Creative Practice Showcases
The Future Wales Fellowship: How Leveraging Art Can Demonstrate the Impacts of Climate Change on Everyday Life View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Alec Shepley
In Wales the Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015) recognizes that cultural capital is an asset and aims for a society that promotes and protects culture. At the time of writing, the author understands Wales is the only country in the world with legislation requiring public bodies such as local authorities and health boards. This puts long-term sustainability at the forefront of their thinking and to work together with the public enhancing wellbeing. One of the seven wellbeing goals for the Act is “a Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language” (Cymru., et al., 2020). Technology and “arts play a key role in fulfilling goals and also contribute to a globally responsible Wales, Resilient and prosperous more equal Wales of cohesive communities” (Cymru., et, al. 2020). One example is ‘The Future Wales Fellowship’, an opportunity leveraging art to demonstrate climate change impacts on everyday life. Fellows are given opportunities to develop artistic and technological works, challenging people’s perception of climate change, encouraging people to live more sustainable lifestyles. Fellowships explore the impact(s) of climate change on the people of Wales focusing on the three main themes of Energy, Food and Transport (Dylan, et, al., 2020). The study shows how mapping art projects builds opportunities for ‘citizenship’ by creating catalysts and legacies.
Transformation in Creative Cross-class Encounters View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Sumbul Khan
Most critical discussions of Arts for Social Change practices focus on the impact of the intervention for the marginalized community in which it was undertaken. This presentation foregrounds the transformational potential of participating in an Arts for Change project for third year Undergraduate students at a private art school in Karachi, Pakistan. As part of a Liberal Arts elective that I teach, students worked with participants from a women and girls’ community-center in a low-income neighborhood to collect oral histories and life narratives of the women who inspired them. Being led by a socially and economically disadvantaged collaborator to find inspiring narratives, developing friendships with young women whose challenges were vastly different from their own and sharing their interviewing, photography and story-telling skills with them helped students revaluate many of their preconceived notions about safety, empowerment and gestures of every-day feminist resistance. The project was conceived on the lines of early feminist consciousness raising practices, Freirean notions of reforming the oppressor and the oppressed and ideas of agency and “power within” articulated by Naila Kabeer. In weekly visits over three weeks, the students’ community-based collaborators identified the women that inspired them, worked with the students to develop and roll out semi-structured interviews and created instagram stories about them which were featured on the community center’s social media platforms. This presentation reflects on the transformation students’ experienced through an analysis of their field journals, subsequent in-class discussions and my own observations of their interactions with their collaborators over the three weeks.
Featured When Martin Buber Met Franz Cižek: Dialogue as (Art) Education View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Yael Vishnizki Levi
Art practice could be defined through engaging in creative and reciprocal processes which go beyond the traditional conventions of time and space. These processes are never created in a void, they originate in different types of dialogues which serve as a stimuli for artists to discover new things in the world and in their practice. My study focuses on two figures, the philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) and the painter and art educator Franz Cižek (1856-1946). Through investigating their practices, I reflect upon historical as well as current artistic and educational processes which still reverberate and effect the everyday existence of many practicing artist-educators. I believe learning (as well as unlearning) from this history could not only open new perspectives (both for the artist and the community) but also serve as a solid base for a dialogue which I see as a form of an artistic action. According to Buber, teaching (and learning) are forms of creation. I propose to juxtapose Buber’s definition of teaching as a reciprocal act with the work of an artist and in particular with the artistic and educational practice of Franz Cižek who was active in Vienna at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th centuries and was the founder of the Child Art Movement, opening Juvenile Art Classes in 1897, and examine their creation of works of art and (literary) works about art as educational actions that carry in them the foundations for dialogue between an artist/educator and the world.
Pro-tests - Aesthetics and Activisms of Socially-engaged Arts: Makings With Place View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Charlotte Lombardo, Phyllis Nowakowski
Like pro-test, art puts forward ideas to be witnessed and interacted with in forms of beautiful trouble. Socially-engaged art projects activate radical authorship from communities to reconsider and reorganize how we come together. Community-engaged arts processes can develop public artworks that become energetic cultural texts placed in and amongst communities enacting much needed social and environmental change. These processes can powerfully re-center underrepresented peoples’ experiences, wisdoms and readings of the world towards collective liberation. The Making With Place (MWP) research-creation project, a collaboration between York University and SKETCH Working Arts in Toronto Canada, culminated in a series of public art projects for ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021-2022. The three-year iterative MWP participatory process with QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) artists captures community-driven aesthetics, activist scholarship and embodied art-making in re-worlding experiments with place, human and more-than-human. This session explores arts process, aesthetics and design-justice principles that challenge dominant paradigms and prioritize critical allyship in emergent arts process and production re-centering voices and leadership from communities navigating marginal realities. Artist-research facilitators Phyllis Novak (aka Nowakowski) and Charlotte Lombardo will curate a showcase and reflective learnings of MWP research, public art and artists, highlighting Queering Place Indigiqueer earth-art medicine installations, Reconstructions of Home storyscapes on homelessness, My Public Living Room micro galleries as radical pods of care, and Indica;Omega performances on Black expression, mental health, and harm reduction.
The Arts - a Toolbox for Social Emotional Learning, and Culturally Responsive Practice: Strategies for Life and Learning View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Alexandra Novak Foster
In our current world, we are faced with many challenges specifically related to issues of mental health and social justice. Almost all students in the world are academically struggling as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and adults are also feeling the pull of change in a world wrought with conflict and misunderstanding. Amidst this, exists The Arts. The Arts help us through difficult times, and help us to heal. In this workshop, we will learn how The Arts act as a toolbox to help us grapple with our own social emotional learning and maintenance. We will learn how the arts help us to be culturally responsive practitioners in our daily life as well as in our workplaces. We will draw connections between social emotional learning and culturally responsive practice, and explore how utilizing The Arts to explore and interact with these topics will help us better prepare students for success inside and outside of the classroom. Participants will engage in arts activities, and leave with arts strategies to use in life or in other environments to help us understand our differences, celebrate our connections, and work toward common goals.
Gold Rush: History, Place, and Identity in Public Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rachel Dickey, Sarika Merchant, Sage Duffey
This paper explores opportunities for historically inspired public art as a way to draw upon existing place-based identities. Specifically, it does so by outlining a case study titled, Gold Rush, a temporary public art installation designed as part of a light festival in Charlotte, North Carolina, sponsored by US Bank. The art team drew inspiration from the city’s history, including the gold mining rush in 1799, then the minting of gold coins in 1836, and now its presence as a banking capital. The resulting interactive sculpture is comprised of 250 gold mirrored panels, reminiscent of a metallic sparkle, suspended within an inhabitable curved ruled surface frame, each integrated with lights producing an illuminated field of floating panels at night. The installation is sited along the Charlotte Blue Line, a public light rail train which was built along the typical commute of financial workers to Uptown, as an incentive for trying to gain additional funding for a network of transit lines throughout the city. The artwork shares the story of the city’s economic relationship with the banking industry, informing visitors of publicly forgotten pasts and potential future impacts. Using the installation as a case study reference, the paper outlines the role of concepts, materials and their effects, and the site in engaging narratives of place and place-based identity in public art.
