ARTSblog

Letitia F. Ivins

This post is part of a series on emerging trends and notable lessons from the field, as reported by members of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leaders Council.

In the midst of the recession, the “pop-up” has emerged widespread among visual artists as a vehicle for aesthetic and social engagement.

From the intimate and homemade to the mobile and socially ambitious, we have come to love artwork that “pops–up” in unexpected places. Whether an endearing artist crafted paper box cottage from which bear cub-sized tarts are doled or an urban planning mobile that functions as community organizer, the pop-up’s inherent temporality is creatively freeing.

What else makes the contemporary pop-up, with its entrepreneurial yet modest, if any, commercial interest so enchanting?

I write this post on my return from my first Art Basel Miami Beach. While I relished the fair art experience (a pop-up in all its garish glory) one of the most memorable artworks was the offbeat public art pop-up Transformer: Display of Community Information And Activation led by LA-based artists Olga Kouramoros and Andrea Bowers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical by Marcia Muelder Eaton

“Great art rewards sustained attention.” This simple theory comes from philosopher Marcia Muelder Eaton, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

In my personal experience, it is true. Eaton has been considering art and writing about aesthetics for a few decades. Her early publications get to the heart of this definition but a later book, Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical (Oxford Press 2001) offers an inclusive concept of art, aesthetics, and value that is very relevant to the themes of Fusing Arts Culture and Social Change.

In that book, Eaton suggests that “formalists in the world of aesthetics ignore the roles that artworks play in the life of community and conversely, ignore the ways in which communities determine the very nature of what counts as artistic or aesthetic experiences that exist within them.” I recommend her writings in general and this book specifically.

I share Eaton’s work here because my enthusiasm for the conversation raised by Fusing Arts Culture and Social Change is not to call out the major institutions and question whether they deserve support, but rather to encourage sustained attention for small, mid-size, and community-based arts groups that are rooted in communities, neighborhoods, ethnic, and tribal traditions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Barbara Schaffer Bacon

Grantmakers in the Arts asks, “What can private foundations learn from public funders who are working with marginalized communities?”

I think public support programs, some old, and some more current have a few lessons to offer. Though neither was without problems or controversy, both Roosevelt’s Federal Arts Projects in the 1930s and The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) in the 1970s suggest that light structure can produce great results.

They provide evidence that talented artists will answer the call and can produce great works that are relevant to and reflective of the communities for which they are created. While the Federal Art Project was more prescriptive, artists had a very public platform and some latitude to create their work. The public works created and the artist’s interaction with the public is credited with stimulating national interest in American art and laying the groundwork for the National Endowment for the Arts to be established.

As a jobs (not an arts) program, CETA had a looser structure. Artists and creative administrators were deployed, often creating their own job descriptions as they went to work in neighborhoods and community centers around the country; but they found their way and many of the programs created had staying power. Read the rest of this entry »

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Erik Takeshita

The deeper the roots, the stronger we are. 

I have a print in my office made by a teen from The Point Community Development Corporation with this on it. I couldn’t agree more. We need to know where we came from to get where we wanted to go. This is true for individuals, organizations, and communities.

On November 16, Minneapolis-based Bedlam Theatre had 24 hours of live, web-streamed programming for “Give to the Max Day” including a panel discussion on “Placemaking? Arts Bubble or Dawning of a New Age?”

While I enjoyed participating in the conversation with Bedlam, Anne Gadwa from Metris Arts Consulting, and my colleagues from the Irrigate project (an artist-led creative placemaking initiative in St. Paul that received one of the initial ArtPlace grant awards in September), I am not sure we are asking the right question.

What I mean is I think placemaking is neither an “arts bubble” nor the “dawning of a new age,” but rather something that human beings have always done. We are always striving to make the places we inhabit more livable, attractive, and vibrant. Read the rest of this entry »

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Caron Atlas

At the recent Policy Link Equity Summit 2011 in Detroit at a session called “Holding Ground,” progressive presenters—including Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor, who participated in the “driving filibuster” to prevent the dismantling of collective bargaining, spoke about maintaining equity in a time a cutbacks.

At the end of the session one of the younger audience members, Michael Collins, asked where in all this talk of holding ground were the progressive ideas, the vision for the future. His question significantly shifted the room.

The conference had begun with Grace Lee Boggs inspiring us to seize this moment to “create something new.” Artists Invincible and Rha Goddess later spoke about shifting the culture and did just that as they performed, bringing economic injustice home. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) organizer Nelini Stamp noted that Occidental professor Peter Dreir has researched a three-fold increase in the word “inequality” in the media since OWS began. She then asked us to “think big”.

This post is supposed to be about placemaking. But right now I’m thinking about holding ground and thinking big. OWS’s place at Zuccotti Park has just been bulldozed. At Policy Link and other conferences I have been to this fall I have found many organizers embracing the energy around the 99%. Read the rest of this entry »

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Joanna Chin

I just returned from a FotoWeekDC lecture at the Corcoran Museum by photographer, Trevor Paglen where he began his talk with this question. The answer is no; however, the crucial point of his talk was about the necessity of broadening our definition of what photography is at this particular point in time.

So, is art dead?

In my opening post for the salon, I said that the arts and culture have always had a place in this work of creating a sense of place, strengthening civic participation, and bolstering positive social change. I refrained from suggesting exactly what arts and culture looks, sounds, and feels like; yet, the overarching thread of blogs throughout this salon have alluded to a broadened definition of the arts as something beyond just a physical object constrained to a physical space.

Our bloggers shared a diversity of opinions and perspective, but two of my big take-aways from the salon overall were:

1.    It’s all about time (not just place): The making of a place isn’t just about the physical space, but also the cultural and social space that continues to develop and change over time. The most vibrant places are those where the process of creation, storytelling, activation, and use becomes woven into the changing fabric of the place.  Part of the key to the future is bridging the past/existing conditions with the present, which is typified by inter-generational work. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tom Borrup (center) and friends

Here’s someone who speaks my language!

In Creativity Will Change the Model, Bill Roper calls for new ways to engage people in re-imaging their communities, specifically to engage creative practices in how community planning gets done!

Just as quickly as we have young people – and people of all ages – paint images or make collages representing their vision (and I’ve done it many times), we also need Facebook, and other social media tools to spark discussions and the exchange of images representing spaces and activities that are important to people. These tools can get more people to engage in face-to-face community engagement, and enrich it, not replace it.

Until we have more experience with these tools, we won’t fully know all they can do for us, but we need to experiment.

I’m presently leading a major cultural corridor planning project in Minneapolis where one of the deliverables expected by the city is a pedestrian study. While they may balk at something other than a report from the same pedestrian consultant they’ve hired 20 times before, we’re crowdsourcing the study using Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

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Erin Harkey

Started in 2002, as an alternative to mainstream gallery culture, High Desert Test Sites (HDTS) explores the connections between site, art and life.

Situated in the desert communities surrounding Joshua Tree, the biannual event produces a series of site-specific installations in the Mojave Desert. Belonging to no one and everyone at the same time, each project’s life cycle is inextricably linked to the site itself.

Intrigued by this year’s roster of artists, I ventured with a friend on a two-hour road trip from Los Angeles to check it out.

The map to the sites we picked up at the HDTS headquarters instructed us to “drive forever” on Route 62. To help us find our way, we relied on the tracks of the cars before us, the unreliable GPS on our phones, and the occasional hidden HDTS sign with a quiet arrow. As we drove, we were fascinated with the number of deserted buildings. Read the rest of this entry »

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Radhika Mohan

At the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, we hold several intimate sessions a year, each with 7-8 mayors and another 7-8 design and development professionals.

At every session, we hammer through case studies that the mayors bring and respond with concrete ways to begin implementing their project. Often, the critique on their urban design case studies sounds something like this: “This design could be anywhere, what makes this place in your city special and unique?”

I often call this the “avoiding the autotune” suggestion. Autotune, being the new(ish) technology of the music industry where a performer’s voice can be digitized, making anyone’s voice sound similar to one another in song.

One way to “avoid the autotune” is to bring artists into the mix of the planning process.

Many of us have written that art, as an expression of our cultural identity, can be a great communicator in the design of the public realm and institutional amenities. Through storytelling, mural-painting, exhibitions, and more, we can foster the exchange of ideas on important projects in our community. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tatiana Hernandez

This Salon sought answers to a very big question: what will it take to move and sustain arts and culture in community development, civic engagement, and social change?

The 21st century is all about intersections, networks, and hybridity. Our goal should be to ingrain arts in community development through cross-cutting projects that seek to anchor people to place. Caron Atlas nailed it by highlighting Arts & Democracy’s new book: Bridge Conversations, People Who Live and Work in Multiple Worlds.

The Stockholm metro is not only informally known as “the world’s longest art gallery” but it’s also a leader in energy conservation — harvesting body heat from passengers to help ease heating requirements.

An example of the art inside the Stockholm subway. (Image via Wacky Owl)

This is a creative solution that puts people (literally) at the heart of the work. Erik Takeshita said it best, “the importance of culture – not just art – is critical.” To Takeshita’s point, the Stockholm metro isn’t art specifically, its culture; a way of expressing the values of a society. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I started out as a professional artist in the mid-1990s, I would engage others in painting collaborative murals to amplify their voices.

I would bring people together in public spaces to address important social concerns: street children in Bolivia’s main plaza; former gang members in a Northern Philly barrio; Greek and Turkish Cypriots at the UN Green Line; Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; AIDS workers in South Africa; kids jailed in Miami’s adult prisons and psychiatric facilities, etc.

Years ago, I remember telling a journalist that I could never see myself painting flowers.

As I type this, there is still some paint on my right forearm. It’s from painting wildflowers. I guess I’m not a good fortune teller and can be a little careless when cleaning up… Read the rest of this entry »

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Bill Roper

In a series of site visits I’ve recently taken as part of the Orton Family Foundation’s selection of a second round of community demonstration projects, I’ve talked about a number of ways land use planning has broken down in America.

One manifestation is the way public meetings are conducted the same old way at the same old place and with the same old people participating. With the same people participating, meetings run dangerously close to the “jerk factor” as Lex Leifheit so humorously and aptly put it in her post.

I won’t call the people who always talk bullies, but when they continually dominate conversations it can move from boring to intimidating.

Anusha Venkataraman rightly recognizes that as resources become more limited to local governments, communities can turn to citizens to fill the gap.

So for us to move to Lex’s “Post-Jerk Era” we need to fully employ the creativity that art brings to unleash new energy and allow for different conversations and approaches to seemingly intractable challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

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Caron Atlas’ post about People’s Potlucks inspired me to write about my own experiment in food, community, and art, Feast of Words: A Literary Potluck. Co-founded with Irina Zadov, Feast of Words is a monthly event where people come together to eat, write and share.

Feast of Words is one year old, and since the beginning it has simultaneously been about bringing communities together and expressing, creatively, what sets them apart.

It was a spontaneous idea—Irina had hosted a dinner party where people shared their creative work and was looking for a “third place” that combined art making with the comfort of a shared meal. I had been attending literary readings, looking for one that was a good fit for SOMArts, which is a multidisciplinary arts space and cultural center. Read the rest of this entry »

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Bill Mackey

Many of the comments inspired further thoughts on my desire to create community based art projects that embrace satire or humor without an apparent or direct tie to any institution (be it commercial or public).

It sounds like everyone here wants artists to be the new generation of urban planners. I have been involved with a few urban planning projects of the past and I just do not know if it is possible for the variety of creative processes described to enter that field.

However, I do believe the current processes used by urban planners should change and Bill Roper’s call to action inspires me to look further.

I appreciate the comments from the folklorist Brendan Greaves, in particular, addressing the need to complete cultural inventories, archival research, and interviews. The process brings historical concepts and multi-generational people into the fold of a project. Today, society knows too little about our general history, our built environment, and our elders; and what it does know is understandably simplified. Read the rest of this entry »

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Participants take part in integrated creative, interactive activities during the workshop. (Photo by Roxanne Earley)

In reading my fellow bloggers’ posts, I was thinking about the different sets of strategies used to interest and involve community members in the short-term (what we might call “one-offs”), and those used to cultivate engagement in the long-term.

The potential of art to involve community in the shorter term is well-documented and recognized. We recognize the value of performance and temporary public art in activating public space during large (and small) community events.

Art is also recognized as an important communication tool, a way to get across a complex message that might otherwise be technical or seem far removed from daily life. Creative processes can even be used to diffuse conflict and create the space for dialogue.

Urban planners and designers have also integrated creative, interactive activities into the charrette workshop model. This week I attended a lecture and workshop at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, led by James Rojas on his interactive, art-based technique of using semi-abstract models and moving pieces to involve community members in reimagining and redesigning urban spaces.

The materials used were simple—blocks, string, plastic toys—but the colors and shapes clearly activated different parts of the participants’ brains, and encouraged new ideas and solutions—even among a crowd of planning and architecture students that is used to addressing urban design issues every day. Read the rest of this entry »

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