Arts and Civic Engagement
Following a reading of “Potent Roles for Art and Culture in Civic Engagement” from Animating Democracy (of Americans for the Arts) I found three excerpts to be useful in my thinking for the HVA community engagement strategy.
“The creative activities produced by professional artists with community members that combine significant elements of community access, ownership, authorship, participation and accountability” This quote surfaced a particular term I had not previously considered: authorship. Often “ownership” is the overarching idea when it comes to claiming history, public space, or community ideals, but authorship takes it one step deeper to identify the sense of pride one may experience after creating something of their own. This pride builds an emotional connection with creativity directly at the source.
While not a direct quote, the description of an ethnic festival as a means to build community engagement reads: “newcomers claim public space, builds intercultural relations.” This prompted me to think of claiming public space in terms of HVA’s desire to generate excitement about the river. We don’t tend to think of environmental assets as members of public space, but by integrating the digital sculpture program, we may activate that space to build inter-environmental relations (between the technologically focused civilized world and negligible natural world.
Lastly, once again not a direct quote, the chart comparing community engagement and civic engagement visualized the separation I have been attempting to articulate all semester, in Community Engagement as well an in my research. I found it interesting how arts focused the community engagement portion was, almost representing direct audience engagement with the arts world, while civic engagement clung to simple policy and advocacy terms. I think here is the gap I have been working with: utilizing the arts to engage the community to work on things past arts participation and advocacy, to bring in other non-arts related topics and make them relevant by means of the arts.