From the Ground Up: Public Art and Community
Friday, February 11, 9:30am-12pm
Hilton, Regent Parlor, 2nd Floor
Chaired by Juilee Decker, Associate Professor of Art History, Georgetown College (KY) and Greg Mueller, Sesquicentennial Sculptor-In-Residence, Gustavus Adolphus College (MN)
Definitions of community-based public art are not homogenous. Community-based public art may be defined as a project or network of activities that forge relationships among the participants and an immediate public; it may also be conceived as a program that fosters the creation of collaborative networks such that new relationships are created through the artistic process, as a by-product of the aesthetic intervention, or part of the work’s reception. While community may be comprised of artists and viewers, artists and collaborators, artwork and public, what other definitions of community have been constituted? How has community-based public art been conceived, perceived, and received? How is the notion of community made manifest thorough collaboration, solitary artistic expression, and/or stealth intervention? How does the process of creation, perception, and reception reveal the complexities of the formation of a community? What challenges to the field of public art, in terms of authorship, process, and activation, are posed by object-oriented and non-object oriented projects? How are the roles of artist, participant, and viewer framed?
This session investigates art that is created by a community, invokes a community, or produces a pseudocommunity through a range of artistic practices. Such approaches include civic art, community- based art, dialogic art, engaged, interventionist, and participatory art, and art as community cultural development. Collaborative programs and other types of community-created or community-oriented projects and paradigms are within our purview. The panelists in this session offer a range of critical strategies, theoretical, and practical approaches that aim to define or reconstitute community.
Public Art Dialogue Business Meeting and Award Presentation
Friday, February 11, 5:30–7pm
Hilton, Gramercy A, 2nd Floor
This session and award ceremony is free and open to the public.
Following a brief business meeting, Public Art Dialogue will present its 2011 award for lifetime contribution to the field of public art. This year the award will be presented to Anne Pasternak. The ceremony will be an hour-long program, including a presentation by the award winner and then a conversation with Harriet F. Senie.
See PAD Award
PAD Special Session (part of ART Space)
Agency/Agencies for Public Art
Saturday, February 12, 9:30-11am
Hilton, Murray Hill Suite, 2nd Floor
Chaired by Eli Robb, Lake Forest College, and Mary Tinti, New England Foundation for the Arts
The roundtable features an exciting line-up of key figures from a variety of New York public arts agencies: Wendy Feuer, Assistant Commissioner for Urban Design and Art, Department of Transportation; Anne Pasternak, Director, Creative Time; and Sara Reisman, Director, Percent for Art, Department of Cultural Affairs. We are looking forward to an engaging conversation and critical examination of how these panelists manage their public art projects.
Please submit questions or suggestions for the panel, in advance of the conference, to Sessions Program Committee member Eli Robb, [email protected].
