An All New “Relationship Guide” for Artist + City Partnerships
Municipal-Artist Partnerships are collaborations between local governments and artists that use creative processes to rethink and improve spaces and systems for their communities. To support growing interest in these collaborations, this new practical resource was created to guide city employees, artists, and arts agencies to achieve positive and powerful artistic and civic results. Created over the course of three years of research, the Municipal-Artist Partnerships guide is the first publicly available platform of its kind designed to answer common questions about how to approach, structure, and evaluate these collaborations. The MAP guide gives focus to the risks, responsibilities, and rewards that arise when artists and municipalities work together. It helps users visualize a spectrum of partnership models and projects to demonstrate the diversity of this work, and to develop a unique model for their municipality. The guide features:
- Models for integrating artists’ work in municipal settings
- Guiding principles, values & quality practices, and reflections on common challenges and ways to approach them
- Value-add and impacts of engaging artists in municipal settings
- Profiles of partnerships across the U.S. that portray a spectrum of municipal-artist partnership structures and projects
- Model documents, tools, and frameworks to guide planning, implementation, and evaluation
- Links to multimedia examples that provide a picture of this work and the voices of partners
Research
Looking for the Municipal/Artist Partnership guide?
Go to municipal-artist.org
We believe that qualitative research and evaluation is an important tool for understanding both the aesthetic value of socially engaged art projects, and the effect they have on participants and other stakeholders’ lives. As part of the Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art and in partnership with the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs’ Public Artists in Residence, A Blade of Grass has built a library of research about a variety of ambitious projects.
Our field research is grounded in action research methodology. This approach studies an action while it’s in process by asking the artist to identify initial project goals and definitions of success, and then conducting interviews with participants and stakeholders to gather their perspectives on whether and how these goals are met. The primary goal of this research is to serve the artists and participants we partner with, as well as a broader field, in three ways. We want to capture the way an art project’s goals and definitions of success will inevitably evolve, and provide narratives of individual experiences that account for the subjective nature of these projects.
Research-related inquiry? Email us at info@abladeofgrass.org.
Newsletter
Sign up to receive our newsletter
A Blade of Grass Magazine
A magazine about art and social engagement
Issue 5 is now live! Access your free digital copy:
Supporters
Our supporters allow us to provide resources for artists who are reaching beyond boundaries to make creative contributions to social change. We’re grateful for this community. Thank you!
Search
Donate
Enacting change takes all of us! Support artists working in community to enact social change.
Meet Our Fellows
The A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, established in 2014, will conclude with its final cohort in 2020. Over seven years, A Blade of Grass has partnered with 57 artists and collectives working all over the world, and amassed a library of research, films, and other resources that exemplify the important role artists can play in civic life and as catalysts for social change.
Fellowship Program
JUNE 2020: Update About 2021 Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art
In the upcoming year, in order to maintain the relevancy and insure the efficacy of A Blade of Grass’ Fellowship, it is likely that we will be replacing the open call with a more streamlined process that narrows our scope or relies on nominations. At the moment, it is extremely hard to know about the social, economic, and logistical conditions of 2021, however we want to make sure that we are being transparent about our planning process.
Our commitment to direct funding of socially engaged artists with minimally restricted grants is intact. Directly supporting individual artists or collectives is the core of what we do. Artists need holistic, flexible support when asked to take creative risks and if they are going to collaboratively show up with others. We fully recognize that the kinds of work that builds trust, elicits creativity in others, and shifts and shares power can be hard for other institutions to support. We currently plan for the amount of funding for artists’ Fellowships to remain the same as previous years.
This decision doesn’t come easily to us—we know that the open call is a rare opportunity to apply for funding as an individual artist, and an important learning opportunity for us. It’s a valuable window into the breadth of socially engaged art practice all over the country that we draw from all the time in the rest of our work.
The reasons for this likely temporary shift are about maximizing our strengths at a time when we must be as efficient as possible. Our general, project-based open call takes about 9 months to administer, and we’re all seeing how much can change in even less time. By streamlining our decision-making this year, we hope to be as focused as possible with the resources we have: whether that means a temporarily more local emphasis in response to continued travel restrictions, directing funding toward projects that are engaged in specific mutual aid, coronavirus relief, or racial justice efforts, or some as yet unknown need that will arise.
In short, we know that things will continue to change, and are taking the summer, when we would normally announce our open call, to listen, assess, and develop a 2021 Fellowship that delivers on our mission and is responsive to this era of upheaval and transformation. We are always willing to hear your thoughts and advice, and how you are managing and responding to this time. You can contact us at info@abladeofgrass.org and the person best suited to your note will reply.