“The Artist is the City: Public Art as Community Activation” 10/5 Recap + Video
What is the role of the artist and the creative economy in helping to frame the narrative of a city? How can artists shape the experience of built urban spaces? How can they make us rethink and deepen the discussion about equity, inclusion, hope, resilience?
In this event we heard from some of our leading public arts programs and projects, including Mural Arts Philadelphia, the nation’s largest public art program; the Greenwood Art Project, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, formed on the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre; the Passageways Project and Ed Johnson Memorial in Chattanooga, TN; and the Capital Region’s own Breathing Lights project, which transformed the landscape of vacant properties into an illuminated life form that catalyzed the region’s awareness around disinvestment, poverty, and structural racism.
"City Thread" Sports Collaborative, Greg Curso & Molly Hunker. Passageways 2.0
As an organization, the Future of Small Cities Institute focuses on small metro regions often marked by dormant infrastructure—vacant lots, factories, alleyways, rail lines. Spaces that have traditionally been underutilized but are ripe for reactivation. Small cities are also hampered by eternal capacities issues—there is never enough time or money or human power. And this means that these cities frequently lean into collaborations and partnerships with the civic and non profit and private sectors, and they utilize activation solutions that are inexpensive but transformative: a couple of buckets of paint, some community programming, and a website can go a long way towards making people see their city differently.
Often these small legacy cities are affordable and open to flexibility—in short, they are places where artists and creatives flourish and prosper. And artists in turn shape the city with their transcendent visions of possible worlds. But what happens when the artists help transform a city into a place everyone wants to be and the city becomes too expensive for the artist to live in that city anymore?
In this webinar we explored this question and others, including how we we sustain an ongoing city-wide conversation even after a public art project is finished, how we invite young people to be apart of that visioning process, and how we honor and support the artists themselves?
"Boat People" Claes Gabriel (2020), Mural Arts Philadephia
JANE GOLDEN and NETANEL PORTIER from Mural Arts Philadelphia opened our webinar with an amazing portrait of their organization's 35-year history and institutional knowledge-build across five mayoral administrations. Ms. Golden, Mural Arts founder and Executive Director, described how Mural Arts began as a small scale anti-graffiti education program way back in 1984, but quickly grew in size as they began commissioning and collaborating with artists to create murals across the city.
People said the murals would get written on… but no one was writing on the murals, they were beacons and focal points. They were signs that people cared. That things could change and government could be effective.
In 2003, Mayor John Street, who was a big fan of public art, made Mural Arts part of the Division of Social Services. “Suddenly we were at the table," said Ms. Golden. "Every department should think about art. I’m a big believer that our program should be aspirational, we should believe in big ideas, but I’m also pragmatic. How can we get this done?"
"We Still Here!" (2021) Gaiaa, Jetsonorama, & Ursula Rucker. Mural Arts Philadephia.
Mural Arts found themselves increasingly working with schools, refugees, the incarcerated, and those recently released from prison. " We found ourselves getting more and more involved in social and civic issues across the city," said Ms. Golden.
4000+ murals later, Mural Arts is embedded in nearly every aspect of the city. It is a treasured cultural and social institution. “We employ hundreds of artists every year. Artists are agents of change. They will look at an issue and think about it differently. We must have creative people at the table... Our traditional interventions fail us."
"Summer Kalaidescope" (2015) Jessie Unterhalter & Katey Truhn. Mural Arts Philadephia
After years of learning how to engage with the community, artists and all the various stakeholders in a multidimensional public arts program, Mural Arts started the Mural Arts Institute in 2017 to advance research on and development of socially-engaged public art practices. It’s also meant to provide support services and training for artists, communities, and municipalities on their own public art journey.
MS. PORTIER, who directs the Mural Arts Institute, showed us one of the many tools the institute offers, a meta-reflective deck of cards called “Level UP! Imagine Reflect, and Collaborate” that helps communities with different approaches for facilitating individual or group learning experiences, reflecting on their own practices, and imagining new and more equitable forms of participatory, socially engaged public artmaking.
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SCC Rendering: Facing North-West on the Kensington Expressway, between Sisters Hospital and Canisius College.
JERICA WORTHAM, an accomplished spoken-word artist, is also the program director for Greenwood Art Project in Tulsa, OK, which was awarded a $1 million Bloomberg Public Art Challenge grant to explore the legacy of Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre on its centennial.
“We wanted this to be an opportunity for the community to have its reckoning with its past but also navigate through healing," said Ms. Wortham. "How do we move forward as a community? How do we continue to grow and thrive? How to take this opportunity to reflect on uniting as a city and honor the space we’re in?”
Ms. Wortham described how the planning and selection process for artworks included in the project was intensely community driven and egalitarian in its methodology, facilitating hundreds of applications from community members for potential art projects and ultimately awarding funding to thirty.
"This was a story told by Tulsa for Tulsa."
Over the course of the past year, the project was incredibly wide ranging and multifaceted, with live performances, installations, readings, tours, a mobile gallery van, and a citywide call and response poster project. "This was an opportunity to engage and teach young and old, to break the silence around our history," said Mr. Wortham. "“People were able to take ownership for the art, and say, 'That’s my cousin, my sister, my aunt.'”
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KATELYN KIRNIE, former director of Public Art Chattanooga, has had played a major role in ushering in Chattanooga's public art renaissance, though as she pointed out, the city has been engaged in public art projects since the early 1990s.
"The city has reinvented itself as a public art city."
Now, many point to Chattanooga as a model for how small, post-industrial cities can transform their downtown and neighborhood spaces by investing in public art projects and supporting an ecosystem of artist support and civic art making.
Ms. Kirnie addressed multiple projects during her tenure at Public Art Chattanooga, including one of the most visible initiatives, the Passageways 1.0 and 2.0, which reactivated the downtown alleyways through a series of temporary (and eventually permanent) installations. The downtown Chattanooga economic development organization River City Company was instrumental in guiding these installations from concept to execution.
Passageways 1.0 coincided with the 2016 national AIA conference in Chattanooga and featured 6 temporary public art alleyway installations, including Garden Grass Inversion by GFB, Stargaze by Heavy, Urban Chandelier by Office Feuerman, and the interactive Neural Alley by Revenge of the Electric Woman [pictured above]. The installations proved wildly popular and were kept up long past their initial planned run. "A big part of this was how River City Company worked collaboratively with the community to fill the spaces with ongoing programming. You had everything from movies to panels taking place in neural alley," said Ms. Kirnie. "Also marriage proposals, which is usually a sign that you're doing something right."
For Passageways 2.0, Public Art Chattanooga and River City commissioned a single permanent installation, awarded to the design duo Molly Hunker and Greg Curso, aka Sportz Collaborative, out of Syracuse, NY.
Ms. Kirnie went on to discuss the divergent approaches that Public Art Chattanooga used when approaching downtown projects, which often focus heavily on economic development, and neighborhood projects, which focus on dialogue, collaboration, and community development.
"This is completely driven by the community members—they're involved throughout the process in determining what kind of project they'd like to see. These projects are really reflective of the community and their culture," said Ms. Kirnie.
Artist Jerome Meadows unveils the Ed Johnson Memorial in front of onlookers on the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, TN.
Ms. Kirnie finished by showing her latest project: the Ed Johnson Memorial by artist Jerome Meadows, which commemorates the infamous 1906 lynching of Ed Johnson on the Walnut Street Bridge, a piece of history which had been buriedbut still loomed large, particularly in the consciousness of Chatanooga's black community. "Many people to this day still could not bring themselves to walk across the bridge," said Ms. Kirnie
The process of creating a memorial for both the event and the courageous work of his attorneys, involved involved a long community dialogue, with over 4,000 people over the course of 5 years. The sculpture was unveiled in September. "His story was lost, but not anymore," said Ms. Kirnie.
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BARB NELSON is Executive Director of TAP Inc., the Capital Region’s Community Design Center, a non-profit practice focused on the planning and design of healthy cities, neighborhoods, and buildings. She was also the lead architect and community engagement director for the Breathing Lights project, a temporary public art installation that illuminated the windows in hundreds of vacant homes in Albany, Schenectady and Troy with a diffuse flow that mimics the gentle rhythm of human breathing.
Another recipient of the Bloomberg Art Challenge, Breathing Lights lit up 200 vacant properties for two months in 2016. The project was not without its skeptics, particularly in a region not accustomed to public art interventions on this scale. "We spent a lot of time thinking about where our audience was coming from," said Ms. Nelson. "Could we carefully and strategically navigate the issue of getting people to experience and not promote simply poverty tourism?"
Breathing Lights illuminated 200 vacant properties across three municipalities.
"We were addressing many issues in a place of pain for a lot of people," said Ms. Nelson. "Thousands of vacant properties have a serious economic and social impact on a community. Thousands of families are missing. These are places people grew up, places where people had memories."
In order to spread the economic impact of the project, the organizers sourced materials locally and employed local contractors to install the project's widespread infrastructure. The project also hired local artists to give their take on vacancy and structural disinvestment. "We were just blown away by the talent that existed in our own neighborhoods," said Ms. Nelson.
A Breathing Lights community and youth engagement event on Halloween in Schenectady, NY.
Additional programing featured sessions on how to purchase vacant buildings and a robust youth engagement program. "A lot of young people we talked to grew up believing that all neighborhoods have vacant buildings. It's just a fact of life," said Ms. Nelson.
"In the beginning we were wondering how can we celebrate these places, but people in the community really gravitated towards the concept and they were proud to show off their neighborhoods and tell their stories and the stories of their communities. It was just amazing."
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A map of the Breathing Lights project, as featured in the documentary "Behind the Lights."
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In the following conversation with our panelists we addressed a number of questions, including how you keep the momentum going after an public art installation comes down, what happens when murals go to "mural heaven," the tension between economic development and community development goals, what "authenticity" means, how to avoid public art as an instigator of gentrification, how to seek funding for public art projects in smaller cities and cultivate support from public officials, and the future role of public art in cities to address climate change and equity.
To see the full video of the event, click on the video image below.
See you around the block! We're all in this together.
Reif Larsen
Founder, Future of Small Cities Institute