An autodidact explores issues of education itself through essays and personal portraits of the key minds who influenced her
What does it mean to be educated? Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her-what she calls a camp of angels. She sees each as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs "uncolonized minds." Goldbard describes how the learning from each changed the course of her life in essays that offer generative moments of a life in art and social change. She also reveals ways a dominant society tried to put a first-generation American from a socially marginal family in her place-and failed. Readers will learn about the author's own self education, issues of formal higher education and its discontents, and the damage done by a society that prizes profits over people. Goldbard asks readers to consider the impact of credentialism on U.S. society and what we can do to set it right.

About the Author
Arlene Goldbard is a New Mexico-based writer, visual artist, speaker, consultant, and cultural activist. She is the author of multiple papers, reports, and books, including New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, and her essays have appeared in Art in America, The Independent, High Performance, and Tikkun. She is Chief Policy Wonk Emerita of the US Department of Arts and Culture and was one of 2015's "fifty most powerful and influential people in the nonprofit arts." She is a 2019 recipient of the Randy Martin Spirit Award from Imagining America. Goldbard cohosts the podcast, A Culture of Possibility, with Francois Matarasso.

Reviews
Organizer, advocate, and artist Arlene Goldbard's innovative autobiography is a dazzling chronicle of a life taking down elitism. Goldbard chartered her own autonomous course towards becoming the influential figure that she is in the world of community-based cultural advocacy; she encourages us to do the same, both in how we live and read and learn in our lives, and even in how we engage with her book. -- L.M. Bogad * The Progressive Magazine *
"A deeply personal, passionate and hopeful account of Goldbard's educational experience." -- Addison Key * The Daily Lobo *



Book Information
ISBN 9781613321980
Author Arlene Goldbard
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint New Village Press
Publisher New Village Press