Penny Balkin Bach

Working in the field of public art automatically puts us in touch with the public, art, and its social context.

In fact, public art may be one of a community’s most overlooked and underappreciated cultural assets; it’s accessible “on the street”, any time, free to all, without a ticket, and diverse in content. It can be enjoyed spontaneously, alone, or in groups, and by culture seekers as well as new audiences.

There is data out there that supports the benefits of public art to the community.

The Knight Foundation and Gallup Corporation’s Soul of the Community study, for example, indicates that community attachment creates an emotional connection to place (which also correlates to local economic growth). They determined that the key drivers of attachment are social offerings, openness, and the aesthetics of place–all potential attributes of public art.

It’s fascinating that these drivers scored higher than education, basic services and safety, and the economy. Also, a local summer visitors survey conducted by the Greater Philadelphia Marketing & Tourism Corporation (GPTMC) found that of the city’s ten most popular outdoor activities, outdoor art ranked second–above hiking, jogging, and biking.

Public art can create community attachment, if we overcome perceived barriers and open pathways for engagement. With this in mind, the Fairmount Park Art Association developed Museum Without Walls™: AUDIO (MWW:AUDIO)—a multi-platform interactive audio experience, available for free on the street by cell phone, audio download, Android and iPhone mobile app, QR code, or online as streaming audio and audio slideshows.

While our delivery system is comprehensive and impressive, our primary goal was to develop a conceptually sound, content-rich program that could be adapted to new technology over time. In my opinion, getting too caught up in the technology is a trap; it’s like jumping on a high-speed train, without knowing where you’re headed.

MWW:AUDIO was inspired by the idea that there is a unique story, civic effort, and creative expression behind every public sculpture in Philadelphia—and that an ideal way to tell each story is in the environment and context of city life.

A sculpture with the real estate-style sign promoting MWW:Audio.

We identified the “spontaneous viewer” as an audience unique to public art: this person typically has not planned ahead, paid a museum admission, or signed up in advance for a cultural tour. Because our intent is to attract people on the street, we’ve used “real estate” type signs and bus shelter posters to call attention to the program.

The hallmark feature of MWW:AUDIO is the use of an “authentic voice” model—that is, people from all walks of life who are personally connected to the sculpture. Nearly 100 “voices” from all walks of life are featured: artists, curators, scientists, writers, historians, civic leaders, and family descendants.

Because each person has something distinctive to communicate, each speaks with enthusiasm and delight. There’s no narrator, so listening is almost like eavesdropping into a fascinating conversation. Some of my favorite audios are Iroquois, Jesus Breaking Bread, LOVE, the James A. Garfield Monument, and–yes–the movie prop from Rocky.

Our planning process integrated evaluation throughout, and we worked with Randi Korn & Associates, Inc. to develop a formative evaluation instrument. We defined the qualities of the audio program that we wanted to measure–including that listeners feel that they have learned something of value, prompting a sense of curiosity about Philadelphia’s public art.

Our findings indicated that people wanted to “get smart” and ‘‘Almost all of the participants said the audio programs evoked new ideas about the sculptures and helped them look more closely at a work of art they had previously passed by without much notice.”

The impact of the program has been both positive and measurable.

Fairmount Park Art Association's Museum Without Walls AUDIO launch event at Love Park.

For the first time ever, we have quantitative tools to track our audience and guide our programmatic development. When we launched the project, the total number of visits to our websites increased 300 percent compared to traffic in the three months prior. With analytics we are able to measure the program’s impact by tracking the time, location, and call duration of participants, resulting in more than 25,000 in-depth audience contacts. We have also experienced an increase in Facebook fans, people opting-in to our mailing list, and membership donations.

The qualitative audience response has also been overwhelmingly positive. We are able to receive direct user feedback through our cell-phone system, and one particular feedback message reinforced the broad reach of MWW:AUDIO.

Trolley driver Carl Brown left us the following message: “I drive a Philadelphia trolley, and drive pass number 12 (the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors) everyday…and I think it’s wonderful that you have this program set up. It was educational. It was educational for me, and emotional, as an African-American. It makes me feel much better to be a part of Philadelphia.”

Angela Adams

Arlington County’s public art program benefited greatly from our collaborative effort with Virginia Tech and Americans for the Arts mentioned in Dr. Elizabeth Morton’s post from earlier this week.

Like many programs across the country, we are adjusting to the new normal of increased scrutiny of public spending as it relates to the arts. We are also adjusting to our recent relocation from the Department of Parks and Recreation to that of Arlington Economic Development and are just beginning to understand the difference in priorities between the two agencies and how these will impact our future work.

We are currently working on developing a white paper on the value of public art to Arlington through four lenses: community and social benefits; civic design and placemaking; economic; and aesthetic/experiential.

It is helpful that the field of economics has begun to look seriously at developing measurement tools for such intangible phenomena as human happiness or fulfillment as well as the intrinsic value of the arts, so there is an increasing body of literature to draw from here. The findings of the Virginia Tech students will similarly help us in making the case for how and why public art adds value to our community.

To summarize some of the more interesting (even surprising) findings of the four teams discussed in the previous post and their value to Arlington’s public art program:

1. The group who surveyed artists with whom we had previously commissioned artwork identified that most artists had not conducted a formal site analysis before developing their concept. While the response rate was low (six responses of the close to 100 polled), this told us that we need to both explain better to artists what site analysis consists of (borrowing from the standard practice in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design) and why we expect that they should do it.

As a result, we will be hosting a training session on site analysis for artists jointly with Washington Project for the Arts’s “No Artist Left Behind” workshop series later this year, and will change our standard contract to include site analysis as a specific deliverable to accompany the concept proposal stage.

2. The team who polled stakeholders and community members on their thoughts about the Water Pollution Control Plant fence enhancement piloted a number of strategies for engagement (including intercept surveys of users of the trail adjacent to the fence, for which a surprising number of people actually stopped to participate in!) the findings of which were summarized in word clouds by type of stakeholder. The team recommended that Remy & Veenhuzien develop a temporary public art project as a mid-project deliverable to keep the stakeholders engaged and updated on their process. As a result, we will be writing this expectation into the artists’ contract and presenting this as a creative example of civic engagement, currently a hot topic for our community.

A photo of Long Bridge Park in Arlington County, VA (Photo © Jesse Snyder Photography)

3. From the two groups who addressed the recently completed first phase of Long Bridge Park, we learned two important things.

First, that without sufficient information about the artwork, visitors were unclear as to both the presence and “function” of artwork in the park (in full disclosure, signs with information about the artwork were developed in cooperation with the artist, but had yet to be installed by the time of the survey). The survey responses also provided a baseline of attitudes about the artwork which will help us track any changes in attitude about the artwork over time.

Secondly, we learned that our design team approach benefits most from the existence of a pre-existing relationship between the artist and the one or more member of the design team and that, if anything, the non-artist members of the design team would have welcomed the input of the artist even earlier in the project development.

In summary, our major takeaways from this studio were:

• new expectations from the artists we commission for projects (such as that of improved site analysis and on-going community engagement techniques) need to be incorporated into our current processes (RFQ, selection panel, outreach, artist contract) as well as our management of the artists’ work as their advocate in the design process;
• in the recalibration of our work plan for the right balance between temporary and public art projects, we can combine both as two stages in a single project; and,
• when we hire artists to work as design team members, we need to work harder get the artist in as early and as high on the food chain as possible.

As I often say, we are still aspiring to the level of this that we achieved with our program’s very first project, artist Nancy Holt’s design of the entire Dark Star Park.

This is an especially important reminder as we strive to play a greater role in the leadership for good public design in Arlington and seek to demonstrate the unique contributions that artists can bring to such projects.

Rebecca Rothman

Public art is a tough sell in a bad economy.

When senior centers are closing and library hours have been cut back, convincing city leaders to spend money on art feels like an exercise in futility.

Instead of focusing on how projects boost the economy after their completion or counting positive media reports, we’ve begun to look the people behind the scenes for numbers that count.

Artists create a concept and are given credit for the resulting project but they don’t work alone. There are many others who help make the project a reality. From fabricators to material suppliers, each firm brings expertise to the process to ensure that the project is designed and built to last.

We’ve asked artists and design leads to list each subcontractor they hire under their contract with our program. Then, we ask the contractor to do the same. These people equal JOBS.

We’ve tracked our projects this way for the past five years and found that 85 percent of the work created by our program has been completed by local firms. Each time we present a project or upcoming commission to city leaders, these job numbers are included and guess what? They’re listening.

Now, instead of thinking solely in terms of enhancing public space, we’re thinking like the Work Programs Administration. Instead of asking leaders to learn the language of art, we’re speaking in terms that they understand and appreciate.

The firms are delighted to be given the work as well as the credit for the job. City leaders are thrilled to have more people working here in Phoenix. We’re elated to have a great product in the end to add to our collection.

The result is a win for all, most notably the public.

Brandi Reddick

The idea of art as an investment is by no means a new concept. Art collectors jet set to major fairs in Hong Kong, Basel, and Sao Paulo hoping to secure their next big investment purchase; gallery owners and curators are constantly on the scout to discover the “next big artist”; and auction houses are drawing in record sales for artworks.

As administrators of public art, it is vital that we take some clues from the art world and evaluate public art as an investment for our community and start scouting for that “next big artist” who lives and works in our community.

The unique nature of public art inherently makes it one of the most valuable and exponentially increasing public assets for a community. I have the great fortune of working for Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places (MDAPP), which boasts a collection of nearly 700 works of public art.

Throughout its 40-year history, the program has commissioned some of the most significant contemporary artists in the world to create one of a kind, site-specific works of art. As with most works of public art, the commissioning cost of these works only reflects a percentage of their current value.

For example, in 1985 artist Edward Ruscha was commissioned by the Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places Trust to create “Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go”, a site-specific installation for the Main Library consisting of eight 16-foot-long panels mounted around the lobby’s rotunda. The work was commissioned for approximately $300,000.

Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go, 1985-89

Since the time of this commission, Ruscha’s career has skyrocketed, and I’ll never forget the day our office received a phone call asking if we would sell the work for $6 million. (I should make it clear that the caller’s offer was politely declined, with the understanding that the public art collection was not for sale.)

So, when that new public art commission comes along, perhaps public art administrators should advise their committee members to start thinking like a collector.

Look at artists whose work would be an investment for your community. Take a thorough look at the artist’s resume, notice which galleries are showing the work, and which major institutions are collecting the work.

It’s also important to take risks with public art, discover that “next big artist” and support the careers of local, emerging visual artists.

Although the MDAPP collection boasts some heavy hitter names, we are also very invested in furthering the careers of visual artists who live and work in Miami-Dade County. In addition to the Art in Public Places program, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs oversees the South Florida Cultural Consortium (SFCC) Fellowship Program, which offers one of the largest regional, government-sponsored artists’ grants in the United States, awarding $15,000 and $7,500 fellowships to resident visual and media artists from the five counties.

Since it was established in 1988, the consortium has awarded close to $2 million in fellowships to over 200 artists. The fellowship program receives over 300 applications each year, affording our staff the opportunity to take a fresh look (removed from public art) at the work that is being created in our local studios.

In fact, it is not uncommon for a fellowship recipient (or applicant) to receive a public art commission.

"Reflect" by Ivan Toth Depeña, 2011 Interactive Video Panels Miami-Dade County Public Art Collection

In 2011, artist Ivan Toth Depeña, a Miami native and former recipient of the SFCC Fellowship, was awarded his first public art commission. The site was extremely high profile—the lobby of our Government Center—which is the entryway to the 29-story headquarters building of Miami-Dade County government. This work, which I repeat was Depeña’s first public commission, would become one of the most visible works of public art in the MDAPP collection.

Completed in November 2011, the artwork (entitled Reflect) resulted in a dynamic installation of permanent, site-specific public art that illuminates, engages, and responds to the activities of the lobby space.

Due to its high visibility, Reflect is now considered one of the most prominent works of public art in the county and has generated increased interest and awareness of the public art program from other county departments, citizens, and employees.

Visitors and employees have commented that Reflect has transformed the lobby into a bright, welcoming and interactive space that symbolizes the spirit of excellence and public responsiveness of county government.

The work is pioneering technological advances in new media art and utilizes a custom software system designed by the artist. Here’s a video of the installation:

This is only one example of an investment in a local artist that paid off exponentially.

Public art programs should support the careers of local artist and serve as a platform for the trajectory of their work.

Take a risk on that promising artist who has a fabulous portfolio, even if they don’t have public art experience under their belt. The reward may be well worth it.

Kaity Nicastri

Editor’s Note: Following Public Art Network Council Member Sioux Trujillo’s post, project partner Kaity Nicastri describes the benefit of using logic models in evaluation.

Evaluation. That’s a hefty word. Most people cringe when they think of evaluation, but it’s really not that scary and doesn’t need to be feared.

With the arts in mind, evaluation can take on many forms—it can be programmatic, project-based, user/patron feedback, monitoring sales/attendance, but they all have a unifying theme: understanding the impact of your work.

I started working with a community public art program over two years ago as a Master’s-level intern from the University of Michigan’s Community Based Initiative. With a concentration in policy and evaluation, I fit the nerdier side of social work. I’m not your average caseworker.

In my new role, I was faced with a program that had surveys, but no real evaluation and no understanding of the results of the surveys. Simultaneously, taking a technical evaluation course, I started with a logic model. This process is truly the crux of all good evaluation. If you don’t understand what you are trying to accomplish, evaluation will mean very little.

Through the logic model, I learned invaluable information about the structure of the program and goals of the directors, funders, and participants for various investments in the program. The logic model process created a useful document that informed my evaluation knowledge and development.

Once the logic model was established, I could determine the goals of the evaluation and design a preliminary evaluation. Afterwards, through various consultations, I decided on a process that would gather the richest, most valuable information possible. Then the hard part began: data collection.

You would think that with all the dissidence around community work, and if it really makes neighborhood life better, more people would have jumped at the chance to give us their opinion, but there are challenges that evaluators face, especially in urban settings.

If you send surveys home, find a way for participants to return it free of charge. If you have people who are not able to attend meetings or events but are on your email lists, offer the survey online. Online survey tools are many and varied in their capabilities. Some common/popular ones are: Survey Monkey, Zoomerang, Constant Contact, Form Site, Kwik Surveys…the list goes on.

Once you jump the final hurdles and have enough responses, you can begin analysis of data and use the analysis to report results.

Depending on the survey design, you might need qualitative analysis or quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis means you have results that are open-ended responses. That means people are able to give their own opinion on a question or statement, which offers some valuable feedback on programs or projects. However, you have to spend more time to find commonalities among answers.

The other type, quantitative analysis, is numerically based. This doesn’t always mean that the answers are numbers, but rather that all answers are standardized. This could be a multiple choice answer, true or false, a scale [(strongly)agree, (strongly)disagree, neutral] or a similar way to standardize answers. Demographic data falls into this category.

You can also use mixed analysis with qualitative and quantitative questions. This provides comments and opinions but also basic data like demographics, participation, and similar standard information.

Evaluation helps programs. Any results should be taken to heart and used to improve services.

Most importantly, you should be learning from evaluation. Evaluation will allow you to integrate your results by creating new practices and processes that will solve past problems and improve future positive results.

My Environmental Education Evaluation Resource Assistant has a good process cycle chart for evaluation:

What type(s) of analysis have worked best for your programs? Share in the comments below.

Christina Lanzl

Many of us will readily name a favorite work of art in a treasured public place, a priceless cultural asset. Similarly, we can probably point to the destruction of such works by neglect, human or institutional failure, war, or extreme events. To put a finger on why certain outdoor works of art are so important or to provide a clear value can already be more challenging.

If anything, one can point to the unique, irreplaceable quality of the treasured cultural asset. If anything, the qualifier ‘priceless’ may be the only accurate valuation of something that is of high quality and unique. Because public art programs and cultural planners have been asking for such a tool kit, the Public Art Network at Americans for the Arts is currently developing a framework for public art evaluation

While public art programs create permanent public art in partnership with contemporary artists, these works immediately begin their art historic trajectory once installation is complete, beginning with a short and long-term maintenance plan. Thus, collection management evaluation criteria for public art can serve as a point of departure and should be coordinated in partnership with existing preservation initiatives. At the national level, heritage preservation institutions like Save Outdoor Sculpture take on advocacy and protection roles in the U.S., joined by local and state historic preservation organizations.

Once the approach has been determined, the process needs to zero in on the types of questions and figures that not only quantify, but also qualify the value of public art. Evaluation of public art projects and programs is a difficult task, particularly so if the researcher considers them within the framework of the cultural or urban context.

Attempting to create a state-of-the-art evaluation structure would need to include site-based qualifiers in any assessment. Such endeavors could be likened to a municipality or a state being asked to submit figures on general or specific well-being of residents.

Interconnectedness is the key to understanding public art and cultural assets within the fabric of a community. Prior to commencing the research, the meanings and boundaries of the terms relevant to the field of public art would need to be defined. Public art inventories and maintenance records contain statistical tools that would aid in measuring size, age, condition, value, and other tangible criteria of an individual object. However, beginning with the question of the contextual framework, other typologies apply. An interdisciplinary effort lies at the heart of delivering a successful methodology for public art assessment.

Any appraisal would need to include an analysis of the more ephemeral qualities of a vital public space and its cultural assets, such as the psychological effect of an environment on the individual, as well as cultural vibrancy and legacy, both short- and long-term.

Urban planners like Jan Gehl and the late William H. Whyte have been instrumental in developing the tools for assessment of public space. Consequently, a review of the principles and methodologies they developed would add important criteria for the valuation of public art uses.

Economic social researchers like Richard Florida have reported their findings on the popularity of cities to the creative class, which also has much to do with a successful public realm, including permanent, temporary, and performative public art and cultural assets.

Most public art programs and affiliated municipal and/or state agencies will lack expertise or time to develop, distribute, evaluate, and report findings of such complex surveys. Opinion poll firms and think tanks would be more adequately equipped to conduct such inquiries with the necessary professional acumen, although the engagement of knowledgeable public art professionals would be crucial to ensure the approach and gathering of data fulfills.

Much work lies ahead—let’s move forward to accomplish the task at hand.

Sioux Trujillo

I recently resigned from a public art program in Detroit that was housed inside a small arts college. During my time there, evaluation became a big part of my job. It was critical to track, define, and report for the future of the program to serve as a baseline for success for the arts institution. Before this, my idea of success was primarily based from the perspective of the studio artist.

The projects that were created in the neighborhoods of Detroit were much more complex because each project was so very different from one another, involved different people from diverse backgrounds, and had community defined goals and artist selection.

When I set out to create a plan of evaluation I realized this was going to be a complex task.

My first obstacle was simply trying to figure out what to call the projects. A seemingly simple thing turned into more than I expected.

I started to compile a list of all the different names that artists and organizations are using to define public art which involves the people around the project in some way.

•    Social Aesthetics
•    Relational Aesthetics
•    Social Justice Art
•    Community Art
•    Placemaking
•    Social Sculpture
•    New Genre Public Art
•    Tactical Media
•    Cultural Activism
•    Social Practice
•    Interventions
•    Happenings
•    Participatory Art

Looking at this list only made more questions about useful evaluation and the purpose behind evaluation. Thankfully, I found a partner to help me in a not so obvious place.

I had formed a working relationship with the University of Michigan School of Social Work to provide a place for social work graduate students to do meaningful work in the Detroit communities as part of their capstone studies. My social work intern, Kaity Nicastri, and I started a dialog about evaluation and our joint vision was developed over time.

Our partnership was a turning point for me when it came to my depth of thinking and understanding evaluation. The experience planted a seed in me about evaluation that is still growing.

A piece of public art that wants to involve a community can do so in many ways, big and small. All of these kinds of projects, no matter what you call them, are very dependent on the context in which it is created. They have a complex social, cultural, political, and economic system at play. Just because a project is thriving in one area of the city doesn’t mean that you can just replicate that project and get the same results.

The projects themselves can appear differently to those who have not been engaged in the project directly. Visually a project can look very deceiving. It could be small and insignificant but the dialogue around that project can be big and could have started other projects and have had a domino effect on the community.

Just as true, a large visually stunning project can ultimately have no real lasting impact on a community.

Community change takes time, patience, community organizing, authentic engagement, careful listening, and hope.

What do you do when those things don’t happen fast enough to document on your evaluation? This is where things really get interesting for me.

Since timing is critical for all evaluation. The story and the shapeshifting behind each project is where the true authentic evaluation exists.

I think the more dialog we have the closer we will get to verbalize this kind of evaluation.

What do you think?

Editor’s Note: Here are two examples of evaluation Sioux provided us for you to check out — Year One Project Evaluation Report and Year 3-4 Survey Template for the Community.

Dr. Elizabeth Morton

This course had its origins in a graduate assignment I had back in the early 1990s. My intimidating professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design provided only two requirements for our final paper: 1) that it be “interesting to him” and 2) that it be no longer than three pages.

I was relieved that he approved my topic of “how do local public art agencies evaluate their projects,” but was concerned about the page limitations. I needn’t have worried, since after reviewing as many of the agencies as I could in the pre-internet era, I did not find much.

At a presentation on public art in Arlington, VA, nearly 20 years later, a question from the audience made me think about my project again. I imagined that as the public art field had matured, surely there had been efforts to institutionalize some evaluative practices, but when I started making inquiries I realized that this was still a relatively unexplored topic.

Since Angela Adams and Liesel Fenner had both been kind enough to speak in my urban design policy class over the years, I approached them with the idea of conducting a graduate studio that would try to take on this topic. It’s a great testament to their openness to inquiry and commitment to the field that they very actively participated in the studio and contributed many hours and many insights.

Recognizing the complexity of the topic and the limitations of the three-month semester, and not having any idea about what we would find, we titled the course, “Exploring Evaluation for Public Art: Arlington County as Laboratory.”

Our 12 students hailed from five different countries and from three different programs (planning, architecture, and landscape architecture). To my delight, two of them were practicing public artists!

In a period of about six weeks, students got a crash course in public art, the Arlington County program, and various methods of evaluation. Students summarized whatever relevant studies we could lay our hands on (mostly from the UK). Although we were helped immensely by the writing of Harriet Senie, Katherine Gressel, and Animating Democracy’s new social impact website, we found little in the way of local government policy in the U.S. that might help guide our efforts.

We settled on a strategy of divide and conquer. Students formed four teams and adopted distinct methodologies to examine particular aspects of the outcome or process.

Guided by some of the goals in Arlington’s Public Art Master Plan, the studio developed some indicators for measuring past and future success. Since we knew that “before” snapshots were often missing in evaluation attempts and that public opinion often evolves over time, we tried develop studies that collected baseline data and that would allow Arlington to measure change as projects moved forward.

For example, one team took on the task of documenting existing attitudes and expectations for the future public art piece along Four Mile Run Park in the vicinity of the Water Pollution Control Plant. To achieve this, the group polled users of the park, members of the Advisory Coordination Group, and plant employees, and compared the results.

Two teams looked at the recently opened Long Bridge Park, which incorporated a piece by Doug Hollis. The first interviewed members of the multi-disciplinary design team to assess how the dynamic among members affected the process and the final result. The second developed a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) polling users of the park about their views of Wave Arbor and assessing whether the stated visual and functional objectives were met. The survey captured impressions of this new sculpture and examined its perceived value as an iconic feature of the park.

A final student team designed a survey for artists who had created works in Arlington, polling them on their processes of site analysis and community engagement; the results inspired students to make some suggestions on how the county’s standard public art contract could be modified.

I had thought that given the constraints of the semester, we may have had to be content with simply setting up the studies, but students insisted on getting out into the field. Although some of the results are still preliminary, the data received so far has been quite interesting.

At the end of the term, we produced four reports (totaling more than 50 pages!), which we hope provide models for continuing use by Arlington County and fodder for discussion in the public art community.

Has this type of project been undertaken at a higher education institution near you? If not, is this something you would consider doing?

Barbara Goldstein

In an era dominated by Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and Yelp!, where we are constantly invited to hit the “like” button and share our reviews, it’s tempting to wade into evaluating public art without asking the question “why?” After all, anyone can should have a valid opinion of anything that lives in the public realm, right?

I’ve always felt that anyone who experiences public art or architecture should have the ability to judge its success. The question we should ask is not really “like” or “not like,” though. The question we should ask is “does it work?”

As someone who plans and commissions public art, I feel it’s my responsibility to engage community members in the work we do—before, during and after art has been installed. After all, the difference between public art and art created in the studio is that the end user will live with it for a long time and we can’t easily move it into storage. If we actually involve our communities in the public art process, we will automatically develop the tools for them to evaluate it.

The first question we need to ask is “What are we trying to learn?”

For many years now, policymakers and implementers have asked whether the economic value of public art can be quantified. This is the wrong question.

It would be virtually impossible to measure whether one work of art has an economic impact in a specific place. The questions that can be asked are more subtle—what makes a specific place memorable? Can you describe what you experience there and how it makes you feel? What do you think when you see a particular artwork? Does it improve your experience of this place?

These are questions that we should ask ourselves and our policymakers before we commission art and they are questions that we need to ask our artists and our community members during the creative process.

If we hope to evaluate public art, we need to spend more time inviting our policymakers and community members to learn about it:

• involve them in conversations when we are planning to integrate art in the public realm
• introduce them to the artists
• create guide maps
• speak to schools and community organizations about the work we do
• sponsor tours for policymakers and the public
• cultivate the local press

Above all, build a relationship between art and the community so that people will feel comfortable participating in the conversation about commissioning art, enjoying it, and criticizing it intelligently.

Until we take our jobs as educators seriously, evaluating public art will be nothing more than a button that says “like” or “unlike.”

With an educated pool of artists and community members, evaluating the work will evolve into a bigger conversation about what kinds of places we hope to build and the significant role that art can play in making those places a success.

Liesel Fenner

Americans for the Arts programs Blog Salons to focus attention on a particular arts topic to generate discussion through online responses: comments, follow-up posts, Tweets, Facebook comments, etc.

While many of us find it challenging to keep up with daily email, much less blogs and our social media accounts, there are a few questions we repeatedly see posted on the Public Art Network (PAN) listserv:

“Does anyone have a sample public art evaluation report?” or “Are there are any public art and economic impact studies?”

After the question is asked the listserv goes silent, no one replies.

The goal of our Blog Salon this week is to turn up the volume and encourage as many contributions of ideas on how the field (PAN, you, me, we) can approach public art evaluation.

We have invited a variety of public art professionals—both administrators and artists—to participate in the Salon with their ideas on how we measure public art programs, projects, or both.

We will hear from arts leaders who are experimenting with ideas on how to measure an art form that is elusive to traditional measurement tools. Artwork that resides in public space.

How do count audience viewers?

Are they actually viewers when passers-by may or may not even notice the work?

Should we approach the general public and measure their reaction to the work?

What was is the scale of work? A landmark, iconic work, or perhaps temporary?

Is the artwork incorporated into a larger urban design or architectural context?

The most vexing challenge as we approach evaluation: What exactly are we measuring? Why are we measuring it? What are the goals of evaluating public art and what impacts are we seeking?

This past spring semester, I participated in an architecture and planning class at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VTech) with PAN serving as the “client” for students to develop model approaches to public art evaluation.

During this Salon we will hear from Professor Elizabeth Morton and Angela Adams, public art administrator for Arlington, VA, as well as one of the students. PAN Council Member Lajos Heder will blog from the artist perspective on how audience should contribute feedback during the artmaking process that would in turn affect outcomes. Penny Balkin Bach of the Fairmount Park Art Association (Philadelphia) discusses social media tools including a new app extolling that qualitative information—stories—are as important than statistics and quantitative data.

It’s time to dig in, roll-up our sleeves, and think deeply as the Salon proceeds this week.

Your input will inform PAN’s next steps in developing an evaluation model for the field.

We need your RFP—we request you to participate.

Joanna Chin

When I asked the bloggers for Animating Democracy’s Evaluation & Social Impact Blog Salon to write about this topic, I thought I knew what I was going to get. Animating Democracy’s Impact Initiative has been going strong for several years now with a fantastic set of evolving framings, vocabulary, metrics, methodologies, etc. and so forth.

In addition, a good handful of these folks have worked with us before and the rest I know through their incredible creative work. None of them are strangers to questions of social impact or evaluation.

I expected discussions about how to show funders and community leaders what impact was made; talk of how to establish outcomes and indicators; examples of surveys and interviewing. While many of these were touched on throughout the salon, what did emerge made me start to adjust my thinking around evaluation.

Perhaps even more important was what surprised me: that the trends in evaluative thinking and practice came from the work itself rather than an external driver.

Is storytelling just a fad?: Qualitative v. quantitative

At Americans for the Arts, we make the case for the arts daily and within that there is a delicate balance between the concreteness of numbers and the power of stories. However, as noted by Katherine Gressel, “surveys and statistics are out; stories and experiences are in.”

While I would argue that there’s still merit in both deep and broad collection of feedback, I think that storytelling is more than just a fad. Simply put: using storytelling, the evaluative method mirrors the work instead of imposing on it.

On the output side, storytelling has its own power. The acknowledgement of this trend is not simply constrained to social impact evaluation, nor even the field of arts for change work. In a realm like evaluation, where anything simple is golden, using storytelling for feedback (input) and casemaking (output) makes sense, particularly if it more accurately conveys the positive change being made.

Art in life: Evaluate in life

Although alluded to already, another theme throughout the salon was the idea that art is part of life; evaluation should follow suit.

Mark Stern spoke about the capabilities approach, the idea that social well-being is a product of people’s opportunities to be and do in certain ways, which could serve as a framework to evaluate the arts within a healthy cultural ecosystem that includes all the dimensions of social well-being.

This concept was exemplified by the Inocente, documentary mentioned by John Bare. I couldn’t summarize it better than when he wrote: “there is only so much to be gained by pitting the arts against other independent variables on tests of short-term metrics. There is something bigger out there: We can identify the situations where arts contribute to sweeping social change.”

For all the discussion in the public art field about the need for more comprehensive/rigorous evaluation models, I was inspired that some of the most concrete examples of making evaluation mirror art and life came from Penny Balkin Bach and Rachel Engh’s posts about public art projects incorporating technology that both added to the art experience and provided evaluative feedback.

A matter of timing?: Before, during, after…and after

A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to sit in on the final presentations for a Virginia Tech course on evaluating public art. One of the aspects that I found most interesting was that different groups did their evaluation at different points in the public art’s timeline (i.e., before, during, and immediately after).

Likewise, one thread in this blog salon that stood out to me was the idea that evaluation doesn’t and shouldn’t have to be a one-time deal. Chris Dwyer’s post about beginning to see concrete indicators of The Shipyard Project over 15 years later speaks to the challenge of tracking outcomes that might appear 5, 10, 30 years down the line.

Equally important, evaluative work has a possible role to play at the beginning and middle of a project’s lifespan, which leads me to…

My take-away…

With work that stems from a desire to address bigger social needs, it’s not enough to simply tack on a survey at the end of a project. I’m inspired by these posts because so much of the thinking in them around evaluation comes from the work itself and the desire to make positive change rather than from external forces like funders or public officials.

In the end, it might be about creating a methodology, nagging people about surveys, mining data, and collecting stories, but the bigger, more interesting challenge is how that evaluation will shape what we do next.

Thanks to everyone who was following, sharing, and commenting on the blogs. You can view all of the Blog Salon posts using this link.

And, a huge thanks to our amazing, innovative, and articulate bloggers for sharing your perspectives and making me reevaluate my thinking around evaluation.

Chris Dwyer

I was impressed that so many posts during the Blog Salon have tackled the challenge of assessing the impact of public art—a particularly challenging area for building indicators of impact.

Several years ago I heard Richard Florida describe public art in terms of community image when making a point about vital cities, i.e. those that attract entrepreneurs and visitors and earn the loyalty of their residents.

The idea of assessing impact through the eyes of strangers intrigues me:

What does a collection of public art convey to those who don’t know the city? Does it say those who live here…

• …are willing to take a risk?
• …like to try new things?
• …are open to new ideas?
• …have a sense of whimsy?

We can perhaps all imagine cities we’ve visited where public art conveyed exactly those impressions of a new locale.

A worthy impact for the investment and not so difficult to measure.

Seeing the messages of public art through the eyes of a younger generation may offer a similar window into the impact of public art.

I thought about this when reflecting on the reactions to a temporary street art exhibit in our community last summer—typically met with delight by young people and bewilderment by their parents.

Young people were delighted with public art that spoke to them. So, here’s another possibility for viewing impact. How does the community’s public art speak to young people? Does it say those who live here…

• …have a sense of humor?
• …welcome different points of view?
• …understand young people?
• …like to have a good time?

We could ask similar questions with various perspectives in mind.

Do you have any more suggested questions and answers communities may ask about their public art?

Public Kitchen participants.

The next intervention the Design Studio is working on is called the Public Kitchen. It’s part of larger project we are developing called “The Public: A Work in Progress.”

As public infrastructures—hospitals, water, schools, transportation, etc.—are privatized, the Public Kitchen takes a stab at going in the reverse direction. It is a “productive fiction”; it’s our experimentation with a new, more vibrant social infrastructure that can:

• Challenge the public’s own feelings that “public” means poor, broken down, poorly run, and “less than” private
• Engage communities in claiming public space, the social and food justice
• Make a new case for public infrastructures through creating ones that don’t exist

The first step of the Public Kitchen occured last fall when we worked with artist and graphic designer Jill Peterson to create what we called a “mobile ideation kit.” This enabled us to have interesting conversations with passers-by in a variety of communities, with an easy, attractive way to ask about what would be important to them in this made-up new form.

Next, we created an indoor Public Kitchen exhibit for Roxbury Open Studios. Over 100 residents, activists and artists came for a bite, took home fresh veggies, imagined new food policies, checked out architectural sketches, and added their ideas for what’s possible for a Public Kitchen.

For our third iteration, we want to commission an artist and a culinary team to create an outdoor Public Kitchen—in a public space—for a week. In this way, the public will really get a “taste” of what this imagined infrastructure could add to their lives.

As is typical with these kinds of gestures, there are interconnected, but distinct intentions for this Public Kitchen: one that is an aesthetic intention, and one that is social/political.

Finding the right partners to sharpen the mechanics of our gesture such that the aesthetic and social/political intentions are so intertwined that the gesture is elegant will be a challenge. A fun one but a challenge nonetheless.

Another interesting challenge will be evaluating its effectiveness on these multiple levels.

Socially, we want the Public Kitchen to have a convivial atmosphere that contributes to the building of community in the place where the commission happens. (Currently we are aiming for Roxbury or Dorchester.)

A close-up picture of the magnets used in the Public Kitchen.

Politically, we hope to affect how people in that community think about food and food production.

And aesthetically, we want to keep the play within Public Kitchen as analogous to public libraries, transportation, and other kinds of critical public infrastructures, without having it becoming too heavy handed of a gesture.

We are hoping to use two kinds of evaluation within our design process. One is in the form of a post-production charette to vet if our gesture seemed conceptually coherent and in alignment with our intentions.

Here we plan to bring allies from art, design, and activist discourses to critique our intervention. One of our longtime art colleagues, Judith Leemann, is helping us to sharpen our process to make this kind of a critique productive.

It is the second, more public, evaluation that is more challenging.

In order to capture the impact of the intervention itself, we’d like to hear from the passers-by who were engaged by it. Did they stop to eat? To talk? What did they think/feel/do?

This is challenging to the extent that we want to capture their reactions without tainting their experience or taking away from the lightness of the gesture. That is to say, without mucking up the magic! There’s nothing like experiencing something delightfully strange and then having a survey or camera shoved at you to bring you crashing back to earth.

We will continue to think with other public artists to find creative ways to capture the feelings and conversations that participants are walking away with. (And we’re happy to take ideas!)

Katherine Gressel

“How [can we] merge our ‘evaluation’ with life’s activities?”

This is an especially provocative question posed by Marc Maxson earlier in the Blog Salon. 

He suggests, “If you want quantitative data about people and social change, it’s probably more practical to transform our evaluation tools into a regular part of daily life—like Facebook or Google—so that we’re constantly looking at tens of thousands of bits of knowledge instead of just a few hundred.”

Maxson discusses Global Giving’s collection of tens of thousands of anecdotal stories throughout communities served by the organization.

This and many of the other entries suggest that when it comes to evaluation and the arts, surveys and statistics are out; stories and experiences are in. Also, social media platforms, like the ones cited above, have opened doors for the often unsolicited, ongoing collection of such stories and experiences.

In my first post, I wrote about the challenges of evaluating the impact of public art, especially on audiences and communities, by traditional quantitative data collection. Instead, what types of “stories” and “experiences” with public art could be recorded or collected, and how?

In her summary of Fairmount Park Association’s Museum Without Walls: AUDIO program, Penny Balkin Bach describes using storytelling to deepen each artwork’s engagement with a general public. Rachel Engh describes a feature allowing users to record their own stories about experiencing art in public spaces.

I do believe that new online and mobile technologies such as these are making it more and more feasible to collect and document a much greater archive of anecdotal evidence of people interacting with public art, “liking” public art, and discussing the issues behind it.

To give just a few examples:

A post on the Public Art Fund Facebook page from a few months back reads: “Passerby comment to one our staffers working on site today: ‘Thank you for making the city more beautiful.’ We feel all warm inside now.”

A user responds to this with the comment: “My college is in the same location to where your profile pic was taken. Without the Public Art Fund to spruce up the place, the area would be nothing but trees and benches.”

A March 30 photo slideshow of a newly-completed mural on the Groundswell Community Mural Project Facebook page seems to have sparked the desire for more murals—one comment (presumably from a teen artist) reads: “awesome project—I wish we could do this at our school.”

More complex stories emerge when a public artwork’s physical signage prompts visitors to send photos, texts, or videos of their feedback about, or interactions with, the artwork—organizations like Public Art Fund in NYC, are incorporating things like QR codes at public art sites that direct visitors to submit their own impressions and interactions to an email address or user-friendly website like Flickr.

The Pallet City installation.

I first experimented with this concept myself as the co-artist of Pallet City, a complex interactive sculpture made from recycled shipping pallets for the 2010 FIGMENT Season-long Sculpture Garden on Governors Island. My collaborator and I put signs up all over our project telling people to email pictures of themselves interacting with the sculpture.

To our pleasant surprise, we received on average three submissions from random strangers each weekend the project was open. This was enough to convince us not only that people were noticing the project—but that we were achieving our goal of fostering a range of participatory experiences. Perhaps our invitation to share photos even encouraged people to be bolder and more creative in their participation, and in their storytelling.

One of my favorite submissions was from a woman who actually wrote a love story inspired by the sculpture:

“While others parked their bikes, we fell in love on the bench, resting, in the shelter, of Pallet City, on that day. However, as we traversed through the City, the lad refused to dance, on the pallet, and we went up and down the bumps of the pallets and then we came to the end, where we promptly fell out of love and left the City. Parting is such sweet sorrow, in Pallet City.

Actually, this is a true story. The gent in the photo on the right spent a lovely day with me and I took these pictures, at Pallet City, of our bliss. Later that night, he confessed to commitment issues (how New York) and while now the gent is gone, I still have the photos we were planning on submitting to your project.

Now you have the photos and a story of the fastest love in Pallet City.”

Of course, FIGMENT on Governors Island is a place where people come specifically to interact with public art—a very different environment from, say, a transit station where people are less likely to stop for an artistic or playful experience (though for a long time my Facebook profile picture was a photo I’d snapped to create the illusion that I was “wearing” one of the mosaic hats on the walls of the 23^rd St. R NYC subway station).

I believe in these everyday environments especially, it’s important to build mechanisms for collecting photos and stories.

Also, I have still only been able to find a relatively small number of such recorded anecdotes per public art organization—nowhere near the “40,000 stories and counting” described by Maxson in relation to Global Giving’s work.

How do we collect such stories from the people who are not already Facebook and Twitter followers of a public art agency?

And when we do get a lot of good feedback, how do we manage all this information to tell a larger story about public art?

Rachel Engh

Last week, I heard local artist Kinji Akagawa’s joyful chuckle as I stood still, swept up in his world while viewing his public art piece, Enjoyment of Nature, in Minneapolis. And he wasn’t even next to me. Instead, I was listening to a recording done by Akagawa for Sound Point, a collaboration by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and the City of Minneapolis.

Sound Point is a technologically innovative way for people in Minneapolis to connect with art, artists, and public space. After the (optional) recorded welcome by Mayor R.T. Rybak, the listener/viewer can experience 13 pieces of art, all within a two-mile radius. In these short recordings, artists explain the significance of the pieces’ spatial contexts and what they hope visitors will experience while viewing their work.

I stood, phone to my ear, for a whole three minutes, as I listened to Akagawa talk about his piece. He communicated his wish of creating a gathering place for people, either waiting for the bus or sitting in the sun sipping coffee, and even birds who can visit the bird bath.

One aspect of Akagawa’s built environment is a moonscape, depicting the moon’s movement over a month-long period. Akagawa notes that it honors the people who clean the city at night, many of whom are people of color and immigrants.

Next, I walked to the City’s Public Service Center where I found another Sound Point, Wing Young Huie’s Lake St., USA. A community photography project, it was originally a set of hundreds of black and white photos that was publicly displayed along six miles of Lake Street in Minneapolis. Now, some of them hang on the walls where the city planners pass every day. In his recording, Huie notes the importance of showing his photos in public spaces because they “reflect realities of so many different people.”

Kinji Akagawa’s "Enjoyment of Nature" in Minneapolis.

And this is what Sound Point is all about, Engagement Editor for Public Insight Network Jeff Jones told me in a recent conversation. The folks behind Sound Point are not only concerned about giving information to viewers, but also wish to engage participants in conversation with the project’s “talk back” function.

After listening to the recordings, viewers can leave a text or verbal message which end up in Jones’ inbox. Jones’ vision is to hear people muse, “I remember this place when…” or “my dream for this block is…”

Jones tells me that one of the goals of the project is to incorporate “real people” into the news who act as partners in reporting what’s going on in their neighborhoods. Since the weather is only now conducive to comfortably standing outside listening to recordings, Jones is hoping for an increase in messages.

His vision is that once he receives several exemplar messages, he will change the recordings so that viewers will hear the artists and then comments from previous viewers; he hopes this will spur ideas for future dialogues regarding possibilities for neighborhood growth and change.

The design of Sound Point lends itself to exciting evaluation and analysis opportunities.

For example, Jones can count how many people listen to each recording, know whether or not they comment on the piece, and analyze the content of their messages. From this information, he can evaluate the value people place on the locations and content of the pieces of art and examine how their viewing experience translates into thinking about the neighborhood.

I’m looking forward to following the evolution of Sound Point because I can envision so many exciting conversations resulting from the project.

Perhaps the recorded messages will spur dialogue between viewers, conversation about public space, art, and relevant social issues reflected in the artwork. Maybe viewers will lobby for additional public art work in their communities.

However Jones’ evaluation shakes out, I know that whenever I pass Enjoyment of Nature, I’ll imagine Akagawa’s laugh, urging me to ponder the joy of and potential for art in public spaces.