The four schools- Saint Paul Music Academy, Glacier Hills Elementary, Mississippi Creative Arts Magnet and Linwood Monroe- each created a fabric mural representing one of 4 major rivers from around the globe-Yangtze, Amazon, Nile and Mississippi. The murals will become a part of a pageant celebrating water at the Festival and then go on display for the remainder of the day before going back to the individual schools.

The kids haven’t met one another and we are excited for them to see one another’s work and share their experiences!

The artists involved are Julie Boada, Mary Hark and Anne Sawyer-Aitch.

More to come!

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The theme was developed from participant feedback: Disciplinary Diversity, New Directions, and Expanding Definitions in Public Art. Here’s a peak inside!

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The artist duo, also called Havel Ruck Projects, used the house’s siding as well as scavenged and recycled building materials—along with their “improvisational cutting” technique—to repurpose the structure into a veritable shingle factory explosion with a front-porch stage, where blues guitar great Texas Johnny Brown and other musicians performed when the house reopened in October 2011.

But there’s a deeper level to Fifth Ward Jam, a project of the Houston Arts Alliance and the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, giving it a more poetic dimension. The recontextualized home calls up the low-income community’s housing struggles and successes, its cycles of decline and renewal—a metaphor for how local history and community are continually erased and remade. The architectural intervention, Ruck told me, was “an act of community activism, a hopeful spark to a potential flame in a neighborhood that badly needs it due to decades of neglect and economic stagnation.”

While the newly developed park is permanent and continues to be improved, the house is a temporary project that will be decommissioned in the fall of 2013. Yet although the structure itself will disappear, its impact will remain. “What started out as a temporary art installation has created this new, wonderful gathering spot for the community, where we lack destinations,” says Fifth Ward CRC president Kathy Payton. “It’s created a sense of destination and place.”

There’s no question that public art can help revitalize cities and communities as well as enrich lives. But temporary projects, in distilling the characteristics and histories of specific places, spaces, and landscapes, can also continue to have spiritual and economic impact after they’re gone, perhaps effecting permanent change.

With placemaking projects, “there is productive thinking in terms of acknowledging that culture has a role in the fabric of cities,” says Nato Thompson, chief curator of the New York–based nonprofit Creative Time, which produces temporary, site-specific public art projects. But, he cautioned, works shouldn’t be driven by economic or “passive entertainment” interests. “Is it possible that a project is super-interesting and good for the neighborhood, that negatively impacts the economy? I say, sure! Not all good things have a good effect on the economy.”

Check out this video about “Fifth Ward Jam” by Havel Ruck Projects:

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Public Art Review: Can you describe your approach to placemaking?

JEFRË: For me, it’s the literal definition of the word place. Millennium Park is a place not only because it has iconic sculptures. It also has great civic parks, architecture, and restaurants. And people.

If you think about great cities, when I ask you, “What is your favorite place and why?” you’re not going to say the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building. You’re going to say Central Park or Millennium Park. Those are places. No one single sculpture or building or landscape will make a place. It’s all those elements combined—plus the people who use it.

So how does this approach translate into your practice?

Because of my background, I don’t really have a certain medium or style. I give you one specific thing related to context and history and I don’t repeat it again. As a result, my work is very site specific. I’m not someone who has to find a place to plop a piece. I’m also very careful to be sure that 80 percent of my materials and work is all done with local folks, so the tax money is going back into the community. Programming is also very important—the idea that you’re not creating things that are static. The most successful public art pieces are interactive.

How do you achieve that with a single sculpture as opposed to, for example, Central Park?

You create an opportunity to be inside it or walk through it, like the Eiffel Tower. For example, I recently won the competition for a sculpture in Kissimmee’s new Lakefront Park. Their waterfront is located near Disney, which is their competition. And they understood that they have an opportunity to create an icon for the city—something that would identify the waterfront not only as a destination, but as an icon that could compete on a national scale.

The sculpture is a cube of water that represents a common form seen in the local Indian tribe. By day it acts as a civic fountain, by night it transforms itself into a cultural performance space, and on the weekends it becomes a civic venue for celebrations like weddings. It’s more than a sculpture; it’s a blank space and people make it art.

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The first direct step toward the development of our current understanding of creative placemaking came with the publication, in 2002, of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class. In this book, Florida, then a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, connected the nation’s most economically vibrant places to, essentially, the size and diversity of its pool of “creative workers.” In a time of dot-com billionaires and charismatic e-entrepreneurs, the idea struck a nerve among civic officials around the country. A New York Times review published a few months after the book’s publication mentioned that Florida had already been hired to consult with a number of cities—Providence, Rhode Island; Memphis; Indianapolis; Phoenix; and Bellevue, Washington—to attract creatives and entrepreneurs who could transform these places.

It is tempting to suggest that the next stage of the evolution of creative placemaking came with the spring 2010 publication, by the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, of Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa’s white paper, “Creative Placemaking,” and follow-up developmental work spearheaded by National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) director Rocco Landesman. But, according to Jason Schupbach, the NEA’s Director of Design, that would be an oversimplification.

“In reality,” says Schupbach, this work built on a “pattern in what was happening organically in communities all across this country.” Markusen, Gadwa, and Landesman’s efforts brought national attention to the fact that places all across America were increasingly using the arts to help shape their social, physical, and economic characters and that funders like The Reinvestment Fund and Knight Foundation were researching and funding projects that used creative activities to drive civic vibrancy and community attachment. In other words, the seeds planted by Richard Florida had spread like weeds to all cultural corners of the country.

Launch of a Grantmaking Revolution 

By 2011, two major new initiatives began throwing significant dollars at creative placemaking projects. The NEA’s Our Town (www.nea.gov) announced in July it was distributing $6.5 million in grant money to 51 projects in 34 states that involved partnerships between arts and design organizations and local governments. These projects were chosen based on their proposed ability to contribute toward the “livability of communities” by transforming them into “lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core.”

Following close on the heels of the first Our Town grants, in September 2011 another initiative announced its investment of $11.5 million to support 34 creative placemaking projects. Called ArtPlace (www.artplaceamerica.org), the project was sparked by the NEA in tandem with Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas and a number of other funding partners—including the Bloomberg Philanthropies and the James Irvine, Knight, Kresge, McKnight, Andrew W. Mellon, Rasmuson, Robina, and Rockefeller Foundations—and an array of federal agencies that would act as policy advisors. The projects supported by ArtPlace were selected for their ability to help towns and cities thrive by “strategically integrating artists and arts organizations into key local developments in transportation, housing, community development, job creation and more.”

Today, after two annual rounds of grantmaking, Our Town and ArtPlace have distributed a total $38.4 million in support of 212 individual projects around the country. While this amount is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of billions of cumulative dollars that flow through the nation’s arts economy, the buzz around these programs has been widely influential, leading a number of other agencies—such as the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development and several charitable foundations—to investigate establishing their own creative placemaking initiatives. The organizations and artists involved in these projects have been deeply appreciative of the support.

“We were excited particularly by the idea of not planning but doing, and of building connections between artists and the community that last,” says Laura Zabel, director of Springboard for the Arts, who helped develop an ArtPlace-funded project called Irrigate, which has created dozens of public art projects along a corridor of St. Paul, Minnesota, during the construction of a new light-rail line. Similar sentiments have been expressed by arts organizations and civic leaders all over the country.

Questions and Concerns from Two Sides

Despite the buzz around creative placemaking, two groups have raised questions and concerns about these programs. First, many policy makers and researchers are concerned that they lack a feedback loop. “The problem with the grant programs so far,” says Ian David Moss, a researcher at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit organization that supports artists and arts organizations, “is that there is currently no way to accurately judge their effectiveness. While both Our Town and ArtPlace are in the process of setting up broad indicator systems to track progress, this approach provides few tools for analyzing whether projects work or don’t and glosses over the complexity of how artists fit into economic ecosystems. Because of this, we won’t know when a grant really made a difference in a community or when it just got to ride on the coattails of other changes already taking place.”

Furthermore, the programs have riled some of the key people they were meant to benefit—the creative workers themselves. With its focus on large-scale community outcomes, rather than on creative expression, artists often feel intimidated or diminished by the creative placemaking process. Artists also often find problematic the community interaction necessary in these projects.

“[Artistic] practice within the public sphere comes with inherent risks,” said Sanjit Sethi, co-director of the California College of the Arts’ Center for Art and Public Life, at a recent public panel on placemaking and the role of artists in the community. “Community is a very loaded term, and so are issues like placemaking and collaboration and all of these other concepts that seem kind of convenient and fitting but are also incredibly problematic.”

Randy Rollison, program director of Intersection for the Arts’ Innovation Studio, concurred while speaking on the same panel. “The risk is enormous,” said Rollison of a major ArtPlace-funded placemaking project in San Francisco called 5M. “There’s risk in perception. There’s risk in mission drift. The ideas keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the possibilities seem more and more endless. But the risk is we burn ourselves out on the possibilities.”

Even considering the new possibilities created by these grants, a number of artists worry that a focus on creative placemaking will actually limit their opportunities to do what they do. “There’s a strong undercurrent of skepticism,” says Ian David Moss. “I think the disconnect comes from the fact that whereas funders think that they are going to bring more money into the arts by convincing all sorts of people working in business, community development, and government of the power of art to transform communities, some artists view this as a zero-sum game, with creative placemaking taking away from the already modest amount of money that goes directly to working artists and art for art’s sake.”

Creative Placemaking Moves Forward

Despite the range of concerns, interest in creative placemaking is growing quickly. ArtPlace reports that it received almost 2,200 applications for its second round of creative placemaking grants in 2012 (in the end they offered just 47 grant awards, or just 2 percent of those submitted). “There is a palpable interest today by arts organizations and artists in finding new ways to connect with their communities, and imagine new futures for the neighborhoods in which they live and work,” says Tim Halbur, director of communications for ArtPlace.

The artists who have most embraced creative placemaking are those most interested in leading conversations about how we integrate place, art, and the community. “We as artists, and arts organizations, are the most creative people in the world,” says John Michael Schert, executive director of the Trey McIntyre Project, an ArtPlace-supported dance company. “So why look to business or government or education to champion innovative ideas?”

With so much at stake, and an increasing amount of resources and attention being utilized to transform communities toward creative placemaking, this may be the only answer for artists: Lead the transformation of your community, or get out of the way.

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The Vijfhuizen Fort was built in the late nineteenth century as part of the Defense Line of Amsterdam. Dozens of armed forts ringing the city were designed so the surrounding land could be flooded if enemies invaded. No fighting ever occurred, however, and in 1996 the military complex was made a Unesco World Heritage site. In 2008, the site reopened as the 20-acre Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (Art Fortress at Vijfhuizen), intended for “peaceful cultural reuse” as a contemporary arts center with a sculpture park and massive concrete casemates used for exhibit spaces and studios. “The fortress is a kind of time tunnel back to the future,” director Holger Nickisch wrote me, adding that they’ve recently discovered two secret bunkers.

Kunstfort has organized many exhibits that explore its unique site. Beginning in spring 2013, “water and landscape” will be the exhibition theme. “Most of [Holland is] below sea level, which is a constant threat, especially in the future with the rising of the sea level,” says Nickisch. The fort is also a designated Dutch “green” site, where trees are being planted to offset their destruction elsewhere. (Wendover AFB, anyone?)

The Kulturpark Plänterwald amusement park, located in Berlin’s Treptow Park forest, was built by communist East German authorities in 1969, a site of Soviet-era leisure. After the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years later, it was privatized and reborn as Spreepark, but dwindling attendance led to the park’s closure in 2001. And there it sat, its plastic dinosaurs, pirate ship, and UFO-shaped Futuro House fenced off and reclaimed by feral nature, visited mainly by urban adventurers. In 2007, on a trip to Berlin, George Scheer and Stephanie Sherman, directors of Elsewhere in North Carolina (see story on page 34), “rediscovered” the park. Soon, aided by a grant from the Art Matters Foundation and abetted by curators Anthony Spinello and Agustina Woodgate as well as partners Dieta Sixt and Christina Lanzl, the Kulturpark research project was launched.

In June 2012, the group invited 20 Berlin-based artists to create site-specific works inspired by the park’s attractions (a Ferris wheel light show, etc.). That was followed by a 10-day “think tank” in which dozens of participants from the United States and Germany investigated and discussed the site’s artistic, architectural, and environmental possibilities. The park is still family-owned and mired in debt, and it’s uncertain when—or how—it will reopen, according to Scheer.

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Soleri spent a lifetime investigating how architecture, specifically the architecture of the city, could support the countless possibilities of human aspiration. In an age of specialization, he demonstrated an architect’s ability to influence and even lead the search for a new pattern of inhabiting the earth.

Arcosanti, the urban project he founded 65 miles north of Phoenix in 1970, was described by Newsweek magazine as “the most important urban experiment undertaken in our lifetimes.” To date, over 7,000 students have participated in the ongoing construction of this project. As Soleri’s former apprentice Will Bruder told the New York Times, “I learned how much you can do with very little, the potential of simplicity and the ability to make unbelievable things from modest means, to dream huge dreams.”

Soleri’s architectural commissions have included the Dome House in Cave Creek, Arizona; the Ceramica Artistica Solimene ceramics factory in Vietri sul Mare, Italy; the Indian Arts Cultural Center and Theatre in Santa Fe; the Glendale Community College Theater; and the chapel at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. His recent public artworks include Scottsdale’s Soleri Bridge and Plaza and the bas-relief murals that are part of Arizona’s new I-17 Arcosanti/Cordes Junction traffic interchange.

His numerous awards include gold medals from the American Institute of Architects, the International Union of Architects, the Venice Biennale, and the National Design Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Active up to the time of his death, Soleri’s final project was a series of collages juxtaposing illustrations from today and antiquity.

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Public Art Review: In your practice, where do you place emphasis when it comes to creative placemaking?

Herbert Dreiseitl: A lot of our public places in cities are dominated by ugliness and constructed by engineers who only look for how to get traffic from A to B as fast as possible. There’s no social awareness about what people really need.

I’m interested in creating a space where people are getting in contact with each other, and also the environment. That’s why we focus on water, because water has an amazing ability to be in a permanent process of transition, and it’s the opposite of the hard, harsh environment we have in our modern cities. Water seems like a therapeutic or healing influence.

Is there a “language” of placemaking? Or a set of principles that set it apart from mere engineering?

I would say rather that placemaking is always an impression of our culture, of what we think has value. You can see this in different cities. In every city, there are fantastic places. You go there and you immediately take it in—such an incredible atmosphere. This atmosphere was certainly not driven by traffic or logical engineering. It is more like a cultural event. Places like that are a living room for society.

Yet your work also has a strong environmental focus.

Yes. It’s another component: a celebration of air, light, water—the environment. It’s a question of getting in contact with something that is lost. Our cities are a totally artificial environment—that’s a fact. As a result, we have a strong desire to sit outside and feel air and light, to feel the temperature change from day to night. People are longing for that.

Do you bring the public into your process?

Placemaking is never accomplished by one person. It’s a social process where you bring in people with multiple fields of expertise. That’s so important to make it a vibrant place.

I like to work on public engagement, though in the United States, it’s very different from here. It can be much more complicated in the U.S. because people are very opinionated and it can be hard to get people to think outside of their opinion. But it’s absolutely essential to have that dialogue with the local people.

During that dialogue, I’m trying to look behind what people say, what’s the message, which is often the unspoken. What is the real intention? It’s very important for artists to listen to that. It’s almost a spiritual dimension.

What about your team? How much work do you do with other professionals?

I like to work with teams—my office team is a mixture of architects, landscape architects, engineers, and professionals in urban design and planning. We also work with many other professionals on projects. More and more, we in the field of art have to connect. We have to create a network. That’s what placemaking really is

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