Outside-in >> Inside-out: Audience Engagement with the Core of a Creative City
Margie Butler
Where are all the artists? This question has remained with me from the time when I began working on cultural economic development in New Bedford, Massachusetts. By the summer of 2003, a portion of visitors to New Bedford had read about the city’s growing arts scene but could not always find it while walking the city’s downtown cobblestone streets. Like many revitalizing post-industrial centers, New Bedford is an authentic and rapidly evolving Creative City. Still I observed during my years there how its core arts scene – organized around studio buildings, local artist enclaves, and grassroots organizations – can be several layers removed from the cultural city visitors encounter. What this scenario really highlights is the cultural tourism gap between the formal and informal experience of a creative city. Or expressed in terms of people, the gap between a city’s outside audiences (visitors and some portion of its residents) and inside creative scene (local and regional individuals connected to the arts). Is such separation the necessary status quo, or is this experiential gap between tourism and the creative city’s core one that can be bridged? Furthermore, is it advantageous to do so? The answer is not an easy one, but it involves continued innovation around how the arts are presented and what can be defined within the cultural tourism footprint.
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Beyond Conversations: Collaborations Between the Academy and the Museum
Teresa DeFlitch
Cultural institutions of all kinds are coming together to produce innovative partnerships that emphasize education, community engagement, and social responsibility. Museums are very much a part of this endeavor recognizing that “collaboration is some of the most important work of democracy, especially in making resources available to public education.” Still, collaborating is hard and there are many museums, particularly small museums, which stand on the outskirts of this initiative and are hesitant of letting in the various voices of an external chorus. The reasons for this are complex but one way that museums can enter into collaborative work is to connect with local colleges and universities, who are themselves embracing interdisciplinary collaboration. The objective of my fellowship was to explore the state of museum/academy partnerships and propose additional ideas that would allow these two institutions to more fully realize the potential of each other’s harvest.
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Touchable Stories: Phasing into Permanence
Shannon Flattery
Touchable Stories is a community art and oral history series that I began in Boston in 1996. It is a program that seeks to have art and artists more deeply connected to their neighborhoods and uses multimedia exhibits as the conduit for communities to tell their own story in their own words. To date, eight “community portraits” have been completed that range from Massachusetts, California, and Texas to the most recent project finished in the spring of 2009 in Birmingham England. We have now trained hundreds of artists in creating effective and thoughtful community art as well as the processes that are essential for developing a respectful community dialog. All of the projects over the past 14 have been based primarily in marginalized urban areas, each with a duration of two to three years. During my fellowship, I looked at ways of developing a more “permanent model.” The project is also being imagined on a national scale, one that would site several exhibits across the country to capture the stories of communities. The model is designed as a permanent structure but with an inherent flexibility to be easily “remade” in order to reflect and follow the host community as it experiences change. At the heart of the work is that it has created places, safe places for community to gather and to better understand each other. That the people we have worked among have all consistently stayed engaged with these projects speaks to the success of the process as well as what I believe is a growing need for meaningful places where people to can continue to come together. Part of the fellowship was also spent digitizing and editing hundreds of hours of analog recordings from some of the first projects that were recorded between 1996-1999. This was a key component of the fellowship that enabled us to both make the collection safer while also allowing that very early work to inform the thinking around the development of the current permanent projects. For further information on Touchable Stories, visit our Web site at www.touchablestories.org.
What I Learned in Islamic School: The Role of a Private School as a Public Cultural Institution
Robin Pringle
With the support of the Public Humanities Fellowship, Robin Pringle, a consultant in school and community development, explored questions raised by her experiences of working with the Islamic School of Seattle from the fall of 2001 to the spring of 2005. As she seeks deeper understanding of issues of diversity within and around Muslim communities in the United States and the implicit responsibilities and possibilities of asking children to take a role in educating the wider public about their faith, cultures, and American experience, she is researching the implications for cultural competence education and identity formation in both private and public education. This project is the initial phase of a larger endeavor to develop a series of dialogues on decision-making and design for education in pluralistic communities along with resources to support those dialogues.
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Contemporary Art and Relational Heritages
Ian Russell
Today, a number of collaborations are developing between contemporary artists, heritage professionals and archaeologists attempting to rethink the way we interrelate with things, activate places and perceive time. Transcending institutional boundaries, these initiatives undercut long-established divisions between the subjectivity of arts practices and the objectivity of the archaeological and heritage sectors. They also have, however, significant implications for cultural heritage policy and the management of cultural resources and heritage sites. For example, allowing contemporary artists to interact with sensitive sites, buildings and artefacts poses challenges to established conservation methods but also creates opportunities for new ways of experiencing and engaging contemporary heritages. Building upon my Ph.D. thesis, postdoctoral research and professional experience as an art curator, I am documenting these movements, critiquing contemporary case studies and executing new exhibitions, installations and collaborations which explore the relationships between art, heritage and archaeology. My thesis is that applying collaborative arts practices and relational aesthetics to cultural resources and heritage sites will lead to innovation, policy development and improved management and interpretive practices. Following this rationale, I am working to develop constructive, collaborative and discursive spaces where the stewardship of the past and the promotion of contemporary creativity complement each other through rigorous critical interaction.
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Academy to Academy: Humanities, Community, and Policing
Pamela Steager
The fellowship funding for Academy to Academy: Humanities, Community, and Policing allowed Pam Steager—a Rhode Island-based public humanist, writer, and prevention specialist—the time and resources to continue her research and writing for the “To Protect and Serve” project. The project is a collaborative effort of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities (RICH) and the Providence Police Academy intended to enhance the Police Academy’s diversity curriculum with a humanities perspective. Funding from RICH, the police department, and private donors in the pilot year (2005) resulted in a 55-hour, humanities-infused Cultural Competency curriculum which was well-received by recruits and staff at the academy, but which raised as many questions as it answered. Ms. Steager used her fellowship to explore those questions and to delve even deeper into the intersection of humanities and community-oriented policing.
Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance
Kenneth Yellis
If exhibitions are indeed a form of theater in which the visitor is the actor, how can we best develop exhibitions that enable them to recognize their roles and equip them to play their parts? Like theater, exhibitions are a ubiquitous and venerable medium and, like theater, they can have a profound effect upon us at many levels. Beyond their practical and didactic functions, exhibitions, like theater, can change the way we feel and the way we see.
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