The Art of Belonging

"Communities are to be distinguished," wrote political scientist Benedict Anderson, "not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined." Nations exist, Anderson argued in his 1983 book Imagined Communities, not because of geographical borders, linguistic coherence, or shared genealogy. They exist because of their members' shared perception of themselves, their history, and their destiny.

Anderson’s ideas about the creation of communities—about the lines groups of individuals draw to define themselves and others—are evident today in Wallace's Advancing Well-Being in the Arts initiative.

The initiative supports dozens of arts organizations across the country that are rooted in communities of color. Among its many components is support for research conducted with each of 18 select organizations that explored the organizations' work and their relationships to their communities. Findings from two of those organizations, the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, touch on many of Anderson's musings about the narratives that create communities. How does a community define itself? Who gets to speak for that community? Who is allowed in? Who is kept out?

The researchers—Timnet Gedar, who worked with the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Jason White, who worked with the Union for Contemporary Art—show how the organizations wrestle with such questions as they work to create rewarding experiences for their communities.

Musical Excellence Through Diversity 

Paul Freeman, the African American founder of the Chicago Sinfonietta, spent much of his career breaking down the walls the classical music community built around itself. He grew up immersed in music in segregated Richmond, Va., listening to radio broadcasts from the New York Metropolitan Opera with his 11 siblings. He started playing piano at five and was playing clarinet at a high-school level when he was still in elementary school. He got his first shot at conducting as a teenager, leading his high-school band in lieu of a teacher who was out sick.

Freeman eventually entered the ranks of America's most successful composers, leading more than 100 orchestras in more than 30 countries. But his path to the pantheon of American classical music, writes Timnet Gedar, was often a lonely one. When he was discovering music, most American orchestras were fixated on Europe, the origin of the community they imagined for themselves. Few conductors were American, let alone African American. When Freeman had a chance to lead his hometown orchestra in the 1950s, Gedar writes, protests forced him out after just two rehearsals. As conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra through the 1970s, he watched Detroit become a majority Black city, but Black representation in his company's leadership remained stubbornly low.

Freeman was moved to help address such disparities when he met Martin Luther King in 1968, an encounter in which King described symphony orchestras as "the last bastion of elitism." Freeman found a model to do so, Gedar writes, at the Victoria Symphony in British Columbia, where he served as music director through much of the 1980s. State funding requirements mandated that 10 percent of the orchestra's performances must feature Canadian composers. Freeman decided to use this model to showcase the work of Americans, especially African Americans, when he founded the Chicago Sinfonietta in 1987. "We must give strong consideration to native talent," Freeman told an interviewer in 1986, according to Gedar's study. "And Blacks in America are native talent."

An ensemble focused on diversity had an uphill climb in the late 1980s. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the city's classical-music behemoth, had never had a permanent Black musician in its ranks. The Oregon Symphony stood alone as the only orchestra in America with a Black musical director. Many were skeptical of the Chicago Sinfonietta's prospects, Gedar writes: "One critic described the orchestra’s debut as a 'shaky performance that couldn’t have made anyone feel very optimistic about its future,' and doubted that it would succeed where 'larger and more technically proficient' orchestras had not."

The ensemble may never have gotten off the ground were it not for Freeman's mastery of his art and his credibility among his community, Gedar suggests. His ironclad musical qualifications and his record of championing Black composers—part of his discography is a nine-album series of music by Black composers since the eighteenth century—helped him find support and funding among well-heeled Black music aficionados in and around Chicago.

Fueled by Freeman's motto, "musical excellence through diversity," the sinfonietta quickly made a name for itself among communities ignored by Chicago's white music establishment. Within two years of its founding, it was the Chicago Sinfonietta, not the better established Chicago Symphony Orchestra, that hosted the memorial concert when Harold Washington, Chicago's first Black mayor, died.

Freeman continued to lead the ensemble until 2011. "The sinfonietta was his labor of love," says Blake-Anthony Johnson, who led the organization from 2020 to 2026, when Gedar conducted her research. "It was his love letter to the things that he wished were available to him."

The story of the Chicago Sinfonietta did not end there, however. Freeman stayed true to his motto of musical excellence through diversity, at least as he defined "diversity." But definitions of diversity evolve, and so must the organizations that work towards it.

The sinfonietta's staff tripled in size after 2020, when it saw a massive influx of donations following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. A new generation joined its ranks, bringing with it new conceptions of what diversity means and how the ensemble should define its community. Much of the staff, Gedar writes, believes firmly in Freeman's vision. "But it has broadened from a racial and ethnic focus," she writes, "to other forms of diversity, such as disability and gender identity."

This evolution is not without its blind spots, she adds. Few staffers she interviewed mentioned economic diversity, eliding what she calls "the explicit problem of class homogeneity as a major marker of elitism among symphony orchestras." It is also not without its tensions. Some staffers, Gedar writes, question whether a focus on Freeman's ethos of inclusion could inhibit future innovation.

Definitions of diversity will evolve, and the communities the Chicago Sinfonietta seeks to serve may well change. But the ensemble's commitment to its community, however one defines it, continues to drive it into the future. "When you build community, you get a certain emotional fortitude and resilience from it," says Blake-Anthony Johnson,"And that's really hard to erase."

Navigating the Complexities of an Adopted Community

A few hundred miles away in Nebraska, another organization grapples with its own questions about community. The Union for Contemporary Art established itself in 2011 in North Omaha, an urban, historically Black enclave. Unlike the Chicago Sinfonietta, which seeks to open a sometimes insular artform to new communities, The Union was founded to bring art to a community that has had few cultural institutions of its own. That effort, research fellow Jason C. White finds, brought with it a host of social tensions that The Union must navigate.

North Omaha, White writes in his report, was a hub of African American arts, culture, and entrepreneurship from the 1920s to the 1950s. But the community born of visions of Black prosperity soon had walls imagined around it. Decades of redlining, municipal disinvestment, white flight, and race riots took their toll. By the turn of the millennium, the memories of a Black Renaissance had faded and given way to perceptions of the area as a tangle of poverty and crime.

Brigitte McQueen, a Detroit native who had spent some years in Seattle and New York City, found her way to North Omaha in the 2000s. McQueen, who is half Black and half Iraqi Chaldean, settled in Omaha because she found a community there that she didn’t find on the coasts. In North Omaha she found a Black community that was virtually nonexistent elsewhere in the city.

She was eager to help the area rediscover its cultural heyday of the early 20th century. Over a decade, she developed relationships among her new community, learned about its needs, and built an institution to help meet those needs. The Union now includes a gallery, a theater, arts education programs, artists-in-residence, and a community garden. “They are literally addressing Maslow's hierarchy of needs,” says White, referring to an 80-year-old framework of human psychology. “They are feeding people in a food desert. This is a place where you can come and feel welcome and valued, and they're using it as a community space.”

By 2022, McQueen was ready to move on from The Union (McQueen’s tenure at The Union formally ended in 2024). She hoped White could help prepare the organization for a new generation of leaders by documenting the day-to-day responsibilities of running The Union. “We'd never had the time to document anything,” she says. “Working with Jason helped us get off the wheel and think about things in a different way.”

White’s work revealed not just the work of the organization, but also the emotional toll it can take on arts leaders in communities such as North Omaha. His research revealed a community whose history had instilled a deep distrust of outsiders, especially of nonprofits led by white people. He writes, for example, of a town hall event where a panelist decried “a poverty pimp game of nonprofits.” In this game, says this panelist, nonprofits trumpet North Omaha’s poverty and crime rates to collect funding from governments and foundations, fail to provide any services, and leave.

Not all residents of North Omaha feel this way. White writes of many, especially those who are creatively inclined, who “publicly endorse (without hesitation) The Union.” But others can be skeptical, especially of an organization whose local bona fides they question. “It’s been relatively easy for The Union to get buy-in and volunteer support from local members of the creative community,” he writes. “However, it has been much more challenging to get that same level of buy-in and support from local North Omaha residents.” He recommends increasing efforts to create community buy-in, in part by inviting more community members to deliberate on new directions before The Union embarks upon them.

Such findings are not surprising to McQueen. She readily tells of tensions The Union can face in North Omaha, especially when the institution’s values brush up against traditional values. She points, for example, to a 2019 exhibit by a queer artist that did not sit well with more conservative and religious members of the community. Many demanded an end to the exhibition, but McQueen felt she must stand by her principles. “We do make space for everyone. We do still fly the pride flag above our building in June,” she says. “But I move through that work knowing that there are members of our community that are deeply offended by the fact that we do that.”

Even beyond conflicts of values, McQueen is intimately aware of the challenges a secular, mixed-race woman can face in North Omaha. She points to the ease with which White, a Black man who grew up in the Black-led Protestant church, could build relationships in 10 months that had eluded her for 10 years. “Even though he was an outsider,” she says, “he was also an insider instantly in a way I had never been.”

It’s a struggle McQueen recognizes, but it is one she embraces with the enthusiasm of an immigrant. “I do believe that you can make a community your home, love a community you've adopted, and want to work to better that community,” she says. “I don't see a difference between being born of a community and choosing it. I think, in a lot of ways, there's an amplified beauty in the choice.”

The Chicago Sinfonietta and The Union for Contemporary Art exemplify the work required to expand and enrich the communities that, in Anderson's conception, people have imagined. A community's ethos and boundaries can change, but that change requires commitment, fortitude, and credibility. Perhaps most important, it requires the creativity to envision new communities that can transcend old boundaries, be they the boundaries communities imagined for themselves or those that were imposed upon them.