Developing Civic Engagement in Urban Public Art Programs by DeShazo Jessica L.;Smith Zachary; & Zachary Smith

Author:DeShazo, Jessica L.;Smith, Zachary; & Zachary Smith [DeShazo, Jessica L. & Smith, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Civic Engagement as Part of Evaluating and Adopting Adaptive Public Art Policies

Sherri Brueggemann

Introduction

Community engagement, or lack thereof, can have significant impacts on public art policy. How public art is funded, selected, managed, and, in some cases, removed are regularly influenced by the level of community involvement. While community engagement may seem to imply that only the external public is directly involved, internal participants also count as part of the public in public art. The City of Albuquerque Public Art Program’s thirty-six-year history serves as a case study for how public art policy adapts over time to internal and external influences. This chapter will explore how internal influences (elected or administrative officials, boards or commissions and staff) and external influences (local citizen participants and national trends) affect the adaptability of public art policy. Four specific public art policies will be reviewed to illustrate how policy shifts over time to address public art funding and intent, community representation in the art procurement process, and intellectual property concerns. Leadership of other established and emerging public art programs can learn from the policy shifts experienced by the Albuquerque program to better anticipate their own policy adaptability.

The City of Albuquerque adopted its 1 Percent for Art Ordinance on November 22, 1978. Since then, nearly all of the enabling, guiding, and internal policies and documents have been modified in some form, from complete rewrites to minor edits. Each time, engaged citizens at various levels were involved in the policy evolution process. The resulting policies have become more adaptable, and the program itself has become more responsive to the public, especially by procuring works of art that have a strong sense of place and help build community.

In order to evaluate the long-term adaptability of the public art–related policies, I created a causal model using a seven point adaptive policy analysis theory, which examines the policy intent, structure, and adaptive capacity. After an in-depth historical context and content review of the changes to the public art policy, the findings show that public art program policy evolution that includes civic engagement at various levels over time supports program longevity.

Government-enabled public art programs are abundant in the United States,1 having proliferated at a rapid pace since the first programs were established in the mid-twentieth century. Government-funded public art programs tend to have fairly significant budgets, equaling between 0.5 percent and 2 percent of entire municipal and/or state capital outlay budgets, often resulting in millions of public dollars designated for art acquisition. However, public art programs are still at risk of being defunded, eliminated, or unable to be created when an economic crisis hits government budgets. Public art program administrators and arts advocates must continually prove the value of their programs to those elected officials and citizens who believe that the funds should be used for more critical benefits and services.

Public art program evaluation has yet to be significantly impacted by a single standardized model that is widely embraced by professional public art administrators. According to the sources reviewed,2 establishment of a single unified model is highly unlikely within the field.

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