On Public Art from a Non-Artist.....

I have no professional experience as a public artist or as an arts administrator. I am a garden variety university administrator. My story about public art comes from the vantage point of one who knows quite a bit about institutional change and collaboration, but little about the artworld. In my public art collaboration, I have learned a couple of critical lessons about the importance and value of public art. Public art is about the process leading to the final piece or pieces. It’s about well-facilitated dialogue; metaphors, images and meanings constructed by the community involved; and artwork that reflects these conversations and meanings. Public art, at its core, is engaged, civic and all about shared meanings that are visually represented in language and pictures that are familiar and dear to those involved in the process.

I am a university program director who focuses on issues of university-community collaborations; diversity of worldview in educational programs and research; and integration of the sciences and humanities. While I have always been an arts lover, I lack the expertise and training to deeply understand the visual arts as a discourse of culture creation. Yet, in the design and implementation of a new faculty leadership development program, I had a strong sense about the need to integrate the civic and culture-making dimensions of public art. The Northern Lights Leadership for Institutional Change initiative (NL-LINC), funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, works with three public land-grant universities in the Upper Midwest to build faculty capacity around civic involvement, collaborative scholarship, and deepened understanding of institutional change. We offer faculty the experiential opportunity to change the way they practice their scholarship in a more civic, engaged and pluralistic fashion.

Public Art and Faculty Development

The bulk of our programming is educational in nature, but is deeply focused on changing the culture of the institution. From my previous experience with public art, I understood that art — like no other process — affords people the opportunity to use creativity as a means to ask difficult questions; challenge assumptions about institutional and cultural practices; and open the minds and hearts of the faculty involved. With this knowledge, we hired an artist with a public art background to serve as an ‘artist in residence’ for the duration of the project. Karl Lorenz, our artist, works with faculty from divergent backgrounds (primarily the sciences), to learn and dialogue deeply around issues of change, collaboration, leadership, diversity, and citizenship. He has designed a wonderful seminar process, where we convene at least one hundred faculty a few times a year for a learning experience centered around one of the above issues. Karl creates sculptural "sketches" for these events, along with multi-media presentations and locally relevant case studies that tell stories and paint metaphors derived from the ongoing faculty dialogue around collaboration, leadership and institutional change. At these events, he may select a metaphor like ‘intimacy’ to generate discussion and learning around shared concerns in communities. These metaphors are drawn directly from the conversations of the participants during the course of the program. Academicians, who are trained to think of themselves as detached and objective, are surprisingly open to the notion of practicing ‘intimacy’ in their scholarship if it is presented through the lens of image, metaphor and the arts.

Difficult or contested issues are also ideal to address through a public arts approach. Civic discourse and focus on the uncomfortable tensions and unanswered questions among groups are always extremely difficult and break down often enough due to poor process. Public art allows the use of image, metaphor and conversation as a means to open up the issue in a new way. Individuals and groups on opposite sides of an issue can engage in dialogue around central metaphors like ‘bridging,’ ‘trolls under the bridge,’ and intimacy. What we find is that a viable way to generate meaning and images are key elements required to create a civic process that allows for genuine dialogue and long-term resolution of critical issues. In fact, when we have used a public art approach to sensitive issues, participants have asked for additional assistance with more deeply engaging in an arts process to allow communities to more profoundly address their critical issue.

What Public Art Teaches Us....

We have discovered several powerful things about public art as well as the type of artist to involve. First of all, the artist should understand that public art is a PROCESS, not just the sculpture or painting at the end of the grant period. The artist must be an excellent facilitator of dialogue and a good listener, as s/he will have to elicit the metaphors and ongoing direction of the project from the conversations and meanings generated by participants. They must understand their role as participant-observer, not as expert creator. Thus, the artist you consider should be as well-versed in the notions of democracy, cultural creation and civic processes as they are in their artistic medium and visibility in the ‘art world.’ The artist should also understand that public art is not a piece of art that gets installed in the public domain, but is the fully-owned culmination of a long engagement with a community around a core of critical issues about which they care deeply.

Art can also get you to places that standard facilitated discussions OR meetings with agendas cannot. It will inspire and provoke fascinating dialogue, because the conversations are meaning and image-based, NOT issue-driven or polemical. We have found that faculty who would be completely disinterested in a learning process around collaborative, scholarly practice suddenly discover the implications for the nature and praxis of their own work because the dialogue has been funneled through an arts medium. Discussing the emotional valance and content of inquiry is much more open and comforting through an experimental, metaphoric and visual framework.

Enticing Repeat Offenders...

We have also learned that arts are a strange attractor. People keep coming back to see what the ‘art guy’ is going to do this time. Others show up because they heard about the ‘art guy.’ In our brief practice, we have seen the public arts approach multiply in numerous configurations from our central, tri-state public art learning process to two separate public art endeavors in North Dakota, a tribal art initiative in South Dakota, and a community-based public art program in rural Minnesota. People like what they see and learn deeply and thus want to replicate this powerful process in other aspects of their lives and communities.

What Public Art Ain't....

It’s also important to know what ISN’T public art. It’s not just sculpture stuck in public somewhere. It’s not just hiring an artist and getting a product after several months. It’s not having an artist display several options for pieces up front and then having a committee select the one they like the best (with some modifications). This is all too typical, as people conflate art in public with public art, much the way we confuse democracy with the political process.

With our faculty, we have used public art to generate understanding and meaning of civic engagement and scholarship. We have learned through our work with Karl that engagement requires intimacy and trust. We now know that through the sculptural sketches that he has constructed that there are many views to understanding a problem and a solution and that consideration of all worldviews must be present to derive the richest meanings. We now know that scholarship is fully about observation, analysis and meaning-generation. It too, at its best, is an art, and when harnessed to a civic process, can leverage deep and sustainable impact in our communities.

Margaret A. Adamek-University of Minnesota