Arts Intranet

Kaity Nicastri

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brandi Reddick

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Rothman

Public art is a tough sell in a bad economy.

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

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

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

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

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

Angela Adams

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

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

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

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

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

Lajos Heder

Evaluation is a different issue for artists creating commissioned work than for administrators running a public art program.

In my view, the administrator needs positive public feedback to politically (and financially) support the program. As artists we need feedback that help us become better artists.

It is much easier to imagine an evaluation of a whole program than to measure the value of a single artwork.

As artists we are all somewhat eccentric in our art making process. We combine research and rational thought with personal intuitions and observations in our own unique ways. We invent things that have not existed before.

Members of the public, who have not seen anything exactly like it before may love it or hate it at first sight. They may adapt to love it, or get bored over time. People who say they love the art, may never pay much attention after the first look. Others who are uncomfortable may eventually come around and gain something important.

My experience is that a large percentage of people pay very little attention to public art.

"Wave Arbor" by Doug Hollis at Long Bridge Park in Arlington, VA.

(Author's Note: This post builds upon prior pieces by Dr. Elizabeth Morton and Angela Adams.)

I enrolled in Dr. Morton’s Exploring Evaluation for Public Art studio as a way to complement my experience as a working artist-art educator with a limited sense of the planning and evaluation process for public art. Over the course of the studio I came to see evaluation not as a zero sum game meant to occur after installation, but rather as an ongoing series of assessments conducted by and for major stakeholders, including, but not limited to, the intended audience.

While public art evaluation clearly includes examining the perceptions of the general public, it must also examine the processes and decisions that influence, direct, and ultimately, commission, new works.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this studio was the opportunity for cross-disciplinary dialogue created by the intentional interface of urban planners, designers (in this case, architecture & landscape architecture students), artists, and arts administrators.

Each of these roles fulfills an important and different function in the life cycle of the public art project; yet all too often we work in isolation from one another and/or use language that is particular to one discipline and foreign to another. The studio proved to me that we have a great deal to learn from one another and that increased cross-disciplinary collaboration will continue to yield exciting new contributions to the field of public art evaluation.

For example, as a predominantly 2D artist moving into the more design-based role of the landscape architect, the concept of site analysis took on an expanded meaning. From a conventional fine arts perspective, a site is a location where an artwork is placed, not necessarily a place that an artwork might inhabit over time. Artists would clearly benefit from the designer’s perspective of understanding site as an ongoing process, with multiple actors; yet this is a concept that is rarely discussed in undergraduate or graduate level art programs.