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This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.

Focusing on the African American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Introduction explores links between 1950s and 1960s process literature and the Community Action Program. Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) was funded through the War on Poverty, and his version of process art fulfilled the participatory requirements of the Community Action Program. Both Baraka and many welfare activists allied with the Community Action Program also drew on a binary conception of class culture popularized by the post–World War II counterculture and liberal social science. This binary conception produced two figures that alternately incited and frustrated literary and social work efforts to bridge the gap between the middle class and the poor: the juvenile delinquent and the welfare mother.

This chapter presents an overview of the evolution of earth art. It recalls works created during the 1960s and 1970s which started to redirect art toward an ecological consciousness, such as Shift by Richard Serra and Ocean Landmark by Betty Beaumont. It discusses art that is normally associated with ecology, namely, site restoration and activist art, and traces their roots in postminimalist sculpture, process art, performance art, and conceptual art. It explains how these precedents, in their decided rejection of modernist ideals and institutions, paved the way for an ecological orientation in artistic practice. It also challenges any erroneous presumptions that earth art is only confined to sculpture in the land or that these early practices have no connection to current environmental concerns.

This chapter puts the Beat writer Jack Kerouac in conversation with 1950s sociologists and psychologists interested in juvenile delinquency. These social scientists used the delinquent to develop ideas that would culminate in the class culture paradigm of the 1960s. Kerouac’s fiction prefigures this paradigm, drawing on the work of Oswald Spengler to distinguish between lower-class minority and middle-class white cultures in the United States. In autobiographical novels like Maggie Cassidy, On the Road, and Dr. Sax, Kerouac imagines the delinquent as a self-divided figure, alienated from the traditional lower class and unable to adapt to the new demands of the rising professional class. His version of process art replicates this division, offering its readers a failed synthesis of middlebrow and avant-garde literature.

What does the craft of public engagement facilitation entail? Chapter 3 unpacks the challenges practitioners face in professionalizing the “process arts.” In making the case for expert administration of humble democratic practices pioneered in the 1960s, practitioners narrate an evolution from adversarialism to a belief in incremental change in whole systems. They carefully balance the tensions of top-down empowerment by blending discourses from therapy, New Age religiosity, and corporate management. Progressive critiques of institutions are linked to neoliberal beliefs in devolving and privatizing governance. As such, public engagement resembles the social movements practitioners repeatedly invoke much less than the “heart-focused” corporate culture and economic insecurities of the twenty-first century.