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Andrew Barco
Community Engagement and Partnership Coordinator, Artist's Resource Center/Institute for Art and Civic Engagement
School of the Museum of Fine Arts

Education: BA, Wesleyan University, 2002

Why did you join MACC VISTA: : I was interested in expanding upon my experience in grassroots organizing in the arts, to see how these skills might be used within an institutional setting. I have found it to be very useful to learn how to navigate within an organization and create change within a system.

What is the role of higher education institutes in their community? Being honest, higher education institutes serve a community by serving as a portal to a national and international culture, and through that culture, systems of power and privilege. It may very well be that all students, faculty, and administrators are attracted from elsewhere (to a lesser degree in community colleges) for the very reason that they came from elsewhere, and not the local community. Higher ed serves as a laboratory of what happens when larger cultural movements intersect local politics and communities. Treating higher ed as a space that houses and employs "unsited" and displaced individuals, confused about their role in the community, is an extremely important way to start conversations--by investigating the local--about how systems of privilege displace and "unsite" us all.