Public Art + Education: What I'm doing with the Public Art Archive
Hello digital world! I’m Molly Pailet, a grad student in the Public Humanities at Brown University. I’m passionate about applied history, non-traditional education, and creating opportunities for engagement and connection. This summer I’m working with WESTAF (Western States Arts Federation) in Denver, Colorado. WESTAF does a lot of different things - the organization develops technology that supports the arts; it organizes and hosts convenings centering on cultural policy and publishes the proceedings to provide field-wide resources; and it supports grant programs for arts and community organizers. This summer, I’m working to improve and grow the vision for WESTAF’s Public Art Archive.
This summer project is a pretty perfect fit for me - I am interested in how different communities and publics use art for placemaking and how art can become a part of individual and group identity. Public art means a lot of different things to different people. I am interested in how the built environment shapes our experiences, relationships, and our conceptions of self in relation to place. During the first year of my master’s program, I thought a lot about how and why people create meaning in place, and what that looks like. Whether it's through street names, dedication plaques, monuments, memorials (everything from monuments put up by a government, by an individual or by a group of people to more temporary roadside memorials), city design (benches, sidewalks, buildings, etc.), or public art - the way we contribute to and interact with the built environment helps to create meaning - societally, for groups, and individually. How we know and understand a space relates to how we see ourselves within this space.
How we interact with this space can build on the framework of meaning that the space has provided or it can contradict and question this framework to provide new meaning. Placemaking and design are intentional; statues of people, memorials to events, and monuments are all erected with a plan. These physical choices represent the sentiment of the time, place, and people who designed and implemented them. These physical markers aren’t limited to representing the time in which they were built, they influence how future people who encounter these spaces might create meaning from them.
Once I started thinking about these ideas I couldn’t stop. If you want to start and never stop thinking about this too, you might check out Erika Doss’s Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Dell Upton’s What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South, and explore projects that are questioning traditional meaning making in place and democratizing the process, like Monument Lab in Philadelphia and Paper Monuments in New Orleans.
In the Spring of 2018, I co-created a pop-up exhibit project called Monument Worthy: Personal Memory Markers (read about the project and the other pop-up projects that happened here!) as part of my graduate program. A friend and I asked the local Brown University and Providence community what was “monument worthy” to them. The idea for us was that while we interact in spaces that have monuments, art, memorials, etc., we also are a part of a more subtle and invisible memoryscape. Different places, people, experiences, ideas, and values could all be a part of this multilayered and invisible memoryscape. Without knowing it, we walk past places and things that have different attachments and meanings for different people. Our exhibit focused on the idea of taking ownership of place and space by asking contributors to create personal monuments and suss out their ideas of what makes something “monument worthy.” In a way, the idea of personal monument making is a call for public art. Here I am, with my friend and co-curator Hannah Mooney, talking about this project.
Enough about me - more about WESTAF and the Public Art Archive (PAA) project. WESTAF has sponsored the Public Art Archive since its launch in 2012. PAA is an actively growing repository of public art located mostly throughout the United States, but with a growing collection of international examples. Although the Archive is a premier resource for public art, the PAA is launching into a new phase. The first iteration of the Public Art Archive has search mechanisms that you can use to browse for specific artists, artwork types, placements, materials, etc. However, the types of information you can find in the Archive, and the interesting thoughts that might come from these findings, depend on how willing you are as a user to take a deep dive and work to make connections. Through a series of development efforts and project initiatives, the Public Art Archive is strengthening the search and explore capabilities to make the database more user-friendly and engaging to those who work in the public art field as well as those interested in exploring for both enjoyment and educational purposes.
The vision for the future of the Public Art Archive is based on its potential for public-arts focused education and sustained engagement. The Archive aims to be the launching point for deeper and further exploration into the world of public art. My work this summer will help improve the potential of the site, explore the potential of creating digital education tools, and act as a starting point to explore the process of using the Public Art Archive to generate curriculum that could be a part of the future website’s education portal.
This summer, my job includes researching digital humanities projects, developing a list of public art resources, and interviewing collaborators in the arts and cultural spheres. My goal is to connect with collaborators to understand how the Public Art Archive might be a resource in their fields - beyond a public art-specific audience. I am creating ideas and content for curriculum, and I’m proposing education tools that would be embedded on the Archive’s digital platform. This Archive has so much potential to become a dynamic educational resource and to engage all sorts of people people in new ways. I’m really excited to be a part of the first stage of this initiative.
How can you get involved?
Tell us how we can continue improving the Public Art Archive? We want to hear from you! What sort of interactives and functions might make the content on this site more engaging? What sort of questions and ideas do you have about public art?
Image above: Molly with Volk ding zero (man doing nothing) by Georg Baselitz in front of the Hamburger Bahnhof Art Museum.
