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Buy The Intercessor<\/em> paperback or ebook from Amazon<\/a>, Barnes & Noble<\/a>, Bookshop.org<\/a>, or Ingram<\/a>! <\/strong> <\/p>\n NOTE<\/strong>: This post is to introduce you to the 67th episode of Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso\u2019s and my monthly podcast, \u201cA Culture of Possibility.\u201d This episode will be available starting 21 August 2026. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes<\/a>, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net<\/a>\u2018s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Podbean<\/a> and find links to accompany the podcasts. <\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019ve known Eric Booth for quite a few years\u2014perhaps 20\u2014and have always been impressed by his enthusiasm, forthrightness, and downright tirelessness<\/strong>. Eric got in touch after listening to Paulo Lameiro talk about Concerts for Babies on episode 66<\/a>, and I was astounded to realize we hadn\u2019t interviewed him for the podcast\u2014until now. Eric is involved in so many wonderful projects, and so much of his work is closely aligned with cultural democracy and community-based arts, even though it goes by different names, that we realized this episode should be an introduction to worlds that listeners need to know about, worlds that overlap and ought to connect.<\/p>\n We asked Eric to talk about how he got involved in this work.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never had a job. I\u2019ve had 50-something years of projects that blessedly one turned into another. So I have had all kinds of opportunities in life, but I began as a high arts guy. I trained as a classical theater person, and was doing Shakespeare festivals and so on. I came to New York and was doing great: Broadway shows, working all the time, and I didn\u2019t like it. I came out of the anti-Vietnam era and just kind of cranking out soap operas and commercials and Broadway shows didn\u2019t feel resonant enough. I stumbled into a workshop of this thing called teaching artistry that was just beginning at Lincoln Center, and my very first day in a South Bronx fourth grade classroom I felt more satisfaction about tapping creative potential within people. I followed that direction and realized I\u2019d sort of left my acting career behind when I found myself saying to my theater agent, \u2018No, no, I\u2019m sorry, I can\u2019t go to that audition. These kids in Staten Island are working on this really interesting artistic problem right now, and I have to be there.\u2019 <\/p>\n \u201cI subsequently had the opportunity to build the field of teaching artistry, which was growing and expanding<\/strong>. A big change came when I was asked to start the teaching artist program at Julliard, which brought me into the strange subculture of classical music, where I did a lot of work with orchestras and ensembles, and then eventually with youth orchestras and youth orchestras for social impact. I would say the big trajectory of my years has been from the high arts guy moving toward the power of community arts, moving toward the ground level impact, where the kinds of changes that my heart always wanted are visceral and visible and buildable. That\u2019s where I find, as I\u2019m now late in my career, where my greatest satisfactions come.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m remembering the first time you and I ever sat down, Arlene, in a Starbucks in the middle of New York City. I was really nervous because you were the representative of the community arts, this huge tradition that I was only just starting to find my way into connection with, and I was this teaching artist guy, and there was some tension between those two workforces at that time. The kind of negative attitudes one held against the other was that the community artists thought, \u2018Oh, you teaching artists, you\u2019re just spokespersons for the high arts, big wealthy institutions. You\u2019re not really listening to where the life of the arts lives in communities.\u2019 And it was true. And from the teaching artist side, the thought was, \u2018No, it\u2019s the magnificence of artworks that transform people.\u2019 And in that conversation, where both of us got past those initial prejudices, we realized that many of the same artists were actually doing the work of both roles, and that\u2019s where the silo thinking really began to collapse for me.\u201d<\/p>\n Our plan was to talk about teaching artistry first<\/strong>. Fran\u00e7ois said he \u201cwas interested in how you saw the distinction between the work of teaching artists and and the work of community artists.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThose distinctions have piddled away over years for me,\u201d Eric said. \u201cI found that the semantic attachment really disempowered the field. To have community artists feeling separated from people who call themselves teaching artists or social practice artists\u2014the multiple names in our field\u2014that was very convenient for people outside of our field, because it kept us weaker and disconnected. Over time, I\u2019ve focused in on what what artists who work in communities do, rather than their particular identity. I\u2019m now given to saying that teaching artists, or whatever you call them, have arisen from the soil of every country on earth, given different names, sharing certain practices, having developed distinctive practices, because since the Paleolithic caves artists have expressed crucial interactions of connecting with community and creating symbols and expressions that hold something a community holds precious that can\u2019t be held in any other way. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I get to travel to see teaching artists, I\u2019m in a lot of countries where they don\u2019t have any word but artists<\/strong> because they can\u2019t imagine an artist would not be directly involved with a community. The trajectory of the field that\u2019s most identified as teaching artistry began with the word outreach<\/em> from major arts organizations, to extend the largesse of the well-funded arts organizations to make sure there would be future butts in seats. But as the work actually happened and found its way into the kind of social impact that was possible, teaching artists as an identifiable practice widened so much. I can\u2019t really draw distinctions between what a teaching artist does and what a community artist does. One of the clearest examples for me was in the early days of Lily Yeh\u2019s Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, where I got to spend some time and work with her a little, and I just couldn\u2019t draw the distinction anymore. It was just the power of artists working directly with people. We say the number one job of a teaching artist is to activate the artistry of other people, and that particular distinctive capacity goes beyond just making artworks, but recognizing and activating the capacity of all people. That\u2019s where the power gets released, and it can be channeled into any number of different directions.\u201d<\/p>\n Eric obliged us by describing the teaching artistry field, drawing on the framework described in an essay called \u201cThe Purpose Threads<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThere are seven purposes for which artists who work in communities and schools are hired. I call them the purpose threads because that focuses on what they\u2019re trying to accomplish. I\u2019ll just tick through them quickly, and I\u2019ll bet your listeners will identify that one or several of these threads resonate more in their own experience. <\/p>\n \u201cThere is the work of art thread that began with Lincoln Center, where the goal is to enhance people\u2019s encounter with artworks. There\u2019s the art skills development, which may be the youngest kid on the block, which is the discovery that engaging with teaching artist skills actually makes you a better artist. It makes you a different kind of artist. It makes you a 21st century artist who can use that artistry in a variety of ways. There\u2019s arts integration. I\u2019ll bet many of your listeners have engaged in arts integrated projects where arts engagement is used to enhance learning in other subject matter. We all began with this when we learned our ABCs using a Mozart-themed song. You learn the song because it helps you learn the alphabet. This is used around the world. I think Finland is the leading exemplar of arts integration throughout their school system. Then there\u2019s community arts. We could spend 67 podcasts talking about the beautiful work of community artists. There\u2019s arts for activism, where the arts are are intended to impact a political or social movement, particularly urgent in the U.S. at this time, with a lot of artists rising up with ways to activate the public around those issues. I\u2019ve been very. Involved in that recently. <\/p>\n \u201cThe last two have terrible titles, but social personal development, where the goal is to develop personal or social capacities. I put the music for social impact field in here. El Sistema inspired programs, where teaching artists guide group music-making to achieve social results in young people, not just to make them musicians, but through developing musical skills, develop a much wider set of options in life. Then finally the terrible title of partnering for non-arts goals, and this is where I\u2019ll work with businesses to increase their creative capacity, or you\u2019ll have the beautiful Lullaby Project where Carnegie Hall was approached by a health clinic in New York to say moms living in a lot of stress, sometimes single moms, are having trouble bonding with their babies well. Carnegie Hall\u2019s teaching artists developed a way to guide the mothers to develop a lullaby for the baby, which proved to have significant advantages for the bonding between the mom and the baby, and it\u2019s now spread to 22 countries. I think it\u2019s in 67 cities around the world. So this core activity of awakening the creative capacity of a participant can lead to this wide array of social benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n I encouraged Eric to add one more purpose<\/strong>, which I described as \u201cpleasure, self-expression, and relationship for the individuals involved in the work. I think it\u2019s not always a social change, or even a skill-related goal, as much as how much we\u2019ve seen people involved in these projects, especially young people, blossom, open up because they tell their story and they find elements of it that are shared. They hone their ability to express themselves. They have enjoyment and they form relationships with other people in the group. I wouldn\u2019t want to leave the individual out in that way.\u201d<\/p>\n We moved on to talk about the landscape of teaching artist projects Eric has been involved in, but first took a slight detour<\/strong> into the question of how decades of work can sometimes feel challenged by the persistence of obstacles. As Eric put it, \u201cI can express with honesty and some sadness now that I\u2019m officially old that having lots and lots of projects that explore and pioneer different aspects of that landscape I just described, it\u2019s hard to feel successful in advancing a movement when it has remained so scattered, and so many of the projects rise with funding and do some beautiful things and provoke a lot of learning, but then disappear when the funding disappears. I do console myself with the knowledge that the people involved have been changed, but I\u2019m greedy for more than just having good experiences with people who happened to gather around a project that went away.\u201d <\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois and I empathized. We talked about how this is particularly extreme in the U.S., where the MAGA regime has erased so much that was painstakingly built. Eric shared the hope that this might catalyze a certain awakening: \u201cI console myself in this time of disruption when I\u2019ve been able to bring people together to think about the future. The perspective I take is: assume it\u2019s never going back to the way it was, that the disruptions are serious enough that now we can start thinking about what it is we want to bring about on the other side of this disruption. Almost invariably the word that comes up in those conversations is collaboration, this notion that it\u2019s past the time of separate silos. There is a real widespread recognition that unless we start building the power of our larger embrace, we will revert back to our weak status. <\/p>\n \u201cThe other positive thing that is kind of dazzling to me is the growth in people moving toward arts and health<\/strong>. There is a kind of a multi-stakeholder, multi-sector agreement that this is powerful. Just over a year ago, I got to spend three weeks introducing teaching artistry across China, and on almost every occasion where people had never heard of this role for an artist, within 10 minutes, their first excitement was about how teaching artists are the answer for the youth mental health crisis. Unprompted by me, they went there almost immediately. I am seeing the lifeblood of the Western world, money, move toward arts and health issues. I think this is going to be an unprecedented opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n This was a deep and detailed conversation. Tune in to hear about the International Teaching Artists Collaborative<\/a>, which is holding its https:\/\/itac-collaborative.com\/home\/itac-8\/eighth conference later this month in Belgium. Eric helped to found ITAC in 2012 and it\u2019s been going strong with members in dozens of countries. <\/p>\n Eric also talks about El Sistema<\/strong>, the youth music program that started in Venezuela, which astounded him from his very first day in that country. \u201cI visited three community centers. They call them nucleos, and the level of group intrinsic motivation, the kind of zeal of young people to make beauty with their friends\u2014because it was joyful, because it was their friends, because it it made sense in life\u2014I had never seen that kind of collective urgency in young people anywhere else in my life. It\u2019s partly in the West and many other countries that kind of total commitment is hard for young people to come to. We have placed so many things in the way of that, so many options and very complicating things for young people. But to see that unalloyed passion to make beauty with your friends as many hours a week as you possibly can was what bowled me over, and the sheer vitality and health of it is what struck me.\u201d You can hear more on the episode and in the book about it he coauthored a decade ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the podcast, Eric introduces several projects worthy of attention<\/strong>, including the Academy for Impact Through Music<\/a>, ArtistYear<\/a>, an AmeriCorps-funded residency project, the New England Teaching Artist Collaborative<\/a>, and Artful Learning<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n He also invited listeners to learn about his book<\/strong>, Making Change: Teaching Artists and Their Role in Shaping a Better World<\/em><\/a>, which you can order at minimal cost in bulk to share and spread the word. <\/p>\n This was a very rich episode you will definitely enjoy.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s \u201cWildest Dreams<\/a>,\u201d one of the lullabies from Carnegie Hall\u2019s Lullaby Project. <\/p>\n