Artists Working In and Within Municipal Governments
When governmental and civic entities employ the arts to engage people in public processes, they often find new and effective ways to motivate participation, make decisions, and solve problems. In communities of all sizes, coast-to-coast, artists and their creative practices are enlivening the workings of civic committees, town hall meetings, and action plans, at the same time they are engaging community members in education, advocacy, and policy efforts related to local and regional issues vital to the public well-being. This Special Collection highlights a wide range of arts and culture-based projects or programs that broaden participation and deepen meaning beyond typical planning processes and/or governmental systems and structures.
 Marcus Young describes sidewalks as "the blank pages of our city as a book." Inspired by names or initials stamped in concrete, Young capitalized on sidewalks as an underutilized public space to give poets a new place to showcase their writing. Through a contest open to all residents of Saint Paul, a panel of judges chose twenty winning pieces and fourteen honorable mentions. Young constructed large stamps of the winning poems and teamed up with the city’s sidewalk maintenance program to create 100 prints across the city. |
 Conceptual and behavioral artist, Marcus Young's practice attends to the collective experience of our inner, natural, and civic lives, and has included works involving slow-walking and smiling, wishing and flying kites, drawing lines miles long, dancing in public, and community gift-giving. His award-winning project Everday Poems for City Sidewalk (2008) has transformed the city of Saint Paul, where he has held the Artist in Residence position since 2006, into a book through re-imagining Saint Paul’s annual sidewalk maintenance program. |
 Creative CityMaking is a partnership between Intermedia Arts and the City of Minneapolis that fosters collaborations between local artists and City planners. In 2013, Creative CityMaking embedded four teams of artists into the Long Range Planning Division of the City’s Community Planning and Economic Development Department (CPED) to enhance the creative planning process in transportation, land use, economic, environmental, and social issues. |
 Melanie Hammet is a performing songwriter who's active participation in city government has influenced and been influenced by her music. Hammet's experience with community and government involvement draws directly from the eight years she served on the Pine Lake city council. While there, Hammet worked on the overhaul of the city’s zoning code to better protect the natural and built environment of the city. |
 The Building Home project is a story of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from the Department of Theatre and Cinema at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, and community artists, actors, and musicians working in partnership with our regional planning office. Building Home use storytelling and theater-making techniques to facilitate and stimulate public conversation about the future of the New River Valley region of southwest Virginia. Through this, Building Home has facilitated community engagement with participatory democracy and civic practice.
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 Art at Work, founded by Marty Pottenger in 2007, is a national initiative piloted in Portland, Maine, designed to improve municipal government through strategic art-making projects with city employees and elected officials. Since 2007, the project has fostered collaborative efforts between artists, city departments, unions, and elected officials that have yielded posters, photographs, prints, and poems crafted by city workers. Art at Work is grounded in the belief that art serves as a way for government workers to share their experiences with the broader community. |
 Springboard for the Arts is an economic and community development organization in St. Paul MN that cultivates vibrant communities by connecting artists with the skills, information, and services they need to impact positive and sustained growth. Springboard for the Arts believes that artists are key contributors to community issues and develops programs and services to link artists to the work of municipal, civic, and community agencies and initiatives. |
 City Council Meeting is a four-city performance project in partnership with Mallory Catlett, Jim Findlay, and Aaron Landsman. Premiered in 2012 and now in San Francisco summer of 2014, City Council Meeting is described as “performed participatory democracy.” The piece incorporates audience participation into the performance for a collaborative exploration of the poetry in bureaucracy, and the power and comedy of government procedure. Drama and role playing create a stage for dialogue about community issues. |
 The Terraced Cascade, which was commissioned by the Scottsdale Public Art Program and the City of Scottsdale Municipal Services Department, is an environmental artwork and theater garden that draws inspiration from water and manmade inscriptions on the desert. Expressed as both miniature watershed and abstraction of the human body, it provides a means for communtiy members to imagine their place within the larger Indian Bend Wash - a waterhshed with alternating conditions of drought and flooding. |
 The Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP) is a field-building resource that aims to make visible the power of the arts to demonstrably increase civic capacity. CPCP collaborates with artists and community/municipal organizations to develop best practice frameworks for innovative engagement and cross-sector partnership activity with a focus on field-to-field translation, collaboration and co-design skills. |
 Lorna Jordan's art engages communities with place by blurring the boundaries between sculpture, ecology, architecture, and theater. Her work expresses a "systems aesthetic" and provides a dramatic play between form, process, and event. She has received numerous awards for her innovative environments including two EDRA/Places Awards for both Planning and Design, a national ASLA Honor Award for her work with Mithun on the Blue Ring, and two local ASCE awards for the Longfellow Creek Habitat Improvement Project and Waterworks Gardens. |
 Alternative classical composer Phillip Bimstein lives in Springdale, Utah, where he also served two terms as mayor. Known as “ America’s only all natural politician composer,” Bimstein has used music throughout his career as politician and environmental activist. |
 Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates has developed an expanded practice that includes space development, object making, performance and critical engagement with many publics. Founder of the non-profit Rebuild Foundation, Gates is currently Director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago. |
 Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) creates performance work that connects lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. LAPD is committed to creating high-quality, challenging performances that express the realities, hopes, and dreams of people who live and work in Los Angeles’ Skid Row, to building community, and to the artistic and personal development of its members. |
 A founding member of Alternate ROOTS, a service organization for community-based artists in the South, deNobriga served as ROOTS' executive director and planning/development director for ten years. A current board member of Alternate ROOTS, deNobriga is a certified mediator in the State of Georgia, and after three terms as Council member deNobriga now serves as Mayor for the City of Pine Lake. As mayor, deNobriga continues to advocate for arts and community development. |