Category

Art That Counts

Apr 24
0
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.
Apr 11
0

Classic Count: The Pulp of the Matter

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Editor’s Note: Our “Art That Counts” columnist has melted all away, or at least her hard-drive did in yesterday’s swelter, so while she attempts to revive it with the flutter of her handkerchief, we present a classic installment of her column on the power of paper, which unlike its digital inheritors can at least be used to fan away the punishing heat. Try doing that with your iPhone. 

The Combat Paper Project invites military veterans to learn how to make paper using their old uniforms. During the multi-day workshops, veterans cut up their uniforms and turn those scraps into pulp and then handmade paper. Participants also have the opportunity to learn a variety of techniques for using the paper, including screenprinting and bookbinding, and the resulting artwork and journals have been exhibited across the country and internationally; selections from the project were exhibited at UMBC last year and were reviewed in Baltimore City Paper. The goal of the project is to “assist veterans in reconciling and sharing their personal experiences as well as broadening the traditional narrative surrounding service and the military culture.”

Combat Paper Sculpture

A collaboration between book artist Drew Matott and soldier-turned-artist Drew Cameron, the project was founded in 2007 and held 26 workshops with veterans across the country last year. Cameron currently serves as director, while Matott has gone on to found a similar project with even broader appeal. The Peace Paper Project uses a format similar to the Combat Paper Project to engage a variety of communities―at schools and universities, in hospitals, with police officers and first responders, in domestic violence shelters―and turns participants’ clothing and cathartic writing into handmade paper. The Peace Paper Project also has an on-staff arts therapist and has run workshops for art therapy programs and conferences.

The impact of both projects is fuzzy on the numbers side; neither web site provides details about the number of participants and, as is true of all traveling workshops, the organizers aren’t in the community to track or see long-term effects. However, it’s hard for me to find fault with these projects that expose participants to crafty skills such as papermaking and printmaking and provide outlets for them to parse, express and share their experiences of violence and grief. For further insight into the benefits of these workshops, I recommend the PBS NewsHour feature on the Combat Paper Project, which includes interviews with local leaders and participants.

IMAGE CREDIT. Standard Operating Procedure by Chris Arendt, 2010.; Sculptural Pieces by Jesse Albrecht, 2010; Photos courtesy of Combat Paper Project and Peace Paper Project.
Mar 28
0
ruler

Why We Measure

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Moving briefly away from the nitty-gritty of metrics, I want to spend some time on the bigger-picture: namely, why we measure and what is measurable.

Why do we measure results of an art project or nonprofit? Artists and nonprofits seek out metrics for several reasons — to provide required metrics for a grant application or report; to prove that donations were used well; to evaluate programming for renewal or expansion; to establish their successes and shortcomings in achieving their mission.

Basically, these motivations can be divided into two types:

  • because someone else wants the data (e.g., donors, grantmakers, government agencies).
  • because the artist/organization has an interest in self-assessment.

In the case of the former, groups have little to no investment in the data itself, only in the outcome. In the latter, however, the motivation to establish the value of the organization or project indicates an investment in what is measured and the story that can be told using that data. (Also, as I wrote previously, frustration with the metrics required by funders can result in organizations getting invested in adopting metrics relevant to their specific mission and programs.)

As Andrew Taylor wrote recently,

If you care internally about good decisions, and metrics will help you (and they will, if they’re specific), then measure. If you are specifically aware of external value that will flow your way if you can express your impact in specific ways, then measure. If neither of these is true, then really, don’t bother. Measuring won’t make a measurable difference.

Measuring for the sake of measurement sends you down a rabbit hole of wasted time and energy. In order to achieve metrics that are worthwhile and reliable, requires establishing goals, monitoring/soliciting data, sorting and analyzing the data and sharing it with stakeholders/leaders. These are not simple tasks, as highlighted by Bill Gates in his 2013 Annual Letter for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

You can achieve amazing progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal-in a feedback loop […]. This may seem pretty basic, but it is amazing to me how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right. […]  I think a lot of efforts fail because they don’t focus on the right measure or they don’t invest enough in doing it accurately.

But what’s the right measure? And what is actually measurable? It’s fairly common for nonprofits and community art projects to be able to establish some basic facts and figures relating to attendance, demographics, and dollars raised. Sometimes these are enough to demonstrate impact or value in a short-term way, but, in general, the results side of nonprofits remains complex and difficult to measure. Just as website analytics have evolved beyond mere clicks and page views to developing a relationship ladder (e.g., converting visitors into subscribers), nonprofits should be willing to investigate and pillage the metrics used by other industries:

All efforts can benefit from these approaches — in both looking beyond our immediate sphere for inspiration, and in stepping back and asking exactly why we want to measure in the first place.

IMAGE CREDIT. CC photo via Flickr user cAtdraco.
Mar 14
0
HIPerwall Demo: Cultural Analytics by Flickr user guategringo

Big Data Meets Art

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | 2 Comments

Big data isn’t something that’s just being covered breathlessly by the likes of Forbes and Fast Company; arts and culture organizations and nonprofits are generating, collecting and sifting through their own data and collaborating to make sense of it all. Initiatives like the Cultural Data Project (CDP) and the National Arts Index have been collecting and sharing data since 2004 and 1998 respectively (check out Baltimore’s Local Arts Index).

The CDP is an online tool which allows arts and cultural organizations to report, review and analyze organizational, programmatic and financial data. Originally developed through a collaboration of Pennsylvania funders, the project expanded to other states beginning in 2007 with Maryland. It now includes 12 states and the District of Columbia. Locally, Maryland State Arts Council is a member of the Maryland CDP Task Force and requires many grantseekers to complete a CDP organizational profile. More than 14,000 arts and cultural organizations have completed a profile, including 447 Maryland organizations (as of December 1st, 2012).

Screenshot from 2013-03-13 19:35:58

This data collection process results in reliable longitudinal data that is useful to researchers and advocates, as well as grant makers and the participant organizations. Participants can run and download reports that compare their activity from year to year, as well as comparisons against data aggregated by other participating organizations on the basis of organization type, geography and budget size.

While it has been run and organized by The Pew Charitable Trusts for the past eight years, the project is currently in transition and will begin operating as an independent nonprofit as of April 1st, 2013. In addition, it announced a collaboration with the arts and business schools at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and other partners to create a National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) at SMU. Together, these organizations look to be a nationwide resource on arts attendance and patronage, the impact of the arts in our communities and the financial trends and health of arts nonprofits. This new center will build upon the comparison reports currently available via the CDP:

NCAR will maintain a website with an interactive “dashboard,” created in partnership with IBM, which will be accessible to arts organizations nationwide. Arts leaders will be able to enter information about their organizations and see how they compare to the highest performance standards for similar organizations in areas such as community engagement, earned and contributed revenue, and balance sheet health.

The current shortcomings and the future potential of the CDP have been outlined in a great article by Talia Gibas and Amanda Keil. Issues such as this were much on my mind as I attended the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance (GBCA)’s gathering of cultural data collectors. While the original invite and some of the presentations focused on mapping data, a broader conversation also took place about the challenges local arts nonprofits face when collecting and analyzing data. I was actually delighted that representatives of the Baltimore tech community (Sharon Paley of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council and Kate Bladow, coordinator of the Tech and Social Change meetup) were attending and a partnership with GBTC has resulted.

There was some discussion that an ongoing group would meet around these issues and, should that come to fruition, I look forward to the opportunity to participate further and meet more individuals involved in the arts and nonprofits who are looking for data-driven answers about the impact of their work. One of my major takeaways from this session, however, was that my consideration of data shouldn’t be limited to metrics of impact, but also the power of data to describe our community. I look forward to highlighting some of this work already ongoing in Baltimore in future columns.

IMAGE CREDIT. CC photo courtesy of Flickr user Brett Walters.
Feb 28
0

Avant-Garde Femmes

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | One Comment

When I opened my copy of The Baltimore Sun last week and saw the front-page headline “Walters Art Museum names new director,” I may have been the only subscriber to skip inside her home and announce a new wave of grrrl power.

The Walters, you see, has selected Julia Marciari-Alexander to replace Gary Vikan as its new executive director. When she starts on April 1st, she will be joining Charm City’s art sisterhood of Doreen Bolger (who has been the Baltimore Museum of Art’s director since 1998) and Rebecca A. Hoffberger (founder and director of the city’s American Visionary Art Museum). Which is to say, Baltimore’s three major art museums will be run by women, which I found to be rather remarkable. As in so many other fields and leadership roles, it’s not always been so.

It’s not even been two decades since art critic Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The glass in the glass ceiling for women in the museum profession remains stubbornly thick.”

Knight was writing in response to the news that Seattle Art Museum had named a female director, Mary Gardner Neill, and noted that she was “one of just three women currently holding the job of director in a major art museum in the United States” in 1994. (The other two were the sorely missed Anne d’Harnoncourt at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the outstanding Kathy Halbreich at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center; d’Harnoncourt died in 2008 and Halbreich is now an associate director at the Museum of Modern Art. Neill married into the Gates family and resigned from her position at SAM in 2009.)

In 2006, the outlook was significantly more positive and Tyler Green wrote in the same paper,

Although women rarely ascend to the top of corporate America—just 1.9% of Fortune 1000 companies have female chief executives, according to Fortune magazine—female art museum directors have become commonplace.

That’s twelve years to go from a mere three directors at major art institutions to being “commonplace.”

And just earlier this year, the Association of Art Museum Directors announced that 43% of its member directors are now women. (It’s worth noting, however, that AAMD is a membership organization and therefore not representative of all art museums nationwide; it also has a strong women’s group which may inspire women directors, in particular, to seek membership.)

It is, still, however, relatively rare for women to be so strongly represented in a city’s major arts organizations. Seattle and Minneapolis remain avant-garde; in the former, the Seattle Art Museum, Frye Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery are now all run by women and, in the latter, the same is true at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and University of Minnesota’s Weisman Art Museum. Santa Fe’s art and cultural institutions are also strong in this light (New Mexico Museum of Art, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of International Folk Art and Palace of the Governors are all run by women, but the city’s museum honoring the work and legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe is not).

I can’t say yet what the addition of Marciari-Alexander to the city’s art scene will mean (although John Lewis has some interesting thoughts on why she is a brave pick for the Walters), but I am inspired given the huge changes Vikan made at the Walters and the impact of Hoffberger (as the founder of AVAM) and Bolger (I can’t be the only one who misses her art blog!). I’m proud to see Baltimore join the ranks of Minneapolis and Seattle; I see the former as particularly inspirational given its innovative and wacky arts scene.

On a final note, I had to cut my grrl power parade short—and not just because the neighbors complained. In Green’s 2006 LAT piece, he also wrote:

That said, not one of the three flagship art museums in the United States—the Met, America’s greatest encyclopedic museum; the National Gallery of Art, the national art museum; or MoMA, the world’s greatest museum of 20th century art—has ever had a woman at the helm.

He wrote those words seven years ago, and they’re still true today.

IMAGE CREDIT. CC photo via Flickr.
Jan 31
0

Metrics for Joy and Life

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Many art programs and projects exist because they seem like good ideas — some because they made good use of an existing space, others because they have good intentions to draw attention to or even solve a community problem. As an example, I present the missions of two now-defunct Baltimore projects:

  1. Operation: Storefront: To match landlords of vacant spaces with tenants to fill space and create life on the street.
  2. Black Male Identity Project (BMI): [To serve] as a catalyst for a national campaign to build, celebrate, and accentuate positive, authentic images and narratives of black cultural identity.

Both of these projects had laudable goals. But there can be substantial difficulty in evaluating the successes and failures in achieving such goals. What does it mean to be a catalyst on a national level or for there to be “life” on a street? Furthermore, how should these things be measured? What can they be compared to?

Evaluations such as this are often considered as an afterthought and usually as an angst-inducing or frustrating rite of passage to receive funding. Clayworks’ founder, Deborah Bedwell, once wrote:

…when I would see the words ‘measurable outcomes’ on a grant proposal, I would experience a wave of nausea and anxiety. I would be required, the grant stated, to prove to the prospective funder that our programs and activities had created a better life for those who touched clay and for the rest of the city — and maybe the rest of humanity.

So, just as an organization or project’s mission and goals can be far reaching and even dramatically overstated, the bar for measurement can also seem impossibly high. In an effort to create one-size-fits-all metrics, some have focused on the most obvious and simple things to identify and measure — such as attendance or economic impact. For some organizations and projects, even these metrics can be challenging. For example, how should the attendance to a mural or other public work of art be estimated? Some sites are using QR codes to track visits, but the necessity of smartphones is an obvious limitation to the resulting data. Some funders have developed their own gauges, such as ArtPlace’s vibrancy indicators, in an effort to create a level playing field among grantseekers and with a hope to create a more useful and larger pool of results data from their activities.

In the case of Clayworks, Bedwell was interested in capturing and communicating something beyond raw numbers about participation in their community arts program and saw the need to “figure out how to evaluate joy, how to measure creativity, and how to quantify that ‘I get it!’ moment that makes weeks of hard work worth the effort.” While many might give up before they started on such an effort, Clayworks received assistance from the Maryland Association of Nonprofits in tackling their evaluation dilemma; they adopted a model used by The Kellogg Foundation, which Bedwell described enthusiastically in an article for the NEA’s web site (Note: This article is no longer online, but is available as a PDF download. All Bedwell’s quotes are originally from this article.).

So, if one can measure the joy found in creating, then it is likely also possible to measure — with adequate thought and planning — the “life” or vibrancy of a street or neighborhood, the changes in attitudes inspired by a photograph or a lecture. It’s important for these challenging metrics to be tackled and shared, not just so funders can identify return on investment, but so artists and communities can benefit, be able to point to their successes, to know which efforts are worth continuing and repeating.

I plan on diving into this in even greater detail in future posts, as well as continuing to highlight existing art projects and their impact. If you want to share some insights about your organization or project, I invite you to join me in the comments or to reach out to me via Twitter or email.

Noteworthy:

If you are inspired by or involved in the intersection of arts, culture and community, these upcoming events may be worth your time to check out:

PHOTO CREDIT. Photo of entrance to the Franklin Building in Chicago by Flickr user Terence Faircloth/Atelier Teee.

Jan 17
0

The Pulp of the Matter

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Synchronicity. This weekend, I’ll be teaching at Mesh Baltimore, so I was already reflecting on Robyn’s previous posts on the benefits of a sharing economy. In reviewing skills and researching presentation techniques for my papermaking workshop, I was surprised to come across some remarkable projects that use papermaking as a tool for social good and art therapy.

The Combat Paper Project invites military veterans to learn how to make paper using their old uniforms. During the multi-day workshops, veterans cut up their uniforms and turn those scraps into pulp and then handmade paper. Participants also have the opportunity to learn a variety of techniques for using the paper, including screenprinting and bookbinding, and the resulting artwork and journals have been exhibited across the country and internationally; selections from the project were exhibited at UMBC last year and were reviewed in Baltimore City Paper. The goal of the project is to “assist veterans in reconciling and sharing their personal experiences as well as broadening the traditional narrative surrounding service and the military culture.”

A collaboration between book artist Drew Matott and soldier-turned-artist Drew Cameron, the project was founded in 2007 and held 26 workshops with veterans across the country last year. Cameron currently serves as director, while Matott has gone on to found a similar project with even broader appeal. The Peace Paper Project uses a format similar to the Combat Paper Project to engage a variety of communities―at schools and universities, in hospitals, with police officers and first responders, in domestic violence shelters―and turns participants’ clothing and cathartic writing into handmade paper. The Peace Paper Project also has an on-staff arts therapist and has run workshops for art therapy programs and conferences.

The impact of both projects is fuzzy on the numbers side; neither web site provides details about the number of participants and, as is true of all traveling workshops, the organizers aren’t in the community to track or see long-term effects. However, it’s hard for me to find fault with these projects that expose participants to crafty skills such as papermaking and printmaking and provide outlets for them to parse, express and share their experiences of violence and grief. For further insight into the benefits of these workshops, I recommend the PBS NewsHour feature on the Combat Paper Project, which includes interviews with local leaders and participants.

PHOTO CREDIT. Standard Operating Procedure by Chris Arendt, 2010. Photo courtesy of Combat Paper Project.

Jan 03
0

Soil Kitchen

By | Art & Social Change, Art That Counts | One Comment

Community art projects that create real impact may look more like a laboratory or even a soup kitchen than a traditional art installation. Soil Kitchen was all of the above and more. Organized by the San Francisco-based art-design collaborative Futurefarmers and commissioned by Philadelphia’s Office of the Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Soil Kitchen was a temporary re-purposing of an abandoned building into a multi-use site to inspire and empower visitors to plant urban gardens.

This artist-led intervention included the collaboration of community members, local environmental and food-issues organizations and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). During the six days in April 2011 when the site was open, residents brought in 357 soil samples, which were tested for lead, arsenic and cadmium content by a mobile EPA lab, then added to a soil archive and logged in a city-wide map of brownfields. More than 300 bowls of soup made from locally sourced ingredients were offered gratis to visitors in exchange for soil samples. The space was also used for workshops and lectures related to gardening, soil contamination, cooking lessons and food issues.

Timed to coincide with the EPA’s National Brownfields Conference, Soil Kitchen was a brief project; however, more sustainable models for this type of exchange and multi-use site are worth exploring given both the increased interest in urban gardens and farms and the very real concerns about urban soil contamination. In addition, the role of artists in initiating and coordinating such unique and multi-dimensional solutions cannot be emphasized enough.

I hate to use the phrase “out of the box,” but that’s exactly what this project was; it wasn’t limited to being a single thing, meeting a single objective or representing a single agency. Instead, it drew from all quarters and, as a result, a community benefited in ways that can be measured — in ladles of soup, pH levels and hours donated — and in long-term impacts that will also hopefully be explored by the city agencies and individuals involved.

PHOTO CREDIT. Photo courtesy of Futurefarmers.

Dec 20
0
Monkey Money street art

Art & Results

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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.