After Hours: Biba Bell, Plume. February 19, 2014, R Lounge at Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel; photo by Carolina Sandretto

The beginning of 2014 has been an investigation of theory and practice. Each spring, Tim Tompkins, President of the Times Square Alliance, and I (Director of Public Art) team-teach a course called “The Arts and the Artist in Urban Revitalization” to graduate students at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. This course examines the different roles art plays in the revitalization of cities through arts institutions, individual artists and public art programs, and with support from the public and non-profit sectors. We use case studies and discussions with leading practitioners in diverse fields to understand how artistic interventions can be evaluated both with respect to their artistic merit and their impact on cities and examine how the economic, geographic, and social context shapes both art and its role with respect to public policy goals. As we teach, we examine our own successes, failures, and learnings in Times Square as well.

Simultaneously, with respect to our public arts program, we are planning the next year and a half of events during the reconstruction process. Experiments with indoor venues have gone well and taught us much, but as the majority of the “low-hanging fruit” has been picked, we move into more complex negotiations with more corporate venues, some of which are part of national or international chains. Our relationships with the City regarding Times Square’s public plazas also have become more complex as plaza availability is limited by both construction and commercial events like the Super Bowl Boulevard.

And while Times Square is an iconic site and a thriving commercial center, we are conscious that the challenges we face—adaptating to shifting trends and funding, negotiation of space, the balancing of nurturing arts and stakeholders, and the measurement and communication of goals, ambitions, and successes—are common to any scale project.

RECENT REFELCTIONS
TEACHING – Ours is one of the only courses in this arena that teach about art within the public realm with representatives from both the urban development and arts sectors simultaneously. We teach directly and indirectly how we communicate, share with, and try to respect each another. Inviting speakers to class not only helps students get the personal story behind those who shape seminal programs, but it also keeps our peers in dialogue with us. We engage future planners, policy makers, and non-profit directors in the reality of the current practice, and the theory and academic discourse reminds us to “keep it real” in the choices we make in our program. ArtPlace America Executive Director Jamie Bennett and Deputy Director Lyz Crane visited a class recently, and Jamie talked not only about the work of ArtPlace but also about his experience shaping arts policy at the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.

ARTPLACE AMERICA – At the 2014 ArtPlace Grantee Summit, we reflected further about the role of artists as well as institutions in creating and changing places, and the difference between an organic movement that changes a culture and a dogma-driven field defined by elders and experts. We saw ourselves trying to create spaces for creativity, risk-taking, and the questioning that is at the heart of artistic practice within the rigidity and structure of our institutions (which provide sustainability and resources). We were inspired by the enormous potential of downtown LA’s historic core and the organic energy of the LA Arts District in and around the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

INSIGHT/PROVOCATION
There are three overarching insights from the intersection of these two opportunities:

Don’t Forget the Artists
We, who preach the need for artists at the table, must invite them. We must lead by example. Next time, we need to include an artist as a speaker in our class. The Summit too can rethink how artists can have more of a leading role in its discourse. In Times Square, we are embarking on a residency program that will allow artists to go deeper and be present longer in Times Square, embedded within the commercial spaces and tapping into peer collaborators over the course of a year to investigate the identity and use of our public space, and to bring artists back as residents to a place from which they had been driven out.

Articulate and Acknowledge the Challenges of Evaluation Criteria with our Peers and Future Peers
As our students were struggling to clearly identify and analyze success and evaluation, we realized our professional peers are asking the same questions and having the same struggles, as are we within Times Square Arts. The process of articulating, presenting and leading discussions provides us with an awareness of the limitations of our experience and thinking and provides ground for potential new insights. We all need to find a way to explore both talking and theory and listening and practice.

Teaching Collaboration and away from Antidotes
Templates, turnkey models, and toolkits have the magical antidotes that are often sought. However, from discussions at the ArtPlace Summit and the 20 case studies our students are investigating, we’ve come to realize that it is the way we deconstruct our approaches to challenges that distills observations and knowledge into transferable skills. Dr. Manuel Pastor at the Summit defined collaboration as “principled conflict.” What we can teach each other is how we enter the conflict, find our commonality through shared principles, and take risks to redefine our creative placemaking.