 All right. Well, thank you everybody for coming to this session. I want to welcome Dan and Paul from Montpelier Live and I'm turning it over to them. Thanks for being here. Dan and I are going to tag team on this. Dan's the executive director of Montpelier Live. I am the executive director of the community engagement lab. And so as we get going, though, just to be sure we're not too settled, I'm going to ask a little up and down exercise. Could everybody, I'm going to set you up for the question and stand up if you can answer this question, affirmative. I have traveled to a city and had a specific intention to go see public art while in that location. If you have ever traveled to a location with a specific intention of seeing public art, stand up. OK. Now, sit down if you have ever invited. Oh, hold on. I've got to be showing I'm getting a double negative here. I had this all worked out at one time in my head. And of course, remain standing. There we go. Remain standing if you have invited somebody to come to your community, specifically to see public art. Only remain standing if you have invited somebody to come to your community to see public art. If you have not done that, then sit back down. Awesome. OK. All right. OK, you may all sit. Thank you. We did that exercise here in Montpelier at one of the workshops. And everybody stood up. There were about 20 of us in the workshop. Everybody stood up because everybody had gone to see with an intention to see it. And I said, OK, here in Montpelier, how many of you had invited somebody to see public art? Everybody sat down except for one person. That was at the beginning of our process about building this master plan. So I'm going to set up just kind of the big arc of what we're going to talk about today. This is all about process. I don't really care about a plan so much as I care about planning. And one of my favorite quotes is plans are nothing. Planning is everything. So we're going to talk about how we got to the creation of this plan. And hopefully that can give you guys some ideas about how you might jumpstart something like this in your community. This is only the second public art master plan in Vermont. Burlington has one that they're in the process of revamping right now, I think. So this was a new process for Vermont. And I want to also start with one more fit of engagement. Could somebody please give me a one sentence definition of public art? One sentence definition of public art. Yes? Buy the people for the people of the people. OK, buy the people for the people of the people or something like that. All right? Give me another. Just give another. We've got public art. What is it? Yes, I'm back. Art on public property are funded with public funds or selected with a civic private curation process. Great. Good. Yes? Market is accessible to everyone at all times. Market's meant to inspire engagement or connections. Would it be a place or some message within the art? It's got an engagement or connection of some kind, some message within the art. Awake up cult of the life within the community. Awake up cult of the life within the community. Good. Let's get a couple more and then I'll tell you. I'll read you the definition that we came up with and then we'll get going. A couple more. Public art. What is public art? A couple more. Public art. What is public art? Come on. I cannot look that easy. Public art makes a community. Public art makes a community. Fantastic outcome. We're going to be talking about that. One more. I'm not going to let you up. One more. Yes? A reflection of the community that helps connect us to our mind is that we are connected. A reflection of the community that helps remind us that we are connected. I love that. All right. Here we go. After hours upon hours of wordsmithing and wrestling and black eyes, the Montclair Public Art Master Plan has defined public art means a work of art that is visible and accessible to the public for a minimum of 40 hours per week. Public art may include sculpture, painting, installation, photography, video, works of light or sound, or any other work or project determined by the Public Art Commission to satisfy the intent of this chapter, provided, however, that none of the public shall be considered public art for the purposes of satisfying the requirements of this chapter. And then it seems things like reproductions, or decorative art, or landscape, et cetera. Is that one sentence? No, that is not. That's a paragraph. That's a paragraph. All right. So when I was thinking about how best to share with you our process, I thought it would be great for Dan to just start out and let you know one of the key successes to this project was that we were not starting from scratch around the momentum in the community to do stuff. And Montclair has got great momentum right now. So Dan's going to talk about some of the things that were already happening that we rolled the coattails up. Yeah, so I just entered into the public art process near the completion of this work, because I started only about a year ago. So this is why I invited Paul to really give a talk. It built on a lot of planning that had taken place in Montclair, and not necessarily arts-related planning. And I think that's important to recognize. We got an EPA grant called Greetings America's Capital Grant, and did a lot of work looking at bike lanes and streetscape. We had just all sorts of comprehensive plans, downtown master plans, things like that. And they sort of touched on the art of what this did was really build on it. But it was important that we had that foundation in place when we were looking to get grants to fund this plan. Montclair Life has a very active design committee. If you're familiar with the Main Streets Model, we kind of are based on that. So we do public art and beautification and things like that. So we have been doing smaller projects. And we continue to do smaller projects to just enliven the streetscape, beautify downtown. But they're not usually permanent. They're not huge commissioned works. This is somewhere between guerrilla art and what a public art commission would do. Wayfinding Master Plan. We've been working on it for a few years. The banners on the light posts are the first piece that's in place. But by the end of this year, we're going to have a wayfinding in place. We just got a grant from the state to implement a comprehensive wayfinding program. So we'll have vehicular pedestrian kiosks, all that jazz. It's all about creating a sense of place. And then there's cool stuff going on the transit center and bike path extension, a new distillery, which, unfortunately, is not quite open yet. I was really hoping it would be open for all of you to go get a drink after this. But there's just a lot of energy going on downtown, French block, which is new housing that's been built in a building that was vacant for 80 years. The second and third floor, nothing was in it. And now there's affordable housing in it. So a lot of energy. And this is really building on that energy. And one more thing is that we're joyous to the local architects. Founded this sort of informal organization called Langdon Street Alive, which focuses on Langdon Street, which I mentioned in my intro, which is a lot of public artwork and events on Langdon Street. And I think that really helped to build the energy around it. OK, so what we're talking about is how do we get started? What's the foundation we needed? And this is a page out of the master plan, just how we got going, writing on all these coattails, and really there was a huge financial bump here, too. The Taylor Street Transit Center was the largest public construction project in 30 years in Montpelier. And the mayor at the time, as we were trying to get the NEA to give us the money through their our town project, grant project, we were talking to the mayor and he said, well, we really want to have public art at the new transit center. And I said, OK, well, why don't we leverage a piece of public art at the transit center into an art town grant to get an additional $50,000 from NEA and we'll do this project. So first year we applied, it was all about this new installation at the transit center. And oh yeah, we were going to do a planning process around it and create a public art master plan. Thumbs down from the NEA on that. And yet next year, almost exactly the same proposal flipped with the planning process as a centerpiece. Oh yeah, we're going to celebrate with the $50,000 commission that we're putting at the transit center and they went with it. So we had $50,000 in our pocket from the city council. Easiest fundraising we've ever done. They had a $12 million project and the mayor wanted it to happen. He said, well, I think we can find $50,000 in that project budget for public art. So when we applied to NEA, that was the funding foundation for the project and then we pledged to raise $50,000 in addition to that. So how we structured a couple, I'm really into, I'm a little bit of a nerd about this, but when we started going, we wanted to be really intentional on how the project was going to flow. And I think this was also one of the things the NEA was particularly pleased with was the structure that we had. We knew that we were going to be inviting the city council to approve this because this is not something that lives at the arts council. This is not something that should live in a friends up group. This is public policy. How is the city going to intentionally support and advance public art as a core piece of its identity and messaging to the world? So we knew we had to sell it to the city council so there at the top. Then we had a small leadership team and Dan and myself and Kevin Casey from the city were on that team. Executive committee and I see Zahn here in the audience. He was one of the inspirations for being sure that you know these people well, you can work with them. You know you're going to be in the thick of it, pick your leadership team so that you can share a beer with them on any given night and still be friends through this process. And then we spread out quickly into an advisory team and this was the community. This was how we're going to bring all sectors of the community together and it included professional art people. It included artists. It included the program director of the library, business people. We tried to get as absolutely diverse selection in that team as possible and 17 came together at the beginning of the project. Two years later we had about seven active so we can talk about that in the Q and A section. But and then we were going to hire a consultant and so we knew that we didn't have the skills to write the city policy and there are about a dozen consultants in the country that do public art master planning policy writing and so it's a small type group but Michelle Bailey at the Arts Council helped connect our RFQ to the listserv from Americans for the Arts and next thing you knew we were getting the RFQs coming in and we selected a group called Designing Local out of Ohio. So get in going. Once we got all this in place we wanted to be sure that we were engaging the community and you know that question that we started with what is public art? That was the question of the moment for almost the entire process. How are we going to define what public art is and how is it going to live in our city and why should city council allocate funds out of the general fund every year to the art commission for them to invest in public art? So we had to have a really clear understanding of what that was and so we did that in a series of different ways and we had a, well, let me go back one actually. So this bottom line, the community engagement. We had lunch talks, we had teaching artists workshops and school residencies, we had guest speakers and I'm looking at Sarah Katz from BCA. I saw her earlier, she was one of our guest speakers and we had one-on-one interviews, our consultant interviewed about 40 people in the community, about art and how they felt about the community and I did a survey that got about 300 responders that went out in social media, that kind of thing and we wanted to know from people what they believed about public art, why they thought it was important to Montpelier and would they be willing to support it and so those are some pretty interesting conversations. One of the things that was really fun about the lunch talks is that we did them at different times of the day in different locations and we got completely different demographics. We did one at the library and it was mostly women of the age of about 60 plus. We did one at a lunchtime where we offered a taco bar and it was business leaders because it was downtown during lunch. We did one at a record shop and it was mostly millennials and you should have heard them. We need more stuff, we want more public art. There was this like, we need more activity in Montpelier and we need the places to keep their doors open after nine o'clock so a lot of venting about public art from that room. We also created a series of workshops. This is one of them. We picked about five locations around Montpelier that were prime locations for public art and we brought together some architects and artists and we had them at stations and the community was invited to go around and actually conceptualize what might live in those locations. And so this is our but ugly center city garage. You'll see the picture on the left that's screaming out for something. It was put hard on me, put hard on me. I hear that every time I walk by that damn take note around it. And this is the idea, well let's commission some high school kids to do something wonderful on the side of that. And this garage lives on State Street as you are walking up the hill. And if you do, look to your left and you'll go, oh, it needs something. So we had that along with public, for instance, earthworks in public and Hubbard Park. How we might do temporary installations. We did one around installations. We had a school residency where a teaching artist spent seven days in the middle school and the kids did visioning around what the future of Montclair could be if they were infused with public art. And you can kind of see on the pinwheels, these were all wind engaged. They wrote their poems or their visions from Montclair and put them on those pinwheels. And these were all, this is all basically a plastic product. So it held up for a little over two weeks right at Christmas time. And it was right at, this is the front of City Hall. And so we installed it right there and got the kids involved. And of course, that was a good talking point for the community. We also had that same installation, had everybody writing down how public art makes them feel. So just kind of a constant engagement with different sectors of the community to see, to get ideas around what this could be. The lunch talks were really about defining public art. And what are the different types of public art? Because you know, I think many people think public art is a statue, right? I mean, wow, I know public art, it's that bronze thing in the middle of the circle, right? So we wanted to offer a bunch of different examples of what public art could be, public art that you can live on, that you can walk all around. And public art that actually transforms the public library in Kansas City, for instance. This is in the front of the public library. So we had to kind of take a deep dive into what public art could be in order to get the community thinking expansively about how we could use art to define Montpelier and to give our expression to the worlds that when people come here, they understand the energy and ethos of Montpelier as being a creative place to live. And it was really interesting how many people that were interviewed identified Montpelier as a creative place. And then we'd say, can you name a piece of public art? Well, there's that thing on the steakhouse lawn. Oh, that's owned by the steak, that's not really Montpelier. And so we had very, very little public art here. By the way, bravo to the Montpelier Live Design Committee for the beautiful piece of public art that's on the parking lot. Have you seen it yet? The garage parking lot downtown. Because you're walking back to the Capitol Plaza, look on your left after you walked by Julio's Mexican restaurant. There's a huge painting, a beautiful geometric painting that just went up last week, right here. Standard and night, overnight. Standard and night, overnight. The moments before the rain came, plus the fair somewhat of blended coloring, but very cool. So all different types of public art. Okay. As we got through the plan and started getting it in a nitty gritty, we really wanted to be sure we had something that wasn't going to live on the shelf. So this is basically an excerpt from the plan and I'm happy to send this to anybody. Well, and you can get it on the, we're going to put it on Montpelier Live. So there's a link on your thing. It's not, unfortunately, I don't know why, on this link right now, but it will be by the time you go look at it as long as you wait until Monday to go look at it. Yeah, so go there and you can download this. So it's about a, I don't know how many pages, 80 page plan, but about half of this is public policy and guidelines. The front half of it is what we did, what we discovered about Montpelier. And so this is why you need a consultant, unless you have someone in your community who can write public policy around public art. So as we get into the meat of what we asked the city council to adopt, these were the sections that drove the plan. So we'll talk a little bit about the creating foundation, the essence of Montpelier. We'll talk about place-based strategies, things that the public art commission could do, and also a priority action plan. Because what we wanted was, and we kind of went through several iterations of what the public art commission would look like, where it would live. There was a lot of discussion of what that, and maybe it would live a Montpelier line. But in the end, we decided it would be a city commission that would be staffed by a city member. So it was an official part of the city government. And then they adopted these policies. So these policies really give you, I think of them as a filter. And they give the public art commission and the city a way to look through the lens of public art when they're investing in public infrastructure. We were saying to the city was, if you invest in public art, Montpelier will benefit. There'll be more vibrancy, there'll be more traffic, there'll be, our identity will be defined more clearly. And therefore, you should be investing in the infrastructure of public art. So how are we gonna do that? Well, we have to have a deaccession plan, for instance. If we put up public art and have to take it down, how do we do that? That's in the plan. We have to have the guidelines for how the public art commission works. How many are there on there? Just like we have in our boards, right? Just in for bylaws. So all of that detail is in here. So nobody has to wonder, if we want a commission of $75,000 piece, who makes the decision on that final commission? Or how do we pull together a selection committee? How does that selection committee work? Is it separate than the art commission? Yes, blah, blah, blah. So a lot of details in there. Is that my two-minute show? Yeah, you may. We're here in 20. I miss my two, I miss my 10-minute show. Oh, we're right at 20, we're done. Okay, we are so done. We're done. We're done. Where's my... Okay, so we have, for instance, flip to questions and, boy, I am, I am done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I pick my point at the moment. Truth and advertising, I'm a city councilor. And I think the last people who should be selecting public art are city councilors. In fact, after one round of that, we make sure we pick it away. Ah, yeah. Good. Bravo. Bravo. Yeah. So how do you get buy-in on that? And how do you reach a, quite a political, how do you get into the political comfort that we're going to be selecting on? Well, so the city council, the city council approved the plan, which created the commission, so the commission is actually made up of representatives from up to your life, or representative from the Economic Development Corporation, representative from our College of Fine Arts, and four at-large members that were appointed by city council. So the city council don't serve on the committee. They were really excited about the plan. I think actually one of the things is some of the other commissions that you more likely end up dealing with if you wanted to do something like this, in the past, like design review commission and historic preservation commission, maybe we're a little bit more hesitant to get excited about things like that. So I think the council is excited about creating this new body that might really actively engage in this and get some stuff going that might have run into roadblocks before. Yeah. I have a two-part question, please. In Burlington, we have public art that emerged from what has been on reflection to look at as a result of systemic racism. And we actually have permanent public art that is frustrating in that it gives the appearance of favoring or grandizing of particular artists at the expense of infrastructure that was removed to put it there that would have served many artists, public and public. So as you talk about what your message is through art, I wonder how sensitive you are to these interpretations of it. I like how Dan was quick to hand the microphone back to you. Okay, thanks, Dan. Thanks. Yes, that's an absolute upfront question that is the challenge for the public art commission to be dealing with. And so the only answer I have with that is have people on the public art commission aware of that question and that challenge. And that's something they're gonna have to deal with as they go through it. I mean, I don't know if I have an easier answer except to say the people who are making those decisions should be aware of that and grappling with that because that's very real and upfront issues. Yeah. Question regarding how you implement the process and keep it going. Do you do an RFP or an RFQ in the state of Massachusetts? We have what's called a procurement law. So it hinders us from being able to work directly with artists. We're working on legislation to change that but our chapter 30 P defines an artist the same way that they define somebody who's bidding on cement. So is your question is... What's your process for procurement and are you able to do an RFP or an RFQ with your artists? Got it. So yes, because we did commission a piece in the process and we put out an RFP, repressor proposals to artists around the state and we had a very, what I thought was very nice process engaged by again with Michelle Bailey and Michelle Bailey from the Vermont Arts Council and David Sheetz, the curator of the state. And so there's also a selection committee separate from both the steering committee, the arts council and what now has become the arts commission. So we established a community selection committee and there was a whole process around that. I'm not sure how that relates to what's happening in Massachusetts but there's also a detail explanation in the plan on what that process is. In the back. So following up on that and FYI, former counselor and I co-signed but said that we should, council members should not be second policy or at least art and I commend you for making this part of the city structure because it goes beyond the individual and it's policy that will just last. And the question is and I got here a little late that the policy proposed policies include a percent for the arts or is there currently a percent for the art legislation within the municipality? No, there is and that was a big question around how we're gonna fund the commission. And so we had a lot of discussions around that because Montelier Life has already has a design committee that's committing a certain amount of money each year to public art but we wanted a lot more money than that. So we looked at the 1% the challenge for Montelier was we don't have enough capital projects. And so if you're in the little tiny community, I mean I work straight if you're in Boston and you've gotten hundreds of millions going into public infrastructure every year. So we couldn't rely on a 1% but it is in the plan to look at a 1% in the first one or two years of the commission to see how that could be implemented because in the case of for instance the transit center had we had that we would have had a $120,000 chunk for public art. So absolutely, I think Montelier is gonna look at that but not yet. Do you want to talk about how it is funded or how I can talk about it? Yeah, sure. So we approached the city council and asked instead for $50,000 a year flat amount to support the commission that thought would be we'd raise additional funds to use that as matching dollars. They committed this first year to $25,000 and then Montelier Life controls the downtown improvement district. So we have a small amount of funds and we committed an additional $5,000 a year. So the commission has $30,000 in the first year. Yes. And the blue. Thank you. Systematized this identity as a community. Who's responsible now for letting people know that you have this public art so that they will come and see it? You push a market into all of these. Yeah, exactly. Are you full time or is this a labor of love? Is this a work of art? No, I am full time. Yeah. Back to the original city council conversation and ripping on what you mentioned about the historic commission. So I think New England wide, we tend to be fairly progressive on a lot of things but we're very conservative about the built environment. And I think that especially in a region that's full of historic assets, I've seen in a lot of places where I work like historic preservation, sort of being the third rail conversation in terms of putting forward public art that's kind of progressive and relevant and kind of forward thinking and not just kind of parking it back through the historic time. And I'm wondering that in a city full of beautiful historic buildings, was that something you explicitly addressed in the process about how it relates to the historic infrastructure and how that conversation works in a way that's not enduring looking at sort of what it came out of. So I'm gonna answer in two parts. First part is that the NEA required a pretty intensive review before they would fund the grant knowing that we were gonna be putting, installing a piece in a historic district. We had some boobs to jump through there but it wasn't at all about the aesthetic. A review was just had to do with some other issues around historic preservation. The other side of that answer is that we struggled when we commissioned the work. We got some very, what I would say, unusual progressive on-guard proposals and some very traditional ones. And the one that was selected is pretty non-traditional. And the committee that, about community members that came together specifically wanted something that was non-traditional so that we wouldn't be stuck in that. Oh, this is a granite sculpture. And so my segue is right here. I also don't, I don't mean to dismiss historic preservation because Montpelier has the largest National Register of Historic Places District in Vermont. And obviously our downtown is full of historic buildings. And I think that one thing that Vermonters in general are really inspired by is how contemporary art can integrate with historic buildings. So if you look at the Kent Gallery in Calis, which is a town about 15 minutes from here, they've taken this old farmhouse and turned it into a contemporary art space. The Garage Cultural Center, which just opened downtown, which is hosting some events tonight, is hosting, has hosted some really contemporary art installations. So, yeah, this is the piece that was selected for the transit center. You wanna talk about it? Sure, it's called counter rotation. It's a six-foot wide marble bench and every time it's rotated around, it activates a split flat machine, which actually you can't see in the picture, but it'll be on that back wall. Split flat machine is what you see in old train stations where the little clips go track five and they give you the time. And it makes a really cool sound but you can program them. And so we're gonna be programming it with things like poetry and there are also images. And you can, can you give me my next slide? So we can do images as well, like this historic Habanaki canoeing image. And so there'll be an audible response that'll attract people to it. And also the fun of kind of turning this huge two-ton chunk of granite that's on this really sophisticated thing to keep it from going too fast. And then like the middle school will be able to say, okay, this is your month to program in some poetry. And then the kids hopefully will come down and say, yeah, it's my ball. So yeah, a fun piece. Yes. The name of the artist. Ah, Navajo Gomez and, I know, Greg Gomez and Navajo Rodrigo from Putney. Yeah, yes. We talked a little bit about how we're gonna show the impact of the investment. We just got out of the city of Boston and we just started a project for our program a couple years ago. I think once there's those kinds of public dollars, we'll need to pull the card. There's a lot of like private telephones. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm gonna, I will answer, but before I forget, on your resource sheet, on the very, the very first resource is a link to the NEA that has actually the, you can look at the application that we wrote for the arts, the art town project. And there's a section in there that asks this exact question, how you're going to measure the impact of your work. And so in creative placemaking, we measure that quantifiably by vibrancy. How is it gonna change the patterns of the people who are coming to our community and how is it gonna change the pattern of our community to come together in different ways? And so there are all kinds of ways you can measure that. And then there's the part of what is the qualitative definition of impact. How is this defining Montpelier differently? How are we gonna use it in publicity to push out our identity to the world? And they're, you know, that's looser. But generally the big impact is traffic, vibrancy. How is it gonna bring people together? And how is it gonna be a force for creating that energy in downtown that we don't have right now? Yes. It sounds like we used the design committee of the Main Street structure to kind of put an entree into this process, which seems like it might be more palatable to our individuals that, you know, might be a little nervous about the public art process. Can you talk a little bit about how your wayfinding plan may be integrated with the public art plan and your other plans and how that was funded? And so let me see if I can parse a couple of questions in there. One is, is there one about getting people changing hearts and minds, moving towards the momentum of a public art plan? Correct. And then the other. That part I can answer. Good. Yeah, so I think absolutely, you know, we're often, not often, but we do small scale works in the design committee of Montpelier Life. There's a flag installation over the river that you can see from the Lightning Street Bridge or you'll see it on a state street as you walk by this mural that we just did. Things like fish and this is a, you know, an iteration that we've had before. Just decorations and things like that. So that I think raises awareness about art in town and we're doing small scale things. I mean, this mural project is going to be maybe $600 and definitely the hardest part was getting it approved. Actually doing it took us four hours, you know. Two years in the making. And you know what, work has done on Lightning Street. I think it raises awareness and I do think it made it easier to engage in these conversations because people had some idea of what public art was a little bit when we started having it. Is that fair to say? Yeah. And one of the things we needed to flip to was the notion of, what's the difference between downtown beautification and public art, you know. And so Montpelier Life is now taking more of that downtown beautification. They're already doing that, but they're kind of pulling out the public art component out of mostly what they do and giving it to the public art commission. The other short answer that I would add to that is the process that we went through of the engagement, this is not about transferring information, it's about getting people doing things that change the way they think, right? And in this instance we were asking them to change the way they think about their concept of public art. So the engagement was all around learning through doing, not just telling people things. Okay, yeah. I'm curious how the performing arts where you think of initial conversations and you're working with the dance center on that. Right, wow. So how much time do I have left? She's asking about performing art as public art. We had a really intense conversation over a series of months. Alana Finney was on the advisory team specifically because she was coming from a background of doing publicly engaged dance and site-based work. And well, why can't this public art commission support performing arts? Well, and then suddenly are we gonna support theater in the park? Or are we gonna support street art? Or are we, you know, and what are all the different ways? So we had to come together with a definition around a definition that the city council could believe in investing in around public art as infrastructure for defining and increasing Montclair's vitality. And they decided in the end that ephemeral performance art did not fit into that of what the city council would be investing in. Yeah. I'm always curious in situations like this, how much infrastructure might play a role as in like short stages or flat-top rocks for impromptu performance art but the investment is in the structure itself. Right, and so one of the projects that's recommended in the plan is a, well, no, actually it was not, it didn't make it into the final plan but one of the things that we played around with was a portable stage, in essence, that could be activated to do the kind of things that Han is talking about where we'd have a pop-up performance things or opportunities for pop-up art. And it's not one of the things recommended in the plan for short-term or mid-term goals but it's definitely in the fix. So each community's gonna come together with this definition around this. We just had to be, because this was the first time out of the gate for the city council to be investing, we wanted to be sure they knew that they were going to be getting a thing. And I literally, the quote from the mayor is, I can't go to the public and ask them to just give you $50,000 for that, knowing what that's gonna be. No way, no way was she gonna do that. And if Anne was here, she wouldn't mind me saying that. Yes, Anne. Yes, Anne. We also in the plan made sure that at the openings of any public art, like when we celebrate, when the completion of this, that performing arts could be a part of that and that it could be funded as part of that. And we recommended that we look towards the creation of a cultural plan to engage further in how we can support this work. So I was excited to just have been at the main cultural plan presentation learning about that because I think that's the next step. But we really had to draw some boundaries in order to make it possible. And I think that's important. You can't do everything all at once. Like we had so much time and so much money and we needed to get support for this project. Like we have to stop somewhere. And I think what about the distinction between public art master plan and a cultural plan. That was a really exciting conversation for Montclair to go through because we don't have a cultural plan. But in the short-term goals of the public art plan, it suggests funding a cultural plan through the public art commission, which of course is much more comprehensive and far reaching than just a public art plan. Someone over here? I have a question. How do you, I find that in our community, we do a lot of volunteer public additions to community events and functions. And there's a perception made that we love to do art, we're just going to do art. And it's kind of a mixed message to the people that don't do art that we should get paid to do the art that is been given to these community events. And it's kind of a volunteer thing, a perception now that art is a way to make things beautified, kind of a gray zone where the events are decorated by the artists in the community, but they're not paid to do the decoration part of it. So how do you, with your officials of getting public art done? Like we have art walls in Swanson and Swanson and it's all volunteer bates. It's all donated paint. It's all kind of that presence. And it's an open canvas that can change in any point. But how do you get those people to know that artists need to get paid as well to produce the creativity? Yeah, that's a really good point. And we had a lot of discussion around that. And so in the plan, it defines those parameters around that. The distinction around professional and, you know, where those lines are. And by the way, your colleagues from the Arts Council were here yesterday. Yes, I know, I saw it. Yes, and so it was well-represented. So that's a real issue, you know. Because you don't want to give them the wrong idea that, well, we'd love to do it, but we are professional. We do have a talent that should be paid for. Right, exactly. It's really a mixed signal that you can start to give people if you just keep following the theory. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Is that the two minutes? No, that. About 20 minutes, but maybe take one more question. And then while we're going to actually respond to your question, that is, as, so I'm part of the city of Brooklyn, then, you know, a public art review process moving towards a 1% in the next year. But what we, as a city, make sure is that we never hire an artist unless they're paid. So it's just from a policy perspective so that we never set in motion anything that, for example, if we don't set that example, no one else is going to follow it. OK, thanks, everybody. Questions? Go create a mingle. And thanks for being here. Have a great day. Thank you.