Project Profile Database
Full List
7 Stages
The Survivor Project
The Survivor Project was a multiyear international exchange program developed by 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta, in conjunction with the Arts Festival of Atlanta. From July 1996 through 2000, artists and companies from the Balkan states were invited to Atlanta for a series of performances, dialogues, and interaction with other artists.
Albany Park Theater Project
Saffron
The Albany Park Theater Project (APTP) is a multiethnic ensemble of Chicago teenagers who create and perform original plays inspired by real-life stories told by local community members. They gather material from their neighbors living in Albany Park, who are generally all immigrant, working-class families. Saffron is their latest show, based on true stories told by the owners, staff, and customers of Noon-O-Kabab, a Persian restaurant.
American Composers Orchestra
Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices
Coming to America: Immigrant Sounds/Immigrant Voices links the symphonic work of immigrant composers to questions central to immigration and the formative process of American identity.
American Documentary, Inc.
P.O.V. High Impact Television Project
P.O.V. is a documentary series produced by American Documentary, Inc. High Impact Television™ (HITV) is a "beyond outreach" effort that forges national and local partnerships to build new audiences, educate viewers, and foster sustained public discourse and activity around the issues raised by P.O.V. programming.
American Repertory Theatre
Children of Herakles
In 2002 and 2003, a production of The Children of Herakles, written by Euripides and directed by Peter Sellars, toured Europe and the United States. Through the production and civic dialogue opportunities, Sellars sought to address issues of democracy and the global refugee crisis in response to the challenges brought on by September 11.
Andy Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America
Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America was a project of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Part of the museum's permanent collection, Warhol's print series of Electric Chairs was used as a catalyst to generate dialogue around capital punishment.
Andy Warhol Museum
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
The Andy Warhol Museum presented the traveling exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, 100 photographic prints and postcards from 1870 to 1960 that document the history of lynching in the United States.
Anna Deavere Smith
Fires in the Mirror
Fires in the Mirror is a play created and performed by Anna Deavere Smith based on the outbreak of racial violence in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York in 1991. In an interwoven series of monologues, Ms. Smith presents 29 characters based on verbatim excerpts from interviews conducted with her subjects.
Appalshop
American Festival Project, Environmental Justice Project
The American Festival Project (AFP), a program of Appalshop, facilitates creative community collaborations that aim to break down the barriers that separate people from one another and their cultures. Since 1981, AFP has worked with community groups and artists, guiding a process that empowers local people and employs the arts as a vehicle for social change. Junebug Productions' multi-year Environmental Justice Project is one example.
Appalshop, Inc.
The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project
RFK in EKY (The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project) was a site-specific, three day performance that recreated Kennedy’s 1968 “poverty tour” of eastern Kentucky. Led by artist John Malpede, and in collaboration with Appalshop, Inc., the real-time 2004 tour was performed along with a series of public conversations and activities about the politics of the 1968 tour and its relevance today.
Ballet Arizona
Day of the Dead
In 1997, Ballet Arizona in Phoenix mounted Day of the Dead, an original full-length story ballet about the conflict of a young Mexican-American girl who struggles to retain Mexican traditions in her family while her parents seek to assimilate and abandon those traditions. Partnered with the University of Arizona, the project worked to relate the performance to community and political issues such as immigration, Chicano culture, and English-only policy debates.
Bates College
A Momentary Order
In a residency in Lewiston, Maine, presented jointly by the Bates Dance Festival and LA Arts, Doug Varone and Dancers created a new work, A Momentary Order (premiered in 1992), that aimed to help Franco-American residents reclaim their cultural identity lost to decades of suppression and discrimination.
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
Still/Here
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Still/Here, a two-act, evening-length dance-theater piece (premiered 1994), explores and contemplates survival, life, and art with a visual score made from edited interviews with people who were or are facing life-threatening illnesses.
Billings Family YMCA
The Writer's Voice of the Billings Family YMCA
Over a three-year period beginning in 1996, the Writer's Voice of Billings Family YMCA conducted a series of readings and discussions in eastern Montana and Wyoming featuring author James Galvin. His book, The Meadow, catalyzed conversations about competing demands of land use and environmentalism affecting the daily lives of people in ranching communities in the western United States.
Blackside, Inc.
Eyes on the Prize I and II
The public television project Eyes on the Prize I: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 and its sequel, Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads 1965-1985, were produced by Blackside, Inc. of Boston and first received national public television broadcast in 1987 and 1990 respectively.
Boise City Arts Commission
Civic Dialogue in the Arts: Diversity and Access
The Boise City Arts Commission (BCAC) presented a three-day Urban Bush Women (UBW) residency project featuring two company members leading variations of their Hair Party!. The event was co-sponsored by Boise State University as part of its week-long 2002 Human Rights Celebration activities and set around Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday observance. It explored diversity issues and increased access-awareness in the arts.
Boise City Arts Commission
Portals/Portales
Portals/Portales was a public art event that literally opened doorways—or portales in Spanish—to different rooms which focused on Mexican American migration and the various experiences of local Latino/Hispanic community members who have settled in Boise, ID. The project’s goal was to provide a space where Boise residents could communally explore the universal experience of leaving someplace familiar behind and settling somewhere unknown.
Brooklyn Academy of Music
The Hating Pot
The Hating Pot is a musical theater work on the subject of prejudice and bigotry using a multicultural cast of teen and adult performers. Artist Liz Swados incorporates folk music from different cultures, blending the musical styles of Yiddish song, African and Spanish rhythms, and incorporating a variety of dance genres.
Brooklyn Historical Society
Crown Heights History Project
The Crown Heights History Project (1994) combined exhibits and educational programs in an attempt to foster better relations and intercultural understanding among the African American, Caribbean American, and Lubavitch communities in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York.
Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra
Klinghoffer Dialogue Project
In November and December 2003, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra partnered with The Dialogue Project to organize the Klinghoffer Dialogue Project. Through a series of dialogues set around a performance of the opera The Death of Klinghoffer the two organizations sought to engage the people of Brooklyn in dialogue on the effects of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians on their community.
Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center
The Arts and Dialogues on Race Series
The Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center (CMAC) presented the first year of The Arts and Dialogues on Race Series in 1998-99. The initiative evolved out of CMAC's long history of programs that tackle difficult issues of race and bigotry through the powerful language of the arts.
CEC Artslink
go_HOME
go_HOME examined issues of physical, psychological, and cultural dislocation. The artists, Danica Dakic from Bosnia and Hersegovina and Sandra Sterle from Croatia, worked with CEC's cultural exchange program, ArtsLink, to be in residence in New York City for four months.
Center for Cultural Exchange
African in Maine
African in Maine was a two-year project that advances a new phase of fieldwork and programming to respond to the cultural needs of refugee Sudanese, Somalian, and Congolese communities in Portland.
Chicago Public Art Group
Echoes of the Heart
Echoes of the Heart, facilitated by artist Olivia Gude (1993), sought to examine and improve neighborhood race relations through a series of ten banners created with an intergenerational group of residents from Chicago's southwest side.
Children's Theatre Co.
Land Bridge Project
The Land Bridge Project, in collaboration with the Perpich Center for Arts Education, brought together rural and urban residents of Montevideo and Minneapolis, Minnesota in dialogue around issues of the expanding farm crisis.
City Lore
Poetry Dialogues
The Poetry Dialogues were a series of intergenerational community dialogues that employed new and traditional poetry genres: rap, slam poetry, African jali (griot) praise poetry, Muslim prayer calling, and Filipino balagtasan in which poets debated issues and challenged one another's positions.
City Theatre
Outreach Residency Project
City Theatre's mission is to provide an artistic home for the development and production of contemporary plays of substance and ideas that engage and challenge diverse audiences. For each play produced (five per season), City Theatre identifies an organization or agency whose constituents can benefit from creatively expressing their concerns.
Colquitt-Miller Arts Council
Swamp Gravy
Swamp Gravy was a series of community plays created and performed from 1992-1994, under the direction of artist Richard Owen Geer. The project involved hundreds of local citizens of different races and from all economic classes as actors and other participants in theater-making.
Conjunction Arts
Civic Endurance
Civic Endurance is an installation by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry that portrays the lives of 26 homeless teenagers in Seattle through portrait photographs and an accompanying video production. Commissioned by Peace on the Streets by Kids on the Streets, the project addresses public perceptions of the homeless and issues of drug addiction through public dialogue and storytelling.
Conjunction Arts
Silence
Silence is an installation by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry that portrays the struggle of a church to desegregate its sanctuary’s seating in 1820. The multi-media photography exhibit was first displayed at the actual sanctuary site—the Center Church on the Green in New Haven, CT—and then moved to the Rush Arts Gallery in New York. A series of dialogues took place at both venues, addressing the underlying themes in the artwork and the controversy it caused within the church.
Cornerstone Theater Company
Faith-Based Theater Project
In its Faith-Based Theater Project, Cornerstone Theater creates original community-based plays with music, in collaboration with specific faith-based institutions as well as inter-faith communities, to address the issue of how faith both unites and divides American society.
Council for the Arts of Greater Lima
Trust Among Leaders
Citizens of Lima, Ohio and Lima/Allen County participated in a theater making and dialogue process with Michael Rohd and Sojourn Theatre to examine issues of trust among leaders.
Culture in Action, Sculpture Chicago
Tele-Vecindario
Tele-Vecindario (1992-93) was a project commissioned as part of Sculpture Chicago's Culture in Action public art program. Artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle aimed to transform and reclaim the neighborhood street, territorialized by gangs, into a communal promenade in Chicago's West Town.
Culture in Action, Sculpture Chicago
Consequences of a Gesture and 100 Victories/10,000 Tears
Consequences of a Gesture and 100 Victories/10,000 Tears by artist Daniel Martinez was a two-part project (1993) that tracked the history of the American immigrant labor movement by identifying important events in Chicago for which no monument or marker exists.
Curbstone Press
The Other Side of Heaven anthology and national book tour
The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers includes stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War as told by thirty-seven American, North Vietnamese, and South Vietnamese writers, seeking to establish the human effects of the aftermath of war for both sides and to create a reconciliation through literature.
Dell 'Arte International
The Dentalium Project
The Dentalium Project explored the economic impact and cultural and political conflict surrounding the construction of a Native American casino in the small rural community of Blue Lake, California, and the crossing issues of reparations, land, timber, and water/fishing rights.
Donald Byrd/The Group with Dance Umbrella
The Beast: The Domestic Violence Project
The Beast: The Domestic Violence Project (1994) was a dance residency and new work commissioning project by Donald Byrd/The Group, first conducted in Austin, Texas.
Esperanza Center for Peace & Justice
Arte Es Vida Platicàs
Addressing issues of cultural equity and democracy, Arte Es Vida Platicàs brings Nuestras Sabiàs (elder wise women artists) and other artists to perform and participate in platicas (dialogues) within marginalized communities of San Antonio.
Facing History and Ourselves
A Guide to the Film Schindler's List
A detailed study guide created by Facing History and Ourselves helps teachers and students connect the events described in the film Schindler's List to present-day events by focusing on issues of choice, group behavior, and racial and ethnic hatred.
Flint Youth Theatre
...My Soul to Take
Flint Youth Theater produced ...My Soul to Take, an original theatre piece motivated by school shootings in Flint, Littleton, and other cities.
Foundation for the Carolinas
Crossroads Charlotte
Crossroads Charlotte is a two-year civic engagement project that aims to shape the future of Charlotte, NC. Throughout 2004 and 2005, organizations, institutions, and individuals will hear and respond to four different stories depicting plausible futures for the community in the year 2015, and will collectively decide which direction they would like to steer toward. The ultimate goal of this community-wide project is to collaboratively choose and pursue a future for Charlotte, NC, based on intentional choices and creative foresight.
Hawai'i Alliance for Arts Education
King Kamehameha I Statue Conservation Project
Hula ki'i or 'image dance' workshops and performances presented by a team of traditional artists, including hula ki'i master John Lake, provided a foundation for the rural community of North Kohala, Hawai'i to resolve a restoration question regarding a revered sculpture of Kamehameha I, Hawai'i's first king.
Henry Art Gallery
Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics
The exhibition, Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, explored the social, ethical, and economic implications of the Human Genome Project.
Historic Northampton
The State Hospital: In Memoriam
The State Hospital: In Memoriam was organized by artist Anna Schuleit to memorialize the former Northampton State Hospital in Northampton, MA, and to promote civic dialogue about the mental health system in America. The project centered around Habeas Corpus, a one time site-specific sound installation of J.S. Bach's Magnificat, through which Schuleit endeavored to honor the building by 'making it sing in memory of the thousands of individuals whose lives were affected by the institution.'
Intermedia Arts
Midtown Greenway Project
As Minneapolis' Midtown Greenway development project threatens displacement of new immigrants, artists, and other low-income residents, Intermedia Arts has commissioned five Minnesota artists to collaborate with community-based organizations to examine public policy and create art that focuses on bringing communities together.
International House of Philadelphia/Neighborhood Film/Video Project
Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema
The Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema is a twelve-day celebration of artistic excellence and diversity in contemporary independent media arts. The Festival's Cine Cafes offer topical, facilitated discussions focused around a particular grouping of festival films that explore common themes.
Intiman Theatre
Twilight: Los Angeles 1992
The purpose of Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, created and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, was to create a dialogue and to use the ambiance and techniques of theater to inspire discussion about the civil disturbances that took place in Los Angeles in April 1992 following the Rodney King verdict.
Judith Helfand Productions
A Healthy Baby Girl
A Health Baby Girl is an autobiographical documentary chronicling the filmmaker's experience with cervical cancer caused by diethylstilbestrol (DES). Shot over five years, this one-hour video-diary explores what happens when science, marketing, and corporate power intervene in the deepest family relationships.
Junebug Productions
Color Line Project
The Color Line Project is a performance and community story-collecting project that revitalizes Civil Rights Movement history as a valued and illuminating context for current issues of race.
Kartemquin Films
Hoop Dreams: Chrysler Hoop Dreams Challenge
The purpose of the Chrysler Hoop Dreams Challenge (1995-96) was to use the public television premiere of Hoop Dreams, created by Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert, as a catalyst for local discussions of important social issues illustrated by the film.
Kirby Middle School
Honoring the Legacy: Learning it, Living it
Honoring the Legacy: Learning it, Living it was an event created and hosted by Kirby Middle School students at their local library in Memphis, TN. Scheduled on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the project sought to engage students and community members around issues of the civil rights movement, particularly in reference to the sanitation strike that took place in their hometown in 1968.
LA Commons
Bangladeshi Dreams
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
The Shipyard Project
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's Shipyard Project (1994-96) explored memories and issues, historic and contemporary, of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and their significance to the lives of people in Portsmouth.
Liz Lerman Dance Exchange
Retrospective Analysis of Arts-based Civic Dialogue Practice
The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange's project is a retrospective analysis of the Dance Exchange's ongoing practice in arts-based civic dialogue.
Los Angeles Poverty Department Theatre Company
Agents & Assets
Agents & Assets, an investigation into the advent of the U.S. crack epidemic, was remounted in Detroit with four performances and postshow discussions. The show, which was originally developed and produced in Los Angeles in 2001, was recast for the Detroit audience using a combined cast of LAPD members and Detroit residents from communities that had been heavily impacted by drugs and drug policy.
MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana
Ties that Bind
Ties That Bind was a photographic, oral history, and public dialogue project that reflects upon the history of inter-marriage between Asians and Latinos in the Silicon Valley to illuminate civic issues of intra- and inter-ethnic relations between them in California today.
Maryland Historical Society
Mining the Museum
Mining the Museum (1992-93), a collaborative project between the Maryland Historical Society and The Contemporary, was a ground-breaking exhibition that urged both the public and museum professionals to investigate their perceptions of race, history, and the role of cultural institutions in shaping societal norms.
Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities
Imagining Robert
Based on Jay Neugenboren's memoir Imagining Robert, a video documentary by Larry Hott and Florentine Films provides occasion to draw together people involved with mental health—family members, medical personnel, patients,and police.
McMullen Museum of Art
J. M. W. Turner and the Romantic Vision of the Holy Land and the Bible
The opening of the exhibit of Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner's paintings and prints of the Holy Land at Boston College (1996) coincided with escalating battles in the Middle East in October 1996. Organizers of the show aimed to help "salve the wound" through the exhibition and an ambitious array of related public symposia with participants from all the faiths rooted in the Middle East.
Michigan Opera Theatre
Margaret Garner
Margaret Garner is a new American opera written by Toni Morrison, celebrated novelist and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature; and Richard Danielpour, Grammy Award-winning composer. The opera tells the true story of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, in pre-Civil War America. The goal for the three co-commissioning opera companies in Detroit, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia was to engage more diverse audience members, particularly from their local, prominent African American communities.
Mozambique National Ballet Company
The Sacred Tree
The Mozambique National Ballet created The Sacred Treeto tell the story of the importance of forests and their resources to the life of rural communities, and the need for local people to manage and protect them, including protection from destruction by mostly foreign logging interests.
Museum of Chinese in the Americas
Memories of New York Chinatown
The Museum of Chinese in the Americas experimented with a wide range of community engagement approaches for both research and public programming in an effort to document, reconstruct, and reclaim the history of Chinatown.
Museum of Photographic Arts
Re: public/Listening to San Diego
This interactive installation by Richard Bolton at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego was held in the summer of 1996 at the time of the Republican National Convention hosted by the City of San Diego. The artist's aim was to enable the community to discuss many of the same national issues that were debated on the Convention floor.
National Endowment for the Humanities
National Conversations on Pluralism and Identity
National Conversations on American Pluralism and Identity (1993-1996) sought to increase Americans' participation in the humanities by engaging in a dialogue around issues of pluralism, asking the question, "What does it mean to be an American?"
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Public Forum and Toxics Assistance (PFTA)
Public Forum and Toxics Assistance (PFTA) is a community outreach and education project of the National Institute of Environmental Heath Science (NIEHS) Center in Environmental Toxicology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The core of the project centers on practicing and performing Forum Theater to hold community environmental health interventions, based on the recent scientific research being performed at the university.
NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre
Re:Configurations
Re:Configurations explored the issue of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity and partnership through an evening of dance performance and storytelling. Presented by NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre, a modern dance company in Tucson, AZ, this community-based art project aimed to give members of Tucson’s LGBT community an opportunity to voice their personal stories while contributing to a larger statewide debate in Arizona surrounding Proposition 107, a proposed constitutional amendment seeking to limit benefits to domestic partners.
New Jersey Symphony Orchestra
Dvořák and America
In 2003 and 2004, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra (NJSO) Winter Festival explored issues of American identity through music by Antonin Dvořák. Led by noted music scholar Joseph Horowitz, the NJSO augmented Interplay sessions, which explored American music and identity through activities and performances, with facilitated discussions involving local students, community members, and musicians.
New WORLD Theater
Project 2050
Project 2050 was an artistic exploration of the post-millennium demographic shift in which racial and ethnic hybridity will progressively blur racial categories.
Northern Lakes Center for the Arts
Water Issues Project
The Northern Lakes Center for the Arts commissioned and produced a series of arts activities to frame community dialogues about issues of water usage and pollution related to growth and development, use of farm chemicals, and recreational use of local rivers and lakes.
Northwest Area Arts Council
Forever Told, Forever Kept
Forever Told, Forever Kept is a storytelling mural that depicts memories of local elders in McHenry County, IL, by exploring life before World War II. The goal of the mural, painted by teenage artists, was to begin a dialogue between the two participating generations. Forever Told, Forever Kept aimed to encourage dialogue between long-time Illinois residents and more recent immigrants.
Oregon Bach Festival
War, Reconciliation, and Peace/St. John Passion
In 1995, a controversy erupted in response to the selection of the St. John Passion to open the Oregon Bach Festival, which had the theme of War, Reconciliation, and Peace, marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. A steering committee representing pluralistic perspectives created a process for community engagement between the festival, its audience, and the greater community.
Out North Contemporary Art House
Understanding Neighbors
Out North, in partnership with the Interfaith Council of Anchorage and Alaska Common Ground, organized 15 to 20 dialogue groups engaging 200 people over three months on issues of same-sex couples in Alaska.
Perseverance Theatre
Moby Dick
A statewide tour of Perseverance Theatre's adaptation of Moby Dick in Barrow, Fairbanks, and Anchorage engaged a diverse citizenry in dialogue about contentious issues of subsistence rights, the urban-rural divide, and the struggle between economy and environment in Alaska.
Real Art Ways
Listening Out Loud: A Hundred Days in Parkville
Listening Out Loud: A Hundred Days in Parkville was a project conducted by Real Art Ways with their Poet-in-Residence, Verandah Porche. The project culminated in a published collection of poems called Listening Out Loud, created from interviews Porche held with a local community members. The goal was to create a living history of Parkville, and the year-long project was celebrated with the distribution of the book to the community and a public reading.
Real Art Ways
Silent Wishes, Unconscious Dreams, and Prayers...Fulfilled
Silent Wishes, Unconscious Dreams, and Prayers ... Fulfilled (1996) was a public artwork created by artist Carl Pope, Jr. with the intent to help the Hartford, CT community reflect upon and heal the pains caused by inner-city crime with the hope of preventing more killing.
Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities
Traces of the Trade
The Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities and producer/ director Katrina Browne are collaborating on the creation of a documentary film, Traces of the Trade, examining the role of the North in slavery, as exemplified by the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island, from whom Browne is descended.
San Diego REPertory Theatre
Nuevo California
San Diego REPertory Theatre brought together a binational ensemble to create Nuevo California, a multi-lingual theatre work that explores physical and cultural boundaries along the United States/Mexico border.
Sharon Carlisle
Larimer County Exchange Project
In this project conceived and coordinated by artist Sharon Carlisle, 25 artists were paired randomly with local residents to create a work of art that addressed growth and development issues of major concern in Larimer County, Colorado. Hair stylist and visual artist, baker and writer, for example, were asked to find common ground on the issue and then create a work of art.
Shepherd College
COAL
COAL was a two-year residency (1992-94) and commisioned piece by composer Judith Shatin, at West Virginia's Shepherd College. Shatin's statewide research and interviews with citizens of West Virginia focused her residency on mining history and related contemporary issues.
Sojourn Theatre
BUILT
Sojourn Theatre’s BUILT explored the future of evolving U.S. cities with a multi-location series of exploratory performance events that culminated in a theatrical event in Portland, OR. Using Evanston/Chicago; Hartford, CT; and Portland as backdrops, the group organized conversations with artists and community members in each city. Through a unique combination of performance, dialogue, and research, its public explorations examined the ethical and logistical challenges that a rapidly growing population poses to shifting urban landscapes.
SPARC/Social and Public Art Resource Center
The Great Wall of Los Angeles
SPARC is using a community education and design process and internet technology to create the designs for the next four panels of The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural and to generate public dialogue that furthers interracial relations in the City.
St. Augustine's Church/ Lower East Side Tenement Museum
The Slave Gallery Restoration Project
The Slave Gallery Restoration Project brings together community leaders, scholars, and preservationists to restore and interpret the 1828 slave gallery in St. Augustine's Church, a cramped room where African American congregants were segregated during the 19th century.
The Houston Grand Opera
Harvey Milk
The opera, Harvey Milk, inspired by the life and assassination of San Francisco's first openly gay elected public official, was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera (1995 premier). The opera asks "Whose America is this?" and explores the ideals of freedom and the dignity of the individual at the heart of American democracy.
The Jewish Museum
Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art
The exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, featuring transgressive artworks by young artists two and three generations removed from the events of WWII, will offer a springboard for dialogue about complicity and complacency toward evil in today's society.
The Kitchen
The Three Willies
The Kitchen presented The Three Willies, a multi-media jazz opera with music by Leroy Jenkins, libretto by Homer Jackson, and direction by Talvin Wilks. The opera addresses the image of the black male as perpetual suspect and the ways that such stereotyping has affected different generations, ethnic cultures, genders, and classes of people.
The Names Project
The AIDS Memorial Quilt
The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is composed of over 33,000 individual three-foot by six-foot cloth panels, each created by an ordinary person to memorialize a friend or family member who has died of AIDS.
The Performance Initiative
ENGAGE
ENGAGE was a civic engagement project led by The Performance Initiative (TPI), a community group dedicated to using the arts to deepen understanding of difficult social issues. The goal of the project was to investigate the lack of voting activity generated by youth in light of local and national elections in 2004. The project culminated in a three-day event at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) that included a multi-media performance and a facilitated civic dialogue with local political leaders.
The Working Theater
Abundance
Led by artist Marty Pottenger, Abundance was a two-year theater-based dialogue about economic resource, distribution, and consumption and the social impact of money on people's lives.
The Writer's Voice of Billings, MT
Finding Common Ground in an Uncommon Land
Finding Common Ground in an Uncommon Land was a series of public readings and writer-led discussions held in rural communities in the western high plains of Montana. Hosted by the Billings chapter of The Writer's Voice, the project aimed to provide opportunities for dialogue around issues of land usage, family communication and intergenerational transfer of ranch property in the communities of Billings and Broadus, MT.
Three Rivers Arts Festival
Underground
The 1993 Three Rivers Arts Festival exhibition in Pittsburgh included an outdoor installation by artist Suzanne Lacy, titled "Sculpture at the Point," on the subject of domestic violence.
Town of Danville
Danville Transportation Enhancement Project
The Danville Transportation Enhancement Project is a partnership among the Vermont Agency of Transportation (Vtrans); the Vermont Arts Council; and the town of Danville, VT, to integrate artistic enhancements into the redevelopment of a portion of U.S. Highway Route 2 through the village center. Professional artists infuse the process with a creative approach to problem solving and an openness to new solutions.
Ukiah Players Theatre
upRooted/reRooted
The purpose of upRooted/reRooted (1991), two versions of a play about deforestation in northern California, developed from extensive interviews and improvisational workshops with community members and organizations representing all sides of the debate, was to seek environmentally and economically valid solutions to deforestation.
Urban Bush Women
Hair Stories
Using a method of cultural sharing that alternates between dance performance and dialogue, Urban Bush Women led a series of dialogues called 'hair parties' in community spaces, hair salons, and homes in racially and economically diverse neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York.
UrbanArts
Art in Transit/Orange Line project
In Boston, public art became a tool to help local residents, fearful about gentrification, cope with the changes imminent in the Orange Line transit relocation. UrbanArts established a station-specific art program, using photography, writing, oral history and theatre.
Wadsworth Atheneum
The Manhole Cover Project: A Gun Legacy
The Manhole Cover Project (1997), by artist Bradley McCallum, was a collaborative public art project that responded to Hartford's past and attempted to gain perspective on the current problem of gun violence in the city.
Wadsworth Atheneum
Hartford Grandmothers' Project
The Wadsworth Atheneum invited artist Peggy Diggs to develop a public art project in conjunction with a museum exhibition tracing the evolution of her work from studio to the public sector. Diggs' resulting Hartford Grandmothers' Project (1993-94) addressed the fear of city streets experienced by elderly women living in the city.
Wallace House Foundation
Common Ground: The Future of Iowa—Convening Community Dialogue to Build a Shared Vision of a Sustainable Future
Common Ground: The Future of Iowa was designed to engage Wayne, Adair, and Kossuth Counties in Iowa in a structured dialogue process to create a regional vision of a sustainable future. Using the play American Dreamer as a catalyst, the Wallace House Foundation sought to engage citizens in discussions that would frame actions to address pressing issues in these communities.
Wintergreen Performing Arts
Preserving the Rural Soundscape
Preserving the Rural Soundscape is a music-based project that explores issues of land use and sustainable economic development in a diverse rural community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
