#11: Whose Community Is It Anyway?

Every conversation I have about public art lately leads back to the same word: community. 

What does “community” mean, who decides who’s in it, and how can we engage, build and utilize its power to make art and solve problems? How can the public art community come together to improve what we do?

One of these recent conversations was with Iryna Kanishcheva, the Miami-based founder of Monochronicle, who is creating a full-cycle public art commissioning platform “built around the conviction that both sides of the commission deserve better.” Monochronicle’s platform serves municipalities, designers, and art administrators across the United States, using innovative technologies and systems to improve the RFQ/RFP process for both artists and administrators. 

Iryna was recently in NY, and we met up at CUNY’s James Gallery to see the exhibition “Culture and Representation in America: The Impact of CETA,” about the short-lived but impactful Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program, which steered federal funds to municipalities to hire artists as workers.

Visual and performing artists were paid for their labor to work with local community organizations in neighborhoods with little access to making or experiencing art. Projects included temporary public sculpture exhibitions, murals and a few permanent public art projects. 

Instead of commissioning artists, CETA paid artists for their labor through local organizations. This guaranteed income not only relieved individual artists of financial pressure, it made community engagement a central objective, as opposed to a secondary agenda item.

After the exhibition, we headed over to Scandinavia House, where it was sadly too early for aquavit (though I’m sure it was cocktail hour somewhere). Iryna recorded our conversation about community engagement, making the public art world more inclusive, and my upcoming  October 24 roundtable “What Does It All Mean? In Search of a Shared Vocabulary for Public Art,” with Jack Becker and Hawona Sullivan Janzen. A longer version of this interview, which expands on the amazing things Iryna is working on, will be published on Monochronicle.

Iryna: Tell me about the panel you’re doing about public art vocabulary. How did this come to be?

Mia: The idea came from a discussion on the Public Art Exchange (PAX) Google group. It became clear that these terms we all use in the public art world, like community engagement, site responsiveness, durability etc don’t actually have exact shared definitions. We might have very different ideas about what durable, or low maintenance, or community engagement means. 

A conversation ensued where people added terms that they often teach or use in their work. It became clear that there are also certain hierarchies of values people have about what constitutes the best or most pure type of public art, versus the more commercial kind, and so forth.

Jack and I had this idea to create a panel at the ISC conference to engage the audience about what words or terms they feel are really meaningful, useful, pointless, confusing, that describe things well or don't. 

I think there are a lot of assumptions in the public art world about what these terms mean, and even about public art itself. For example, we all assume, because we believe in public art, that it’s a necessary good for the community. Well, not everybody agrees with that.

Who is against public art??

Well, I think if you asked people walking down this street, many would say that money could be used for other things. For example, there's public art right there [gestures to the median on Park Avenue and 37th]. It's a temporary exhibition. I don't personally think it's amazingly good work. If I lived in one of these apartment buildings, maybe I would ask, "why do I have to look at that every day? I didn't get any input in the decision making." [I don’t actually know how this work was chosen]

That's the point of community engagement. Did anyone ask them what they wanted to see? But you're right, not everybody understands how exactly to do community engagement. 

Once I was on a jury panel for a public art commission. 10 points were to be awarded for durability, but nobody explained to me, what is durability? If it's a wooden artwork, is it durable? Because I know there are wooden benches, so it may be durable. 

We don't have many opportunities to meet as a community, so we can get isolated in our own personal definitions of these words. Imagine if we had an open exchange across the entire public art ecosystem where I could say, “I think wood is durable,” and you could say, “wood isn't durable,” and we could have a collective discussion about what materials qualify as durable. 

Aren't there glossaries or libraries that define the meaning of those words?

From what I understand, there isn't one accepted glossary of terms. You can find definitions of words or terms, but there's still a lot of nuance to them. 

For example, you mentioned community engagement. What kind of nuances or differences could that have?

First we have to ask, “Who is the community?” That itself could mean many things, and have many embedded value judgments about the audience for a public art work. Who will the community be in 20 years? Who gets to decide who the community is, or isn’t? So even this term can be very opaque.

For some people, community engagement could mean having participants from the community be involved at every stage, from ideation to production, to vetting it, deciding what art gets made. They could be very, very deeply involved. 

For others, it could mean being inspired by the community, or soliciting inspiration from the community, and then going off and making your own work in response to that inspiration.

In other cases, it could mean having community meetings to educate locals about the project: “Hey, we're doing art here. We want you to know what we're doing, how much we're spending on it, the artists that we're considering, and then we want you to vote on their final proposals.” So, it can mean many different things. I am sure there are 20 other options.

Why don't we have a system where not just artists, but programs and administrators can learn how to do community engagement or other practices? What we're talking about is not only about defining the words, but some shared vocabulary of terms and processes.

It comes back to not having opportunities for the entire public art community to come together to address these types of issues. Not having this type of dialogue creates problems.

For example, if a municipality commissions artists, and they say they want community engagement in their RFQ without defining what that means, or including it in the budget as a cost, they may wind up commissioning an artist who has a very different idea of what community engagement is. A lot of friction can be caused by that lack of shared understanding. 

When artists see RFQs that mention community engagement, it's often hard for us to understand how big of a priority that is in jury selection, and what the expectations are. 

Let's say I am awarded a project that will include community engagement. Do they expect me to knock doors in the community and hold meetings at the local school, or do they just want me to talk to a couple people? Do they want the community to vote on my proposal? When there’s a lack of precision in the way we talk about things, it’s easy for our expectations to become mismatched.

I feel like artists, especially emerging artists or disadvantaged artists, artists of color, or immigrants, suffer the most if they don't understand RFQs and other public art language. Who do you think is affected by not having a shared definition of these terms, or access to this language?

I truly believe that people involved in public art have really good intentions, and everybody wants the process to be democratic. But some of the things that may look democratic on the surface actually create more barriers to entry for artists, especially people who might not speak English as a first language, didn't go to art school, or have never made public art before. One of these barriers is this jargon around public art.  I went to 8 years of art school and have made public commissions, and I also find it offputting. If I don’t understand the RFQ, I’m not going to apply.

How could we solve that problem? 

All of this has a simple fix: let’s talk to each other more!

I really am a believer in community. I started this event called the Public Art Party, a community building event that happens in New York twice a year. When we are all in the same room–and I mean anybody who's involved with public art, architects, fabricators, artists, consultants, curators, administrators–we can learn from each other. 

I think if we had more opportunities to talk about these things openly, without fear of being judged, or looking stupid, or seeming unprofessional, we would learn a lot about how we could collectively improve public art for everyone involved. I don't have all the answers. I only know what I know. Other people might have very, very different opinions about the best way to move forward. 

I do the public art party for free. I keep the ticket price really low so that anybody can come. But with more resources, we could go further with it. I’m basically just putting everybody in a room and giving them snacks and alcohol. But I think that we could collectively build something where, as you say, it's constructed to help people gain new skills to address real world scenarios, and to have open debates that maybe need to happen.

What can YOU do to make the public art world a more fun, equitable, and open community?

Come to the PUBLIC ART PARTY on October 20th!

Please spread the word and buy your tickets now!

Thanks for reading,

Mia Pearlman
http://miapearlman.com