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Public Art Conference Archive—2001
Pane Presentation: An Examination of Community-Based Public Art Projects and Processes
- Moderator: Julyen Norman, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore, MD
- Panelists: Meg Saligman, Artist, Philadelphia, PA, and Zevilla Jackson Preston, Architect, New York, NY
- Notetaker: Rondi Silva
Summary
Using case studies from recent projects around the country, this panel will explore the results of community involvement in the creation of large-scale permanent public artworks. The discussion will include information about the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium, initiative, which was a national, NEA-sponsored, special millennium project which placed artists in community-based residencies in every state and jurisdiction throughout the US in the year 2000.
Julyen Norman introduced his panelists Meg Saligman and Zevilla Jackson, and thanked Charlotte Cohen for inviting him to participate in the conference. He said that he would show some of the community based public art projects that Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MAAF) funded last year as part of the Artists & Communities: America Creates for the Millennium program. He went on to thank that program's main supporters, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation/Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Prudential Foundation, the Earle I Mack Foundation, and the Brimstone Fund. Mr. Norman then emphasized Artists & Communities was not a public art program, but a community arts residency-based program. There were also dance projects and theater, film and video, storytelling, publications, printmaking, weaving, and puppet making. However, a number of organizations, artists, and their host communities chose to use this opportunity to create a lasting work of art in a public setting. He then proceeded to show slides of several different completed projects.
Meg Saligman is a muralist from Philadelphia, PA. During 2000 she was resident artist at the Shreveport Regional Arts Council in Louisiana, where she produced the nation's largest publicly funded mural "Once in a Millennium Moon" as part of the Artists & Communities program. Ms. Saligman said she felt that the community involvement was very successful with this project. Meanwhile, she held extensive workshops with the community, approaching schools, churches, etc. for access to a wide variety of people. She asked community members a lot of questions including, "If you could have one object last until 3000, what would it be?" She found through talking to people that it was not the objects themselves that had meaning, but the stories behind them. With this in mind, she also asked what the year 2000 meant to people, and found that it reinforced the idea that we are just a small part of a very large cycle. Then she considered Shreveport specifically, and filled her design with symbolism relating to all that she had learned from this process. Once the design was complete, she brought it to the community. She worked with a team of artists assembled from the area, and interns from surrounding colleges, and received support from people with businesses in the community who gave money, time, and materials. She developed a sort of "paint by numbers" system, so people could come by and paint for just a day. They would receive a diagram at the end of the day that showed them what part of the mural they had painted. In this way, Over 2,500 people were able to participate in the execution of the mural. Over 40% of the mural was actually painted by the people of Shreveport.
Zevilla Jackson Preston is an architect form New York who founded J-P Design Group, Inc., Harlem based architectural firm, in 1992. Ms. Preston described herself as "committed to design excellence in communities of color," as well as committed to including art in the community environment. She is not interested in art that is "placed," but instead wants to integrate art into the infrastructure. Ms. Preston described several projects that her firm designed, including an homage to the "birth of Bebop" at the site of the original Minton's Jazz club in Harlem. The project employed a mosaic piano key design as a sidewalk enhancement, and a musical note design on the perimeter fence and on surrounding tree grilles. Information panels were also included with the intention of connecting the "past with the present," and to help answer questions about the history of the site. Another project discussed was the Harlem Gateway and Commemorative Walk. This ambitious project is located at the intersection of four major Avenues in Harlem, each of which commemorates a prominent figure in American history. It is the job of the Gateway and Walk to unify the commemorative plazas and circles with the existing streetscape. The last project presented was the Bright Light Trail situated in the Allegheny West community in Philadelphia. This project developed out of a dialogue with the community, which surfaced many of their personal stories and memories. This dialogue resulted in a walking path (takes about two hours to complete) that is punctuated with "bright lights" placed at important community landmarks. The overall purpose was to help unify the community.
