Artistic Outreach; How Betty McGinnis Builds Bridges
“Arts are the best international language we have, and the best means for the peoples of the world to ‘speak’ to each other and develop mutual trust.”
Ambassadors leave their mark on history as arbiters of war and peace. They may be yes-men or statesmen. As statesmen, they help us to escape the “narrowness of mind… which selfishness and ignorance place upon the human adventure,” as former President Lyndon Johnson said.
Alongside official ambassadors, ‘goodwill ambassadors’ are today more than ever taking the helm of international service and relief organizations to facilitate peacemaking in dozens of war-torn and impoverished regions of the world. In 2002, Betty McGinnis became one of those ambassadors.
Now a Marylander, McGinnis, who spent years globetrotting in a variety of international service jobs, was raised on a farm outside the small town of Due West, South Carolina. Despite its tiny size (approximately 800 residents), Due West was, according to McGinnis, “an amazing little town which took in refugees from around the world,” such as the wartime Jewish refugee from Vienna who drew “magnificent murals in all the little stores.”
McGinnis’ father, a businessman, and her mother, a high-school teacher, brought in all sorts of global guests, including an Englishman who announced his arrival by landing his airplane on the field next to their home.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, in addition to traveling on volunteer relief and literacy missions to Malawi, Cuba, the Czech Republic, the former Soviet Union, Kenya, Mexico, and Jamaica, McGinnis raised a family of four and hosted several Cambodian refugee families in her home. Opening her door to strangers honed McGinnis’ innate diplomatic skills.
The quiet-spoken woman with bobbed chestnut hair recalls an angst-filled moment while driving a 7-year-old Cambodian boy past the Annapolis National Cemetery. “He began to scream uncontrollably,” recalls McGinnis. “He knew no English, so he told his story using his hands. He kept pointing to a tree and then shaped a mound of heads – like one he had seen under a tree in a cemetery in Cambodia. He was reliving the killing fields.
“Then he calmed down. He needed to share that story with someone,” McGinnis adds.
Increasingly, McGinnis became intrigued by the ways in which the arts could be used to tell those stories and to build relationships between Americans and the rest of the world.
With her numerous contacts in the State Department, the Peace Corps, and academia, McGinnis, who once studied organ and piano, called a meeting of the minds in Washington, DC, in 2002. The collective thinking from that meeting resulted in the launching of World Artists Experiences, a nonprofit organization which McGinnis founded to “spread global understanding through the arts.”
“Arts are the best international language we have, and the best means for the peoples of the world to ‘speak’ to each other and develop mutual trust,” says McGinnis. “I wanted this to be a grassroots educational movement, touching the lives of Americans who normally wouldn’t have the access or resources to see world-class artists.”
With a staff of 200 volunteers, World Artist Experiences has already electrified audiences across Maryland and beyond with its signature delivery of dazzling – and free – performances by individual artists and groups from Egypt, Brazil, China, Ghana, Slovakia, Gambia, Colombia, Qatar, and a host of other countries in eastern and western Europe, South and Central America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Appreciative audiences have attended performances by Brazil’s popular group Carcoarco, the Czech Republic’s Jaroslav Czech Dulcimer Ensemble, Ghana’s music and dance troupe Kusun Ensemble, Ecuador’s Latino band Solazo, China’s Shanghai National Orchestra, Israel’s Contemporary String Quartet, and Egypt’s guitarist Mahmed Kazem.
McGinnis’ long-term strategy is to have these artists “showcase their countries and share the common bonds of the creative arts” in schools and community centers first in Maryland, and then throughout the mid-Atlantic area and eventually around the country.
She has also developed a signature “student ambassador” program which enlists elementary to high school students to welcome the artists to their schools. She is developing art exchanges between American students and students abroad. Teachers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia have contacted World Artists Experiences to arrange for these exchanges in their schools.
McGinnis’ organization also sponsors all-day typically sold out Cultural Immersion programs at a range of Washington, DC, embassies, and is now working on a “sustainable development” program to see the art and handicrafts of sponsored visual artists.
But why all the determination, especially at a time when the world’s ills seem so daunting and insurmountable?
“Building global trust is more important now than ever,” insists McGinnis, a true pioneer in the field of bridging cultural divides through the arts.
“I always return to the saying that ‘the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but brotherhood.’”
MARYLAND LIFE
January-February 2009