Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2017

This article contributes a practitioner’s perspective on social art practice, focusing on redefining approaches to evaluation by taking into consideration a critical perspective on the work. Through compared findings from the Creative People and Places conference in the United Kingdom and the Open Engagement conference in the United States, the research determines how artists’ voices are being represented. Citing Cedric and Littlewood’s Fun Palaces, the article offers social art practice as a bridge between established notions of arts practice and the communities who could benefit from a redefining of art’s purpose. A new co-created evaluation proposal between artists and programmers is offered as a development in the language around social art practice and its impact.

Policy critiques indicate that strategies aimed at fostering participation in publicly funded arts have focused too heavily on individuals’ capacity for engagement, rather than on the capacity of the sector to engage individuals. Programmes like ‘Creative People and Places’ (CPP) see this capacity as shared, community networks, ideas, infrastructure and skills. Through analysis of one local council’s Arts Development Service, specifically Mid and East Antrim Borough Council (MEABC) in Northern Ireland (NI), this article brings the role and position of local government work to light within this broader understanding of capacity as a community-wide phenomenon. Through focusing on the assumptions, operations and experiences regarding cultural participation held by MEABC’s arts staff, the article enhances the learning about community capacity more formally underway in the CPP projects and supports the notion that capacity building is a multi-directional process. In taking a new approach to programme delivery, the team’s assumptions and beliefs about cultural participation and infrastructure have been challenged. This change in perception has impacted the development of their practice to promote and develop arts and cultural participation in their locality. The study has implications for what more democratic practices of participation might mean to the strategic decision-making processes of local cultural policy development and governance. As a result, the article advocates for more and deeper consideration of local government as a key actor in the arts and cultural sector and cultural policy-making.

Municipal policy in post-war Britain included dedicating streets to noted individuals, many of whom are much less familiar to the people who now live on the neglected housing estates that still bear these names. Returning to Biddick Hall on the edge of South Shields after a 30-year absence, I wanted to celebrate not only the socially engaged writers embedded there by town planners, but open up current residents to a collaborative visual arts project. People could express their own hopes by choosing quotes by these writers that resonated with their lives today. In a shipping container re-appropriated as a photographic studio, participants were invited to bring an object that symbolized a personal passion of their own, to be included in a portrait that would then have their selected quote embedded in the final output. A total of 60 pieces were co-created with people who have strong connections with the estate, printed on birch and mounted on a wooden frame in the container, alongside objects brought by visitors. The results meld poetry within a visual art and votive tradition, that enabled residents’ own creative ideas to flourish, as their interpretations brought more than was asked, in an immersive project that values and celebrates their contributions.

Respectable: The Experience of Class, Lynsey Hanley (2016) London: Allen Lane, 240 pp., ISBN: 9781846142062, h/bk, £16.99

Review of Rediscovering the Radical Conference: The partnering of activism and performance

Review of International Teaching Artists’ Conference (ITAC), Edinburgh, 3–5 August 2016

ITAC 3 Best, Next and Radical, Edinburgh, 3–5 August 2016