Steven D. Lavine and Janet Sternburg

Steven D. Lavine and Janet Sternburg(husband and wife) have long worked at the forefront of cultural change.

Steven D. Lavineis president (1988 – present) of the California Institute of the Arts, where he has created opportunities for educating multidisciplinary artists in bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees, as well as creating national models for the creation of new work through CalArts’ performance space, REDCAT, and for the forging of new relationships among an arts college and its communities through the Community Arts Partnership. Lavine is also the co-author of Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display and Museums and Communities. He is proud to note that Luis Valdez served on the Board of Trustees at California Institute of the Arts from 1990–1996.

In 1970, Janet Sternburg, writer and photographer, discovered an unopened box at National Educational Television containing videos of early actos; these became the basis for her 1970 feature documentary El Teatro Campesino, broadcast nationally and shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. In 1980, W.W. Norton published her now-classic book The Writer On Her Work; Julia Alvarez, in her introduction to the 20^th anniversary edition, wrote, "It was a first: seventeen women laying claim to rooms of their own in the mansion of literature." Sternburg is also the author of two books of memoirs, White Matter and Phantom Limb. A monograph of her photography, Overspilling World, has been published in 2016 by Distanz Verlag with a foreword by Wim Wenders.

Occasionally a work of art emerges that defines a cultural moment and points to its future. In 1978, audiences in the United States were privileged to see such a work: Zoot Suit, performed first in Los Angeles and nine months later on Broadway where theatre critic Jack Kroll described the play as a key event in the consciousness of a community. Wit...

The Consciousness of a Community and Beyond