Katherine Gressel

Talking Points: Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation

Posted by Katherine Gressel, May 17, 2012 2 comments


Katherine Gressel

Katherine Gressel

The Challenge of Evaluation

In the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Public Art Review, Jack Becker writes, “There is a dearth of research efforts focusing on public art and its impact. The evidence is mostly anecdotal. Some attempts have focused specifically on economic impact, but this doesn’t tell the whole story, or even the most important stories.”

Becker’s statement gets at some of the main challenges in measuring the impact of a work of public art—a task which more often than not provokes grumbling from public art administrators. Unlike museums or performance spaces, public art traditionally doesn’t sell tickets, or attract “audiences” who can easily be counted, surveyed, or educated.

A public artwork’s role in economic revitalization is difficult to separate from that of its overall surroundings. And as Becker suggests, economic indicators of success may leave out important factors like the intrinsic benefits of experiencing art in one’s everyday life.

However, public art administrators generally agree that some type of evaluation is key in not only making a case for support from funders, but in building a successful program.

Is there a reliable framework that can be the basis of all good public art evaluation? And what are some simple yet effective evaluation methods that most organizations can implement?

Key Challenges: Establishing Common Metrics and Collecting Reliable Data

One of the most common barriers to evaluating public art is defining exactly what we are evaluating. The intended “impacts” of various types of public art, and our capacity to measure them, are very different.

I find UK-based think tank Ixia’s 2010 Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation to be the closest thing to a common framework for assessing any type of art in the public realm. Ixia provides a helpful Evaluation Matrix that identifies a range of different values from which to select when considering possible outcomes of a public art project. The matrix accounts for the fact that each public artwork’s goals will be different depending on the nature of the presenting organization, site, and audience.

Most public art organizations are following similar steps during the planning phase of a project, identifying desired outcomes based on the specifics of the project. However, developing a common theory of change about all public art’s social impact may be an unrealistic expectation.

Systematic data collection via accepted social science methods, is also widely perceived as costly, challenging, and maybe even detrimental to the field. The few comprehensive studies connecting long-term, permanent public art to economic and community-wide impacts (such as An Assessment of Community Impact of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation Mural Arts Program) have led to somewhat inconclusive results.

So What Can We Measure and How?

The good news is that there are several examples of indicators that are more easily measurable in certain types of public art situations, largely thanks to new technologies and effective partnerships.

These include:

Testimonies on the educational and social impact of public art project
Groundswell Community Mural Project surveys mural artists, participating youth, community partners and parents before, during and after projects. Youth are also contacted every few years after a project is completed, to report on how Groundswell has influenced their ongoing development. Groundswell recently hired an outside researcher to build a comprehensive database to analyze data on both participants and completed murals.

An artist’s career trajectory after completing a public art project
Similarly, artist may keep an agency informed of future commissions, publications, and other accolades that come as a direct result of a public art commission.

How a public artwork is treated over time by a community, including whether it gets vandalized, and whether the community takes the initiative to repair or maintain it.
Organizations engage representatives from neighborhood partner organizations that house murals in regularly reporting on the artworks’ condition and observed community response. Similarly, such partners can report on how a public artwork has enhanced their own operations (such as whether it is being used in educational programs or marketing campaigns, or catalyzing further community development).

It is becoming increasingly possible to track, and increase, levels of audience engagement with public art via interactive technology.
Online media platforms such as blogs aggregate not only professional press coverage on public art, but comments by random readers. Public art agencies across the country have been implementing such technologies as interactive websites and mobile audio tours to solicit responses from the general public, increase community stewardship, and simply grow their audiences.

Public Art Fund’s robust Facebook page invites users to comment, and sometimes even quiz themselves on, past and present artworks and artists. Smartphone apps like Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Association’s Museum Without Walls enable people to send in their own public art “stories,” or in the case of Kentucky’s TakeItArtside! app, earn points by checking in to different art sites.

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program even has a section of its website where people can upload photos of murals they notice in need of repair—another way of measuring investment.

All of these systems are capable of, at the very least, tracking how many people download, log or dial in. In some cases, they generate basic demographic data, and information on which artworks or topics generate the most discussion and how people are responding.

While these tools do not generate conclusive evidence on public art’s impact on a community, they make it much easier than it was just five years ago to gauge what a broader general public is thinking and doing. It is increasingly feasible for public art organizations to quantitatively track not just audience engagement, but benefits to participants, and community stewardship of completed artworks.

Though there may not be one magic formula that works for all public art, I am convinced that we should not give up on the idea of evaluation.

Author’s Note: In January 2012, I first published the longer article Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation on Createquity.org. The full article can be found here. I am also currently working on a follow-up post to be published in Createquity later this spring/summer, on public art agencies’ use of interactive technologies for audience engagement. Above, I summarized key issues and findings from the published article as well as my recent research.

2 responses for Talking Points: Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation

Comments

May 03, 2012 at 9:28 am

Clearly you are singing my song about taking control of evaluation and re-thinking what measures impact.
Very drawn toward "community stewardship" as an area of measurement for impact of public art. Thinking about how it might resonates and manifest in other arts areas (esp for mine: theatre). I also appreciate that you highlight, as do a few of the other posts, the importance of the impact on the artist(s) and her/his (their) career(s) and continued/active participation in the community.

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Christopher Cory says
August 15, 2012 at 8:11 pm

I know the autor' thoughts. Come from her own practice of public art as well as her own research. I believe her ideas encourage and develop a useful body of work that strengthens public art everywhere.

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