EP 28: Government and Art
Why does government feel inclined to support or invest in local arts? We ask the director of a municipal government arts office and talk with a notable public artist who together paint a picture of beautification, community pride, connection, attraction, inclusion, dialogue and big economic returns. They say public art also brings about an important conversation for growing municipalities whose identities may be changing or as new public challenges emerge. Can art be an outlet for government itself? Or a culturally significant communications tool? A lot to consider on this episode. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 'New Data Showcase Economic Impact of Arts and Culture in U.S. and States' - https://blog.bea.gov/2017/04/19/new-data-showcase-economic-impact-of-arts-and-culture-in-u-s-and-states/ Matt McConnell, McConnell Studios - http://www.mattmcconnell.com Office of Raleigh Arts - https://www.raleighnc.gov/parks/content/Arts/Articles/RaleighArts.html Chicago public art initiative - https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/yopa/yopa0.html CitiesSpeak, '8 Ways the Arts Can Boost Your Local Economy & Strengthen Your Community' - https://citiesspeak.org/2017/06/09/8-ways-the-arts-can-boost-your-local-economy-strengthen-your-community/ News & Observer, 'Arts play big art in local economy, study shows,' http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article157663339.html Americans for the Arts' Raleigh study - file:///C:/Users/bbrown/Downloads/AFTARaleighReport.pdf CityLab piece, 'Where Are America's Real Arts Capitals?' - https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/06/where-are-americas-real-arts-capitals/530304/?utm_source=SFTwitter Mayor Rahm Emanuel's podcast - https://soundcloud.com/chicagosmayor
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Transcript
On this episode, The Municipal Equation. You wanna have a successful project. You wanna have an artist who gets to know the community they're working in because that's how you have a great art scene, is you have productive
creative people in the middle of it. If it's publicly accessible then you still have a responsibility to try to make something that's elegant and interesting that people will enjoy when they see it. Not everybody agrees on what that is.
Government's role in art, what the quirks are, the economic argument, and then talking with an artist who frequently works with the public sector, which as a client is a bit different than the private buyer. My name is Ben Brown and this is Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode 28. About a month ago, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel got some attention for launching a podcast with the tagline, a new podcast from city hall featuring the stories
of everyday Chicagoans as told to mayor Rahm Emanuel.
This is mayor Rahm Emanuel. We're doing our Chicago, stories, which is our podcast about interesting people in the city of Chicago who I think make this city tick. It's certainly not the first time a top city official has entered the podcasting world, but maybe it's a sign of expansion or encouragement for city hall communications as we've talked about in past episodes. Just recently, mayor Lance Olive of Apex, North Carolina started his own podcast so he could put his own voice on local happenings in a subscribable way. Plenty of other examples, but the development of public sector podcasts is something we'll keep following. And please send me links to those you bookmarked. Twitter handle is muniequation. That's muniequation. Back to Mayor Emanuel. His office also just recently put out a press release announcing a list of 50 artists or art companies to be creating public art for each of Chicago's 50 wards. Sculptures, murals, and other forms. It's a $1,000,000 investment, the city says And it coincides with what Emmanuel's calling the year of public art There's more to it A public art festival, a public art youth corps It's gotten a lot of attention, both positive and negative. You know, a lot of people love art, a lot of people don't. That's art. Chicago artist Tony Tassett, if I'm pronouncing his name right, told the Chicago Tribune a few days ago, quote, It's tricky to make public art. The public hates art a lot of times. It's different from when you make art for a gallery or a museum. You know, people go to galleries and museums. They know something about art. There's often a wall label or a docent that explains everything. You don't really have that outside. Meanwhile, you have people saying that having art on display in open or common spaces is a signal of the creativity, class, and intelligence of that town. So what's the net value? And once you factor in everything there, you know, why would for instance a local government have an entire office focused specifically on the advancement of local arts? We're gonna talk more about that right on the heels of some economic impact studies that have come out calculating the benefits of the arts to the community and the coffers. Starting with Raleigh, North Carolina, the capital city.
Sarah Powers. I'm the executive director of the office of Raleigh Arts. I am a, the director of an arts organization, and whether that's a non profit or a city entity, it's usually just managing all the different program areas that you need to promote or serve the arts community. In our office we have public art, we have community programming, we have grants to organizations. So I'm sort of in charge of managing all those different programs and all the staff that keep them going every day, making sure we have the resources, making sure we're connecting to the bigger city, all that. We call this the office of Raleigh Arts as a distinction between what's broader Raleigh Arts, which should include like our multiple, you know, off-site, you know, public art sites or our art centers where the kids, classes or there's the ceramic studios, things like that are all under our umbrella. But, we kind of sit in this perch here and have started to call ourselves the office. But, if I, you know, for this I should say I'm Sarah Powers, I'm the director of Raleigh Arts. That's a little more descriptive. But, if I was saying you need to come visit me, I'm the director of the office of Raleigh Arts, which is this place that you're sitting in right now. And and what what's the history of this office? How long is it? Did the city create it recently or is there a history to it or? No. I mean the city's had an arts office since the seventies. We've, the Raleigh Arts Commission which is the citizen board that's supposed to advise the city on arts. It's been around a long time and has steadily guided the city to bigger and bigger investments in the art. Our public art program is five or six years old officially, although we've had investments before that. And our grants program, has been going on, you know, for more than thirty years. It's not a new not a new program, but we are definitely poised to grow to catch up with how big our city is getting.
That brings up a repeat question from our episode a few months back about Sanford, North Carolina's public mural project. It's in a growing area where arts is becoming a bigger part of local branding and attraction. Now Sanford has a pretty prominent arts history in pottery. The mural project came about as a way to visually revitalize old downtown buildings and give people to pause and something to look at.
We can create a destination place of public art that people would wanna come maybe eat lunch, spend a Saturday or an afternoon here, see the mural trail, walk the mural trail, and enjoy everything while they're doing it. And maybe they'll pop into a store, that's great. If not So the question was, how does your city's growth or change impact that in terms of character and artistic portrayal?
What they did was hire muralists like Scott Nurkin to paint imagery that ties right in with specific local history, keeping Sanford's established character as the center of the artwork, keeping it from being a collection of nonsensical pose or aesthetics. The murals are very real to Sanford, even as the city grows and develops in character. Sarah Powers with the city of Raleigh, agrees that it's important to identify ways to be innovative with art and celebrate art as a thing, as cities across the world do, but not in a way that detaches from what the city of Raleigh itself actually is. Again, as development continues to transform the place. With the growth, you know, growth changes character. Is there a kind of a dynamic in that when it comes to arts, or do you want to kind of seize on what that change actually is? Or maybe talk about what some of the goals are of this office, in today's context. Sure. Well, we have a ten year plan. We adopted a master plan last year to sort of guide
future investments, and there's eight goal areas. And that's, you know, community engagement, there's public art, there's equity and access, marketing and promotion, sort of making sure we have a convening role for our creative community. I think in a city that's growing like Raleigh, we can't sort of almost expect to know what our creative community needs, but we also have a a bigger view than most folks do. So we have to make sure we understand what everybody needs and how in our special city the best way to solve them is. Everybody in this across the country is excited about the arts and trying to invest new things, and we you could drown trying to read about all the cool stuff everybody's doing. So we do feel like we've got lots of peers, but what we need to figure out is how it's best to do it in our city for our our folks, our artists, so that they're first. Not the cool thing someone else did, but what what are our what are our creative folks want to do? Yeah. What makes them excited? Because that's how you have a great art scene is you have productive creative people in the middle of it.
What is the art scene like for Raleigh? You know, do we know what economic impact and job support is? Do we have data like that? We do, and we actually in a couple weeks, we'll have,
new data in a couple couple, weeks from the Americans for the Arts. We did a economic and prosperity index.
That data has since come out. Americans for the Arts, by the way, is a national non profit. They do these studies for cities across The US to report the value from the support that cities, their governments, and non profits give the arts. A phrasal typically here associated is the arts mean business. According to the report, which I'll link to in the show notes, the economic impact of the non profit arts and culture industry in Raleigh has doubled since the last analysis in 2010. Partly tied to growth and the attraction of global events like the week long World of Bluegrass event from the International Bluegrass Music Association, And a series of other cultural festivals and investments. The economic impact figure is more than half a billion dollars. Roughly 19,000 full time equivalent jobs are in the picture. A few more numbers. $357,000,000 in household income locally. 53,500,000.0 in local and state revenue. This is based on data collected from 78 eligible non profit arts and cultural organizations in Raleigh.
Some of which get government support. But we keep an keep an eye on it. I think Raleigh, has made steady investments in our grants programs. We've have feeders like the NC State, you know, College of Design. There are lots of reasons to be here, a lot of young folks, so there's certainly a big diverse arts community. There's lots of theater, there's dance, there's visual arts, we have museums, we have a great foundation, But, you know, I see the opportunities in our public art program. It's got a lot of room to grow, partnerships. There's a lot of room to be more experimental, create new things. Mhmm. And that's where we're looking for the next way to to operate.
I got curious about government's in house knowledge of where to invest and how an expertise of art is developed, including a sense of trust and collaboration with working artists. I asked Sarah about connecting with them for public art projects. For example, some generic questions might be, do artists feel like they're maybe sacrificing something by having government as a client? Or does government even really get art? Here's Sarah. Then Now, let's talk to one of those artists.
I think what's really important for Raleigh is maintain the network. One of the reasons I wanted to be in this position is because I've worked with SparkCon and Visual Art Exchange who are all about working directly with the artist connection and, knowing everything that's sort of being tried. If you're if you're not kinda showing up to to everything and giving people a chance to create whatever they wanna do, how can you sort of sit back and be like, I'd like to hire someone to do my idea. That's sort of not how it works. So the idea that my team, we're always out, and we're always working with organizations and with artists as much as we can, so that we can build that you know, build the ranks. So folks are ready to you know, muralists. Murals are starting to become hot around here. There's but instead of us saying, hey. We need murals. We the public art team has a great list of everybody in town who does a really good mural because lots of people hire muralists for Mhmm. All sorts of projects. But we also have community voices. We've got the Raleigh Mural Project. Emily Emily Alexander is a local artist who's creating a mural festival, and they are so much more tapped in and engaged and know what's going on nationally. They know what's going on locally. They know who was working with who. And so our role can be a little bit knowing who's doing doing everything so that when we're ready to go forward, we know the right curators, we know the right, artists, we know the right, sort of pathway to get something new and fresh out of our our, own creative creative community.
One artist familiar with how Raleigh and other city governments do business for public art projects is Matt McConnell. He's been doing it a long time in all kinds of mediums for public and private clients. Alright. So I just pulled up to the, creative studio of Matt McConnell in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's actually a big warehouse building in the Boylan Heights neighborhood.
Hey. Go ahead.
Sparks were flying with metalwork projects and such, and there were huge creations in progress all over the place. On one side was a kiln that was the size of a car.
So this is main workspace. It's about 5,000 square feet. The whole building is 8,500.
We've got some woodworkers in the back, and there's a paint area, which you'll see in a minute. McConnell has degrees in architecture and industrial design. Not to mention a long time of practice, so he's totally capable with large intensive works and quirky stuff, including just a bit of involvement with one of the most well known video games of all time, which you'll hear in just a minute. He showed me around the studio a bit. But there's traces of,
public art proposals. One of our current projects that just concluded was for the town of Cary and its maps. So so these are like street maps that have been sort of stylized?
McConnell said the idea behind these panels of artistic maps was to create a sense of interaction, relationship, and identity with people who live in the town. So where would something like this go?
The final project that I I can show you pictures of are four columns 10 feet tall at the entrance to Downtown Park in Cary, and they comprise 80 individual maps of the entire town. So you can find the street that you live on if you're from Cary. And there's gonna be a map that you can access online so that when you get there you can, look up your street, find out which grid point it's at, find the column, find the location, and find your street. If you don't wanna do that, you can go on a detective search Right. And try to figure out what's there. Now the whole concept of this is art integrated into the landscape, sense of place because you're history is grounded around the places that you remember, the places that you know, where the movie theater is, where the gas station was around the corner from your house, stuff like that. McConnell took me on a tour around the warehouse with examples of projects for the public and private sectors.
There's a lot of found or repurposed objects like electrical components or cymbals from a drum set. An instrument used to create,
part of the soundtrack for the Tomb Raider video game when it was rebooted.
How so? I mean, what what was it? So you've got,
chimes, and then there's a sort of So this is like a pot with sticks that resonate inside, and then you play with a bow. So we created something that was about the texture of the environment in the game. There's a video about this, and they actually, they created an iPad app where you could play the instrument. But the composer who lived a couple blocks from here as a friend
came down and started tinkering with banging on metal and then decided, hey, we should make a piece of art out of this. So Whether it's for the public or private sector, there's a common denominator McConnell sometimes has to follow if his work is ultimately going to land in an open populous space.
The phrase that I've come to land on is publicly accessible art because it's not always public art, funded by the municipalities or by the construction of buildings, which the half percent for art, that Raleigh is a part of, that funds the artwork. In many cases, it's privately funded. But, if it's publicly accessible, then you still have a responsibility to try to make something that's elegant and interesting that people will enjoy when they see it. Not everybody agrees on what that is. Which is pretty much the same thing that Chicago artists said. And probably everyone understands
that. Again, that's art. I asked Sarah Powers about that when it comes to a city commissioning art for the public that has broad acceptance. How do you kinda define what that is? I mean, it it seems like it could be such a moving, you know, waterline. How do you you know, what's that conversation?
Well, on private property, freedom of speech is alive and well in Raleigh. There's not much we can do to stop, as a as a community, to to stop it. And in on the in the private you know, in our public sector, we've learned, through our work as well as what other cities before us have have sort of shared. You know, engaging the community, choosing an artist, as a community rather than as a some something completely removed, and then developing, our public art process is we choose the artist, then, then have a few you know, let's say we choose three artists, and then they develop ideas, all of which are presented to a a stakeholder group of folks, you know, volunteers, people who work in the building, and so they're all working with the artist to develop something that everybody can, enjoy. Sure. If it's more challenging, you know, it's something maybe folks aren't as familiar with, a new new media, you know, the the the process is even more important. Because the, a public artist who's working on the scale of a, like, a municipal public art program is used to this. It's part of the challenge of being a public artist, as you know you need to develop your project, with the support, with the buy in, with the sort of synthesizing the ideas of, the folks who live with it every day, the engineers who have to take care of it and make sure it's safe, with the, you know, the sites, in usual conditions, but have a strong enough vision, and, you know, sort of thoughtful process of making the art that it still really stands alone as an artistic piece. It's a true talent. Public artists are really special. When you see someone come in and can explain their process, and what they're thinking about, and how that, comes across visually, and how the technology will work to enhance it, and how it will be taken care of. It's an incredible feat, and they are always listening to the folks, that they're gonna work with. Because they want it to look good in the long run, they want it to be beloved. So developing those process processes to make sure everyone feels like they have a voice, that they get to know the artist, that they're not just selecting a piece from a menu that they've worked through, all the specific site or community issues, and then, you know, have a a permanent project. And that's some of the things that we would like to be able to help as new folks get involved with public art, is saying, here's some ways that, you know, process can really help. It did seem might seem labor intensive or you need to do all these things, but you have you wanna have a successful project. You wanna have an artist who gets to know the community they're working in. You you it all ends up a bigger,
a bigger win for everybody, including the artist. Here's Matt McConnell. There are times I mean, the the committee represents the public in that regard, and then they're looking to make sure that it is whatever the whatever you're coming up with, addresses what they've laid out as their goals for the project. Mhmm.
Sometimes those are very well defined. There is their histories, there there's a history to spaces that is oftentimes connected to them, and sometimes it's brought to the forefront and connected with, and sometimes it's not. Art integrated into landscape has become a central focus in many more projects. So we actually end up with developers who are creating benches that are reflective of a sculpture or that have something to do with the branding of the space. It broadens both the impact of artwork on a a on a on a on an area, whether it's a commercial development or a public development, and it also increases the challenge on artists to think outside of the framework of a painting or a sculpture or, you know, something that might be more traditional in terms of I'm going to create a piece of art for this space. So the the the limitations, always exist, and that's where my background as a designer, coming out of the College of Design, architecture, industrial design, even working with Thomas Sayer, you know, there's always a framework for for this for the project.
Another angle on public art, using art as a facade for aesthetically displeasing components of a city and not just by putting up murals on old brick. McConnell told me about a project he did for the TSA that involved creating artwork that covered some safety componentry at an airport. And there's one of the most well known variations on that, at least in Raleigh.
One of the most prominent pieces in Downtown Raleigh is the shimmer wall which covers up the whole side of the building,
for the convention center. The shimmer wall, a 9,300 square foot installation of about 80,000 small aluminum squares that altogether look like pixels that kind of hang loose and change color as they catch the breeze. That's how it shimmers. And it's backlit by LEDs at nighttime. The image on the shimmer wall is a giant oak tree. Raleigh's nickname is the City Of Oaks. And as McConnell said, it covers a bunch of unsightly infrastructure on top of the Raleigh Convention Center. And I know because I've been up there, I've got to see behind it. The designer of the Shimmer Wall, by the way, was Thomas Sayer, whose art is all over the world. Sayer humbly says that for all its high-tech appearance, the shimmer wall is really about as low tech as can be. It's just the wind, he says.
There are plenty more examples around town. They've got a piece done by the Marriott, which was, you know, there's weird transformers, you know, the sort of fun the junction boxes that people needed to hide, and they did a piece of sort of changing light and glass around it. Super cool. We wouldn't know that that is. So so that makes utilities a little bit more attractive. Oh, yeah. And I think there's a ton of, you know, ton of opportunity to have you, you know, artists problem solving, funny junction boxes you don't need to touch. Oh, use some cool LED lights. Get an artist,
to to make it look really interesting. A lot of cities and transit authorities are incorporating these ideas, I e, you know, city buses don't have to be these boring cuboids on wheels.
We have our tenth anniversary of Art on the Move, which is our partnership with Go Raleigh buses, and we work with, local visual artists to create, sort of bus wraps. And they're great. They're like big moving billboard. And for the tenth anniversary, instead of having, you know, sort of, our traditional ribbon cutting with swag, we decided to hire local artists to hang out in the buses and perform, which is something I've seen before, and it's really fun. But It's neat. We you know, when you start looking at, okay, we need to design whatever we do, let's how do we work with artists first, and then, go forward? That seemed like the most fun way to go about it, that they just we wanna we like we believe in public transportation, and we think it's really a great way to integrate, public art into everyday life, have looking at how people move across the city. And so having the other art forms be able to participate was a pretty easy thing, and our public art team lined up a day of programming quickly with everything from Shakespeare to comedy.
Another example. Parking deck
screens. The piece we built for Sky House down near Moore Square called Rise was a cover for the side of the parking deck to make sure that it didn't look bad. The, a couple of blocks away from there, we also worked on a place called the Lincoln Apartments and created a screen for them. Using artwork as a way to sort of deal with large scale surfaces, and the developers are trying to work with that the same way that the developers in Cary need to have, a piece of art on-site if they create a create a major development, then there needs to be something that, adds to the environment. And the town of Cary encourages developers not only to think about the object of art, but integrating the design of the artwork into elements such as benches and railings and planters and things like what we did with the Exchange Plaza.
So, you know, I I work in the the space of municipal government, but you know, you often hear from the outside and I want to try to ask this question kind of objectively is that you often hear from the outside is that, you know, arts is the kind of thing that will, it's gonna exist, that you know, if you really have a passion for art, you're gonna find a way to make it work. Why does government have to get into it and help to foster anything? What I guess to paint some contrast, what would it be like if all this went away? I mean, what's what's at stake here with, local government involvement in arts and fostering that kind of culture?
The way I look at it is in local government, we have an opportunity to be a big part of, you know, the everyday life. We are gonna serve our community. We're gonna make sure that trash is taken care of, that people are safe in their houses, that if you wanna build something, that there's someone making sure that it's not gonna, go wrong. You know, people deal with storm water, but it all of it comes back to, you know, the pride we have in where we live. And our our job is to sort of take take advantage of what people need, why they wanna be here, and, make sure that those investments because we make huge investments in a government level. We never have enough to do everything we wanna do, but we do have this big leadership opportunity to make make sure our cities are thriving. And when we think about arts from my perspective here in the city is that we have these equity and access, issues to tackle. If we're gonna invest in public art, why why don't we put make sure it's everywhere and not just concentrated in one part of town? Why do we wanna say this art form is better than this other art form? Because our community is told it's loud and clear that art is important, parks are important. They're very proud of their city. We're building a new city hall and I'd really love to see that it has a sort of a bold design and creativity as part of it because you think of grand, city halls or big wonderful parks that make a city something truly special. That's because people have made the choices. Maybe you have to wait a little longer, maybe we have to fight a little harder, but we do have an opportunity to to have you know, we have the leverage and and this sort of position to be able to do great things, and that's that's a choice we can make, so why not why not go that direction rather than meh. It's not important that people have great schools or great parks or great education because we do need it all to work. And there's no yeah. But sometimes you have to be creative in how it works together. But that's what I see we can do in Raleigh is we're gonna build this new city. We might as well make it an awesome one.
Another angle on this: the starving artist. I don't know if I'm exaggerating or being sarcastic with that phrase or not, but when cities grow and demand rises, you know, for housing, for instance, things get kind of pricey. So So there's a question out there about inclusion and equity when it comes to local arts and artists. Sure. We have, you know, the city is is growing quickly, which means people wanna be here. It's a great place to live. I mean, it's getting expensive.
And a lot of the the places that had character or would attract a young artist to the town are at risk. So you can't come in and find a a cheap house in an old neighborhood and fix it up. That's sort of a, past. Raleigh wasn't ever that big. Now that it's growing a lot of construction and things like that are new and maybe not meant for
a creative class in a way. So Howard says she does hear about artists not finding Raleigh affordable, and that affordability, yeah, is a much bigger issue affecting more than just artists.
But if you wanna have folks experimenting and creating new work, there has to be a little bit of potential energy. There has to be room to grow. There has to be space to experiment. There has to be sort of, you know, a landscape that is that, you know, can grow into. And if we have everything really nice in our square foot, footage is really high in the Arts District because all the galleries have attracted the restaurants. All the theater folks have gotten everything, nicely, you know, organized. You you don't see what's next. You only see what's there. And so the artist generally, may speak of myself as an artist, aren't that interested in that. We should have done. We Sure. Wanna create new things. So affordability
is sort of hitting in a few different ways. One solution some cities have put out there are these artists live work spaces. Though some are saying that model kinda maybe has waned a bit and there might be some regulatory hold ups with that kind of thing. But art might itself be functional and the solution to some of these issues. To quote Mike Williams, the curator of ArtsNOW NC, with the arts as the centerpiece, Raleigh's been able to create opportunities for the creative community and start to have discussions on topics like economic development, gentrification, and equity. Art is the only thing that makes all of this possible. End quote. Something to ponder. Can art be an outlet for government? In terms of partnering directly with the arts community, I I did an episode a while back about, the these people who have this idea of interpreting civic data through Bluegrass, and that was just sort of one example. I think the bottom line was, you know, how can we take public policy and filter it through an arts community and let the arts community tell the story versus local government putting up the boring graphs and charts that don't resonate with people? And if you talk about numbers and if you talk about it just you lose your audience fast. Whereas, you know, if if arts are the the the way of explaining it, then you might have an audience better. Maybe they understand it in more of a conceptual way, versus the concrete and, you know, the bureaucratic way, but at least they might have a concept for something that they didn't have before. Think about where people show up. We don't we forgot to
locate Raleigh on a river or some old body of water, so what gathers people that sort of we need seen and be seen, the promenade is our arts community. They're coming to First Friday, they're at the theaters, they're coming down to, events. So I think we we see that as an opportunity that that's we use our arts and culture to gather people. That is the best way to engage our citizens. I heard a speaker, at the Ignite Creativity Festival from New Orleans, and they had some housing issues, a bureaucracy that made it really easy for folks to lose their property if they had moved away after Katrina, and she and her teammates figured out, oh, that they don't see this information that's posted in that sort of boring way you're talking about. You know, it's put up there. The legal notice is put up there, but people weren't seeing it and didn't know their rights. So they engaged artists to make signage to just sort of make sure folks were aware of their rights, of the programs that could help them, and they're they're kind of cheeky and fun, but it got a lot of folks aware of policy or, you know, opportunities that they might not even know to look for. And we also want to think about how do we you know, so events and artists gather people, how can we, you know, engage artists in communities to to get people out, to get folks more interested in what's going on in their community center, or be more engaged with, development? How can we, use artists or artist programming to, you know, to get people more excited about what's going on and feel like they're included. I think community engagement is a big topic in Raleigh in general. We're a city that really relies on planning to to move forward, and an engagement is huge. You know, we don't build a park without having a citizen group and public meetings. But in 2017, is that absolutely the best way to get the all the voices you need? Probably not. We're doing a master plan for public art and looking for, you know, ways to engage folks in in what, you know, what's the vision for public art in a less sort of standard, you know, city, you know, town hall meeting kind of way, where you we will hear a lot of what we need, but we won't hear all the the newest ideas because it's just not where everybody's gonna go. So the city is developing its master plan. It'll take some time to complete.
They see it as more of a community plan dealing with policy and public private partnerships and citizen engagement, and have a new framework to not only get people excited about opportunities for art in the public space, but also for guiding them through any bureaucracy that that might exist for pitching a public art initiative to the city, for example.
I think so many people assume government will say no, because it's it the process might seem hard, there might seem to be a lot of waiting, there might you need to make wait for someone to meet. And if you're excited, and you have a really great idea, and you wanna do it fast, it seems like no. And sometimes it can end up being no, but we're trying to figure out in a way that can communicate it pretty clearly. Like, you wanna do this?
Cool. This is what you need to do. In creating a simpler, friendlier process has ramifications, not just as a potentially scalable exercise for other agencies or governments, potentially, but it can also inspire.
Raleigh has really grown into its own, and there's a lot of public art out there now. Greensboro, Durham, local communities, the town of Cary has its public art advisory board, and they're involved in much more than just creating a piece for a building. There are a lot of other projects that they're involved in. Many of them are finding art to place on a rotating basis around town. They have locations and they will, send out a call to place art for the year. And that is one of the ways in which they're interacting.
So there's a bunch of different avenues.
Once we start to break that seal, once once murals are sort of more normal than not, once you see them outside of different neighborhoods or, you know, there's you see diversity from small to large, then I I think people start to understand, oh, you can have public art here.
Part of what I've learned is be flexible enough to have the conversation vision. We've it's always been when I respond to the calls that I will say, I am a dialogue artist. I like the conversation. We want to figure out what's going on, but I do bring my own vision. And you wanna you wanna make your mark. I have a good friend in California who always says, make it yours. You know? You can have a conversation, you can have a dialogue, you can have limitations, but you wanna put your mark on things and have that be the way that you're you're seen. My mark on the town of Cary's public art project is is subtle and it's in there, but you you wouldn't walk into the park and and just immediately point at it and say my name. At the same time, it's about the town. And that's that's one of the lines that's that's always really tricky is how do you bring the the community into it and make it about them. The one project I'll I'll mention last is, the Wilder's Grove Art Project is a 40 foot long undulating wall of recycled materials for a waste treatment plant. And we had honored volunteers spent hundreds and hundreds of hours weaving together plastic and fabric and making chain mail out of bottle caps. And we created this long undulating wall. Built into it is an electronic system. We talk about maintenance. It's run on computers and creates a kaleidoscope, and you can use recycled materials to create a kaleidoscope yourself at the center of the piece. And it tells a story, but it was completely community based. The fabrication of artwork by the community is a tricky move, and that's another aspect of it. So you have public art can mean things that are in the public whether or not they're paid for by the city, things that the community actually is involved in creating, things that the community contributes thoughts to. Then it can be sort of a pa a passionate source of dialogue. Doesn't always go well, but you have to have the strength if you fail or if things get complicated. And I would just say persistence if on both sides, because there there is difficulty on the side of municipality and on the side of artists to to to meet agreement, and that can be complicated. But if you stick with it, then it can be really amazing.
I'll have links to a bunch of related or supplementary information in the show notes at soundcloud.com/municipalequation. Including some data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis on the economic impact of arts and cultural activity in each state According to the bureau using data from 2014 Arts and cultural economic activity accounted for 4.2% of the nation's gross domestic product or $729,600,000,000 for that year. I'll also post a blog entry from the National League of Cities on ways communities can better leverage arts for economic or community development. Gotta say thanks for the feedback you gave us on our recent episodes on public skate parks and on the relationship between honeybees and cities. And a shout out to the kids and volunteers who've pitched in for the Savannah Georgia Public Skate Park, which is coming together with private funding. Great Instagram page. Just look up Savannah Skate Park and you'll find it. Also gotta clarify something from the bees episode. I pointed out that honey bees aren't native to America and that they came over with colonists from Europe. That even though there are native pollinators here, honey bees turned out to be easier to raise and manage in large numbers. I cited The US Agricultural Research Service for that info. Phyllis Stiles from Bee City USA wanted to make sure I clarified that modern agricultural systems are the reason honey bees are the main pollinators for our food crops, not because they're the best. In fact, she says, many native bees are much more efficient and effective pollinators than honey bees, But we can't ship them around by the thousands in boxes, and they don't live year round like honey bees. Thank you Phyllis for that clarification. And while I'm at it, if you hear any factual stuff that you think needs clarification or correction, please let me know. I'm all about keeping the record straight. Don't get facts and opinions confused, but I welcome opinions as well. Thanks for listening. Municipal Equation is a biweekly podcast from the North Carolina League of Municipalities online at nclm.0rg. All past episodes @soundcloud.comslashmunicipalequation. On Twitter at muni equation. That's at m u n I equation. Follow us on Instagram too, and we'll talk to you soon. This is Ben Brown.
