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It Ain’t Easy Being Public Art

January 15, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

I think Art in Public Places staff for any community have one of the most difficult jobs in the arts, particularly when it comes to public perception of the job they do. While everyone accepts that not every work of art will be appreciated, the fact that public art installations are visible for years in places hundreds, if not thousands, of people pass each day makes them the subject of daily comment, often repeatedly by the same people.

Not to mention there are birds pooping on them, too

While some pieces become the source of enormous pride, local identity, and tourism (i.e. Cloud Gate in Chicago), and others generate a mixture of pride and bemusement (here’s to you, Blucifer), in some cases it seems you can’t win for trying.

That seems to be the case in Annapolis, MD where all three options for a traffic circle the Art in Public Places folks posted for feedback got panned. Maybe it is the location that is cursed or the local residents who are particularly critical. The new sculpture is meant to replace one installed in 2011 that fell prey to termites.

…meant to evoke the ribs of a ship in a nautical town. Even [artist] Donovan admitted it could also be compared to whale bones on a beach or a brontosaurus-sized rack of barbecued ribs.

Among the comments people made for the submissions included noting that two of the options looked like hand of people coming out of graves. (Apparently, there are some cemeteries in the vicinity). Another said one of them looked like drowning people reaching for a lifeline. One commenter said one piece looked like it belonged at the entrance of a retirement village in Boca Raton. One piece was likened to a condom.

There were also the inevitable comments about the whole endeavor being a waste of money.

There is a rule in surveying that you should never ask for feedback if you aren’t prepared to act upon the responses. So the question is what the public places art commission intends to do with the comments they received. One option is to reject the finalist pieces and go back back with a solicitation for proposals. Another option is to ask the artists to make changes to their work in response to the comments.

A former commission member addressed the latter option:

“If you take a public comment to reconstruct an artist’s vision, then you are basically attacking the integrity of their art,” said Genevieve Torri, a former commission chair who represents the area around the circle. “It’s up to the artists. This is their vision.”

Advocacy, Arts Facilities, Audience Relations

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Kids Making Modern Art Less Intimidating For Adults

January 10, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

I came across a link to a post on the Alliance of American Art Museums website about the Clyfford Still Museum’s efforts to make their facility a welcoming option for bringing kids as young as toddler age. (I think credit goes to Ruth Hartt for liking a Linkedin post) The post was written by the museum’s Director of Education and an associate curator who recount how they have approached making a modern art museum approachable for young children.

When I wrote my post on Monday about organizations focused on community engagement entering dialogue with their constituents and making changes based on the feedback they received, I wasn’t envisioning using toddlers as focus groups. But that is pretty much the approach the museum employed based on research data about children’s art preferences.

We met with our infant co-curators over Zoom and observed their teachers presenting them with two reproductions of Still’s paintings that prominently featured black, white, and red. Our pre-verbal co-curators showed us their preferences through pointing, vocalizing, grabbing, and extended looking. We tracked and tallied each of these expressions of preference, and the most popular works of art overall went on the checklist. For another gallery about pattern, we watched how three- to five-year-olds interacted with predetermined provocations (materials to spark open-ended exploration) to design an interactive experience. For that same gallery, five- and six-year-olds from a different school virtually “placed” drawings selected by three- and four-year-olds into a pattern arrangement on the gallery wall using our virtual planning software.

I actually thought it was pretty ingenious to leverage the bold colors and swaths of color often found in modern art, (and in Still’s work in particular), in a way that aligned with what appeals most strongly to infants. It sort of recognizes that when people make the dismissive statement that their kids could “draw that,” they are acknowledging that there are elements present in the work that are appealing to kids. In some respects, the kids may find the work more accessible than their parents who are seeking to discern some sort of meaning in the work.

In fact, the museum saw an opportunity to change adult perceptions about who has the ability/authority to understand modern art, by letting them experience it through the eyes of their kids:

We wanted to challenge the idea that you need specialized expertise to meaningfully engage with abstraction and expand adults’ appreciation for what young children teach us. To do this, we integrated photos and videos of our young curators from the exhibition development process in the gallery design to show their contributions and palpable interest in our collection..

…This helped children (literally) see themselves in the museum and modeled their intuitive understanding of Still’s work to adults who feel uncomfortable engaging with abstract art (If comments about megalodons and hungry scary monsters are ok, then so are my perspectives!).

The museum shared some lessons learned about making the museum more welcoming to families with infants. When your Arts Crawl literally involves crawling, some of the traditional rules about touching; the role, appearance, and demeanor of gallery attendants/security need to be changed, along with other elements of the experience and environment.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, State of the Arts

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Many Moving Pieces Means Many Opportunities To Remove Friction

January 9, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

One thing I like about Broadway producer Ken Davenport is that he is constantly trying to identify barriers to attending shows on Broadway. Not just his, but any show. He has the rising tide raises all boats perspective. Recently, he wrote about how he started a conversation with group sales agents and buyers who arrange tickets for groups attending Broadway shows to figure out what problems they face when it comes getting those butts into seats.

Some of the issues had relatively easy fixes. Groups like to book shows about six months in advance, but tickets aren’t on sale that far out. Okay, Davenport says, we can start selling tickets nine months in advance. Another issue was that every theater owner has a different payment policies in terms of when deposits and balances are due. Davenport figured he would need to work on getting the owners of the different chains to agree on a uniform policy.

While that might be a tough task, the third impediment that came up was a little more tricky. Group sales agents said that it is hard to sell a new show as it is, but without images, videos, it becomes even harder. But as Davenport notes, with new shows the content may not even exist because the show hasn’t been cast and some of the show elements may still be in development. But he wants to figure out a way to make it happen.

What videos, photos, etc, tell the potential buyer who/what we are before we’re up in front of an audience? Movies use trailers. What can we do . . . and what can we do to make sure it’s available those 9 months prior to when that group comes?

In the process of discussing these problems, he noted that he was able to answer the demand for meet and greets with Broadway casts on the shows A Beautiful Noise and Harmony which he produced. Apparently people are willing to pay a fair bit for the opportunity. There isn’t a price list on the Harmony page I linked to, but for A Beautiful Noise, they charge between $1500 and $3500 for groups up to 50 to meet in the theater or rehearsal room for up to 30 minutes. Pizza and soft drinks are available for an additional $500.

For $7500, they will rent a room in a nearby restaurant for a meet and greet with up to 50 people with wine, beer and appetizers provided.

I know a lot of readers are probably wishing they were in a position to have people pay a few thousand dollars for a meet and greet. There may be some places outside of Broadway operating in an environment that creates a sense of occasion that could pull it off.

Depending on how many groups take them up on the last option, that is sure to make the production a lot of allies among local restaurants. If they weren’t already talking up the production to customers, they would probably start.

This particularly resonated with me because in some communities in which I have worked, I have regularly emailed all the area restaurants to make them aware when ticket sales were good for shows in the upcoming week so that they could bring more staff on. Even with that, there were occasions where some restaurants had to close early because enthusiastic crowds ate and drank them dry.

Recently, some art galleries told me they see a surge in visitors when we have shows. While I don’t believe it results in immediate sales, (I haven’t see anyone come to a performance with paintings tucked under their arms), hopefully it will result in something down the road.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

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Audience Engagement & Community Engagement Aren’t The Same Thing

January 8, 2024

by:

Joe Patti

In a recent episode of Quick Study, Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), notes that the arts community, including the NEA, toss around the term “social and civic engagement” as a benefit of the arts, but many arts and cultural organizations aren’t necessarily doing the work to achieve that. (h/t Artsjournal.com for the link)

He points to recent research by Marie Kim (George Mason University) and Jodi Benenson (University of Nebraska Omaha) which differentiate between audience engagement, community engagement, and civic engagement.

Iyengar says civic engagement is:

It’s all the political and nonpolitical processes that individuals invoke to improve the quality of lives of their communities or neighborhoods: you know, voting, volunteering, taking part in community meetings or activities designed to advance a public outcome.

Currently, it seems like the terms audience engagement and community engagement are used interchangeably, but the researchers say a significant difference is that community engagement is more of a two way conversation where the arts and cultural organization will effect changes to reflect the needs of the community.

“‘Audience engagement focuses on having members of the public experience a relationship with the arts as created and/or presented by the artist or organization, while community engagement seeks to develop relationships that potentially transform both the arts and individuals who come to enjoy the arts.’ So they add that to be a hub for truly community-engaged activity, the organization must invite open and honest two-way communication between itself and its audiences. An organization adopting this approach must be willing to change, I think that’s key, based on the needs voiced by the community.”

In a survey Kim and Benenson conducted of executive directors or equivalents, many organizations expressed a commitment to community engagement, but few were taking the steps to achieve it in terms of things like surveys and involving the community in planning:

“So the survey results showed that while most nonprofit arts and cultural organizations said they developed programs, quote, “Relevant for local community members,” and they offered, quote, “participatory programs,” they were not often very active in collecting data on audience preferences or in– this is important– or in involving audiences and visitors in program planning. They also found separately that when they asked executive directors to rate the importance of civic or social issues for their organization, half of them deemed such issues as extremely or very important, but nearly one-third of these organizations expressed ambivalence about this importance, and roughly one out of ten said such issues were not important for arts and cultural organizations.”

In terms of how this all relates back to civic engagement, Iyengar says Kim and Benenson found that when an organization increases their efforts at audience engagement, civic engagement in the community shows a corresponding increase. However, there is a much greater increase in civic engagement when the organization increases their efforts in community engagement.

Iyengar says some of the findings of this study dovetail with research goals of a national survey of arts agencies the NEA is conducting and form the basis for the ArtsHere grant program which seeks to “strengthen the organization’s capacity to sustain meaningful community engagement and increase arts participation for underserved groups/communities.”

Audience Relations

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