Yes in My Front Yard: Participation and the Public Art Process

(This story appeared in High Performance #69/70, Spring/Summer 1995.)

	"Mnemonics," 1992, by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, an art installation built into the walls of Stuyvensant High School, Battery Park City. "Mnemonics" was commissioned as part of the NYC Percent for Art program and incorporates hundreds of glass blocks that encase artifacts collected from around the world.

Adminstrators of public art programs once came to decisions about the public environment using only the help of art experts. Now, according to the 19 public art professionals around the country with whom I spoke, they have become advocates for involving members of the community in the public art process-for many reasons. Whether it's a public sculpture, an environmental installation, a mural, a performance or a media project, presenters now agree that when people's lives are being impacted by something, they deserve to have a say before that impact occurs. Community involvement can also increase support, not only for a single artwork, but for the public art program as a whole. According to Gordon Church, director of the City of Albuquerque Public Art Program, the success of his program lies in its "involvement with each constituency and their satisfaction."

Cee Scott Brown, former executive director of Creative Time in New York, gave another reason: "If they're not involved, they're not engaged. If they're not part of the process, they're going to hate it, they're going to destroy it."

Being concerned about the community's wishes and opinions and involving them in the process decreases the chances of vandalism. In addition, involving people may lessen the chance that a work will be so unacceptable that it will have to be removed.

Besides practical reasons for advocating community involvement, it is believed that respect for community can affect its self-worth. Dorothy Desir-Davis, an independent curator formerly with The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, said, "For various economic and political reasons in black and Latino communities, people never see enough positive images of themselves. They never have enough of a sense of their creative ability and whatever empowerment accompanies that." She believes public art by and about community people can help change that.

Gordon Church believes that by encouraging involvement in the public art process and supporting nonmainstream artists and art forms, his program can help to give community members a stake in their environment. He spoke about public art's ability to enhance cultural awareness by using culturally specific art forms. "Without any physical reminders," he said, "people forget a lot of these things socially or culturally. They all get tied up together and they can all get lost together. So we have to keep both material and psychological culture going at the same time."

The notion of who the community is defies simple answers. As distinguished from a generalized audience or a general public, "community" often comes to mean people with a locality in common. A community is not necessarily limited in space, but because public art is tied to a site, it is more difficult to float free of that site. When one wants to involve the community, as public-art professionals now talk about doing, the obvious one is the group of people directly impacted on a daily basis.

Chicago theater director Richard Owen Geer, who specializes in community performance, defined the term in three ways: by location (neighborhoods or towns), spirit (beliefs or values) or tradition (shared activities over time). For example, certain segments of the Hispanic neighborhood around Torreon Park in Santa Fe where a piece of public art was installed share a common language, a religion, a common heritage and a 400-year-history in the northern New Mexico location. So they have location, beliefs and activities over time in common. However, they are not the only residents nor even the only Hispanics in the neighborhood, and the larger community of Santa Fe also had an interest in the piece. So even such a seemingly clear phrase as "local ethnic community" is slippery.

The localization of the community for public art is two things. On the one hand it is a dismissal of the aesthetic thinking that held art as a universal to which everyone would relate in the same way. It dips public art into the messiness of everyday life with its diversity of opinion and people, welcoming such diversity. On the other hand, however, the critic Patricia C. Phillips is concerned that localizing community within concentric rings, and giving more say to those inside the ring, has the potential drawback of creating a "myopic gaze" through which, Phillips fears, the community looks in on itself to the exclusion of the world around.

Looking For Support

Most public art programs seek support from the community by keeping information flowing about what is going on. The presenter showcases the work-in-progress to community boards and neighborhood organizations, and recruits the local media to spread the word. The more people there are who know what is going on, the more chance there is that people will not mind the art coming and perhaps will even greet it with enthusiasm.

Penny Balkin Bach of the Fairmount Park Art Association in Philadelphia talked about the various approval processes her organization must go through to place a piece of public art. The approvals, which they are obliged to get, allow them to "muster up various kinds of support. And so when the thing is done and it's out there, there are a lot of people who understand it. When you can convince 18 commissioners who know nothing about art that it's a good thing to do, you've got 18 ambassadors."

If presenters have done their job well, these good-will ambassadors will spread the word and support will grow for the coming artwork. Not only that, Bach said, a mythology grows about the artwork as it is being formed. The public media, which she sees as "the most powerful tool available to public art," translate and interpret the work and help to transmit the growing mythology to the public, sparking their interest. By the time the work is installed there is already a broad base of support for it.

Imparting information to the community in order to generate support is one approach public art programs use. Nowadays, with increased concern for community involvement, programs are likely to solicit information from the community.

Advice and Consent

A common process in public art programs in New York, Philadelphia and New Mexico is the formation of advisory committees for each project, made up of arts professionals, commissioning agents and community representatives. A community representative can mean anyone, from a member arts or civic group in the area to someone who will be directly impacted by the work when it is in place.

In New York the community representatives on the committees are also art-world people, for example, someone from a local museum. Then the programs also go to the Community Board in the area to get their approval and support for the public art project. According to Tom Finkelpearl, the director of New York City's Percent for Art Program, "You can go to the Community Board meeting with two attitudes, either to try to sell the design to them, or you can go a little earlier in the process and see what they have to say. We used to do more of the first, now we are doing more of the second."

Going earlier in the process, before any design is in place, will allow community members who are not on the advisory committee to offer their opinions about what might work best for them. It also allows concerns that might not be evident to an art-world committee to be aired.

In New Mexico public art committees always include two community members-at-large who are not arts professionals, and who must represent the minority interests in the area. Anne Green, coordinator of the Art in Public Places Program for the state of New Mexico, said of minority representation, "If you have no Hispanics on your committee chances are that committee, if they're all Anglo, [is] going to think of art in Anglo terms of what is art. Well, Hispanics have different ideas of what is art, and Native Americans, yet other ideas of what is art. So to get them all involved in terms of sitting on a committee is crucial, and that's our main vehicle for getting the involvement of those artists, and therefore those art forms."

In New York City there is always a diverse group of artists and panelists, and so minority involvement is not a problem to implement, according to James M. Clark, executive director of The Public Art Fund, Inc., which places temporary work. In fact, he said, "To work with only Anglos would have to be a deliberate act. If one is interested in the breadth of contemporary art, one can't ignore minorities."

Once chosen, committee members advise the public art program about what they believe would be most appropriate for the designated location. "The first thing that any public art commission should do," said Harriet F. Senie, critic and author, "is take a very hard look at the community, and think about what that community needs at that point in time. Listen to what they say they want," she insisted. Equally important with regard to input, says James Clark, is the social and political context of the chosen site. "The approach we use," he said, "is to understand the construction of the public at each site and identify the stakeholders. Don't take for granted that elected officials are it. Try to discover who has strong feelings about the site, about public art in general; we try to unearth that."

The process of unearthing community concerns is not easy, says Larry Ogan, the chair of Santa Fe's Art in Public Places Committee. "With the Torreon Park piece," he noted, "there were public meetings called and not everyone in that neighborhood showed up or had the interest to say what they would like to see happen. So basically the members of the community that were involved were those who were interested in what they would like to see happen in that park." In this case the community wanted a torreon, or tower, built in the park, and the committee chose a design by Pedro Romero.

Public meetings are not often called about public art projects, so it becomes even more important for the committees to make sure they really are representing local interests. Mary Kilroy, formerly the director of the Fine Arts Program of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, spoke about an approach to community involvement her organization used. "First we looked around the city," she said, "and [for many reasons] targeted North Philadelphia for a project. Secondly we found a community group that was organized and extremely active, the Advocate Community Development Corporation. We met with the president, Christine Washington, and she immediately set up a small group on her board to work with us. We wanted a broader outreach into the community, and we now have 60 people on the urban art committee. That includes block captains, people who are politically involved in the community, gardeners, etcetera."

In this case, a vacant lot was chosen and the committee was given a lot of information about contemporary public art and what a park could be. The people from this African-American community wanted what Harriet Senie, who was on the selection committee that chose the work of Charles Fahlen, called a "Gramercy Park aesthetic," that is, something contemplative that would be maintained under their control that they could lock at night. The concept of a locked park as a piece of public art raises the question of calling something public that is not open to all. Yet this particular community wanted a place they could feel proud of that would not be another potential junk collector or a place that could be taken over by local drug dealers.

In this case and the Torreon Park example there was a competition held from which an artist's design was chosen. In other cases an artist is chosen first and then it is up to the artist, who must function almost as a politician, to negotiate with the community and reach consensus, or otherwise convince them that she or he is giving them something that incorporates their ideas and fills their needs.

Getting input from people rather than simply approval or support raises the stakes in community involvement because it raises expectations that input will be considered; but more than that, acted on. However, when a neighborhood has more than one group representing it, some may be pleased and some unhappy about any public art project. According to Penny Bach, in the '80s, when Jody Pinto's "Fingerspan" was about to be installed in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, even though members of the neighborhood group had approved and even helped her find a site, others in the group had become unhappy because they didn't want outsiders coming to "their" part of the public park. The city's Park Commission had to override them and say, "We have to speak for all the people. We're going to approve this because we know it's good for the park," Bach explained.

"You should never really work to please a small number of people," she went on. "You really should be working to deal with important issues that are solved in the most creative way. Then you can stand behind that. If you wind up where you're compromising over and over again to appeal to this minority opinion then you wind up with something that's not very good and people don't really want anyway."

More recently, in Albuquerque, where Gordon Church considers the percent-for-art program he directs to be "populist," community representatives had agreed to a mural project on a dam. Some people in the middle-class Anglo neighborhood didn't like it when they saw the cartoon start to go up. Church felt it was important that the whole community approve and moved the proposed mural-something done by an artist working with what Church called "graffiti kids" from outside the neighborhood-to another site, and allowed the community to choose something they felt was more appropriate. They wanted a mural designed by an artist to be painted by professionals. "Obviously," Church said, "this neighborhood was very well organized, but they did not feel comfortable just with their board leading us. What they wanted was basically more control."

The Community As Co-creator

Usually involvement in the public art process is limited to getting information and support from a community. But many artists and some public art programs prefer to involve the community more closely, in the actual making of the piece. Tom Finkelpearl described a project at New York's Stuyvesant High School, "Mnemonics," where the artists Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel installed 400 large, hollow glass blocks, some containing a diverse range of artifacts, all around the school. They chose 176 blocks to represent the years of the school's past and future-one for each class since the school opened and on into the next century. Each class, including those who have already graduated, forms a committee and decides what to place in their block. In this case community members actually have control over their part of the final public art product. In New Mexico, according to Anne Green, the community is almost always involved in helping muralists develop a theme and often people from the community, usually students or seniors, work on the mural itself.

In public artwork where various people collaborate in the making and even the designing, there seems to be a tendency to name the artist and let the other participants remain anonymous while sometimes calling them artists. But at least one organization is quite clear that the artist is the only artist, and retains authority. A new project by the Public Art Fund, "Urban Paradise: Gardens in the City" involves the community in ways that may collect memories, consult with residents to produce a neighborhood space, and even collaborate in design in some cases. But according to Clark, "From the beginning we assert that the artist is the person with the creative vision and is to be used as a visionary person and the community has this resource available. Their responsibility is to let the artist know the factual conditions of the site, their concerns, their dreams for the site. The artist will accommodate their concerns." Most public art community collaboration allows the artist to retain authority and, although the community is requested for input, nonprofessionals are rarely involved in the selection process.

Who Decides?

In most cases, decision-making, if it involves the community at all, is done by elected or appointed representatives. Harriet Senie said community input helps to make the selection process better. "But," she said, "I don't feel community members themselves should be the ones to pass on the thing professionally. The way I look at the public art process is that it's part of the representative democracy. For example decisions about the economy are made by elected representatives or the people that representatives appoint. And I think that public art has to be exactly the same way. That not everybody has a vote, but it is a function of a representative democracy to get the best professionals to make an enlightened decision in the context of a democracy where people are talking to one another."

In New Mexico, on the other hand, there is a very active commitment to allowing people who are not art experts to be included in decision making by placing them on committees. These people, who are often local politicians, or from the chamber of commerce or an active neighborhood organization, are assumed to represent their community's, or their constituency's, wishes.

The word "constituency" is being used in the public art field more and more. It can be seen, for example, in NEA guidelines for public projects. It is a word that comes from politics and is specifically localized, that is, in residency or in the empowering of someone to speak in your place. It is generally a word implying voters, or active participants in democracy. Constituents are the people who authorize the elected officials to speak for them; the elected representatives in turn must convince the constituents that they are speaking for them. When the word is used in public art there is not the power implied in politics. Public art constituents have no vote, they cannot un-elect their representatives. They can only let their objections be known when they find out what is going on. This lack of decision-making limits how participatory the public art process can actually be.

An article by Arza Churchman in the edited volume Neighborhood and Community Environments (Plenum Press, 1987) discusses various kinds of participation. Churchman defines participation as decision-making by unelected, nonappointed citizens, or the incorporation of community members in planning and design. Without that decision-making element in participation, or if decisions are made by elected or appointed representatives, she will not even call it "participation" but rather "involvement."

Participation in public art is not always or even often decision-making, planning or design. In public art it often comes down to what Churchman calls involvement, the official decision makers try to gain support, prevent opposition or control the situation through cooperation with the public.

Such a concept of participation-decision-making, planning and design-points to a much more active community than one that puts facts and dreams into a pot to be cooked by an artist. Getting information and support from a community are much more participatory than public art has been in the past, but still a far cry from what theorists consider complete participation. Public art in the past has been used to inform and educate the public. Now the public is being asked to inform and educate the public art process. But that process is still in the end controlled by the professionals-the artists, administrators and art experts who make the decisions and create the involvement with the community.

Whether full participation is necessary or even desirable when it comes to art is a different question entirely, and perhaps public-art professionals are correct in limiting participation to involvement. The kind of commitment and ongoing work needed in ideal participation seems to be impossible in percent-for-art programs where funds are tied to time and locality. Giving people the public forum in which to air their views, give pertinent information, resolve conflicts and, in the end, drum up support for projects is perhaps the only thing that can be done at the scale in which such programs work. Perhaps participation in public art is best left to artists working in ongoing transaction with groups of people over time in support of one another; and public art programs should go on working to perfect community involvement.

Marie Gee is a visual artist in Santa Fe working on a research project about public art.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #69/70, Spring/Summer 1995

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999