A young Mesa Arts Center patron has fun testing the prototype for a Sand Dune Simulator designed and constructed by students from ASU Polytechnic
Updates
The last month has been packed with ArtPlace activity! We released the RFQ for our Shade Sculpture artist. Interested artists or those who wish to pass along the information can find the RFQ at http://www.mesaartscenter.com/volunteer-donate-membership-mesa-arts.html. We also hosted 12 teams from the ASU Polytechnic College of Technology & Innovation that presented to the public ideas and prototypes for potential future interactive art projects for the 21st Century Café Society. It was a busy day in our theaters, and the twelve teams set up their displays and prototypes throughout the theater lobbies at a peak time of people arriving for, and leaving after, performances, engendering great engagement and obtaining valuable feedback about their ideas.
Three of our core team members traveled to Minneapolis to attend INST-INT, a conference for producers and presenters of interactive art. We saw great presentations and met a number of artists, expanding our contacts and knowledge about this exciting area of art production, very much focused on experience and an important tool for creative placemaking. We will have the opportunity to observe our community’s reactions to a number of these projects in March during spark! Mesa’s Festival of Creativity, for which we will animate the 21st Century Café Society environment with both atmospheric and interactive arts experiences, and provide the social infrastructure we hope to create permanently as we develop the site.
Recent Wins
Our Mayor hosted a Summit on downtown economic development and the new urbanism. Several national experts presented, and the conversation was focused on the development of walkable communities with a strong sense of place and vitality, with the arts shining at the heart of many of the conversations! As usual, the out of town visitors were blown away by the beautiful and extraordinary Mesa Arts Center.
Visit Mesa, our Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, produced a great promotional music video around their theme, which is Mesa: City Limitless. It’s a very cool video with an original hip hop music piece written and performed by an artist who grew up in Mesa but is now touring with national acts. Mesa Arts Center is featured very heavily in the imagery, and there’s a wonderful lyric that talks about “art at the heart” of our community. If anyone’s interested, you can check out the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXCoNichNYg.
Insights/Provocation
While we are planning a specific project to be implemented this calendar year, our creative placemaking processes have propelled us years into the future, thinking about how we layer activities and improvements to the infrastructure and environment over time to transform place. Success breeds success, and the rate at which new opportunities are arising is breathtaking. With so many balls in the air, it’s really hard to find time to paint the picture of how all these pieces (current and future) work together. People are regularly acknowledging that there’s an enormous impact from each “piece,” but creating a comprehensive story about the larger picture we’recreating is challenging with everything moving so fast. Time to stop and take a breath during the holidays—hoping to take the time to dip the paintbrush into the pot and work on that epic painting!