Tatiana Hernandez

People have looked to the arts to help define their communities and create a sense of place for generations. So, why are we so excited about creative placemaking today?

Perhaps it has something to do with context. In this digital world, many are reexamining the fundamental nature of “community” and our relationship to place. We now know, based on findings from the Knight Soul of the Community report, that social offerings, followed by openness and aesthetics explain why we love where we live. What does that tell us about the essential importance of our connection to place?

“Vibrancy” is popping up as a way of describing the intangible nature of a neighborhood’s character. Here are three projects working to help define a sense of place in each of their communities:

Philadelphia has a strong tradition of mural work, and thanks to Mural Arts, artists and residents continue to come together to help define “home.” As part of their Knight Arts Challenge project, Mural Arts brought two Dutch artists, Haas&Hahn, to North Philadelphia to live, work, and engage the community around a large-scale mural that will span several blocks of Germantown Avenue.

Caron Atlas’ post about People’s Potlucks inspired me to write about my own experiment in food, community, and art, Feast of Words: A Literary Potluck. Co-founded with Irina Zadov, Feast of Words is a monthly event where people come together to eat, write and share.

Feast of Words is one year old, and since the beginning it has simultaneously been about bringing communities together and expressing, creatively, what sets them apart.

It was a spontaneous idea—Irina had hosted a dinner party where people shared their creative work and was looking for a “third place” that combined art making with the comfort of a shared meal. I had been attending literary readings, looking for one that was a good fit for SOMArts, which is a multidisciplinary arts space and cultural center.

Erin Harkey

Started in 2002, as an alternative to mainstream gallery culture, High Desert Test Sites (HDTS) explores the connections between site, art and life.

Situated in the desert communities surrounding Joshua Tree, the biannual event produces a series of site-specific installations in the Mojave Desert. Belonging to no one and everyone at the same time, each project’s life cycle is inextricably linked to the site itself.

Intrigued by this year’s roster of artists, I ventured with a friend on a two-hour road trip from Los Angeles to check it out.

The map to the sites we picked up at the HDTS headquarters instructed us to “drive forever” on Route 62. To help us find our way, we relied on the tracks of the cars before us, the unreliable GPS on our phones, and the occasional hidden HDTS sign with a quiet arrow. As we drove, we were fascinated with the number of deserted buildings.

Annually, the Public Art Network (PAN) Year in Review recognizes outstanding public art projects that represent the most compelling work for the year from across the country and beyond. The projects are selected and presented by a jury of three professionals who represent different aspects of the public art field, including artists, administrators, and other public art allies. New this year, the PAN Advisory Council curated the selected 49 selected projects for 2018 under five unique themes to broaden the exposure of the selected works on ARTSblog and social media, and to provide context to the works through national trends and themes that are impacting the field today.

At the forefront of the current dialogue across the nation and around the globe are questions concerning how we negotiate with the world around us to address the growing concerns of resource allocation, preservation, and climate change. The pursuit and development of the policies, systems, and infrastructure needed to provide long term sustainable solutions to these issues reaches across multiple fields from the political to the scientific and serves as inspiration to many of the 2018 PAN Year in Review projects. Though the materials, execution, and duration are all unique, these projects are unified by the role of the artist(s) in translating the collective experiences and stories of our essential ecosystems and habitats into personal narratives of site.

I vividly recall my first meeting with Isela Sotelo and Manuel (“Manny”) Prieto, the outgoing and current Executive Directors of LAMusArt. They introduced me to the issues that LAMusArt and other arts organizations face, such as the need for better engagement of Millennials and younger generations, as well as the need to build a more diverse pipeline of board leadership. Traditional board member duties have often been limited to raising large donations; however, the dynamic and evolving nonprofit arts and cultural landscape demands that arts leadership look to their boards for deeper engagement, creative thinking and problem-solving, and fresh ideas in order to grow and thrive into the future. I shared with them the desire and passion that I and other young professionals have to make a more sustained impact on nonprofit organizations, contributing new and innovative ideas and building new leadership skills—goals that many existing one-off volunteering opportunities fail to meet. From that conversation, the idea for our Young Professionals Advisory Board (YPAB) was born. 

The post-graduation years are considered a rite of passage, where emerging artists navigate crushing poverty, unpaid internships, uninformed financial decisions, and rejection in order to emerge as bona fide artists. People use words like sacrifice and bootstraps. You’re expected to work for free in order to demonstrate your work ethic and “make connections” with important people. These connections, we’re told over and over, lead to paid jobs. Just not yet. Let’s look closely at these expectations through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. In a field that is still white and male-dominated despite encouraging signs of change, those who hold privilege (economic, racial, gender, social, etc.) are better positioned to take the unpaid internships, get that one-on-one meeting with the artistic director, or convince the seasoned leader to take them on as an assistant. How can we better prepare aspiring artists from all backgrounds to enter this field?