to this failing is Sunfest, one of the largest Global Music and Culture festivals celebrating diversity in my hometown of London, Ontario. I have it on good authority but a member of City Council, inevitably white male and middle class, came to the festival and declared ‘where did these (diverse) people come from?’. Well, they were always there but shielded by a lens of white privilege.
In the late 1990s, I was honored to serve as the Canadian National Coordinator for a 7-nation Comparative Study of Cultural Policy Responses to Diversity, undertaken by the Council of Europe. The other countries where Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom. The study could not deal with all facets of diversity and instead focused on ethnic cultural and racial diversity.
On one level the study examined sectoral issues such as the degree to which the cultural labour force reflected (or didn't) reflect the demographic realities of the “host” nation and the degree to which “European high culture” norms prevailed over more nation specific (‘Indigenous’) understandings and definition of culture. On another level, it was exploring the idea of ‘cultural citizenship’ which was being widely written about at that time.
On one level, cultural citizenship was challenging understandings of citizenship rooted in homogeneous nation states. On another level, it was probing the idea of ‘citizenship as agency’ seeing diversity as contributing to rather than fracturing our collective commitment and shared purpose in communities and societies.
Leslie Oliver
Cultural Knowledge and the Power of Curriculum
I first encountered Leslie G. Oliver in 1988 during my involvement as a team member with the Ontario Heritage Policy Review (OHPR). OHPR was a ‘cross-government’ policy exercise to assist all Ministries in the Government of Ontario address ‘heritage’. Here heritage is understood as ‘the living context - both natural and cultural, tangible and intangible - in which we live and draw meaning and sustenance in our individual and collective lives. Heritage is not about the past but about the continuity that connects past present and future. English novelist E. M. Forster (A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India) famously said "Unless we remember we cannot understand."
Leslie was a resident of Aurora, Ontario and had been the founder of both the local Arts Council and the local Historical Society. He helped rethink the purpose of the Aurora Museum to embrace a larger understanding of a Cultural Centre whose mandate was not restricted to the building but was about engaging in animating culture and heritage in the community. His lifelong passion has been the study of material culture which refers to the physical objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define, construct, and interact with their social world.
Leslie was also a senior administrator with the Ministry of Education in Ontario whose PhD had been in the content, structure, acquisition, and dissemination of personal and professional knowledge. More specifically he taught me about curriculum and the requirement for any field of work claiming professional status to have a curriculum that maps out an integrated body of theory and practice. This sounds easy but in fact is extraordinarily difficult. In culture we’re very good at the theorizing of culture but not so good at connecting those ideas to a body of tools and levers. Among the content matter for the professional was a clear statement about the public interests served by the profession.
Carol Tator’s conclusion that curriculum was the key to addressing diversity and anti-racism was reinforced by Leslie’s Understanding of the actual structure and form of curriculum.