Art Could Be Used to Creatively Engage Other People About an Important Global Issue

Past Tom Borrup

This excerpt from the book The Artistic Community Architect's Handbook: How to Transform Communities Using Local Assets, Arts and Culture (2007 Fieldstone Alliance), makes a compelling case that cultural projects are not only a luxury but play a fundamental office in reviving the fortunes and boosting the prospects of poor, minority and other disadvantaged communities.

Civic institutions, like museums, public galleries, community art organizations, performing art institutions, arts councils and public arts organizations take a rare opportunity to pb pregnant change by engaging specific groups to aid devise and carry out creative customs-edifice neighborhood programs. But it needn't always be the institution that takes action. The selected stories shown below offer inspiring examples of how individual artists can besides make a difference.

Tom Borrup was managing director of the innovative Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis for more 20 years, and is a nationally recognized leader in cultural and community evolution work. He wrote this book with Partnership for Livable Communities.

The Creative Community Architect'due south Handbook tin exist ordered from the publisher, Fieldstone Alliance. For more information see www.communityandculture.com or www.livable.com.

The links between the economic health of a community and the quality of its social bonds are becoming increasingly clear. Robert Putnam and other sociologists take supplied convincing evidence that stiff social connections are necessary ingredients of economical success.

In looking for the ingredients that affect the concrete well-existence of people in different kinds of places, Dr. Felton Earls, a Harvard professor of public wellness, conducted an extensive, fifteen-year study in neighborhoods beyond Chicago. His research plant that the single-well-nigh important factor differentiating levels of health from one neighborhood to the next was what he called "collective efficacy." He was surprised to discover that information technology wasn't wealth, access to healthcare, crime, or some more than tangible factor that topped the list. A more elusive ingredient--the capacity of people to act together on matters of common interest--made a greater deviation in the health and well-being of individuals and neighborhoods.

The communities profiled hither found opportunities for people to come together in creation and celebration of civilisation. They developed their social capital by cooperating, sharing, and seeking and finding shared goals, and by developing ties on a cultural level. These connections serve these communities well in their other endeavors--from economic development to civic participation to salubrious living.

1. Promote Interaction in Public Space

Public spaces and marketplaces are essential ingredients in every community. Public space provides opportunities for people to meet and be exposed to a variety of neighbors. These meetings oftentimes take place past chance, but they likewise can come through active organizing. The art of promoting constructive interaction amid people in public spaces has been virtually forgotten in many communities. Planners, architects, and public administrators accept focused more on creating aesthetic places and on providing for the unimpeded move and storage of automobiles than on creating places that encourage social interaction. More than recently, public officials have been even more than concerned with security and maximizing their ability to observe and control people in public spaces.

William H. Whyte asserted that crowded, pedestrian-friendly, agile spaces are safer, more economically productive, and more conducive to healthy civic communities. "What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people," he wrote. Since the 1950s, city planners, developers, policy makers, and transportation engineers take built and modified communities in simply the opposite vein.

While the design of public space influences its utilise, Project for Public Spaces notes that 80 percent of the success of a public space is the effect of its "management," referring to how the space is maintained and activities programmed. In other words, even in the best-designed spaces for public interaction, activities need to be planned, and the space needs to be clean, secure, and well maintained, or it is unlikely to serve people well.

Public art administrators and cultural planners of all kinds can be significant players in designing, managing, and programming public space. Increasingly, artists are being tapped to interact with architects, landscape architects, engineers, and city planners in the design and cosmos of public spaces, buildings, roads, highways, and public transit facilities.

Equally important as the infinite, piece of art, or consequence is the process by which information technology is created. A puppet parade may simply exist a group of artists marching in the street, or it may be the result of a lengthy, community-wide process involving hundreds of residents who begin themes, construct and pigment the puppets, plan the activities, and march together with their families and neighbors.

Success Story #1

Providence, Rhode Isle: WaterFire

Igniting A New Urban Spirit

WaterFire, a public art event in Providence, Rhode Island, brings unprecedented numbers of people together on a regular ground to share a profound experience. At the same time information technology instills pride, belonging, interaction, and homo connection. Created by a public artist, WaterFire involves hundreds of volunteers and supporters, and information technology has become role of the community'southward collective identity.

Built at the convergence of ii rivers, Providence covered its polluted downtown waterways in the 1950s with roads, rail yards, and expanded parking lots. In the early on 1990s, the city uncovered, or "daylighted," the rivers and lined them with public promenades and pedestrian-friendly parks.

WaterFire, a public art event that takes place on the downtown waterways, became the needed goad for revitalization. The event involves music, performances, ceremonial bonfires, boats, and ritual and, when it is staged, transforms almost one mile of Providence's downtown. One hundred burn baskets, or braziers, are placed at regular intervals in waterways that current of air through the heart of downtown. Filled with fragrant local firewood and set ablaze at sunset, they're fed late into the nighttime by black-garbed "fire tenders" who make their style from fire to fire in small boats. Powerful and mesmerizing music, conducted through an elaborate speaker system, seems to emanate from the flames.

Artist Barnaby Evans conceived WaterFire every bit a former event in 1994, only citizens immediately recognized the power of Evans' spectacle, in which fire evoked a ritual feel and the flames symbolized the renaissance of the city. Their support, seconded past the metropolis's mayor, led to the institutionalization of WaterFire as a community ritual in 1997.

Evans created WaterFire Providence in 1997 as a nonprofit organization to carry on the public art event. Today, twenty-five events, or "lightings," are held each year, jump through fall. Each outcome attracts as many equally 100,000 people to downtown Providence's public spaces. Multiple partnerships with social service, education, arts, and borough groups help promote other causes through the effect and provide a steady stream of volunteers, weaving a fabric of community through multiple levels of participation.

Visitors now come from around the world, and local residents volunteer for and nourish the event again and once again. Past working across public, business, and nonprofit sectors, the urban center revived its economic system. Perhaps more importantly, WaterFire boosted the community's spirit and self-epitome beyond what anyone could take imagined.

world wide web.waterfire.org

2. Increase Borough Participation Through Celebrations

Creating the kind of connections betwixt people that lead to collective borough action is a challenge for any planner, organizer, or customs builder. It?south a lot of hard work and there's no secret formula, simply it's an essential ingredient in a democratic lodge. Annual or seasonal events such as festivals or farmers markets tin can be specially effective in communities with slap-up social, ethnic, and economic variety. The processes used to programme and comport out these events are at least equally important equally the events themselves.

Success Story #ii

Delray Beach, Florida: Cultural Loop and History Trail

Keeping Everyone in the Loop

Planners and a multitude of artists involved in the Delray Embankment Cultural Loop plant inventive ways to connect a wide range of people for the first time through community-based cultural organizations. This process crossed indigenous boundaries and helped people celebrate together in a apace growing area of due south Florida.

Situated on the Atlantic declension near Palm Beach, Delray Beach is an unusually various suburban community. There are numerous arts and cultural organizations in the customs that offer exhibitions, performances, and classes and an equal number of celebrated groups and sites. Many churches and other places of importance serve as sites for ritual, anniversary, and social activity.

The Delray Cultural Loop and History Trail began as a i-time outcome on a weekend in November 2003. Information technology consisted of a 1.3-mile rectangular route that led participants to sites representing all the metropolis's major ethnic groups. In doing and so, it showcased the community'due south rich and diverse cultural heritage. Partnerships between cultural and community-based groups rooted in the African American, Haitian, Anglo, and Latino communities were important to the issue'due south success.

The cultural loop tour included xiv churches, six civic institutions, and xx-three boosted celebrated sites, all welcoming passersby. A variety of artists projects--on utility poles, copse, sidewalks, and kiosks--lined the way. Each told a story of the people and the place. A vacant lot was occupied past the Open Door Projection, displaying over one hundred used doors, painted and collaged in preceding weeks past people of all ages through workshops allow by artist Sharon Koskoff. The spectacular drove of doors symbolized the people and events that helped open the doors of diversity and opportunity for individuals and the community.

A "dark-green" marketplace featuring fresh, locally-grown foods, holiday craft show, and outdoor art fair were other attractions along the route, and One-time Schoolhouse Firm Square near the center of the rectangle featured music and entertainment. Miami-based artist Gary Moore gear up up a temporary barbershop in a vacant firm in the African American neighborhood, offering free haircuts and a glimpse into the world of Blackness pilus for travelers on the loop.

Delray Beach'due south Cultural Loop connected people in celebration of their own diversity. Although rapidly growing and predominantly prosperous, Delray Beach has ongoing healing and bridge-edifice work to do. The cultural loop was a unique issue that helped locals to be tourists discovering their ain hometown using familiar public spaces. At the same time, it gave visitors admission to the various cultural riches and history of this southward Florida beachside community.

world wide web.delrayconnect.com www.delraybeach.com

3. Engage Youth in the Community

Including young people as meaningful contributors in the social and economic aspects of community building must non exist disregarded and cannot be left to schools and parents solitary.

Engaging youth has a dual benefit: it brings more adults into the flick. Enquiry in civic engagement by the League of Women Voters indicates that the gene most likely to become people more involved in community affairs is helping to better conditions for youth. "Problems related to children, including mentoring and coaching, and education are those nigh likely to mobilize the untapped reservoir of volunteers."

Success Story #three

Boston, Massachusetts: Artists For Humanity

Creative Entrepreneurs Earn Respect

The Artists for Humanity programs in Boston does just that. Information technology provides avenues for youth to get socially conscious and engaged entrepreneurs who span economical and cultural differences. Youth build confidence and proceeds business organisation experience while working with professional artists as mentors and instructors.

Artists For Humanity (AFH) began in 1990, when Susan Rodgerson, an contained artist, worked with students at Boston's Martin Luther Rex Middle School to paint a mural. Afterwards it was consummate, six students asked her if they could paint something else. That summer they showed up at her studio every solar day as she institute things for them to paint, somewhen turning their attention to designing and producing T-shirts to earn coin. In 1992, Rodgerson and the vi students incorporated equally a nonprofit. While they secured more commissions and product sales, the group developed studio production activities in graphic pattern, commercial photography, silk-screen printing, sculpture, theatrical fix design, ceramics, and painting. The system later added warehouse space for offices and a gallery.

In 2004, AFH opened a state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly "green" facility with 23,500 square feet of studio, gallery, performance, and office space in Boston's Fort Point Aqueduct Arts District.

The arrangement works with youth primarily betwixt the ages of fourteen and eighteen from all parts of the metropolis. Fundamentally, it is based upon a pocket-size business model, concentrating on what young artists can creatively produce, rather than following a social service model that attempts to address their shortcomings. Young artists are paid and participate in client meetings and contract negotiations. AFH is careful not to depict boundaries betwixt commercial arts and fine arts--art as personal expression and art as a product for sale. By embracing both, the organization encourages youth to tap their intrinsic creativity.

Artists For Humanity operates every bit a structured, paid apprentice program to pair teens with experienced artists in a wide range of fine and commercial arts for product development and services to the business customs. Participating youth represent the unabridged metropolis and come primarily from low-income neighborhoods.The programme employs roughly eighty young artists in its microenterprise programs each year and serves over 3 hundred through drop-in programs. The young artists receive an hourly wage and have the opportunity to earn a 50 percentage commission on each individual work they sell through the gallery, shows, or negotiated contracts. T-shirts, murals, graphic design, and fine fine art works are the primary earned-revenue sources. While AFH has earned over $one.vii million since 1996, foundation grants and corporate sponsorships even so account for the largest share of the organization's budget.

www.afhboston.com

iv. Promote the Ability and Preservation of Identify

When people become involved in the design, cosmos, and upkeep of places, they develop a vested interest in using and maintaining these spaces. When they have a true sense of "ownership" or connection to the places they frequent, the community becomes a amend place to alive, work, and visit. The residents' feelings of respect and responsibleness for the place bonds them to that place and to each other. No architect or boondocks planner can blueprint or build a place that does that.

"The sooner the community becomes involved in the planning procedure the ameliorate--ideally before any planning has been washed," write Kathy Madden and Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces in the book How to Turn A Identify Around. "And people should be encouraged to stay involved throughout the comeback effort then that they become owners or stewards of the place every bit it evolves."

Citizen involvement in public decision making is too often reactive and negative in character. People are inclined to involve themselves when the status quo is threatened. Only denizen involvement is best when community members and grassroots organizations accept the atomic number 82.

Success Story #4

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Hope Community

Building the Urban Village

Promise Community in Minneapolis stimulates the creative juices of its citizens in shaping and uplifting their customs's self-image. The system has not only made people believe great things are possible simply besides it has already accomplished many great things. Through an asset-based community-organizing strategy and "listening process," Hope Customs brought people of multiple ethnicities together in small-group dialogues. Hope has organized three major listening projects--each including more than three hundred adults and youth--focused on jobs and education, the meaning of community, and the design of a park. In fact, the organization has designed an entire neighborhood with business organisation for children as the unifying factor based upon what it learned from listening. Engaging people through their cultural traditions and involving artists equally catalysts have become key parts of Hope's strategy.

The Phillips neighborhood but south of downtown is the poorest and most racially diverse of Minneapolis's eighty-six neighborhoods. It serves as home to a long-standing and politically organized Native American community, as well as burgeoning Latino and Due east African immigrant communities. Hope Community, Inc., is a customs development corporation steeped in a tradition of "creating non just housing merely community." Equally of 2005, Hope owned and managed 89 units of housing and over six,500 square feet of community space, with plans in motion for 250 more units and 20,000 square feet of new commercial infinite.

Hope embraces active listening and a cultural focus in all information technology does. In 1997, Hope began its Listening Project to assistance learn about residents' ideas on educational activity and jobs. More than than thirty dialogue groups helped deepen Hope's relationships with the community and its understanding of these problems. A larger projection with over 3 hundred participants, including many youth, subsequently focused on the meanings, struggles, and hopes people attach to neighborhoods and communities.

These discussions led into a projection to redesign Peavey Park, an underutilized, crime-ridden park that the Minneapolis Park Board had scheduled for an overhaul. The listening and visioning procedure enabled Promise to engage broad-based participation and to recognize that building customs was the cardinal purpose of the park. Hope arrived at the design through a series of creative workshops that were subsequently translated into a formal design and adopted by the Park Board.

As Hope brought together what information technology learned with its core activity of creating a safe environment for children, it embarked on a assuming project to envision a larger community it called Children?south Village. The organization commissioned professional planners to draw up designs for this sixteen-block expanse and presented them to urban center leaders and the media. In 2003, Children's Village Centre opened. It is a four-story, xxx-unit of measurement, depression-income housing complex that includes offices for a staff and a community middle. It sits prominently as the first of four developments at the intersection of two major city thoroughfares. When consummate, these well-designed centers of community activity volition betoken a massive turnaround for a neighborhood long infested with drugs, poverty, and hopelessness.

www.promise-community.org

5. Broaden Participation in the Borough Calendar

Some people accept argued that social upper-case letter--the volunteer organizations and efforts that provide the glue in whatever customs--has eroded steadily over the past two generations, as seen by the drops in participation in social and civic groups. This crisis may actually be one in which the one-time tools for involving people in civic issues are no longer sufficient to run across new challenges. The tools may have lost effectiveness as the population diversifies.

At the aforementioned time, many social, civic, and cultural functions have been "professionalized" in ways that exclude participation of ordinary citizens. From customs to customs beyond the Usa, professional arts organizations have grown up where voluntary groups in one case stood. This trend has severed the exercise and feel of the arts from 24-hour interval-to-day life. Participation in cultural activities (equally opposed to spectatorship) connects people to each other and to their community institutions, providing pathways to other forms of participation. Thus, arts and civilization can create opportunities for political expression, community dialogue, shared cultural experiences, and civic work.

Inside the arts, there is a vital withal lesser-known field of practice that strives to develop cultural understanding and civic engagement. Community-based arts practitioners bring members of a community together to solve issues, build relationships, and get involved in ways that rebuild social capital.

Success Story #5

Danville, Vermont: Danville Transportation Enhancement Project

Where Artists Encounter the Route

In rural Danville, Vermont, artists and highway planners engaged citizens to solve a route construction dilemma. The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project found a unique style to identify and resolve touchy issues of values and aesthetics.

Danville is a community of two,200 people in the northeastern office of Vermont. Information technology sits on U.S. Highway Route 2, part of the National Highway System and one of the major east-west roads across northern New England. With the White Mountains as a backdrop, Danville boasts some of New England's most unspoiled and spectacular scenery.

The town is anchored by a classic village green with a Civil War monument, bandstand, distinctive schoolhouse, general store, courthouse, and churches. The Danville Village Improvement Club was formed in 1896 to beautify the boondocks. The following twelvemonth information technology placed an elegant stone watering trough on the greenish, an assiduities however in utilise today. The social club besides installed street lamps and planted rows of shade trees on the light-green and along the streets surrounding it. The past one hundred years have brought little alter to the town and its appearance.

The purpose of the Danville Transportation Enhancement Project was to plan for the redevelopment of a portion of U.S. Highway 2 through the town's village centre. The Danville project needed to notice a way to upgrade route conditions and meet federal highway requirements, while respecting the artful, economic, and cultural textile of the community.

Highway expansion in a rural expanse, where the most valuable currency is often artful, can be difficult and controversial, pitting residents, businesses, local officials, and state officials against each other. Many quaint towns and villages have lost all sense of place and have been economically and socially devastated past such expansion. The Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) is a leader in the national move among transportation agencies toward context-sensitive blueprint solutions and public involvement. Vtrans aims to bring communities together early in the planning process to help design environmentally responsible transportation infrastructure that promotes safety and efficiency while preserving the customs's vision of itself.

A local review commission was formed as office of the legislated highway planning process. Two artists were selected--landscape architect David Raphael as pb creative person and sculptor Andrea Wasserman--to joining the local review committee. The Danville projection implemented the principles of context-sensitive pattern and the fourth dimension-honored Vermont traditions of public meetings, civil soapbox, and representative commonwealth. Artists, working closely with engineers and residents, infused the procedure with creative problem solving and openness to new ideas.

Raphael and Wasserman led community meetings, interviewed residents, and circulated questionnaires. They helped residents envision the hereafter of the hamlet and its fundamental green, and they took the community through a review of preliminary VTrans designs. The civic engagement process was the virtually of import aspect of the projection. It was purposefully inclusive, sensitive, engaging, and ongoing. Having artists, rather than highway engineers, lead the procedure seemed less threatening to community participants, and they were more constructive at devising satisfying alternatives.

A final blueprint and enhancements were presented to the Danville community in tardily 2002. Construction and completion are scheduled through the latter function of the decade. Enhancements include gateways with signage, lighting, landscaping, granite posts, and sidewalk markers to alarm motorists that they are entering a village middle. Streetscape designs reinforce the village character and improve aesthetics and pedestrian comfort.

Almost as of import equally the road design, a number of related activities emerged from the community process, specially those involving youth? -- projects that got started right away. They include a pupil photography projection that led to postcards and a Danville calendar. Other students carved rock figures to exist embedded along three miles of physical sidewalk. Youth planted seedlings in the project's right-of-mode, and they designed tile markers, a ceramic playground mural, and clay cutouts of hands to hang in the hamlet green.

Putting a team of artists at the helm of highway design may seem risky. Yet, when the most difficult part of highway construction is sorting out and negotiating private and customs values, feelings, and aesthetics, it makes sense--and information technology works. The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project fabricated everyone an expert in highway construction. In and so doing, the Danville project met the needs of local residents and the pike department. Community members of all ages gained a new understanding of the function and possibilities of highways, as well as a greater understanding of what they tin exercise when they piece of work creatively together.

www.danvilleproject.com

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Source: https://www.pps.org/article/artsprojects

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