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An orange and brown playground apparatus including a slide, monkey bars, and a treehouse, sits on a bed of wood chips in a grassy park on a sunny day. Four children of varying skin tones play on the equipment. Beyond the park area a man in uniform watches the playground and behind him is a clapboard house.

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Child showing a story book to another child.
Health

How This Museum Supports Community Integration and Trauma Recovery

Using artistic expression to de-stigmatize and treat trauma.

Arts & Culture

Creative Placemaking: Honoring the Past While Welcoming our Futures

A discussion about honoring the history of a place while actively working to encourage its growth and foster positive change.

Three Minneapolis residents chat while sitting at a table outdoors.
Arts & Culture

Artists as Organizers

Creative placemaking means more than merely adding public art into the mix. To be sustainable it needs to build relationships—and power.

People gathered outdoors around a table.
Arts & Culture

We Need the Data—But Can’t Forget the People—in Creative Placemaking

However difficult, altering one’s viewpoint of a community is a crucial step, because creative placemaking’s overarching goal is to reach everyone where they are, and you can’t do that if you begin with a well thought-out plan in hand.

Man with a cane stands at the top of set of stairs in a park .
Arts & Culture

Poem: “Gentrification”

I have seen a neighborhood eat itself for dinner

Patrons looking at gallery wall.
Arts & Culture

If We Want the Arts in Baltimore, We Need Its Artists

Artists have left their mark on Station North and paved the way for an arts district, but the organically-developed communal live/work spaces that play such a vital role in helping make Baltimore an arts mecca are an endangered species.

A sprawling white “hipster” is memorialized against a backdrop of romanticized visions of blight in a mural that dominates an intersection in the historically Black 7th Ward in New Orleans.
Affordability

The Cultural Ramifications of Gentrification in New Orleans

Gentrification is not just physical displacement; it’s cultural appropriation across entire neighborhoods. Artists have an obligation not to participate.

Front porch with three chairs.
Arts & Culture

Taking Back the Front Porch: Using Art to Reclaim Community Identity

The front porch is a space in-between our private family space and our more public spaces where we create our own definition of “community.” In many parts of Chicago, this space is often a battleground.

Public art in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: A utility box on a sidewalk is covered with interlocking hands in all the colors of the rainbow.
Arts & Culture

Could Public Art on Utility Boxes Displace Communication?

What’s not to like about colorful art on utility boxes? Well, in some places that drab infrastructure might be performing informal community functions…

Mural on wall with faces of girls looking into the distance.
Arts & Culture

Art in the Face of Gentrification

Four representatives of New York City organizations discuss their employment of art and artists to empower residents in the face of gentrification.

An abstract mural in red, blue, green, yellow, and black.
Arts & Culture

Challenges of Space and Place in Creative Placemaking

Some of us, myself included, are susceptible to the inaccurate thinking that when the arts are involved, the complications that can arise with traditional community building are lessened.

Arts & Culture

False Narratives About Artists Harm Artists, and Communities

In 2002, Richard Florida published a book that kicked off a wave of urban development efforts based on the belief that architects, artists, musicians, and writers were core members of […]