CREATIVE
PLACEMAING IN
RURAL AREAS
URBAN HUMANITIES INITIATIVE
Faculty Seminar Projects 2015-16
University of California, Los Angeles
www.urbanhumanities.ucla.edu
CREDITS
Margo Handwerker, Author
Faculty Research Workshop
A cohort of sixteen UHI affiliated faculty met once a month from October
to June to present in progress work for review and workshopping.
INTRODUCTION
The language of creative placemaking is widely criticized
among social practice artists and others as an agent of
gentrification. Practitioners in particular are quick to
distance themselves from creative placemaking, resisting
an assumption implied by the label—an assumption that
the quality of a place is made using cultural expertise
from elsewhere. Challenging questions abound: How is
a community’s interest determined, and by whom? How
is improvement—a relative term—determined? How do
we judge transformation as successful or unsuccessful?
How do we measure whether or not character and
quality are shaped? How does framing the field in these
terms impact the artists, the places, and the funders who
participate? In turn, how do the missions and methods
of such disparate participants frame this growing field?
These questions are especially salient to me, as I
personally participate in the field in two different ways.
I am, on the one hand, a theorist: a lecturer in the
Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA
and a doctoral candidate in the School of Architecture
at Princeton, where my research explores the role of art
as a tool and of artists as service providers. On the other
hand, I am also a practitioner: an active member of the
M12 group, a collective that uses social practice both to
celebrate and to survey the character of rural lives and
rural landscapes in the 21st century.
Photos from Action on the Plains
M12’s annual collaborative
program supporting experiential
art-making activities on the
Eastern Colorado High Plains
Read Margo’s full article below.
CREATIVE PLACEMAKING IN RURAL AREAS
Faculty Research Workshop 2015-16 | www.urbanhumanities.ucla.edu
Creative Placemaking in Rural Areas1
Margo Handwerker
In their 2010 white paper for the National Endowment for the Arts, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa
describe creative placemaking as follows:
“In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors
strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region
around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces,
rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and
brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.”
The language of creative placemaking is widely criticized among social practice artists and others as an
2
agent of gentrification. Practitioners in particular are quick to distance themselves from creative
placemaking, resisting an assumption implied by the label—an assumption that the quality of a place is
made using cultural expertise from elsewhere. Challenging questions abound: How is a community’s
interest determined, and by whom? How is improvement—a relative term—determined? How do we judge
transformation as successful or unsuccessful? How do we measure whether or not character and quality
are shaped? How does framing the field in these terms impact the artists, the places, and the funders
who participate? In turn, how do the missions and methods of such disparate participants frame this
growing field?
These questions are especially salient to me, as I personally participate in the field in two different ways. I
am, on the one hand, a theorist: a lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA
and a doctoral candidate in the School of Architecture at Princeton, where my research explores the role
of art as a tool and of artists as service providers. On the other hand, I am also a practitioner: an active
1
An early draft of this paper, generously supported by the Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA, was presented at the
2016 annual conference for the Association of American Geographers, as part of a panel titled “Creative Placemaking
and Beyond: Continuing and re-invigorating the arts-led conversation.”
2
See Stephen Pritchard, “Place Guarding: Activist and Social Practice Art - Direct Action Against Gentrification”
(conference paper), Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, 24 March 2016; and Ann Markusen and
Roberto Bedoya, "Political Economy, Displacement, Race, and Placekeeping: A Reframing of the Gentrification
Debate" (conference paper), Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, 25 March 2016.
member of the M12 group, a collective that uses social practice both to celebrate and to survey the
st
character of rural lives and rural landscapes in the 21 century.
What follows are some preliminary observations, from my perspective, about the benefits and challenges
for a social practice funded by creative placemaking initiatives, particularly within rural areas. My methods
and lines of inquiry are particular to my circumstances as historian, critic, and curator, and do not reflect
those of M12, even though my views are undoubtedly shaped by my involvement with the group.
--
The collaborative, resourceful ethos characteristic of both rural life and social practice have produced
lines of inquiry that seem either too nostalgic or too dismissive: Idyllic portrayals of the barn raising and
utopic visions for how artists might brighten blighted neighborhoods raise criticism from those who
suspect that generalizations about whole “communities” do not account for difference and, therefore,
undermine attempts to address the specific qualities or needs of a given region or population. The latter
criticism stems from a 2004 essay by Claire Bishop wherein the art historian criticized a relational
aesthetics: we mollify the politics of relational aesthetics by interpreting a “community” generally, by
3
aestheticizing it. One of the ways that artists in the United States who engage in social practice answer
this criticism is by formalizing their practice as a nonprofit organization. The IRS guidelines for
participation, profit, and accountability formalize a set of behaviors that enable navigation within
communities to which the artists do not "belong." The status creates legitimacy for a project, which, if
couched as an art work, might otherwise be perceived as alienating or elitist—rendering more transparent
the transitory or unfamiliar artist or collective.
Take, for instance, the non-distribution requirement: A nonprofit’s board of directors must comply with the
non-distribution requirement, assuring that no one receives surplus income generated by the
organization. This requirement heads off the common accusation that social practice artists profiteer from
3
See Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 59–79. It is important to note
that social practice is not relational aesthetics. But, the same criticism applies.
the social capital generated by their schemes. On the contrary, “The flow of resources to a nonprofit,” as
third sector scholar Peter Frumkin writes, “depends entirely on the quality and relevance of its mission
4
and its capacity to deliver value.” Resources will diminish should a project cease to be relevant—
ensuring that artist-run nonprofits are accountable to constituents. These projects give new meaning to
the term “performance” art, or “reception” even—now a “deliverable.” In this regard, the missions of artistrun nonprofits are more independent of market pressures than their for-profit counterparts—compelled to
meet a set of demands from their “audience” and not from the discursive or formal constraints of
traditional art making.
Filing as a nonprofit also allows artists to diversify their sources of financial support as funding for the arts
decreases: An artist who applies to the National Endowment for the Arts not as an individual, but instead
as a nonprofit is eligible for awards granted by the endowment, as well as for funds from other state and
federal agencies; this is especially important for social practice art, which does not produce object-based
works that might fund their operational commitments. One of the endowment’s awards is the Our Town
creative placemaking grant. The lead applicant for this grant must be either a local government or a
nonprofit organization. In other words, no individual artist engaged in social practice unless they operate
under the umbrella of an existing nonprofit can submit a proposal for a creative placemaking project
through the NEA. By requiring artists to apply as a nonprofit, the NEA’s creative placemaking initiative
validates the use of IRS guidelines as a mode of art making for the reasons previously described.
M12 has such a status, and so it is eligible to fund its social practice through the Our Town grant. The
program supports research-based projects, feasibility studies, strategic planning, and workshops—
dialogical and process-oriented forms of art making like M12’s. The four grants that M12 has received
since 2011 have supported Action on the Plains, a series of experiential art activities on the High Plains of
Eastern Colorado wherein experts from a range of fields are invited to collaborate with M12 on
conceptualizing and creating new work with citizens in and around Byers and Last Chance, Colorado.
But, with these benefits come challenges. Federal funds cannot be used to create projects that do not
4
Peter Frumkin, On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
2002), 4.
comply with NEPA5 and NHPA6 regulations, for instance. In order to comply with these regulations, artists
must present more or less completed schemes before collaborating with the community in which they
intend to work. Gran’s University (Dyestad, Sweden and Last Chance, Colorado) (2012–13) is a case in
point. The project, a collaboration between M12 and the Swedish art collective Kultivator, celebrates the
wisdom of our grandparents by collecting and archiving their knowledge. The mobility of the “classroom,”
was crucial for this project, given the great distance between rural communities. But, had the dialogical
processes instead produced more permanent infrastructure, the project may not have complied with the
NHPA regulations. It is much easier to fund a structure that is mobile, temporary, or entirely new—
strategies that seem to move further away from the Our Town program’s objective to improve the livability
of a place through infrastructure that is both contextual and long-standing.
In order to comply with the NHPA, alterations to buildings that are more than fifty years old require review.
So adaptive reuse, which would seem to be an ideal strategy, risks being too arduous to be practical.
Moreover, a decision allowing for alterations to such buildings using federal funds depends on an
assessment of the building as having no merit worth preservation. This requirement would undermine
endeavors like M12’s Feed Store, the group’s studio in Byers, Colorado. The collective’s relationship with
Eddie and Roberta Roth, the building’s owners, represents one of its strongest collaborations in the town.
M12 uses the building, which dates to 1910, precisely for its merit as a fixture within the community.
Renovation of the space as an art center would be ineligible for Our Town funds unless such merit is
denied.
Similarly, Our Town prefers to fund projects that do not repeat. Ironically, the success of a project is
frequently evidenced by whether or not the project can function in the future independently of the grant; a
reasonable requirement for reasons I described early on, and yet numerous projects have ended for lack
of funding and not for an entire lack of support.
5
6
NEPA: National Environmental Policy Act.
NHPA: National Historic Preservation Act.
--
M12’s Ornitarium (Denmark Shire, Western Australia) began as a modest bird hide and gathering place
for wetland educators and guests constructed using regionally sourced materials in collaboration with
local hobbyists and environmental nonprofits. Local collaborators on the project continue to build on to the
site, regularly forwarding the artists updates on how the site is being used and improved upon by area
citizens. 7 These subsequent interventions are what demonstrate the improved livability of this wetland,
both for human and non-human users. The art project is not in and of itself accountable for strengthening
the livability of a place; it merely fosters the kinds of exchange that make placemaking possible. The NEA
too is careful to describe Our Town’s mission as fostering the potential for, “projects that contribute to the
livability of communities” [emphasis mine].8 Couching social practice as social entrepreneurship risks
reinforcing the notion that social welfare is sufficiently provided by individuals, private and third sector
initiative instead of by the government.
9
M12 is turning its energies toward another grant, one that focuses more on processes than deliverables:
NEA Chairman Jane Chu’s Creativity Connects. Projects funded by the Art Works: Creativity Connects
initiative require a cross-sectorial approach. This approach is in keeping with the momentum of M12,
which, as part of its community-based approach has always collaborated with non-arts stakeholders; but
now, more than ever, collaborates on these works with experts from other fields of study. The group has
proposed "Observatory Hall," two sister spaces collectively created to facilitate a more connective mode
of knowledge exchange between M12 and the Mountain Research Station (University of Colorado at
Boulder). Each structure—one located in the Rocky Mountains at the Mountain Research Station in
Nederland, Colorado and the other in the High Plains at the M12 EXPSITE in Last Chance, Colorado—
will be a sculptural open-air classroom and overnight field shelter. This new infrastructure will facilitate onsite and sustained encounters between M12 and its partners at the Research Station for the purpose of
7
The Ornitarium was not funded by Our Town, but rather by IASKA (now International Arts Space) for the first rural
arts biennial in 2012.
8
“Creative Placemaking,” National Endowment for the Arts website, 1 July 2016.
9
For more on the criticism that social entrepreneurship is not the reaction against neoliberalism that it claims to be,
see Beth Cook, Chris Dodds, and William Mitchell, "Social entrepreneurship: false premises and dangerous
forebodings," Australian Journal of Social Issues 38, no. 1 (2003), 57–72.
advancing our common goal: to broaden the role of creative thinking in our respective sectors for the
purpose of addressing complex environmental issues of broad concern to artists, scientists, and citizens
in these two distinct rural landscapes.
It is unfortunate that project “partners” for this grant require a taxpayer ID number—a requirement that
would disqualify the Hall family, for instance, M12’s collaborators on the Black Hornet. The Black
Hornet is usually a four-cylinder, front wheel drive Honda that races at the I-76 Speedway in Fort Morgan,
Colorado. The project quite literally mobilizes the value of exchanging intergenerational knowledge in
order to challenge the assumption that the revitalization of a rural place depends upon the introduction of
cultural expertise from somewhere else, usually an urban center.
--
M12 is rooted in the Plains east of Denver, but non-local exchange is critical to its practice. Attention to
both the local and to the non-local is crucial in the rural case. Individual rural communities span large
distances and those who practice in and with these communities rarely network in one place the way that
other artists converge in major art centers. On-line platforms are increasingly more common, so that
groups like M12 can maintain their site-based character without losing access to a more extensive
dialogue. Still, they prioritize direct contact whenever possible, and so exchange is important—exchanges
on-site between M12, local partners, and collaborators invited from elsewhere; and exchanges between
M12 and those collaborators at their own sites, to which M12 sometimes travels. Regarding this dialectic
between the local and the global, several questions have emerged for me: How can a global conversation
be produced from so many distinct, regionally specific case studies? Where can we find common ground,
e.g. are more case studies found in countries where public funding for the fine arts has sharply declined
in recent years?
Working through the complex funding challenges for a social practice in rural space, one question in
particular intrigues me: How might a project that is at once local and non-local clarify how rural studies are
sometimes shaped by urban contexts? Here, I think Leo Marx’s remarks about the role of dissonance are
useful. In his 1964 book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, Marx
wrote: “the pastoral ideal has been incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction—a way of
ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today.”
10
To make his point, he outlines two kinds
of pastoralism: a “pastoralism of sentiment” and a “pastoralism of mind.” Examples of the first include
leisure activities like camping and gardening, flights to the suburbs. Marx is critical: sentimental
approaches to a so-called rural experience orient our attention away from the urban issues that drive one
to the country. They are distractions and not solutions. The second kind of pastoralism—what he
describes as a pastoralism of mind—is more complex. We find this kind of pastoralism in the arts, namely
in literature as a metaphor that may “enrich and clarify our experience” by contrasting two modes of
consciousness: rural peace and simplicity with urban power and sophistication. Marx gives an example:
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of the train whistle that interrupts his quiet moment in the country. This
“little event,” also called a “counterforce,” produces a dissonance that, once presented, demands
resolution—it provides “a check against our susceptibility to idyllic fantasies” a reminder that sentimental
pastoralism is an urban phenomenon. Today, we need not even leave the city to exercise our nostalgia
for rural places—we can read Modern Farmer while having lunch at a farm-to-table restaurant.
Creative placemaking initiatives are, I think, a train—no longer a metaphor for industrialization, but rather
for a global cultural economy built on urban sentimentality. In this regard, they answer Bishop’s criticism:
aestheticizing rural culture in rural space through creative placemaking initiatives is a pastoralism of mind.
Each little event, each initiative that assumes that the quality of a rural place is built using cultural
expertise from urban centers, actually demands that we resolve our perception of a seemingly passive
rural place with the realities of a post-agricultural landscape or a rural diaspora. They clarify the
st
complexities of rural and urban co-existence in the 21 century.
10
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), 4. Subsequent quotations are also from this text.