I Hope to Create Food as if It Were Art

By Tom Borrup

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

Borough institutions, like museums, public galleries, community art organizations, performing art institutions, arts councils and public arts organizations have a rare opportunity to lead significant modify by engaging specific groups to help devise and carry out artistic community-edifice neighborhood programs. Merely it needn't ever be the institution that takes action. The selected stories shown beneath offer inspiring examples of how individual artists tin can likewise brand a departure.

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

The Artistic Community Builder's Handbook can be ordered from the publisher, Fieldstone Brotherhood. For more information meet world wide web.communityandculture.com or www.livable.com.

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

In looking for the ingredients that bear upon the physical well-being of people in dissimilar kinds of places, Dr. Felton Earls, a Harvard professor of public health, conducted an extensive, fifteen-year study in neighborhoods across Chicago. His research found that the single-almost of import factor differentiating levels of health from 1 neighborhood to the next was what he called "collective efficacy." He was surprised to notice that it wasn't wealth, access to healthcare, crime, or some more tangible gene that topped the listing. A more than elusive ingredient--the chapters of people to deed together on matters of mutual interest--made a greater divergence in the wellness and well-being of individuals and neighborhoods.

The communities profiled here found opportunities for people to come together in creation and celebration of civilization. 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 economical evolution to civic participation to healthy living.

1. Promote Interaction in Public Space

Public spaces and marketplaces are essential ingredients in every community. Public space provides opportunities for people to run into and be exposed to a variety of neighbors. These meetings often take place by chance, only they also can come through active organizing. The art of promoting constructive interaction amid people in public spaces has been about forgotten in many communities. Planners, architects, and public administrators have focused more on creating aesthetic places and on providing for the unimpeded movement and storage of automobiles than on creating places that encourage social interaction. More recently, public officials have been even more concerned with security and maximizing their ability to detect and command people in public spaces.

William H. Whyte asserted that crowded, pedestrian-friendly, active spaces are safer, more than economically productive, and more conducive to healthy borough 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 just the opposite vein.

While the pattern of public space influences its use, Projection for Public Spaces notes that 80 percent of the success of a public space is the result of its "management," referring to how the space is maintained and activities programmed. In other words, even in the all-time-designed spaces for public interaction, activities need to be planned, and the infinite 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 pregnant players in designing, managing, and programming public space. Increasingly, artists are being tapped to collaborate with architects, landscape architects, engineers, and city planners in the design and cosmos of public spaces, buildings, roads, highways, and public transit facilities.

As of import as the infinite, slice of art, or effect is the procedure by which it is created. A boob parade may simply be a group of artists marching in the street, or information technology may be the issue of a lengthy, community-wide process involving hundreds of residents who brainstorm themes, construct and paint the puppets, programme the activities, and march together with their families and neighbors.

Success Story #1

Providence, Rhode Island: WaterFire

Igniting A New Urban Spirit

WaterFire, a public art issue in Providence, Rhode Island, brings unprecedented numbers of people together on a regular footing to share a profound experience. At the same fourth dimension it instills pride, belonging, interaction, and human connectedness. Created by a public artist, WaterFire involves hundreds of volunteers and supporters, and it has get role of the community's collective identity.

Built at the convergence of 2 rivers, Providence covered its polluted downtown waterways in the 1950s with roads, rail yards, and expanded parking lots. In the early 1990s, the city uncovered, or "daylighted," the rivers and lined them with public promenades and pedestrian-friendly parks.

WaterFire, a public fine art result that takes identify on the downtown waterways, became the needed goad for revitalization. The upshot involves music, performances, ceremonial bonfires, boats, and ritual and, when information technology is staged, transforms almost one mile of Providence's downtown. One hundred fire baskets, or braziers, are placed at regular intervals in waterways that air current through the center of downtown. Filled with fragrant local firewood and set ablaze at dusk, they're fed late into the nighttime past blackness-garbed "burn tenders" who make their way from fire to fire in pocket-size boats. Powerful and mesmerizing music, conducted through an elaborate speaker system, seems to emanate from the flames.

Artist Barnaby Evans conceived WaterFire as a i-time effect in 1994, but 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 back up, seconded by the urban center's mayor, led to the institutionalization of WaterFire as a community ritual in 1997.

Evans created WaterFire Providence in 1997 equally a nonprofit organization to carry on the public fine art issue. Today, twenty-five events, or "lightings," are held each twelvemonth, spring through fall. Each event attracts as many equally 100,000 people to downtown Providence's public spaces. Multiple partnerships with social service, education, arts, and civic groups help promote other causes through the event 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 attend the event again and once again. Past working beyond public, business organisation, and nonprofit sectors, the city revived its economy. Maybe more importantly, WaterFire boosted the community'south spirit and self-image across what anyone could accept imagined.

www.waterfire.org

ii. Increment Civic Participation Through Celebrations

Creating the kind of connections between people that atomic number 82 to collective civic action is a challenge for any planner, organizer, or community builder. It?due south a lot of difficult piece of work and there'due south no secret formula, just it's an essential ingredient in a democratic social club. Annual or seasonal events such as festivals or farmers markets can be especially constructive in communities with bang-up social, ethnic, and economic diversity. The processes used to plan and carry out these events are at to the lowest degree as of import as the events themselves.

Success Story #2

Delray Embankment, Florida: Cultural Loop and History Trail

Keeping Anybody in the Loop

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

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

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

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

A "green" market featuring fresh, locally-grown foods, holiday craft show, and outdoor fine art off-white were other attractions forth the route, and Quondam School House Square near the middle of the rectangle featured music and entertainment. Miami-based artist Gary Moore ready upward a temporary barbershop in a vacant house in the African American neighborhood, offering free haircuts and a glimpse into the world of Black pilus for travelers on the loop.

Delray Beach's Cultural Loop continued people in commemoration of their own diversity. Although rapidly growing and predominantly prosperous, Delray Beach has ongoing healing and span-building work to do. The cultural loop was a unique issue that helped locals to exist tourists discovering their own hometown using familiar public spaces. At the same time, it gave visitors access to the diverse cultural riches and history of this southward Florida beachside community.

www.delrayconnect.com www.delraybeach.com

3. Engage Youth in the Community

Including immature people every bit meaningful contributors in the social and economic aspects of customs building must non be overlooked and cannot be left to schools and parents lonely.

Engaging youth has a dual benefit: it brings more adults into the moving picture. Inquiry in civic engagement past the League of Women Voters indicates that the gene most likely to get people more involved in community diplomacy is helping to improve conditions for youth. "Issues related to children, including mentoring and coaching, and education are those nigh likely to mobilize the untapped reservoir of volunteers."

Success Story #3

Boston, Massachusetts: Artists For Humanity

Creative Entrepreneurs Earn Respect

The Artists for Humanity programs in Boston does merely that. It provides avenues for youth to become socially witting and engaged entrepreneurs who bridge economic and cultural differences. Youth build confidence and gain business organisation feel while working with professional artists equally mentors and instructors.

Artists For Humanity (AFH) began in 1990, when Susan Rodgerson, an contained artist, worked with students at Boston's Martin Luther King Centre Schoolhouse to paint a mural. Subsequently information technology was complete, half-dozen students asked her if they could paint something else. That summer they showed up at her studio every day every bit she found things for them to paint, eventually turning their attention to designing and producing T-shirts to earn money. In 1992, Rodgerson and the six students incorporated as a nonprofit. While they secured more than commissions and product sales, the group developed studio production activities in graphic design, commercial photography, silk-screen printing, sculpture, theatrical set design, ceramics, and painting. The organisation afterwards added warehouse space for offices and a gallery.

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

The organization works with youth primarily between the ages of xiv and eighteen from all parts of the city. Fundamentally, it is based upon a small business concern 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 draw boundaries between commercial arts and fine arts--art every bit personal expression and art as a product for sale. By embracing both, the organisation encourages youth to tap their intrinsic creativity.

Artists For Humanity operates as 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 organization customs. Participating youth correspond the entire urban center and come primarily from low-income neighborhoods.The plan employs roughly eighty young artists in its microenterprise programs each year and serves over three hundred through drop-in programs. The young artists receive an hourly wage and accept the opportunity to earn a 50 percentage commission on each private work they sell through the gallery, shows, or negotiated contracts. T-shirts, murals, graphic design, and fine fine art works are the main earned-revenue sources. While AFH has earned over $i.7 one thousand thousand since 1996, foundation grants and corporate sponsorships still account for the largest share of the organization's budget.

www.afhboston.com

4. Promote the Power and Preservation of Place

When people become involved in the design, creation, and upkeep of places, they develop a vested interest in using and maintaining these spaces. When they have a truthful sense of "ownership" or connectedness to the places they frequent, the community becomes a better place to alive, work, and visit. The residents' feelings of respect and responsibility for the place bonds them to that place and to each other. No architect or town planner tin design or build a place that does that.

"The sooner the customs becomes involved in the planning process the better--ideally before any planning has been done," write Kathy Madden and Fred Kent of Projection for Public Spaces in the book How to Turn A Place Around. "And people should exist encouraged to stay involved throughout the improvement effort and then that they become owners or stewards of the identify as it evolves."

Denizen involvement in public conclusion making is too often reactive and negative in character. People are inclined to involve themselves when the condition quo is threatened. But citizen involvement is best when community members and grassroots organizations accept the pb.

Success Story #4

Minneapolis, Minnesota: Promise Community

Building the Urban Village

Hope Community in Minneapolis stimulates the creative juices of its citizens in shaping and uplifting their customs'south self-image. The organization has non only made people believe groovy things are possible but also it has already accomplished many smashing things. Through an asset-based community-organizing strategy and "listening process," Hope Customs brought people of multiple ethnicities together in small-scale-group dialogues. Hope has organized three major listening projects--each including more three hundred adults and youth--focused on jobs and education, the pregnant of community, and the design of a park. In fact, the organization has designed an entire neighborhood with business organization for children as the unifying gene based upon what it learned from listening. Engaging people through their cultural traditions and involving artists as catalysts have go key parts of Hope'due south strategy.

The Phillips neighborhood just south of downtown is the poorest and most racially various of Minneapolis'southward eighty-six neighborhoods. Information technology serves equally dwelling house to a long-standing and politically organized Native American community, as well every bit burgeoning Latino and Due east African immigrant communities. Hope Community, Inc., is a community development corporation steeped in a tradition of "creating not only housing but community." As of 2005, Hope owned and managed 89 units of housing and over 6,500 square feet of community space, with plans in motion for 250 more units and 20,000 square anxiety of new commercial infinite.

Hope embraces active listening and a cultural focus in all it does. In 1997, Promise began its Listening Project to help learn about residents' ideas on education and jobs. More than xxx dialogue groups helped deepen Hope'southward relationships with the customs and its understanding of these bug. A larger projection with over 3 hundred participants, including many youth, afterwards focused on the meanings, struggles, and hopes people attach to neighborhoods and communities.

These discussions led into a project to redesign Peavey Park, an underutilized, offense-ridden park that the Minneapolis Park Board had scheduled for an overhaul. The listening and visioning process enabled Promise to engage broad-based participation and to recognize that building community was the central purpose of the park. Promise arrived at the design through a serial of artistic workshops that were later translated into a formal pattern and adopted past the Park Lath.

Equally Hope brought together what information technology learned with its cadre activity of creating a safety surround for children, it embarked on a bold project to envision a larger community it called Children?s Village. The organization commissioned professional planners to draw upward designs for this sixteen-block area and presented them to city leaders and the media. In 2003, Children'south Hamlet Center opened. Information technology is a 4-story, thirty-unit of measurement, low-income housing complex that includes offices for a staff and a customs center. It sits prominently as the first of 4 developments at the intersection of two major metropolis thoroughfares. When complete, these well-designed centers of community action volition signal a massive turnaround for a neighborhood long infested with drugs, poverty, and hopelessness.

www.hope-community.org

5. Broaden Participation in the Borough Agenda

Some people have argued that social capital--the volunteer organizations and efforts that provide the glue in whatsoever community--has eroded steadily over the past 2 generations, as seen by the drops in participation in social and borough groups. This crunch may really be one in which the former tools for involving people in borough issues are no longer sufficient to meet new challenges. The tools may take lost effectiveness as the population diversifies.

At the same time, many social, civic, and cultural functions have been "professionalized" in ways that exclude participation of ordinary citizens. From community to community across the United States, professional arts organizations take grown upward where voluntary groups once stood. This trend has severed the practice and feel of the arts from day-to-mean solar day life. Participation in cultural activities (as opposed to spectatorship) connects people to each other and to their community institutions, providing pathways to other forms of participation. Thus, arts and culture can create opportunities for political expression, community dialogue, shared cultural experiences, and borough work.

Inside the arts, there is a vital however bottom-known field of practice that strives to develop cultural agreement and borough engagement. Community-based arts practitioners bring members of a community together to solve bug, build relationships, and become involved in ways that rebuild social majuscule.

Success Story #5

Danville, Vermont: Danville Transportation Enhancement Project

Where Artists Run across the Road

In rural Danville, Vermont, artists and highway planners engaged citizens to solve a road structure dilemma. The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project found a unique way to identify and resolve touchy bug of values and aesthetics.

Danville is a community of 2,200 people in the northeastern role of Vermont. It sits on U.S. Highway Route 2, function of the National Highway System and 1 of the major east-west roads beyond northern New England. With the White Mountains as a properties, Danville boasts some of New England's most unspoiled and spectacular scenery.

The town is anchored by a classic hamlet green with a Civil War monument, bandstand, distinctive school, full general store, courthouse, and churches. The Danville Village Comeback Society was formed in 1896 to adorn the town. The following yr it placed an elegant rock watering trough on the green, an amenity all the same in use today. The society also installed street lamps and planted rows of shade trees on the green and forth the streets surrounding it. The past one hundred years have brought little change 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.Due south. Highway 2 through the boondocks'due south village center. The Danville project needed to notice a way to upgrade route conditions and encounter federal highway requirements, while respecting the artful, economic, and cultural fabric of the community.

Highway expansion in a rural expanse, where the most valuable currency is ofttimes aesthetic, tin 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 by such expansion. The Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) is a leader in the national motility among transportation agencies toward context-sensitive blueprint solutions and public involvement. Vtrans aims to bring communities together early in the planning process to assist design environmentally responsible transportation infrastructure that promotes safety and efficiency while preserving the community'south vision of itself.

A local review committee was formed as office of the legislated highway planning procedure. Ii artists were selected--mural architect David Raphael equally lead artist and sculptor Andrea Wasserman--to joining the local review committee. The Danville projection implemented the principles of context-sensitive design and the time-honored Vermont traditions of public meetings, civil soapbox, and representative democracy. Artists, working closely with engineers and residents, infused the process with artistic problem solving and openness to new ideas.

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

A last pattern and enhancements were presented to the Danville community in late 2002. Construction and completion are scheduled through the latter part of the decade. Enhancements include gateways with signage, lighting, landscaping, granite posts, and sidewalk markers to alert motorists that they are entering a hamlet centre. Streetscape designs reinforce the hamlet character and improve aesthetics and pedestrian comfort.

Nigh as important equally the road design, a number of related activities emerged from the community process, especially those involving youth? -- projects that got started right abroad. They include a pupil photography project that led to postcards and a Danville calendar. Other students carved stone figures to exist embedded along three miles of concrete sidewalk. Youth planted seedlings in the project's right-of-style, and they designed tile markers, a ceramic playground mural, and clay cutouts of hands to hang in the village green.

Putting a team of artists at the helm of highway design may seem risky. However, when the virtually difficult part of highway construction is sorting out and negotiating individual and community values, feelings, and aesthetics, it makes sense--and it works. The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project made anybody an expert in highway structure. In so doing, the Danville project met the needs of local residents and the state highway department. Community members of all ages gained a new understanding of the function and possibilities of highways, as well every bit a greater understanding of what they can do when they work creatively together.

world wide web.danvilleproject.com

williamsimesers.blogspot.com

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

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