ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) is a ten-year collaboration that exists to
position art and culture as a core sector of comprehensive community
planning and development in order to help strengthen the social, physical
and economic fabric of communities. ArtPlace has four core areas of
activity: it manages a national grants program that supports creative
placemaking projects in communities of all sizes; it will extend this work by
investing more deeply through multi-year investments in 5 communities;
it seeks to understand, document, and disseminate successful creative
placemaking practices through its research strategies; and it works to
connect practitioners, organizations, and communities with one another.
For more information, visit artplaceamerica.org
Houston Arts Alliance (HAA) is a nonprofit agency established by the
City of Houston to enhance the quality of life and tourism by advancing the
arts in the Houston region. HAA invests in and nurtures Houston’s thriving
creative community by providing more than 225 grants to nonprofit arts
organizations and individual artists each year, commissioning the work
of artists for public spaces, managing the city’s art collection, showcasing
Houston’s rich folklife traditions, cultivating skill-based volunteers, and
empowering arts organizations to become sustainable and reach new
audiences through business incubation and other services. For information
on Houston-area arts and culture events, visit HAA’s online resource at
Artshound.com.
For more information on HAA, visit houstonartsalliance.com.
What It Really Takes for Art to Drive Placemaking:
A Conversation between Jamie Bennett and Jonathon Glus
November 14, 2014 - University Center Theater
The Center for Arts Leadership at the University of Houston brings
together artists, community leaders, students, faculty members, and
arts professionals around policy, research and best practices in the arts.
Through annual symposia and ongoing strategic partnerships, the Center
investigates, creates and tests leadership practices in the arts. Sixto Wagan,
a nationally-recognized arts administrator and a celebrated commissioner
and producer of contemporary art works, is the Center’s inaugural director.
The Center is part of the UH Arts initiative that nurtures and contributes to
the creative economy in Houston.
For more information on the Center, visit uh.edu/artsleadership.
Presented by:
uh.edu/artsleadership
facebook.com/UHCenterforArtsLeadership
http://bit.ly/tCALpinterest
@ArtsLeaderUH
Co-sponsored by:
CREATIVE PLACEMAKING - A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Creative Placemaking is the emerging term for a set of practices in which
art and culture work intentionally to help to transform a public space.
Advocates of placemaking see artists as catalysts for growth and culture
keepers who move neighborhoods forward. They see themselves as part of a
movement that reimagines public spaces at the heart of every community, a
transformative approach and a philosophy that inspires people to create and
improve their public places.
Detractors of placemaking criticize it as a synonym for gentrification and
other forms of neighborhood development that displace residents and
institutions that signified community in public and private places.
OPERATING DEFINITIONS
ArtPlace defines creative placemaking as:
Arts/culture efforts that strengthen the social, economic, and/or
physical fabric of a place.
National Endowment for the Arts defines Creative Placemaking as:
Art works to support creative, economically-competitive, healthy,
resilient, and opportunity-rich communities... Excellent art is an
essential part of building a strong community, as important as landuse, transportation, education, housing, infrastructure, and public
safety. Artists and community development practitioners across our
nation --sometimes one and the same, sometimes working together -are striving to make places more livable with enhanced quality of life,
increased creative activity, a distinct sense of place, and vibrant local
economies that together capitalize on their existing assets.
FUNDING & RESOURCES
ArtPlace has invested a total of $56.8 million in 189 projects in 122
communities across 42 states and the District of Columbia since 2012.
The National Endowment for the Arts’ has awarded 256 Our Town grants
totaling more than $21 million in all 50 states and the District of Columbia
since 2011.
Some posit that the relationships built through the cross-sector
partnerships are the true long-term gain for arts and cultural sector, as they
are leveraging resources where the arts were not previously thought of as
integral. One result of the creative placemaking frame is that in 2011, the
Department of Housing and Urban Development took the unprecedented
step of including arts and culture in Sustainable Communities grants.1
METRICS, EVALUATION and EQUITY
ArtPlace evaluation metrics incorporate strategies that: strengthen social,
economic, and/or physical fabric of place; respond to the local context; has
art/artists/culture as an integral component; and cross-sector partnerships.
Our Town metrics include: catalyzing a persuasive vision for enhancing the
livability of the community; incorporate arts into a systemic approach to
equitable civic development; and reflect or strengthen a unique community
identity and sense of place, and capitalize on existing local assets.
These current metrics respond to learning within the first years of the
grant programs. Ann Markusen, one of the featured speakers at last year’s
Leadership in the Arts Summit, spoke about the “fuzziness” of the initial
metrics of “Vitality” and “Vibrancy” and how placemaking efforts have
rarely succeeded on short-term time-frames, some taking over ten to fifteen
years.2
Many creative placemaking discussions rightly focus on a building and
a physical location. Some are starting to argue that these metrics are less
about a specific building, but the more about the interaction of the people,
with a location, and shared future vision.
Placemaking is about transformation, but from what to what? Who
determines what is valuable, and what progress looks like? In placemaking
endeavors, the politics of transformation should consider who is invited
into this new place, and who might be displaced.3
RECOGNIZED HOUSTON PROJECTS
Four organizations and projects have received significant international
recognition and national funding for their placemaking efforts: Project
Row Houses, a community-based arts and culture non-profit organization
and our neighbor in Third Ward; Southeast Houston Arts Initiative
(awarded to UH research professor Carroll Parrott Blue) that created a sense
of character for a neighborhood through community-based art initiatives;
Home and Place a project of HGOco, Houston Grand Opera’s education
and community collaboration iniative that engages the community to
tell its own story through music, poetry, dance, visual art, and film; and
Houston Arts Alliance’s Transported and Renewed that continues through
November celebrating Houston’s historic East End.
1. Nicodemus, Anne. “Artists and Gentrification: Sticky Myths, Slippery Realities,”
createquity.com, 5 April 2013.
2. Markusen, Ann. “Fuzzy Concepts, Proxy Data: Why Indicators Won’t Track Creative
Placemaking Success,” createquity.com, 9 Nov 2012.
3. Bedoya, Roberto. “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-belonging,” GIA
Reader, Vol 23, No 1 (Winter 2013)
For more resources and links, bit.ly/tCALpinterest
Progam notes compiled by Sixto Wagan