Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

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.