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community art Archives - ChangingMedia

Sep 25
0

Numbers Dire and Inspiring

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | No Comments

September is Suicide Prevention Month, which seems like an unlikely tie-in for my series of columns about art and metrics. But, the data on suicide is dire. In the United States alone:

  • Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death.
  • More people die of suicide than in car accidents.
  • Military veterans have double the rate of suicide as nonveterans.
  • The suicide rate of LGBTQ youth and adults is three times the national average.

And, of course, there is a solid connection between art and suicide; enough of my favorite artists—visual and written—took their own lives. But I’m not interested in being that sort of ghoulish, especially when, instead, I can talk about work that looks to alleviate the loneliness of depression and fund suicide prevention. Honestly, I can’t believe it took this sort of in-your-face connection to bring me around to exploring the metrics and results of popular art project PostSecret. Its creator didn’t start it to be about suicide specifically, but, by it’s very nature, it led people to share thoughts about loneliness, depression, suicide and gave a sort of release valve to those feelings.

If you’re not familiar…well, why ruin the sense of discovery. Check out the slideshow I made below to learn about the project, its influence and the connection to Suicide Prevention Month.

Jul 31
0

Close Encounters of the Creative Kind

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | No Comments

In a previous column, I explored a bit of the what and why of creative placemaking.  But what about the placemaking that’s happening here and now in Baltimore?

Earlier this summer, as I walked around Highlandtown with a group of friends, I stumbled upon two remarkable things…

The first was the Maryland Traditions Folklife Festival was wrapping up as we approached the Creative Alliance. The street was filled with music and smiling faces of all ages. Even though it wasn’t our destination, it was a kind of random joy, the sort you experience just from discovering the cool things going on in your city and the people enjoying them.

Further down the block, we discovered new benches and yarnbombed trees at the intersection of Conkling and Eastern. What had previously just been a street — fairly unremarkable — was now an inviting and creative space.

Yarn-bombed tree in in Yellow Springs, Ohio

Yarn-bombed tree by the Jafagirls. Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Both of these encounters touch upon the strength of creative placemaking: Spaces are transformed and, as a result, they pique your curiosity, invite you in and just plain make you notice them. For residents, the process not only improves your immediate area, it also forges a sense of place and identity.

The public space at Conkling and Eastern is one of the neighborhood improvements that’s come out of a creative placemaking workshop held last May by the Southeast Community Development Corporation, the Creative Alliance and Banner Neighborhoods and facilitated by Deborah Patterson of ARTblocks. The workshop involved a wide cross-section of the community, including residents and area merchants, and resulted in a list of short-term and long-term goals for the community and the Southeast CDC. Creative placemaking is just one of the tools the CDC is using to promote and improve the community, but it’s a significant one because it allows so many voices to be heard and for residents to not only benefit from, but also participate, in the process.

That focus on improvements generated and determined at a grassroots level is the work of Deborah Patterson and ARTblocks and is informed in the placemaking process developed by Project for Public Spaces. I admire the work Patterson is doing because, while the process is consistent (i.e., public workshops soliciting community opinion on issues and solutions), the end result is awesomely varied:

  • A living chair in Druid Hill Park
  • A ceramic mural in Pimlico
  • A guerilla crosswalk in Hampden
  • Elephants in Mondawmin (coming soon!)
  • A mosaic mural on the facade of Westside Elementary (coming soon!)

Photos courtesy of Druid Hill Farmers Market (leftmost) and ARTblocks.

I also appreciate that ARTBlocks projects are happening all across the city, not confined only to designated arts districts. While I’m also excited for the developments in those areas (like the Bromo Tower crosswalks and Europe-Baltimore collaborative placemaking project Transit), I also applaud efforts by ARTblocks and The Baltimore Love Project to make all neighborhoods surprisingly and delightfully artful.

So much of what’s happening in Baltimore is relatively recent, so it’s difficult to quantify the impact of these projects. Next, I’ll be diving back into the numbers, though, and exploring the challenges of communicating the impact of creative placemaking.

Apr 24
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Community art

Meaning & Merit in Community Arts

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | No Comments

So much of establishing metrics and evaluations for an organization or program is about asking the right questions and sometimes those questions take you unexpected places. For Rebecca Yenawine and Zoë Reznick Gewanter, their questions have led them on a multi-year research project encompassing not only the outcomes of community art projects, but also illuminating the meaning and merit of the field itself.

Yenawine and Reznick Gewanter are both involved in MICA’s Community Arts program (Yenawine is an adjunct faculty member and community art evaluation consultant and Reznick Gewanter is a graduate of the Masters of Art in Community Art and research assistant for studies through the Office of Community Engagement) and collaborators in the Reservoir Hill-based youth media nonprofit New Lens. In pursuit of useful evaluations for New Lens, the pair realized more contextual research was needed in the area of community art. They’ve designed and are in the process of completing the following three-phase research project:

  • Phase I (2010): Conducted 14 national interviews with community arts practitioners with ten or more years experience.
Chart describing the outcomes of community art

Outcomes of community art cited by current practitioners in the study. Source.

  • Phase II (2012): Interviewed more than 80 youth participants of Baltimore community arts programs.
  • Phase III (ongoing): Studied the impact of community arts programs in five Baltimore neighborhoods (four with active community arts programs, plus four control neighborhoods), collecting 1,000 surveys.

As a whole, this research looks to document the impacts of community art in order to help other practitioners, organizations, communities and funders. This sort of broad multidisciplinary research is rare and provides a benefit to the entire field. In its first two phases, the study provides a common language with which to discuss outcomes in community art, and the final phase includes the development of an assessment tool that can be adapted across organizations and communities. In addition to better describing the outcomes of community arts programs, the research of Yenawine and Reznick Gewanter also challenges practitioners and organizations to invest in evaluations that are specific to the impact and influence of the field and not simply generic metrics. On the Americans for the Arts web site, Yenawine writes:

If art is in fact offering a space for developing social understanding, for connecting and building relationships, and for developing greater cohesion, part of the story that needs to be told is about how and why this is a valuable counterbalance to a society whose bureaucracies emphasize productivity, economic success, and competition without fostering the larger social fabric of communities.

This is really the value of outcomes and metrics. Data is more than numbers in a spreadsheet, charts submitted with reports; at its best, it empowers our descriptions and understanding of our communities, our work and their merit.

IMAGE CREDIT. Photograph courtesy of New Lens.
Dec 20
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Monkey Money street art

Art & Results

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | No Comments

Some artists and art lovers alike cringe when they encounter the buzzwords of the 9-to-5 business world encroaching on the sacred territory of art, while others seek for their artwork to have not just meaning and aesthetic value, but impact and results.

Sarajevo artist Alma Suljević, for example, creates work that isn’t limited to raising awareness of the deadly impact of landmines after the Bosnian War. Instead, she began by mapping and marking landmines and sharing the resulting documents in art exhibits. Later, she entered the minefields and did the work of clearing landmines and sold the decontaminated minefield soil both as documentation of this work and in order to fund additional efforts to eliminate landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through her work and activism, the actual number of landmines in her country has decreased.

Though I would never ask for all arts to be results-oriented (buy me a beer sometime to hear me rant against prescriptive art critics like Clement Greenburg), some artists create, design and perform work that, either in itself or through its dissemination, provokes a change that is perceptible — even measurable. Additionally, organizations that award and distribute grants to artists and art programs often include inquiries about audience and impact in their applications ― either as a perfunctory note or as a driving motivation.

Given that the mission of ChangingMedia is “creative solutions for social change,” it makes sense to focus not just on art or even community art, but specifically artists who are similarly innovative and results-oriented. In future columns, I’ll share not only art and artists, but also consider and question what impact means in this area of the art world and how it can be measured. I look forward to this discussion and the opportunity to highlight artists like Suljević who, through frustration with the status quo or Utopian inspiration, push their work to make the world a better place.

PHOTO CREDIT. Photo by Flickr user Thierry Ehrmann.

Sep 06
0
Baltimore-Love-Project-Mural

Public Art and Community Art – We Need Both

By | Art & Social Change, Of Love and Concrete, Social Media | No Comments

(Photo: Sean Scheidt)

When I started working on the Baltimore Love Project four years ago, lead artist Michael Owen and I defined it as a city-wide mural project. After several months of pounding the pavement and telling the story of a mural project we discovered that people were confused. We needed to express ourselves differently. We began to define ourselves as a city-wide street art project. We discovered that murals were often viewed as a form of community art, not public art. So what’s the difference?

We found that many communities strongly support murals. They were willing to let an artist paint on the side of their buildings as long as the community had control over the image and the process of painting the image. They believed in community engagement, particularly in the process of creation. This is community art.

The Love Project proposes painting on the side of buildings which communities supported. However, the definition of the project is to paint the exact same image on 20 walls. It does not cater to the specific aesthetic or story of a community. To maintain the integrity of the image and provide exceptionally high quality art to ALL communities the process is also tightly controlled. We believe in community engagement but it happens after the art work is completed. This is public art.

Community art AND public art are incredibly powerful!

Community art can provide the euphoric experience of creation to everyone. A child has the opportunity to hold a paintbrush in hand and see a product of their own doing at the end of the day. A citizen has the opportunity to tell their story and see the reaction of others to their experiences. Community art empowers people where they are at.

Public art provides the challenge of new perspective. A thoughtful and highly skilled artist can establish new analogies with provocative concepts and the stroke of a brush. The creator confronts individuals with a new way to experience the world. He can show the world not only as it is but also as it can be. Public art empowers people with new outlook.

A city with a litany of walls can and should be home to both community art and public art. There is enough room for everyone to express themselves. There is enough room for new perspectives. The combination of both will lead to a healthy city that knows and expresses its story but is also striving to achieve.

In future posts I will delve further into the specific value of the Baltimore Love project. Much like a great wine, the power is in the nuance.