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| | Barbara Goldstein and Lisa Richmond |
Exploring the role of artistic thinking in the urban context has always been at the core of the discipline called public art. Inserting the artist’s creative thinking into a specific physical environment has led to design team projects and permanently sited work. But until recently the public art genre has limited itself largely to the physical, producing artworks that incorporate cultural icons and local history in their imagery without significantly engaging communities in their development.
In Seattle, the public art program has adopted as its mission "to actively engage artists in the civic dialogue". In Seattle, and in cities across the country, a recent move into the realm of the virtual – of ideas, of discourse, of community – has broadened public art’s reach. The results are original and unexpected artistic encounters, and a new way to celebrate the power of art and ideas to transform communities.
The key has been to think of artists less as a generator of objects, and more as a source of new ideas within the urban context. This has led to public art programming that privileges process and engagement. Public artists are taking on new roles as cultural animator, as planner, or, as Rick Lowe of Houston’s Project Row Houses calls it, the “passion ball” that can galvanize entire communities and inspire social change.
Often, the results of this type of art practice cross all sorts of discipline boundaries, so that their character as “art” may not even be readily apparent. Yet the artist’s creative thinking, stamina, and aesthetic are absolutely essential to such projects.
Public support is critical to the development of this field of practice. The government framework must move beyond bureaucracy to be a champion of new thinking. Free from commercial constraints, the City can act as a bully pulpit to develop new models for thinking about public art and urban lived experience.
One such model is ARTS UP: Artist Residencies Transforming Seattle’s Urban Places, a program of the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs that pairs artists from around the country with Seattle communities to engage in arts-based civic dialogue. ARTS UP is founded on the idea that art plays a vital role in thinking about the city, that it can stimulate fresh ideas about old problems, give voice to citizens, and create a forum for group expression and action. Artists work together with communities to identify core issues and concerns, then develop an art project around them. ARTS UP is an act of faith in the creative process, and reinforces the notion that art can be at once community-based, challenging and articulate.
In its initial two years, the artworks and activities that have resulted from the program have been as mutable in form as the participation it has attracted. Communities participating in ARTS UP have included such diverse groups as homeless youth, neighborhood groups, cancer patients, elderly Asians, and the parents of children with disabilities. The artworks that have emerged from the program have included media projects, publications, performative works, and permanently sited artwork, each bringing innovative ideas and insight into the issues and concerns of the community that helped create them.
The Freemobile developed out of a collaboration between Oakland artist Jon Rubin and residents of Hillman City, an extremely diverse neighborhood in Southeast Seattle that has struggled to find its own identity. In an atmosphere with little community cohesion, the critical task became simply getting folks outside and talking to each other. Rubin, and his community liaison Michelle Jones, enlisted a cadre of residents willing to share with their neighbors things they made or did. Then for eight weeks last summer, the Freemobile, an old ice cream truck with original painting and theme music, cruised the neighborhood, distributing free handmade items such as candles and services such as hair-braiding and bike repair. The project was so successful in creating community that Hillman City wants to repeat it in 2004; other city neighborhoods are looking to it as a model for inviting participation.
Endurance is a multi-media installation designed to give a strong local and national voice to homeless youth in Seattle. Endurance, created through a collaboration between artists Brad McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry and the kids of Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets, recorded the oral testimony of participants and their endurance performance on a Seattle sidewalk. The resulting work, which has been exhibited and published nationally, has created a powerful voice for the youth, as well as an encouragement to change. The Endurance exhibition was the site of a multi-disciplinary dialogue about homelessness, using the artwork as an entrée into the lives of street youth for civic leaders, legislators, service providers, funders, the police department and other issue stakeholders.
Becoming Citizens represents an interesting hybrid of art, medicine, social service, policy and visual anthropology. The work comprises a publication (University of Washington Press, 2005) and exhibition about the lives of families living with children with developmental disabilities. The artist, Susan Schwartzenberg, used interviews and visual materials developed through workshops with families of Seattle Family Network to place disabilities issues — such as institutionalization, the disability civil rights movement, and waning public support for families — into a broader social and political context. The work has found audiences in the scientific, art, and policy communities, and will be used as an advocacy tool.
Other ARTS UP projects point to a host of provocative ideas developed through the insertion of the artist into the civic environment. In his collaboration with the Courtland Place neighborhood, artist Don Fels generated an archaeological dig and research project for young people that looked at history as a way of defining community. In her work Postcards in Time with the elderly low-income Asian residents of Kawabe Memorial House, artist Rene Yung used a response system of postcards of residents’ stories and images to invite dialogue with the world outside the walls of the institution.
The laboratory for ARTS UP is Seattle, a city that has long embraced the innovative thinking of artists in an urban context, and is characterized by a history of activism and process among its citizenry. During the 1990s, the City engaged in extensive neighborhood planning efforts intended to promote and manage growth in a rational way. The plans were published, neighborhoods were funded to create pilot projects, and City departments built some of their development priorities around neighborhood plans. However, participation in planning often favored communities who were already predisposed to participation — generally middle-class, middle-aged, middle-income white residents — while newer communities, and communities that are defined outside of geographic boundaries (such as ethnic communities, or communities of interest), were not well represented. As an art program, ARTS UP deliberately set out to address those missing elements.
ARTS UP values risk-taking. The project has the faith and courage to inject new ways of thinking into a dynamic urban context and the patience to let ideas unfold as they will. Some of the projects will fail or flounder. But without giving artists the leeway to experiment, the program would lose its raison d’etre, and its excitement.
Artists have always openly courted risks; some of the best and most enduring art has involved pushing comfort zones. But embracing risk is much more difficult territory for the City to underwrite. ARTS UP is working with a host of intangibles and unknowns. Communities come together and then people move on. Ideas change and so do the circumstances that surround them.
Despite the risks, ARTS UP has remained committed to open-ended process and has been willing to listen and learn. In today’s social and economic climate this is a rare and brave stance. The possible pay off to the community is enormous. Artists and communities participating in the program are being trusted, their ideas valued. With that trust has come art that has managed to deliver even more than promised. |
Barbara Goldstein and Lisa Richmond are public art managers for the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. |
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