Magnificent spinning “Dragonflies,” a temporary, site-specific public artwork by Jeff Zischke created for Mesa Arts Center’s “spark! Mesa’s Festival of Creativity,” light up at night through the use of solar powered LEDs
Updates
We are excited to share that our review panel has chosen three finalists for our 21st Century Café Society Shade Sculpture. Cecil Balmond, Koryn Rolstad, and Harries Heder are creating proposals for their initial design concepts. Each of these artists has an extensive public art background, and we are so pleased that our RFQ drew the attention of so many highly qualified artists. This component of our 21st Century Café Society will help to transform our north plaza into a visually interesting and comfortable social gathering space. Our panel will reconvene in May, when they will decide on one artist’s design, and will then work with that artist through concept and beyond.
In addition to our shade sculpture project, the campus of Mesa Arts Center is currently being transformed in preparation for next week’s “spark! Mesa’s Festival of Creativity.” We have yarn-bombed trees throughout our campus, adding fun and unexpected splashes of color to our environment. In the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum’s courtyard, Jeff Zischke has added his temporary site-specific work “Dragonflies,” which are beautiful both during the day and at night when their solar powered LEDs light up the body of each dragonfly.
Recent Wins
The inaugural “Southwest Maker Fest,” the first of its kind in Mesa, took place on Saturday, March 22, and there were more than 80 exhibitors and more than two dozen programs during this one-day event. In many ways, the event resulted from relationships that have been nurtured during our work on 21st Century Café Society—one of the unanticipated consequences that were discussed briefly during the closing session of the ArtPlace Grantee Summit. The truly remarkable aspect of this festival is that it came to fruition as an all-volunteer organization. Mesa Arts Center is so grateful for the valuable relationships that we have made through our participation on the core team for Southwest Maker Fest and the many opportunities to involve our new colleagues in our ArtPlace project.
Insight/Provocation
Thank you to ArtPlace for bringing the grantees together and producing a truly thought-provoking event that enabled wonderful networking with our creative placemaking colleagues. Those at the closing session got to hear the discussion (debate?) about whether we are a field or a movement—and the conclusion of one speaker that we may well be both, and that each serves different needs. I hope we will keep both of these definitions and the conversations that go with them alive. Our field has had so many different initiatives that have sought to place the arts in a more central role for community and economic development. Community engagement programs, socially-engaged practice, education reform based on arts integration, and the development of cultural districts have all galvanized one portion or another of our field to action, and have stimulated support from certain segments of the public or corporate communities. Of course, each of these has separate and laudable goals, and together creates a fabric that weaves the arts into all of community life. And these efforts have moved the needle, but we still find ourselves sometimes bewildered, and oftentimes troubled, when the arts are not at the table for key strategic discussions about education, social issues, and community and economic development. We need a movement that successfully moves the arts higher on the agenda, and creative placemaking may be our best shot, because it ties together so many of the other threads into a whole that is exciting and accessible. And because it can be a movement in which many people from different sectors and communities can see themselves as both advocate and activist.