The Impossible Task of Community Art Practice: a methodological micro- guide for seven young chicagoans Page 1 of 25 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 05 September 2019 Print Publication Date: Sep 2019 Subject: Sociology, Social Research and Statistics Online Publication Date: Sep 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274481.013.23 The Impossible Task of Community Art Practice: a methodological micro-guide for seven young chicagoans Jorge Lucero and William Estrada The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship Edited by Patricia Leavy Abstract and Keywords Through a formal examination of some of the most important long-term community art practices in Chicago, Mexican American artists and educators Jorge Lucero and William Estrada recount their own community art work in the Chicago area. The chapter is divid ed into three parts: Precedent, Contemporary Stories, and Tips. The first section is an overview of relevant markers and important precedent in community art practice. The second part comprises two stories of contemporary community art practice in which the authors have been involved. Finally, the authors propose 13 tips for enacting the “impos sible” act of community arts practice. Lucero and Estrada recommend that community art practitioners pay close attention to the longevity of their work, incorporating difference, listening, “deskilling,” playfulness, love, failure, the complicated relationship with institu tions, collecting data, co-creation, inquiry, and situationality. Keywords: community art work, inquiry, co-creation, Chicago, art as research, arts-based research, activism, par ticipatory research, public scholarship (p. 121) Introduction THERE are hundreds—if not thousands—of people qualified to write this chapter. We both know a lot of artists, educators, and community members actively participating in com munity art practices, and we are awed by their expertise and the sharable histories they carry within themselves. One easy way for us to have completed the task of writing this how-to/methods chapter, while also demonstrating how diverse and interwoven communi ty art practice can be, was to simply contact 30 of our friends and ask them to tell us the story of their community arts practice in brief. Putting those 30 curated narratives on dis play in this chapter certainly would have offered a robust picture—however incomplete— of what a community arts practice could potentially be and how to “do” it. In their Histo ries of Community-Based Art Education (2001), Congdon, Blandy, and Bolin have done ex actly that for the visual arts. They have made a juxtaposition of sophisticated examples