 All right, so a quick background on art synergy about, well, almost three years ago now, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded the City Montpelier $50,000 as part of what was proposed as a $150,000 project to create a master plan for public art for Montpelier. And master plan for public art in the NEA's lingo and in the field is a very specific policy document that the city adopts to help drive their planning going forward. And so we wanted to bring the community together around a discussion of what kind of public art we want in Montpelier, how that public art can inspire community connectedness and vibrancy and growth, and to propose a structure and a funding mechanism that the city would adopt to help make that a reality. And so since last fall, we've been having series of workshops, different types, teaching artists' residencies, galleries spent 10 days at the middle school, and some of you may have seen the installation they did in front of City Hall with the beautiful windmills and whatnot. That was galleries in the seventh grade team. We had several visioning workshops of different types to capture ideas of where public art could go, what type of public art people are interested in seeing, and also just kind of information sessions to explain just what we mean by a public art master plan. And so we're lucky to have tonight some spokespeople to share their ideas about public art. Michelle is kind of my co-anchor, and Michelle runs the public art program for the state. Is that the best way to summarize that? Sure, yes. There's a couple of different programs around that for permanent installations and for communities. Great. And so one thing that this master plan for public art is not is a cultural plan. And so I've asked Michelle to talk just a little bit about the difference between a cultural plan and a master plan for public art, and so we can start getting that distinction, because when we propose the policies to the city, they'll be very narrowly written about supporting public art and investing in public art, and specifically not a broader cultural plan right now. So we want to be sure as we go forward we understand what that is. So the plan for tonight is Michelle's going to talk just a minute about that, and then one at a time Sarah and Gary and Lars will present just, I told them it was like speed dating. I've asked them to do the worst thing possible. I'm actually going to clock them and time them. And look, I have my five minutes, you get your halfway through sign. I'm bad. I'm bad and good about this. But everybody gets about 10 minutes to talk about a particular issue and set up some ideas for then us to talk about and throughout questions, and this is really a free for all. So we'll have about 10 minutes after each presentation to talk, and then we'll have a challenge question for everybody to complete after each presentation. Any big questions before I hand it over to Michelle? All good? Ready, set, go. Well, my presentation is really short. It's just to kind of give you a little context that some of the conversations I've been involved with Paul, sometimes they go down roads that really aren't exactly what a public art master plan so is. So a cultural plan for a city or a town or some place might involve much more mapping of cultural assets, looking at programming, creative economy stuff, quality of life goals. It's a much broader look at how a town or a city or region wants to support its cultural endeavors. Whereas in a public art master plan, it's really much more about identifying specific locations, looking at public art policies, funding strategies, commissioning processes, those kinds of things for public art. Now public art can be temporary as well as permanent and temporary can include many art forms. It doesn't necessarily have to be all visual art, but there may be some spaces identified in this plan that might be places where people can encourage activities and programming as well as temporary installations. So we do want to think broadly when it comes to the temporary pieces, but for permanent installations there may be ways that you can get funding and think about the private development as well as the public possibilities. So it's really more about physical place right now. Public art can be one part of a bigger cultural plan, but for the purposes of what Paul and his group is working on, it's pretty specifically defined. Perfect. Sound right? Yeah, and that inspired me just to add a little more background about arts synergy. So the kind of governing or the steering committee around this project includes myself, Kevin Casey from the city and the executive director of Montpilers Alive who for a while was Ashley Whitsunberger, but they're in transition right now. So that team was really the leadership team that applied to the NEA. And the type of things we'll be presenting to the city will include a governance structure of what type of group of people we want to have come together to manage the public art program for Montpilers. And so there are different options there. There's a steering and advisory team that's come together to help to go through all that. And so this is part of collecting those ideas so we can add your voice into that public plan and be sure that Montpilers is really represented. Okay, so we're going to start with Sarah who's going to talk a little bit about what's happening up in Burlington. And so take it away. Okay. Yes, I'm just going to give you a little bit of a piecemeal perspective or a perspective on how we piecemeal our public art program together over a number of years. So Burlington City Arts is a department of the city of Burlington, but we actually fundraiser earn 60% of our budget and function more like a non-profit municipal hybrid. So we established a formal art program by resolution of the City Council in 1991 called Art in Public Places and then soon after spent the next period developing guidelines for commissioning and accepting public art on city property and outlining a percent for public art policy. While the guidelines were accepted in 1999, the mayor felt that the percent for public art resolution was too risky to put forward to the City Council at the time and preferred instead to try for a voluntary approach to commissioning public art and a percent for art program was not passed. So for several years BCA worked in partnership with city entities, primarily the airport and private developers to commission public art and advocated for the inclusion of public art in city projects, but in most cases the public art components were value engineered out. So BCA was also simultaneously developing other temporary art in public places projects in the City Firehouse Gallery, which some of you may be familiar with, and activating public spaces by programming concerts, festivals and ongoing events like the Artists' Market on Saturdays and Concert with Farmers Market. These projects could be developed and executed much more quickly and less expensively than permanent public art projects. It got money into artist hands, quickly created popular community gathering events and were fairly easy to fundraise for, which was important to us as a fundraising organization. Because we did not have this funding stream for permanent public art without a percent for public art program, and then the recession reduced private and public capital spending by quite a bit, permanent public art became less of a focus for Burlington City Arts for a number of years. But now ten years, we have a ten-year capital plan in place in the city of Burlington for the first time. I know that's crazy, big city. And a mayor who's eager to really dramatically improve the built environment. So there's renewed interest in commissioning permanent public art in the city, with the impetus not so much coming from Burlington City Arts, who used to be pounding on the door every day to try to make this happen in the old days, but it's really coming from other departments who are inspired by what other cities have done in other parts of the country in transportation projects, parks, infrastructure, and public spaces through public art. And they're looking for a roadmap to do the same kind of thing, and a percent for our program could really outline that. So once again, we are working to advance the percent for our program with the mayor's encouragement. Permanent public art is an exciting symbol of the kind of collaboration a city is capable of. It can represent the uniqueness of a place and contextualize it within the world. And it can provide a platform for vital and sometimes controversial discussions that lead to potentially stronger communities. And I am referring to a very specific mural involved in that. However, it is also a time-consuming and bureaucratic process. I often imagine what BCA would have been like if we were successful in our first attempt to pass a percent for art program. And it's likely that we would have spent a lot of resources developing a handful of permanent public art projects. Some of them would have been great and some of them maybe not as good, rather than building the many programs and temporary projects that have become part of Burlington's creative landscape and that support hundreds of artists every year through teaching, exhibiting, and performing opportunities. So now we are at a point where the professional and grassroots arts community has grown and BCA is a more mature organization deeply integrated within city government and community processes and in a much better position to revisit what it will mean to manage a percent for art program in the city of Burlington. That's it. And my question, do I pose that now? Does everyone know this or not? Did you want to use any of your images and also before we go further? Oh, I thought you were just running behind me, sorry. In case people don't know what a one percent program is, give us a description of what that means. Yeah, so different cities implement different percent for art policies. Generally what it is, is it's a policy that takes a percent of a capital budget and sets it aside in a fund for public art. It can only be used for public art as defined by whatever that policy includes. So the percent for art resolution that we are proposing at the moment is a percent of the city's capital fund, so the annual appropriation for anything that's invested into the capital budget would be a percent of that would be put aside for public art. And then the way that we're planning to word it, I think, is that in addition to that city departments would also do their best to find other sources to meet a percent of the project, but it's not going to be a requirement that it's a percent of every project. It's a percent of that capital appropriation. And that's coming partly out of the desire from all these other city departments that I was referring to for clarity on how they budget for public art, where those funds come from. They want to do it, but they don't have a mechanism, a place right now, to just sort of say, okay, if we're going to do public art, I can get that part of the funding from over here and then if I have a grant source that allows me to include public art, I can get another bit of funding from over here and start putting together a larger budget. So you're not trying to get a percent from developers? We are not trying to get a percent. Some cities do that. And I think that it might have even been what the attention was when we talked about this in, like, 1995 or whenever it was that happened last in Burlington, but we are not trying to get a percent from developers, but there will be other incentives written into the policy to encourage developers to either participate in public art projects. And part of that will, so a lot of this is, the committee that's working on this in Burlington is a series of different planners from different departments, so they really understand all of the different ways that incentives can be put in place based on existing plans within the city. So, for example, the comprehensive planners said, well, there's a new, we just passed the, what do you call it, the, it's the downtown, it's basically the downtown plan where within the downtown area, developers will be required to do certain things and provide certain amenities in spaces that are public. And so public art program may offer them something to do that, which is essentially, you know, resources in the city to help, help commission that work through PCA. Inclusionary zone. Tell us a little bit about this, in case someone hasn't heard about this. That doesn't look so good on that. Sorry, that was a little under. So I heard people laughing when I mentioned this mural because obviously it's been in the news a lot and it is a very controversial subject in Burlington and the question of whether or not the mural should be taken down, if it should be added to or a new mural should be created in Burlington has been the source of a lot of tension and I think rightly so. And then, of course, there's the whole conversation about whether it was a good piece of public art or not a good piece of public art in the first place. And to me, it's not as important in public art in public places like how amazing the work is. It's really that the strength of this piece has become, no matter what you think of it as a piece of art, the dialogue that we have begun to have in public about how, not just how we think about race and bias, but also how it surfaces in art and symbolism every day and things that we look at. And just as a side, my personal opinion is that it's a very dangerous road to start carrying down public art once it's in the public and whether it's good or it's bad, you can change the story that surrounds that piece of work, but I think it would be a very dangerous thing to start taking work down and taking it out of the public eye rather than helping people understand where the controversy is coming from. And this is, it's around the lack of racial diversity that's represented. Yes, lack of racial diversity. So the piece was actually commissioned during the Quadrucentennial in Burlington, and I'm sure you're familiar with that. It was like the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Samuel de Champlain. So basically commemorating French culture in the Lake Champlain region. So at the time, a lot of the conversation in the Quadrucentennial was around how abnaki cultures were represented in the arts and festivities of that time. And so that to me is more of an issue in this piece. There isn't really a representation of abnaki culture and that was a real lost opportunity. I would not consider this like unnamed Indian, not even an abnaki, appropriate abnaki attire, referencing their culture at all, yeah. Could you vlog us through the commissioning process? How did a group of decision makers end up with a mural with that flaw in it? Yeah, so this particular mural is a weird one because the Church Street Marketplace, so in the policy that we passed in 1999, Burlington City Arts was bested by the city council as the department that would manage public art for all city departments. However, the Church Street Marketplace is a weird little loophole because they, by charter, are very separated from the rest of the city and I don't completely understand exactly what the charter says and what they're allowed to do and not to do, but it was put in place essentially so that they could really function more like a business running a number of, you know, supporting businesses on Church Street and keeping Vitality alive in the retail marketplace. So they commissioned this piece on their own and they have always sort of stuck to that idea that they would commission their own work. They felt Burlington City Arts was a little too edgy for them, like we were going to, you know, commission work, but I know it's not, that's not how it works because we don't actually ever pick the artwork as administrators of public art. We use a panel of community members who represent the stakeholders and the community and so forth and they did make an attempt to do that because they asked us, you know, what we thought they should do and we said we should have a panel of stakeholders and then they proceeded to put together a panel of like 26 people which was like 20 and three. They don't even know who was involved and who wasn't involved. I don't know. He actually counts me as somebody who was on the panel which I never was on actually on the panel. But most of the stakeholders in this particular mural from the marketplace's perspective were businesses on Church Street who were right downtown people who were funding the mural. There's a whole other conversation there that I won't get too deeply into. And I think that they had been in Quebec and looking at work like this that could be funded through sponsorships essentially and that was the driver of how this piece was put together. So this 26-person panel, sorry I don't know everybody who was on it, that was not, they were not thinking about some of the concerns that were surfacing in our department around the Plaza Centennial. We were also, we were putting together a two million dollar festival at the time so we were not involved heavily in this and consulting as much as now I wish we had been. And they just didn't, and I will say that when I re-looked at the proposal from the artist, it wasn't a proposal where you would have said, oh, this is terrible. Like this is not, he did reference, he referenced Black History and he referenced the Abinac Nation but just the way that it ended up being expressed didn't really quite match the proposal and because it was an evolving process I think with the Church Street Marketplace and who was in and who was not in was a lot based on who was paying to be in. Sarah, in the time you've been in Burlington at BCA, how long have you been there? I'm kind of embarrassed to talk about this but I've been there for almost 19 years. Okay, well good, this question is good. Then how have you seen the city's relationship to public art change as the city has grown in its development of public art? Or have you sensed that there's been a change? I think that we're experiencing a change right now. There really wasn't a lot of development happening from like 2005 until really like 2015, 16. Things have started to really ramp up in Burlington. There's so much going on now all of a sudden. There's a real neck of projects that hadn't happened over the course of the recession and the leadership that was in place for a number of years and so forth and all of a sudden all those projects are happening and everybody wants public art to be part of them. So that's a really different position that we are in. We're actually kind of panicking. Okay, so who's going to run all these projects? How are we going to fund the person that is going to need to be hired in order to make sure that we can actually manage them well? So part of that percent for art policy is the intention is to try to figure out some of those financial pieces for the actual admin as well as the payment to artists. In the older days, I call them the older days, they were really early days when I first started working for VCA, it was truly like a constant battle in public art. We were always pounding on the doors and saying we should be at the table when you're redesigning the College Street traffic circle. That could be so much more interesting and a much better learning opportunity for the public about all the stormwater stuff that's happening on the site if you include a public art project and I spent so many hours sitting at these tables with these super boring engineers and it was just like never the thing that ended up happening. So that was the truth, that was the way it was for a lot of years and there wasn't, I think because we had a different mayor at that time, there wasn't an interest from and I love, I've loved all the mayors, it's not a personal thing, they've all been great leaders in their own way but we didn't really even know how much leadership could make a difference in advancing public art until recently because when the mayor says guys are going to have to put aside $40,000 for a public art piece when that street gets redone and they all start going like oh, okay, I guess we'll try to figure out how to make that happen whereas that never happened in the past and we don't have a mechanism to fund it and that's why everybody's scrambling around saying hey, can you come up with a better policy so that we know where to get that $40,000 from in the future? This is a little related but I'm learning if being forced to do temporary projects both taught you guys sort of internally how to do it and as well as sort of got the community up to speed too about because when something's permanent it has such weight and so I'm wondering if there was a learning process both internally and for the community that got you to this point where now you've got the freedom everybody wants to do it Yeah, and when I say everybody I'm really talking about my city colleagues because I don't know that I have an exact temperature on what the public feels but I do know that a lot of the temporary work that we've done and like I said in my earlier presentation it was a great way for us to get money into artists' hands to get things happening whereas with a public art project it is like that happens over a really long period of time it's like building a house so I think we were able to build a much stronger active artist community because there was actually opportunities for them to kind of write their fingertips during those years as opposed to having to wait for the permanent piece to come around or for all the controversies that will inevitably come around permanent public work just don't really happen as much in the temporary realm I mean not that they don't happen but they come and they go so there's not really something to fight about for too long you kind of take those conversations home continue to know on them so you have cards on your desk or on your chair in a pen just take a minute to reflect on this question and write it on one of those cards before we go on to our next I'm Gauri Sephora and I'm a visual artist and a teaching artist and I'm a founder of an organization called the River of Light which brings parades and the joy of parades and the joy of communities through art making and shared celebration there's also a large degree of skill sharing and a whole process of art making with professional artists and working with community members that results in a big public celebration so I'm going to talk very briefly about the role of parade and procession and temporary public this is a patri art event how they can exist as really powerful pieces of public art in order to have a parade or some kind of processional piece there's probably maybe a year maybe two years in the process of that coming about and that's just an important part of that procession but the event itself is very quick they can last from anything to an hour but they're just packed with this really kind of visceral, exciting audio-visual experience that invites so many different art forms and has a whole wealth of entry points music visual art, costume choreography there are so many ways in which you can enter this world and the event itself is ephemeral and that's the whole point of being able to be permanent they're meant to just last more in the hearts and minds of people and to be able to start a tradition that carries on after the event is over thank you Paul so participatory public art events really bring attention to public spaces and they redefine how we use them as well this is a photo from the Romney Memorial School had a lantern parade in 2013 and they do not have a space where they can walk in the street the school is right on the main road it's a really dangerous place there was no way of closing down the road or being able to organise that so we ended up having the parade in this football field with a bandstand in it which was a real surprise to everyone who came including the students because this is a space that is never used during the winter it's never plowed it's just full of snow, it has a bandstand and come spring people will use it again so there was a way in which these spaces can be redefined and used and it's not just streets can be used it can be parking lots and village greens and we can close the road if we can employ the police to help us out but that act of empowering people in these spaces is really important before I'd been to my first parade which probably happened when I was in my mid-20s in England I'd never actually walked down the middle of a street before like in the road where the road had been closed I know we have the Macy's Forces July Parade but that's like a very specific occasion it isn't really about the people as much as the event so uh we've got a more political demonstration I remember that so so uh parade this is a one of the finales of the parade parade mobilized people from all different walks of life and they bring people together either to the streets but the whole the one thing they have in common is that they unify and they connect people and people are able to have a shared celebration as well so they build bridges between schools and communities but they also create a sense of ownership and civic pride and I think this is why there are some really important crossovers with public art and how we view that the vehicle is different but the end result is the same so I'm going to talk about the river of light in Waterbury which has been happening for eight years now um last year I was doing it for seven years and now I've carried on the torch and the community who are going to take it forward in the direction that they want to take it but it began in 2010 as a small school residency myself and then came on the art teacher at Thatcher Brook Primary School began our first parade and had a community element and an all every student in the school made a lantern and after seven years it's become one of the largest light events in New England had a big feature in Yankee magazine and they really do clog up the highway to get to the parade which is a good sign I think but it's very beloved within the community and most importantly it started a new tradition it's an event that's been building social capital since then so the funding model has been interesting at the beginning we were very reliant on arts council funding and money from private foundations but over the years that's moved on local business sponsorship and and support sale of merchandise and donations from community members who really want to see this succeed which has been wonderful and for the last few years the parade's been a lion item in the school budget which has passed thankfully and we've also seen a real benefit in tourism of Waterbury as well and this is an image from sorry did I go too soon but it's okay it's alright you can go straight I just want to show that one that's some of the artist's lanterns thank you Paul so with any kind of participatory art event the people that participate in the process of work that's the important part of it there's also a high degree of equity as well because it really doesn't matter how you participate maybe on the organisational committee perhaps you attend a workshop you're making fairy wings or a lantern or you're making a drama it doesn't really matter perhaps you're a spectator but every individual contribution adds to that sense of social cohesion thank you Paul this is an image from a refugee first of all that happened in Manchester where artists many many artists worked with a club from Manchester to work with refugee groups I worked specifically with refugee groups and we had a big festival at the end of it again it's just a one day event well what happens after that one day event what's important because those initial collaborations are then over and it's how they continue in future years that's important and it really is about community champions taking on that torch and shaping it in a way so the leadership will change and the event will evolve but the important thing that it does keep moving forward so some of these events do not have to be expansive and fantastical they can be very low-key local, community-minded and also topical quite often parade and procession has a crossover with social activism or protest this is an event that Darne Hill a shopping trolley olympics it was just the most adorable thing and a very economically deprived area of Manchester but the arts organization orchestrated this employed multiple artists to work with groups all over the region focusing on different olympic sports my tour hot air ballooning which is an olympic sport and tennis but what was important with this was that we had a sense of ownership and pride and they were able to learn about being healthy and having exercise and also sharing their work in public next slide please Paul so participatory art events I think really bring people together and again I just want to stress that with those crossovers with public art they allow people to communicate openly and really connect in profound ways how many minutes have I got you're good you got a couple minutes I just want to read out this research that I found incredibly interesting and it was published by this think tank in england called the audience agency who worked with multiple organisations around the UK it was several years of research and they found that our outdoor art so whether it's parade or procession or meeting in a gathering space consistently attracts an audience that's representative of the population as a whole now for me that was important because it's not about going into a museum or a gallery or a poetry reading but the understanding is that outdoor art I'm just going to read this out has a few barriers because there are no strict timings and there's no entrance into buildings there are social experiences that exist as entertainment only for the most part people have the ability to roam in and out and come and go as they please without intimidation or fear of having to explain how they feel about the artwork and they are fully in control of their own experience and their own level of engagement is up to that so they have autonomy over that and the audiences are generally overwhelmingly local so 70% of people come from a 20 mile radius and there is an expectation that the experience will be surprising different and of a high quality so I thought that was a pretty interesting stuff anyway that's the end of my bookish view yay any questions for Galvan? I've found it difficult in galvanizing busy parents families around our projects and I was wondering how you did that not only within the community but it sounds like you have more than just one town participating it's always a struggle to do that and I think it's a struggle because we're talking about parents in school schools tend to make excuses for reasons why parents can't do this but they're so busy we can't ask them we can't ask them to do anything else but I found that you incorporate allow parents to participate in the whole process rather than telling them what you want or telling them what to do they fill a little more sensitive power and membership over the event as much as the students and this was a particularly a point when I worked in Montpelier a few years ago and we had an upgrade here was that the more that we asked parents to come and just be part of this process and turned it into a more of a social event where they could meet other parents and work together and take responsibility for creating something of their own so in this case it was like building poles or testing lights they really kind of embraced it and it became quite a social occasion and people just tended to come and just have some coffee or make it about pizza and just turn it into a social thing so having kind of spreadsheets that go out or doodle poles or just inviting people to line up and then turn it into something more sun has almost always worked so we've never had problems with people not signing up across the community so but it is difficult it's how I think we frame it and how would you say in Waterbury how many of us have been to the Waterbury parade? anybody in here been to the Waterbury parade? they closed down both streets literally like 2,000 people paraded last year they were so big they had to start on both sides and converge in the middle in the intersection and over the 7 years or so how would you characterize the way the community's idea about the parade has changed and therefore it's participation because it started with just a little funding and now it's kind of ongoing it is ongoing and the town wants to pay for it because it's paying for itself there's a lot of increased business for restaurants and bars they've noticed a peak in tourism around that weekend as well it's always on the same weekend I think every community's been the same where at the beginning we're unfamiliar with the concept we don't know what's going to happen people are resistant we don't know what this is I don't think we like it there is resistance from everybody but once they experience it it's not something that can be seen on television that's the whole point of public art that you have to be present in that environment and once people experienced it and they realized the benefits of it and how it brought people together and how much joy it created that started to change over the years and the thing with the streets was really a significant part of that because the first year we asked the police to shut the streets and sat in his car and ate a donut and didn't do anything and we had to walk on the sidewalk in a whiter it was crazy and then the next year we realized maybe you make a donation to the police and that helps a lot and then after that second year we've never had, they're more than willing to participate so it really, it's slow fame stems is your team usually for facilitating or running a project like this has it grown or what's the kind of median team so I do not take a team of people in which I could I could take artists in sometimes my husband he's a sculptor as well so we'll teach the artists workshops to build these larger scale pieces purely because it's just easier with two of us for the most part I try not to have a team because I don't want it to be the model I think I'm trying to make it a little bit different about allowing communities to have autonomy over it because I can employ artists and take them in but that's not teaching anybody about how to do it themselves so what I offer is that I will teach you how to do it yourself so you have artists workshops, teachers workshops and we'll invite community members to learn how to build and how to orchestrate the but in terms of a school recommendation or a community recommendation I'd say maybe four or five people on a team so they can delegate marketing and the materials and then I will teach people how to build a lantern so they can work with that community and that way they have the skills to take it forward so no help with keeping things kind of it's all about volunteers so a lot more than Maria and it goes back to that same thing about engaging people like people want to help because they realise it's their event for themselves and that's the difference with just taking people in and providing the entertainment Cowery, why don't you both go ahead I'm just wondering about your experience with your small community and how did it look it's just gorgeous it's just magic if that's even more magical because there's this kind of ragta kind of parade of people but it's everyone from the town when I worked in Stratford a few years ago very small community we still had a community workshop and a school residency because that's something else that's very important to me is keep this community element it was just very sweet and small and they kept it going for a few years and maybe they'll revisit it in years to come but yeah it worked well my question was about the themes or if you have any particular themes I assume when you started in Waterbury that it was probably related to the curriculum or somehow something they were studying in the school or not and how has that evolved as you've kind of let the community it was a tenuous link that first it was funny because there had to be a link and it worked well because they were studying Brazil and the arts and music of Brazil so we were bringing in Brazilian beats and looking at some of the artwork and so there was a connection there but I think in terms of very topical social issues work really well because it gives students an opportunity to research not only students it gives people an opportunity to think about subjects that are ongoing in our environment right now so anything to do with the environment or nature are always very popular but there's generally some link with the curriculum but not quite so arts integrated but you worked with MK to have the classes coordinate and that sort of thing I think that's pretty brilliant to have the kids creating the work throughout the whole semester yeah I think MK works with some of the grade but she was working with some of the grades in the weeks up to the point where I would come and work with some of the older students so yes they were primed and ready for when I came in and then of course they have lanterns afterwards and I think what's really pointing to that is that I think two years ago the students who had moved on to middle school had had this event in their psyche since they were in preschool so they had done this it had been present in their lives this idea of a community arts project that's really kind of important to them since they could remember so hopefully they're going to take that forward and take some responsibility to make it happen okay we're going to ask you to take a look at this question and after you've filled out a different card you'll see that this table over on the side has these questions set your cards out on the table and then we'll come back for Lars my name's Lars and I'm an artist, educator really quickly here in 10 minutes one is provided brief introduction to the work that I've done and how that informs my view of public art second offer a couple of examples here's one already and we'll get to those talk a little bit about what I think unites them as public art and then get to this question of what did you call them a provocative question or a challenge question so my artistic coming of age if you will happened in Washington DC I was a photographer there I worked with young people on a project called Shooting Back and our goal with Shooting Back was to teach kids who were at risk low income how to use a camera and the purpose for how to use a camera was two fold one is it's functional, teach a skill you can use that later in your life we hope the second was to create voice to be able to tell the story of being homeless of living in a shelter whatever that was get it out into the public discourse in Washington DC we found that lawyers offices were the best place to do that because they had long halls with very bad art so what we ended up doing is putting these young people's artwork that they had produced over the period of you know, six months in their lives up on those walls we would organize a reception everybody would come together and the young people would be talking to them in a gallery context about what these images reflected from their lives so that was one example of art as advocacy and agency for young people the second piece we found that as a group of artists in DC you do this when you're young, found an organization so we founded something called the Center for Collaborative Art and Visual Education it was a gallery in downtown Washington but we also did a lot of outreach programs was to look at vacant and deteriorating buildings in the city because at the time the downtown core was kind of being lost as the sort of outer part of the city was being developed David will probably know what that looked like so what we would do is we would propose to the developer the owner of that building to go in, clean it up, activate the space make it look pretty and attractive but at the same time as public art shows what we chose to do was use sound and dance so what we would do is gather some of the sounds that we heard in the building, create a score around it install that, have a big opening and really sort of bring a sense of life and delight to buildings that were otherwise really a mark against the city this was important I think because it positioned us as artists as partners with developers so the third story I want to share happened after I moved up here to Vermont which was using a collage process to tell stories from young people who were impacted by HIV and AIDS again as self-advocacy and as agency to be able to advocate for the change that they needed to survive so what we did with this global peace tiles project is foster workshops around the world from Uganda to Brazil from here in Vermont we did some workshops to places in Europe all these workshops were happening led by educators a lot like gallery working in schools, community centers remote Ugandan villages and then we were able to get a number of those selected from every community and we would assemble large scale murals with those individual works what we did because we were dealing with the issue of HIV and AIDS was install them where AIDS policy makers worked so we got a mural installed at the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria in Geneva we got it in the board room as well a second one in the board room when they had their sort of global annual meeting in Tunisia so again with this idea of inserting young people's voices into the lives of people with authority and power to make decisions over their lives so those are three examples of sort of art in public spaces but really from an advocate perspective the artist agitator that's not all that public art is right, I recognize that there's this bigger discourse around delight and function and form in public spaces so I wanted to offer four examples that I think are really different but still help us think about public art as impactful in our lives in meaningful ways so has anybody been to Chicago and seen what they call the bean, right but I think it's cloud map maybe is what it is before calls it I love this piece because it transforms how we see the world around us it really gives us an entirely new perspective but with this central focusing I mean it brings people together I think Freeway Park & Seattle, anybody know what I'm talking about it was built in the 70s Lawrence Halpern thank you Lawrence Halpern the guy who also did the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC but it's a fantastic piece of public art as landscape art and the idea here is that public art transforms the landscape it can become a piece that again brings people together, I mean every summer you go there there are kids of all different backgrounds enjoying both the green, the concrete and then the flowing water that courses throughout this environment it's wonderful, okay so this one I like because it's a very simple piece of public art sort of like the pocket parks that you've seen Ward Joyce putting up around here but actually go to the other one first yes Brooklyn back to Brooklyn so here's the great example of public art, very simple it's one of the lowest common dominator forms of getting public art out there but with technology today we can really turn that public art into delightful play and share it, communicate a brand if that's what you're about share your city if that's what you're about but I think the idea of connecting public art to how we engage each other today is kind of new and exciting territory okay so now we can go back to that's hilarious piece that's Tinder, if you guys know what Tinder is it's a dating app so very clever, so not that one but the floating yes, so this is the idea of public art that can nourish us not just spiritually or in our souls but actually from a nutritional perspective more and more we're seeing vertical walls growing things, living things being used as public art okay now we can go to the last one it's not I want to say Utrecht, but it's not Utrecht it's a small town in Amsterdam okay so Arcosanti the entire city as a work of public art so Arcosanti is a visionary sort of community in the desert in Arizona, founded in the 70s going to a couple of themes that I heard tonight one of the things that organizes this visionary city which is built I think maybe about 1200 people live there now is this idea of a river and then of course green things growing within it, but the river is the central theme for the entire city in the sense that people can sort of move through it in a very water like fashion a lot of public gathering spaces a lot of green spaces and spaces where art is installed throughout this city and so I wanted to offer that there because the city can be a platform for public art and for art engagement and so that's one of the things that I hope we can bring to this conversation is how is Montpelier a platform for public arts engagement whether that's that temporary artwork that's advocacy oriented activist oriented play oriented people oriented in the sense of wonderful parades but then also how can it be that space for the lasting intergenerational public art so I think that's all I got, is the question at the end of this? It is, but do we want to Lars, I mean you introduce yourself as a provocateur a little bit I think I can't remember if you used that exact word Agitator, yeah and you work with local 64 and bringing people together into infrastructure to share space just talk a little bit about your experience and the challenge of that and the way it's been transformational here in Montpelier because you bring art into that space and bring people into that space around art So I'll speak to the transformational part because I think it's very short if it's been transformational I'm glad to hear it because you know too often we're just doing the day to day month to month week to week thing or year to year thing and it doesn't feel in the day to day particularly transformational right but we do do art shows on first Friday we bring people in fairly sort of bread and butter stuff for a public space what we'd like to do is more things like what we did with Norwich University when their students crafted some very exciting visions for what we could be doing with what is now a pocket part created by Ward Joyce next to the old country store where that burned down so there's a making space there we invited Norwich University students to envision what that space could look like if we sort of adapted our eyes and our aesthetic to a more modern architectural vernacular and so we did use it as a space for real public engagement in that takes a fair amount of work and we haven't done enough of it we'd certainly love to do more very sort of by hook by crook I'm going like this but I mean hooking by crook baby steps baby steps I blow it open so that'll be good I don't do anything small what was the timing arc on the pocket part how long from like concept to you know creation I think the fundraising piece was the longest piece I mean Ward worked with I think the property owner to clear the runway and I think the developers very open to this kind of thing which in my experience has been true and then worked with I think Vermont technical college students at the time to design some things and then of course they had to raise the funds to get their 9000 or whatever it was to build it and I would say all total maybe it was 8 months or something like that and then it comes in and out every year now the second one the larger one I don't know the one I was talking about earlier is one that usually hangs out in front of capital grounds which kind of comes and goes seasonally to free up that parking spot and get out of the snow mitigation but yeah Ward would be a great person to have in this conversation because he's probably done more with his 1, 2, 3, 4 pocket parks now to turn us into probably the pocket part capital of the country. Yeah there's one coming to Randolph this summer as well. Of his as well. Fantastic. That's great to hear. Ward and the VTC students. Oh and it's VTC students too right? Good. Any questions? City is platform. That's my concept. City is platform platform. Any thoughts for large before we go to his question? You want to give that one to us Lawrence? Sure what infrastructure is required to establish accessible inclusive and transparent public art planning over time especially and you know this is my bias for youth and working artists and when I talk about infrastructure it's both the spaces and places and the decision making processes. I want to open it up for any general questions for any of the presenters that we've had tonight for Paul about the process. How far along are you? Is there anything already in the works for an operator? And so we're in kind of that's a good question let me see how I can characterize this. So there are two big chunks to the process. One is three big chunks. One is all these sessions where we're gathering information and we're coming to the end of this kind of public workshop phase so this started back in the early fall and we're entering into the kind of brass tacks of writing the policy and also we've been having meetings with city government and counselors. Great to see Donnie here and she's been really engaged in the process learning about it and understanding what that governance structure might look like so when we have funding who's going to manage it? I think Sarah's speaking to that certainly the challenge that is involved you can't just throw money out there and not have a process. So that's the second phase is actually writing the plan what are we going to be proposing to city council to adopt that phase that Sean was involved in and some other artists where we actually commissioned the $50,000 work of art that will be installed at the One Tailor Street project when it's finished in the summer of 19 and we just awarded that commission after a several month process 23 applicants and Gregory Gomez and Rodrigo Nava will be creating work to be installed outside of the city center on the porch underneath the balcony facing the river and we're getting some images from them to refine and share that with everybody so that one's done this one is almost done and now we're moving into the final policy writing phase and what was your question again? Just if anyone had any questions yeah so what are some ways that artists might be able to get involved in the more preliminary or administrative side of things or the more what are the kind of soft skills required for being a part of the other end of the art making does that make sense? Are you talking about in the planning phases of a construction project or I'm curious what you're where you want to dive into? Well there's like I'm trying to understand all of it but I mean there's the creation part of it and there's a lot of things that happen beforehand so I guess I'm trying to identify opportunities or ways of getting involved and the beginning of it you know aside from coming up with my own idea and starting my own festival or something Well I think and Sarah please jump in if you have any suggestions here too but I think if you think about public art as a whole spectrum there's the $50,000 or $250,000 permanent public art type very formal process for a permanent piece of work everything from that all the way down to the low cost no cost temporary it's happening in a weekend let's get together and do something to engage with one another type of project and then within that spectrum there's also various points within any kind of community planning process whether it's for a building or a bridge or anything where there's visioning that happens so how can artists get involved with the visioning and thinking about what do I value about my community posing questions thinking about that there's also then once you know okay we're going to put a building here what are the ways that an artist can get involved in thinking about what's it going to look like how do we want people to interact with it working collaboratively with maybe a design team and the architect and then there's also actual creating of the work and then once you've created the space all the way up to activating that space after it's built and keeping things and programming going in there I think if you just keep thinking broadly and Paul too public art plan that they're creating in your policies and things like that I think the idea is to be wide open to lots of ways and places that people can engage is that right? We're actually writing into the policies specifically I think Sean we were talking about is so that artists can be articulated an artist's role in development that they connect with the architect early on and the planners to give ideas and input into what's possible without that artistic input of course they just go on and do the same old same old I was just curious sort of in this planning process maybe where the other points are I mean as you start writing it where are the points where people can come back and see what you've done so far comment on it sort of review whether or not some of the things that you care about are going to be supported through whatever the policy is so it's helpful to kind of get that's I think a place where it might be helpful to as an artist to see what a policy is going to do to create opportunities for you now. Yeah and I know it's kind of a vague or hard question to answer but you know I'm very aware of calls to artists and those kinds of opportunities in ways to apply to make art but it's kind of a mystery to me how one comes to the other side and it's maybe like on a panel or writing a call. A committee or writing a call or a grant that gets the money for the art and so those you know like in this instance with Arts Energy we had calls to the community to volunteer for the artist advisory team and then also for designing the RFQ and serving on the artist selection committee. So that was in the fall? Yeah that was all in the fall and we did I mean of course the challenge is getting the word out and getting everybody saturated with the fact that this is going on and since this is new this first time it's harder and as it becomes established people will know where to go for that information but right now that information was on Facebook pages and Montpelier Alive but in the future as this becomes established each year people will know the calls going out at this time of the year or whatever so I think that will be easier for our community going forward. What about Paul? The possibility of putting artists on your board or on an advisory committee that is sort of more closely connected to those decision channels. I don't know if that's what you're asking for but you know other than sort of subscribing to all the email lists and trying to show up when everybody says jump are there ways to pull artists into the heart of the process? Sure and I just so everybody knows the art synergy project will go away and a formal governing body will be established to go forward and the selection of those individuals will be I think what you're talking about Lars you know having people that will be identified or volunteered and selected to serve in some way and again I'm not sure exactly what that government structure is going to be yet but that's a way for the community and artists to be involved in the process and serve for a certain amount of time and rotate and have different people involved. Dominique? I've heard through creative network zone meetings the idea of bringing artists to the table and their art development opportunities and working that into kind of the common mechanism that happens for this and I was thinking that it would be really great to have maybe it's the local art organization of course that's what I'm thinking about everyone else or maybe it's another thing where they're the conduit, the channel for getting the word out to schools they find out you know connecting with the town the art organization connects with the schools or whatever it is for the artists puts the word out and has a forum of sorts like the developer wants to incorporate the specific thing they have this criteria could we throw it out there for some creative thinking so it's not just one artist or a few artists that are contributing to that conversation but you really get more of a diverse creative feedback and it seems like that could be something that would work and we're jealous of river arts here in Montelier and we're jealous of catamount arts and we're jealous of studio place arts we don't have that kind of organization we're working on it center for arts and learning absolutely I think that's part of the evolution hopefully that this project can inspire for Montelier to have that kind of a group Paul will there be opportunities as Amanda does these drafts of the policies for people to see those initial drafts and comment on them yes we'll have them up on the arts synergy page which is Montelier Alive slash arts energy and if you haven't gotten a card I'll take this moment to push this out there's a survey that we would love we've about 200 people have taken it so far and if you haven't gotten a card please see me I think I'll pass them around so just go to Montelier Alive dot com slash arts energy and the survey link is right there and we'll be posting stuff there and yeah so it's almost eight o'clock I know we're almost out of time here we've got a couple more minutes but before I just ask if there's any last question I know Paul if there are things that you'd like to share comments things like that I'm sure there are some extra yellow cards or cards around here you can link them on the table for politics elective so you don't get a chance to verbally express them here now I'm sure you would take any thinking or thoughts that you have about this process or ways that you want to be involved so yes and if you're not on the just write your email on the card this last card and I'll add you to the mailing list otherwise follow arts energy project on Facebook is one way to keep in touch with the happenings and we'll be posting all kinds of things there as we have been any last questions or comments I was personally curious who is here in the room like what kind of mix of citizens to come I'm not asking everyone to give a bye or anything but maybe you might have a sense of that well how many stand up if you are involved in art making okay okay let's see what's our next question stand up if you have or stay stand no stay standing state of those art makers stay standing if you have been involved in the production of somebody else's art or advancing art other than your own stay standing if you've advanced someone else's art other than your own we have a we have a group full of does that allow us to stand if we're not already oh yes standing group okay okay everybody class set thank you class it's really interesting that I mean you know we're preaching to the choir here to one big degree but we all come from different backgrounds but we've got a lot of artists in the room and we've got a city counselor we've got an executive director of river arts I have a question I'm wondering how many people live in Montpelier because I hand if you live in Montpelier yeah my daughter and I are here we live in Chelsea and we're actually in the process of doing mature great we live in a valley that's rich we're both artists but we are in a valley that's rich with just incredible incredible number of our sculptors viewers, classrooms and there's no unifying organization and if you know anything about Chelsea it's it's not on the way to any place so which is a nice thing but the the idea of what's exciting for us is to see the investment obviously on a much larger scale and hearing about what's happening in Burlington but wanting to take some of these ideas and think about how we might consider our small community and and how we can create some unifying arts events we're really at the very beginning I put you know front porch forum has been great but it only reaches the people we were on front porch forum and we have a lot of older residents who don't use technology so how do we get out to bring people in and we're very very excited because the response has been tremendous and starting with you know food is our we brought 90 people together in January to begin the conversation and it was really encouraging so we're going to be keeping an ear to what you're doing and paying attention and it's extremely inspiring listening to you know I've never even thought of a parade as a public I mean I've attended and participated but I never thought of it as a unifying arts event and it's another really wonderful way to consider and get people out well one of the great truisms of gallery's work and teaching artist's work is that when people make something they care about they're invested and they have ownership in a way that you can't build any other and so that ability to drive intrinsic motivation in a project to get people wanting to invest in it if you can get them making something whatever that is they'll be invested and that's one of the core powers of participatory art thanks everybody and I want to thank our speakers and Michelle and Ginny and Adam please place your last cards over in the section over there