Forecast Consulting Associate Expands Reach of Making It Public Workshop

Forecast consulting associate Candida Gonzalez is leading Making It Public workshops across the country!

A Puerto Rican native of South Minneapolis, Candida Gonzalez is passionate about education, community engagement through the arts and equitable arts access. She approaches her work by centering at the intersection of art, activism, healing and personal/community empowerment. Gonzalez is part of the team who won the Creative City Challenge 2019 for their participatory art installation, “Radical Playground;” debuting during Northern Spark (June 14-15, 2019), their installation intends to invite indigenous communities and communities of color to a space where they feel free to gather, to play, to heal. Deeply invested in the concept of using art and community design as tools to wage love and healing, Gonzalez is working with Forecast on Making It Public workshops around the country as an associate. As an associate, she also led a session, The Art of Storytelling, at the 2019 South+Appalachia Creative Placemaking Leadership summit in Columbia, South Carolina.

Making it Public (MIP) is a customizable two-day workshop designed for artists of any discipline who want to gain knowledge about the fundamentals of public art and placemaking. The intensive workshop gives artists the skills necessary to produce meaningful public art in the 21st century. Participants engage in panel discussions, round-robin sessions, learning activities and networking opportunities, and leave prepared to move their work into the public sphere. Forecast has brought Making It Public to artists around the country, from Minnesota to Hawaii.

Gonzalez is using her background in experiential education and cooperative learning to refresh the workshops so they are more interactive and build on participants’ knowledge. She recently co-led a workshop in Grand Rapids, Minnesota—where the workshop was held as part of a larger initiative Forecast is working on with the Grand Rapids Arts and Culture Commission—and will lead the next MIP workshop in Arkansas on May 10-11, as part of Forecast’s work with the Walton Family Foundation. For that work, Forecast is organizing and facilitating two sets of MIP workshops for artists in northwest Arkansas who are interested in public art but are new to it. These workshops incorporate local artists speaking about their work, provide information about the creative project, ideation, stakeholder involvement, situational analysis, and more. Forecast conducted the first set of these northwest Arkansas workshops in October, 2018.

Planning for more MIP workshops in other locations nationwide are in-process. Contact our consulting team today for more information about our extensive public art services.

Candida Gonzalez is one of five Forecast consulting associates who were participants of GroundWork and joined Forecast in January 2019 to work intensively on a variety of public art initiatives through six-month-long paid positions. 

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.