By Marianne Dhenin for Yes! Media. Broadcast version by Emily Scott for Ohio News Service, reporting for the YES! Media-Public News Service Collaboration
In Philadelphia, there's a mural around every corner. Since 1984, local organization Mural Arts Philadelphia has created more than 3,600 murals on building exteriors across the city. According to its mission, the organization believes these striking works of public art have the power to "transform public spaces and individual lives."
"We always say that art ignites change," said Jane Golden, the organization's executive director. "There is something deeply catalytic about the work."
Researchers agree: Studies show that public art has a host of benefits for communities. Its community-building powers can combat feelings of anxiety and social isolation. When locals participate in creating public art, these effects are amplified. A 2018 London-based survey found that 84% of respondents believed participating in public art projects benefited their well-being.
Public art also provides economic benefits, including new jobs and increased tourism. Murals, in particular, are great for artistic placemaking and city marketing. It's no surprise that art-focused bus and walking tours have grown popular in dozens of cities in recent years, from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and London to Austin, Texas, where the city-led Art in Public Places program has been funding public art for more than 30 years.
Elsewhere, public art is used to address practical problems like safety. For example, last year in Cincinnati, nonprofit organization ArtWorks created a permanent, illuminated art installation to light a popular walking trail in the Avondale neighborhood. The installation has aesthetic benefits, but it has also improved the neighborhood's walkability and residents' safety after dark.
ArtWorks also provides economic benefits to Cincinnati residents. It creates jobs and fosters youth development through an apprenticeship program. Since its founding in 1996, the organization has employed more than 4,000 young people, ages 14-21, and 3,000 professional artists and creatives in art projects throughout the city.
"Our apprentices are being mentored by professional artists on the job," explained Sydney Fine, senior director of impact at ArtWorks. "So beyond being an arts nonprofit, we are also in many ways a career-readiness, positive youth development organization."
However, one of the most meaningful effects of public art is that it creates what urban designer Mitchell Reardon calls "community fingerprints" - spaces that make people feel represented, foster community ties, and give people a sense of ownership and belonging in their neighborhoods.
As a senior planner at Vancouver, British Columbia-based urban planning and design consultancy Happy City, Reardon has seen how public art serves communities. "Often, we look to public art as a way to address a challenge that a city is looking to solve - say, a transportation issue or safe streets - while doing so in a way that is going to be meaningful for a broader cross section of people," he explained.
In the United States, public art depicting American communities carries on an artistic tradition that blossomed almost a century ago, when the Works Progress Administration, a Great Depression-era New Deal agency, began funding the visual arts. Through a program called the Federal Art Project, the Works Progress Administration employed more than 10,000 artists, who created a significant body of public art, including thousands of murals, between 1935 and 1943.
According to Victoria Grieve, a historian of visual culture in America and author of "The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture," supporters of the Federal Art Project shared a belief in "the relationship between the arts and the daily lives of the American people, and the educational, social, and economic benefits of widespread cultural access."
Many of the murals produced during the period represented this ethos and belonged to an emerging artistic tradition called "American Scene Painting," a style of realism inspired by American history, mythology and culture. Federal Art Project murals commissioned for airports, post offices and public schools depicted the everyday lives and contributions of working-class Americans, American immigrants, and communities of color, meant to foster a shared "American" cultural identity.
While the representation of people of color in public art during the period was often problematic, and New Deal programs failed to meet many of civil rights leaders' most pressing demands, the Federal Art Project still had some upsides for the nation's marginalized communities. According to Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, author of "Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era," the program created needed opportunities for interracial cultural exchange and allowed artists of color to exercise "cultural self-determination."
In other words, New Deal funding and increased attention to public art allowed more artists - Native American, Chicano, Black, and Asian American - than ever before to paint their communities into American art. Those artists' creations also allowed underrepresented communities to see themselves, perhaps for the first time, on the walls of their cities. Today, Mural Arts Philadelphia and ArtWorks honor the spirit of this work.
James Daniel Burns, a staff artist at Mural Arts Philadelphia, has experienced this firsthand. "Sometimes, [a mural] can propel the identity of a place into fruition," he said.
Fine agreed. She said a mural of Cincinnati-based civil rights activist Louise Shropshire on the side of Avondale's main recreation center has helped turn the location into a vibrant community hub. The mural was created in 2019 as part of a new quality-of-life plan for the neighborhood. "The main focus of the plan is increasing safety and wellness," explained Fine. "And so, murals have been a part of that. Documenting the important historical figures that have come from a neighborhood and increasing that pride, which then further activates that neighborhood in that space," she explained.
Both Mural Arts Philadelphia and ArtWorks take great care to ensure locals feel represented in the murals in their neighborhoods. The organizations partner with local community leaders, organizers and activists to plan and implement new projects. In Cincinnati, this process takes an average of eight months. At Mural Arts Philadelphia, things move much faster. Most of its murals begin with an application filed by someone living in the community where a project will be implemented. They're expected to rally a community around the proposed project before applying. After that, creating a mural takes only 4 to 8 weeks. At the end of the process, Golden said people feel real ownership of the work.
These collaborative planning processes also forge strong relationships within and between communities. Staff artist Burns said he has a trove of personal stories for each of the projects he has completed in Philadelphia, "rooted in the relationships with people who shape these projects."
Those relationships last long after the paint has dried. Golden said that Mural Arts Philadelphia also remains a fierce advocate for its art and the communities its projects foster after completion. A mural on South 30th Street in West Philadelphia is an excellent example. The mural depicts a person alone in a small raft on a turbulent sea - a metaphor for the feelings that locals who had contemplated suicide described to Burns, the lead artist on the project.
The mural, completed in 2012, resulted from a two-year-long collaboration between Mural Arts, the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The project also engaged more than 1,200 community members. It was meant to shed light on youth suicide rates in Philadelphia, which were rising at the time, and provide a voice for survivors, attempters, and their families and friends.
"The mural created a community of love, a community of care, where people kept coming together long after the mural was created and finished," Golden said. "It was really inspiring."
When Mural Arts got word that a new dorm would be built in front of the mural, obstructing the view of it from the street, Golden said her team organized with the community that had contributed to the project and others in West Philadelphia. They sent a strong message to the developer. "'Look,' we said, 'this project is really important,'" Golden said. The group was able to secure a donation from the developers to create a new mural. The new project, which is still in its early stages, will bring the same collaborators together again to create a mural with a similar vision in a central location.
By holding developers accountable and addressing practical problems, such as street safety, organizations such as Mural Arts Philadelphia and ArtWorks create clear value for their communities through their work. The same is true of dozens of other public art organizations, including the Bay Area Mural Program in Oakland, California; the Portland Street Art Alliance in Portland, Oregon; and the Chicago Public Art Group in Chicago. The work itself also fosters a sense of communal ownership over space, strengthens neighborhood ties, and allows folks to see themselves represented on the walls of their cities. The message it sends is clear: Public art is good for us and our cities.
"I think a city that is vibrant and thriving has art right at the center," Golden says.
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Marianne Dhenin wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Dhenin, a writer and researcher based in Cairo, holds a master's degree in Human Rights Law and Justice and is earning a Ph.D. in Middle East History. She writes about social justice, politics and the Middle East. Follow her on Twitter @mariannedhe.
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By Cinnamon Janzer for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Chrystal Blair for Michigan News Connection reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration
Drive through nearly any part of the Great Plains and you’d be hard pressed to not come across incarnations of the enduring symbol of the U.S. Midwest—barns. Even though a wooden structure painted red and dotted with white trim may be the classic image that comes to mind when we think of barns, they come in a range of styles from bank barns with axes parallel to a hill to round barns with domed roofs.
Despite different designs, one thing that all barns have in common is the special place they hold in the lives of the community members where they exist. Barns have historically offered a unique reciprocal way for rural community members to come together and enjoy the pride and satisfaction that comes from the shared accomplishment of raising a barn—an act that, for centuries, was unable to be done alone.
“It took a large group of people to work together in harmony to get the frames up. It was a strong community effort, like a lot of other things that happened in rural areas like husking bees and quilting and sewing bees,” says Steve Stier, an educator and historic preservation specialist who focuses on traditional barns through his work with the Michigan Barn Preservation Network. Because barns were needed by nearly everyone, it was known that by participating, you were sure to have the support you needed when the day inevitably came that you’d be the one requiring community labor.
Today, Stier sees the process of raising a barn as an increasingly rare way for a community to come together. “It brings this joy that people have when they work together, shoulder to shoulder, accomplishing a significant piece of work like raising a [barn] frame. People are just ecstatic about the way they feel about it.”
Stier notes that quite a bit of creativity, craftsmanship, and problem solving go into building a barn and its rehabilitation.
While modern machinery has removed much of the need for a community approach to barn raising, organizations like Stier’s are keeping the art alive and bringing people together through workshops, field programs, awards, and grants. At the Barn School, classes often include assessing the condition and stability of a barn; and learning about barn architecture, construction, maintenance and repair approaches. They also provide a handy Barn School 101 booklet, barn condition check sheet, and a resource document. This is a significant offering as we see barns and unused agricultural structures being reimagined as new community gathering spaces from hosting events to artist residencies across the country.
From the National Barn Alliance and the Center for Rural Affairs to Friends of Minnesota Barns and Iowa Barn Foundation, there is a significant national and Midwestern movement to preserve America’s historic barns and rural heritage. There are active initiatives to document barn structures and historic farms in almost all 50 states through state historical preservation offices.
And these barn preservation efforts are being made with good reason — “They’ve become the icon of the rural landscape,” Stier says.
Cinnamon Janzer wrote this story for Arts Midwest.
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By Rose Vance-Grom for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration
Akron, Ohio has been a hotbed for jazz in the Midwest since the 1930s. Its central location between bigger cities like New York and Chicago made it a perfect stop for traveling musicians. Many renowned artists, including Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, performed in Akron as they passed through; but there was also a thriving local scene, the roots of which can still be felt today.
For much of the 20th century, Akron was an industrial powerhouse. People flocked to the “Rubber Capital of the World” in search of jobs causing the population to jump, growing from 70,000 in 1910 to nearly 210,000 by 1920. Akron’s Black population increased eightfold in that time, and many of them settled along Howard Street between Downtown and West Akron.
Where It All Began
This neighborhood – dubbed “Little Harlem” – became the center of the business and entertainment district along Howard Street, with Black-owned hotels, restaurants, clubs, barbershops, and beauty salons that served the tight knit community. According to the Ohio Informer, Akron’s short lived Black newspaper, there was always music and dancing at the clubs down “Rhythm Row” from the Cosmopolitan, to the Hi-Hat Club, to Benny Rivers, just to name a few.
By the late 1960s the rubber industry was dwindling and much of Howard Street, like the rest of Akron, was in decline. A 1968 “urban renewal” project to build a highway spur linking Akron to the larger interstate network would seal the fate of Howard Street. Construction on the Innerbelt began in 1970, resulting in the destruction of the predominantly Black neighborhood within the decade. Adding salt to the proverbial wound, the project was never fully completed and is now mostly abandoned. In 2023, the City of Akron issued an apology for the lasting harm the project caused for generations of Akronites.
The loss of the Howard Street neighborhood was devastating but it was not the end of the jazz scene. It lived on in small clubs and church basements, and through the people who continued to play anywhere they could.
Where It Lives On
When Justin Tibbs, a local saxophonist and composer, was a teenager in the 2000s his mom snuck him into a blues bar where he met local legends Jim Noel, Waymon “Punchy” Atkinson, and Donald Stembridge.
“Growing up, I always had to ask one of the legendary guys, ‘where’s the jam session at?’, and it would be in some church somewhere. We would go there and play tunes and watch ‘em all play. I didn’t know how big they were,” Tibbs said of his early experiences. This exposure led Tibbs to enroll in The University of Akron in 2006, later joining the Jazz Studies program.
The University of Akron Jazz Ensemble has a direct link to Howard Street. It began in 1978, under the direction of Roland Paolucci, a jazz pianist who played on Howard Street in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He led the program for 22 years before Jack Schantz, a UA graduate and jazz trumpeter, took over for the next 20 years.
The program continues today, co-chaired by Theron Brown, a jazz pianist and two-time UA graduate. Brown moved from Zanesville, Ohio in 2005, unaware of Akron’s jazz history and Howard Street until about 2009, “That’s when I just heard of the names like Punchy Atkinson and Jimmy Noel.”
Brown was part of a Howard Street tribute concert in 2019 at BLU Jazz+, one of Akron’s premier live jazz venues. He played with 91-year-old Jimmy Noel for the first time, only months before his death. Brown reflected, “That’s when I really woke up… There is literally nobody else that can tell the story. We need to go out and find out … there’s a spirit in the air for this music, there’s a vibe, you can call it whatever you want.”
It was similar for Tibbs, who grew up in Akron, “I would talk with them, and they would tell me stories… And I wish I would have had an iPhone at that time to record everything because it’s gone to history… It’s sad that history is gone, but I feel like I’m a part of it in a way because I know their story.”
Jazz for the Future
This sentiment has been shared in recent years as more attention than ever is being paid to this era of history. In 2016, Brown started the Rubber City Jazz and Blues Festival to celebrate Akron’s musical legacy. Now in its ninth year, it has grown into a cultural festival featuring dance, performance art, digital art, and a celebration of Black musical traditions.
Students at The University of Akron are now further documenting this history with the Green Book Cleveland Project, started by Mark Souther of Cleveland State University with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in 2021. The restorative history project is rooted in the “Negro Motorist Greenbook” published between 1936 and 1966 for Black travelers and documents the entertainment, leisure, and recreation sites available at the time.
In addition to his Jazz Studies courses, Brown recently co-taught a project-based class with Dr. Hillary Nunn, called “Round Howard Street: Telling the Story of Akron Jazz” in which students studied jazz culture in connection with the City of Akron to bring about a fuller understanding of its Black History.
Both Brown and Tibbs credit The University of Akron for fostering an environment for young musicians to meet and play together. “I wouldn’t know any of my buddies that play if it wasn’t for that. It centralized the community in a space even though Howard [Street] didn’t exist,” Brown said. Tibbs similarly reflected, “It’s a whole new generation of musicians… that play original music”. Brown and Tibbs are just two of many musicians playing in the area, all of whom will tell you that Akron still has a unique sound.
Rose Vance-Grom wrote this story for Arts Midwest.
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By Kate Mothes for Arts Midwest.
Broadcast version by Kathleen Shannon for Greater Dakota News Service reporting for the Arts Midwest-Public News Service Collaboration
On the five-acre campus of the Cheyenne River Youth Project (CRYP), a unique, community-wide graffiti art event—the first and only in Indian Country—aims for more than just the walls. Located in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, on the Cheyenne River Reservation (one of nine Native Nations in the state), the organization has focused on providing youth with opportunities to get creative, develop healthy habits, work together, and learn new skills since its inception in 1988.
Executive Director Julie Garreau, who has been with CRYP since the beginning, is no stranger to balancing numerous aspects of the program. On the day Garreau spoke to me from her office, she and the CRYP team were preparing to welcome artists from around the nation—and this year, New Zealand—to kick off the tenth annual RedCan Graffiti Jam.
Far more than just an art showcase, RedCan promotes collaboration and community initiatives through pairing artists with teen interns of a CRYP Lakota Art Fellow. “CRYP created the Lakota Art Fellowship in 2019 so it could provide opportunities for teens on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation who have an interest in pursuing careers in the arts, and who have completed multiple internships through the nonprofit youth project’s dedicated art institute,” says communications director Heather Steinberger.
An Evolving Event
Garreau remembers RedCan as “a risky kind of project to initiate, but I feel like with CRYP we really understand kids, and you’ve got to take some risks sometimes to keep them interested and motivated and you have to do things very differently.”
Starting with the evening they arrive, the artists enjoy a traditional Lakota meal of buffalo soup, wojapi (a berry sauce), and fry bread. The four-day event, which includes performances, skateboard painting, music, and community meals, serves to not only engage but keep kids’ attention while celebrating Lakota identity and culture.
This year, buildings in the mural lineup included the animal shelter, veterans building, radio station, and food pantry. Garreau takes time to discuss with the artists what the buildings are used for and their history within the community. Murals are also installed in the Waniyetu Wowapi Art Park, an open-air space where a series of wooden panels, shipping containers, and walls host constantly revolving graffiti compositions.
Returning artists include, among many others: East, an artist of Cherokee descent from Denver; CYFI, a Yaqui and Azteca artist from Minneapolis; and Natasha Martinez, a.k.a. Rezmo, a Diné and Mexicá artist currently living in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Arizona. New to the event this year are Māori artists Phat1 and Lady Diva, from Aotearoa (New Zealand); Midwestern artist Brady Scott; and Kansas-born Ponca artist Amp.
Celebrating Connections
Rezmo had just arrived in Eagle Butte when in an email she wrote, “What I look forward to the most this year is painting in the community and making connections with the community members that come out and talk to us throughout the week.” At home in Arizona, she works in youth services and teaches art to kids ranging from pre-K age to teens, so partnering up with interns and young artists at RedCan sparks her energy. “It makes me happy to teach them and share what I know,” she says.
Garreau relates a story she heard from artist Hoka Skenandore, a Lakota artist who painted a mural spelling “Lakota” in both the Lakota language and in sign language, depicting each letter in hands of varying skin tones. “He said, this little boy came up to him and was watching him for a while,” Garreau shares. “Then the little boy went up to the mural and put his hand on the wall. And he said, ‘Huh, just like me.’ That’s the other part of this, right? Seeing yourself in these spaces and knowing that you are part of this, you know that this is for you—for us.”
Kate Mothes wrote this story for Arts Midwest.
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