In this episode of ART IS CHANGE, Bill Cleveland shares next chapter in the continuing Weather Report, (now called the Arts Freedom Weather Report) Rather than chasing single headlines or isolated outrages, this episode steps back to examine the cultural climate shaping 2026: how small policy shifts stack up, how institutions quietly recalibrate under authoritarian pressure, and how artists and cultural organizations are responding in real time.

In this show, we explore three critical dynamics shaping the arts and democracy right now:

1. How culture is being strategically targeted and weaponized — through funding shifts, legal pressure, and narrative control.
2. What’s actually happening on the ground at the NEA, in public media, museums, universities, and courts.
3. How artists and organizers are responding with preparation, creativity, and discipline, treating resistance as a learned practice rather than a spontaneous reaction.

Listen in as we establish a cultural baseline for 2026 — one we’ll return to again and again — and map the early warning signs, fault lines, and sources of strength shaping the struggle for artistic freedom and democratic life.

Bill Cleveland

Host of ART IS CHANGE and founder of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.

Renee Nicole Goode

Minneapolis poet, mother, and community member whose work and life are honored at the close of the episode. (Minnesota Public Radio)

Sonia De Los Santos

Singer-songwriter and educator who stepped away from a Kennedy Center performance, citing concerns that the space no longer felt welcoming.

Stephen Schwartz

Composer of Wicked who withdrew from a Kennedy Center gala in protest of politicization.

Béla Fleck

Banjo innovator who canceled Kennedy Center appearances rather than participate in a politicized cultural space.

Chuck Redd

Jazz vibraphonist and bandleader who canceled his long-running Kennedy Center Christmas Eve jam.

The Cookers

Jazz ensemble that canceled its New Year’s Eve engagement at the Kennedy Center.

Wayne Tucker

Trumpeter and composer who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming.

Doug...

In this episode, Bill Cleveland sits down with theater director Emily Hartford and composer–storyteller Ned Hardford to explore Metra: A Climate Revolution with Songs—a nine-episode musical audio drama that reimagines an ancient Greek myth as a near-future climate story.

What starts as a conversation about craft opens into deeper territory: imagination as resistance, music as pedagogy, and why genuinely new stories don’t come from algorithms—they come from people doing long, human work together.

In it, we explore three big questions at the heart of Metra and the moment we’re living in now:

1. How music, story, and the human voice reach places that facts, lectures, and policy arguments can’t
2. What it looks like to tell a climate story without fear-mongering or “disaster porn,”
3. How artists can build work that others can actually use,—turning art-making into cultural infrastructure rather than a one-off production.

Bill Cleveland

Host of Change the Story / Change the World and founder of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.

Emily Hartford

Theater director, writer, and producer; founding member of Flux Theater Ensemble and co-creator of Metra.

Ned Hartford

Composer, songwriter, audio engineer, and co-creator of Metra, focused on musical storytelling and audio drama.

Alan Lomax

Folklorist and field-recording pioneer whose work capturing the emotional power of the human voice is referenced in the episode.

Enoch Rutherford

Old-time banjo player recorded by Alan Lomax in Virginia; referenced through a story of lineage, listening, and musical transmission.

Bill McKibben

Climate activist and author referenced for framing distributed solar power as a metaphor for bottom-up social change.

adrienne maree brown

Writer and activist whose work on emergence and collective power informs Metra’s worldview.

Martin Buber

Philosopher referenced for his concept of relational connection (I–Thou), via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Flux Theater Ensemble

New York–based theater company where Metra was...

Making art, Building communities, Driving change.

30 years in operation,

62 communities engaged,

47 awards won,

550 artists contributed,

9, 500 people participated,

2. 6 million audience members.

Can a skateboard ramp in the rainforest spark a global movement for justice, creativity, and environmental protection?

In Part Two of our BIGhART Series, we ride along with Scott Rankin and the BIGhART team as they blend skate culture, Indigenous wisdom, and creative process into a powerful force for social change.

Listen to Part One Here

Whether it’s fighting for the endangered Tarkine rainforest or giving marginalized youth a platform to be seen and heard, BIGhART shows how art, patience, and deep listening can radically transform the world around us. If you’re wondering what change-making really looks like, this story will challenge and inspire you.

1. Explore how skateboarding becomes both an art form and a mental health lifeline for young people at the edge of society.
2. Hear how BIGhART’s long game—projects that unfold over decades—challenges quick-fix activism by centering deep community invitation and legacy-building.
3. Learn why creativity rooted in respect, reciprocity, and humility is essential to confronting cultural wounds, environmental destruction, and systems of injustice.

Scott Rankin co-founded Big hART with friend John Bakes in 1992. As CEO and Creative Director, Scott leads the overarching vision for all Big hART projects – from pilot through to legacy. A leader and teacher in the field of social and cultural innovation, Scott provides daily mentorship and knowledge transfer to all Big hART staff so that they can in turn lead our projects with confidence.

An award winning writer and director in his own right, Scott’s works have been included many times in major arts festivals. His reputation is built on a quarter of a century of work, creating, funding and directing large-scale projects in diverse communities with high needs, in isolated settings.

Big hART is Scott’s passionate contribution to the arts and society.

BIGhART:

Ngapartji Ngapartji: Big hART designed the Ngapartji Ngapartji project to raise awareness of Indigenous language loss, and the lack of an national Indigenous languages policy.

Tasmania is an island state of Australia.[15] It is located 240 kilometres (150 miles) to the south of the

This isn’t a regular ART IS CHANGE episode. It’s a pause. A moment to mark the passing of Leni Sloan—artist, activist, catalytic troublemaker, and beloved friend.

In this special reflection, Bill Cleveland shares stories that trace Leni’s life across stages and communities—from a daring Bicentennial musical about minstrelsy, to decades of cultural work uncovering erased Black histories, to his role as a catalytic force inside institutions that needed shaking awake. This is a portrait not just of what Leni made, but how he moved through the world.

You’ll hear about a man who believed history lives in bodies, that culture breathes through people, and that the real work is connection—between past and present, pain and joy, the visible and the forgotten. It’s a meditation on art as lineage, memory, and moral practice, told with humor, tenderness, and deep respect.

Listen in as we honor Leni Sloan’s life, legacy, and enduring presence—and let his stories remind us why telling the whole truth, especially the hard parts, is how we stay human.

Multiple early and foundational episodes of this podcast include extended conversations with Leni on art, history, humility, and social change.

1. L. O. Sloan - Adventures of a Gunrunner for the Arts Part 1
2. L. o. Sloan - Adventures of a Gunrunner for the Arts Part 2
3. Building Blocks of Effective Art and Social Change Practice: W/ Leni Sloan, Barbara Shaffer Bacon, and Bill Cleveland

Bill Cleveland: Founder of the Center for the Study of Art & Community and host of Change the Story / Change the World. Longtime collaborator and close friend of Leni Sloan, offering this remembrance.

Leni Sloan (Lenwood O. Sloan): Playwright, director, cultural strategist, and community arts leader whose work bridged history, performance, policy, and community storytelling for more than four decades.

Laurie Meadof: Friend and colleague and internationally recognized artist organizer who shared the news of Leni Sloan’s passing with Bill Cleveland.

Barbara Schaffer Bacon: National leader in arts-based civic practice and longtime collaborator with Leni Sloan, referenced in connection with recent podcast conversations.

Bert Williams: Groundbreaking African American performer whose life and legacy anchor Sloan’s musical play The Wake.

What if telling a story could rewrite history, heal generational trauma, and reclaim a community’s stolen legacy?

In a world where the voices of marginalized communities are often silenced or distorted, this episode explores how the arts—through projects like BIGhART and the Ngapartji Ngapartji and Namatjira initiatives—can become powerful instruments of cultural justice, truth-telling, and transformation. If you’ve ever wondered how creativity can confront systems of power and elevate unheard voices, this story offers living proof.

In this episode we:

1. Discover how a small arts organization in Australia sparked a global movement for Indigenous rights, language preservation, and youth empowerment.
2. Learn how performance, storytelling, and community-led creativity dismantled colonial narratives and reclaimed stolen intellectual property.
3. Be inspired by Scott Rankin’s vision of sacred, process-centered artistry that goes beyond performance to become a force for healing, justice, and deep social change.

Scott co-founded Big hART with friend John Bakes in 1992. As CEO and Creative Director, Scott leads the overarching vision for all Big hART projects – from pilot through to legacy. A leader and teacher in the field of social and cultural innovation, Scott provides daily mentorship and knowledge transfer to all Big hART staff so that they can in turn lead our projects with confidence.

An award winning writer and director in his own right, Scott’s works have been included many times in major arts festivals. His reputation is built on a quarter of a century of work, creating, funding and directing large-scale projects in diverse communities with high needs, in isolated settings.

Big hART is Scott’s passionate contribution to the arts and society.

BIGhART: Authentic, high-quality art made with communities.

Big hART brings virtuosic artists into communities to collaborate and create authentic stories which illuminate local injustice. We present these stories to mainstream audiences to help raise awareness. This builds public support for change and helps to protect vulnerable people.

Everyone, everywhere has the right to thrive.

Big hART works with communities experiencing high levels of need. Rather than focusing on the problem, our unique non-welfare projects build on community assets, strengthening vulnerable individuals, and creating long term attitudinal shifts. Our hope is for all communities to flourish.

Positive, generational change begins as a cultural shift.

Big hART designs and delivers transformative projects to address complex social issues. Our cultural approaches are evaluated and acknowledged as best practice. Decision makers seeking better solutions can use our award winning projects to help develop new and better policy. We aim to drive generational change.

Ngapartji Ngapartji: Big hART designed the Ngapartji Ngapartji project to raise awareness of Indigenous language loss, and the lack of an national Indigenous languages policy. In order to create visibility around these issues, we launched a language and culture teaching portal, offered audiences the chance to learn Pitjantjatjara through a small teaching show, created short teaching films, as well as music and CDs with a Pitjantjatjara choir. We made a high profile...

Why does sustainability matter in activist art? When funding cycles are short, residencies are brief, and institutions often treat creative work as temporary or expendable, what does it mean to commit to change that lasts?

In this episode of Art Is Change, the sixth in our series on the building blocks of effective community arts practice, Bill Cleveland sits down with two legendary cultural leaders — Leni Sloan and Barbara Schaefer Bacon — to explore sustainability not as longevity for its own sake, but as ethical responsibility. From invisible lineages of community practice to the quiet power of relationships that outlast grants, they examine what truly endures when art engages deeply with communities.

Drawing on decades of experience as practitioners, funders, and advocates, this conversation

• challenges conventional ideas of growth, impact, and institutional survival.
• asks whether sustainability lies in organizations, practices, relationships,
• or something more elusive — trust, memory, and the transmission of creative values across generations.

If you are an artist, cultural organizer, funder, or community partner grappling with how to build work that matters beyond the life of a project, this episode offers hard-earned wisdom, moral clarity, and a powerful reminder: some forms of change are too important to be temporary.

• Lenwood “Leni” Sloan – Activist artist, cultural organizer, impresario, and long-time leader in community-based arts practice; featured guest on Art Is Change.
• Barbara Schaffer Bacon
• – Former Co-Director of Animating Democracy, a national initiative advancing arts-based civic dialogue and democratic practice.
• Bill Cleveland
• – Host of Art Is Change and Director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community, with decades of experience in arts-based community development and cultural organizing.
• Liz Lerman
• – Choreographer, civic artist, and thought leader whose work has profoundly shaped community-based and socially engaged dance practice.
• John O’Neal
• – Playwright, performer, and cultural organizer; co-founder of the Free Southern Theater and founder of Junebug Productions, a cornerstone of African American community-based theater.
• M. C. Richards
• – Poet, potter, educator, and author whose writings on creativity, discipline, and teaching have deeply influenced generations of artists.

• Center for the Study of Art and Communit– A national resource supporting artists, organizations, and institutions working at the intersection of art, community, and social change.
• Animating Democracy– A program of Americans for the...

This episode digs into one of the trickiest—and most revealing—corners of community-based arts work: the way humility and failure shape everything we do, from a 12-line role in Richard II to a city-wide public-art firestorm.

Leni Sloan, Barbara Shaffer Bacon and Bill Cleveland tumble into stories that peel back the glossy surface of “successful” arts practice:

• the actor with decades of experience learning cadence from an 18-year-old,
• the choreographer who turned military restrictions into creative fuel,
• the prison poet who left a Broadway star speechless.

And threaded through it all is this question: how do we stay porous enough—humble enough—to learn what the work is actually teaching us?

Together they talk about the kind of failure that doesn’t end a project but opens it—cracks the thing apart so the next, truer version can breathe. And they remind us that in this art-and-community dance, no one is ever done learning, not even the masters.

Listen in as we explore why humility is not soft, and failure is not fatal—they’re simply part of the craft.

And stick around: the next episode asks the big follow-up question—what responsibility do we carry for sustaining access to creative resources once communities have experienced their transformative power?

Use this Venmo account @Cheryl-Cotterill or send a check to:

Cheryl Cotterill

Attorney at Law

1770 Post Street #207

San Francisco, CA 94115

People

Leni Sloan

Actor, director, community-arts practitioner, and co-conversationalist in this episode, reflecting on humility, failure, and learning within community-engaged art.

Barbara Schaffer Bacon

Co-director of Animating Democracy and long-time leader in arts-based community development; contributes insight into constraints, ethics, and readiness in community practice.

Lori Woolery

Director formerly with Cornerstone Theater Company and a leader of community-based productions at The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park.

Liz Lerman

Choreographer, educator, and founder of the Dance Exchange, known for pioneering community-based performance projects including The Shipyard Project.

Robert Frost

Poet quoted for the line “Freedom is riding easy in the harness,” used here to illuminate creative constraint.

M.C. Richards

Potter, writer, and philosopher known for her disciplined practice of smashing imperfect pots—a metaphor for artistic rigor and humility.

F. Murray Abraham

Award-winning actor involved in the Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, who visited San Quentin and sought insight from incarcerated actor Spoon Jackson.

Spoon Jackson

Poet, educator, and long-incarcerated artist whose work in Arts-in-Corrections and...

Budgets frozen. Institutions wobbling. Political earthquakes everywhere. In the middle of all that, many artists and cultural workers are stepping straight into the messy moral world of community change.

This episode is the fourth in our special series where we're unpacking the building blocks of effective art and social change practice,

This episode we explore:

• What happens when “good intentions” aren’t enough?
• What do we owe the communities we hope to serve?
• And how does an artist even begin to understand the ethical weight of their presence in places carrying trauma, tension, or long histories of power imbalance?

People

• Bill Cleveland – Host of Art Is Change and Director of the Center for the Study of Art & Community.
• Leni Sloan – Activist, performer, impresario, and cultural historian.
• Barbara Schaffer Bacon – Educator, author, and longtime arts-and-democracy leader.
• Confucius – Philosopher quoted on the cultural health of society.
• Carol Bebelle – Co-founder of Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans.
• Roberta Uno – Director and cultural organizer referenced via Project 2050.
• Judy Munson – Composer for the series' theme and soundscapes.
• Andre Neppe – Text editor for the series.

Organizations

• Center for the Study of Art & Community – Producer of Art Is Change.
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) – Federal arts funder.
• Mid Atlantic Arts – Regional arts funder.
• Kennedy Center – National cultural institution.
• Junebug Productions – Community-rooted arts organization.
• Ashé Cultural Arts Center – Cultural organization founded by Carol Bebelle.
• UMass Project 2050 – Intergenerational arts and social justice project.
• Freesound.org – Open-source audio effects platform.

Events

• Pennsylvania Arts Residency Shutdowns – State-level budget freeze causing all residencies to wind down.
• California Gerrymandering Ballot Vote – Referenced political event affecting democratic institutions.
• White House East Wing Renovation – Described as symbolic cultural destabilization.
• Northern Ireland Peace-Sector Encounters – Experiences working in sectarian communities.
• Prison Songwriting Class – A pivotal ethical moment demonstrating the power of creative work.

Publications / Texts

• Confucian Canon – Referenced philosophically regarding art and society.

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Change the Story / Change the World is a podcast that chronicles the power of...