Module 2: Artist Agency

About this Module

Artists at the Community Development Table

What does it mean and what changes when an artist is at the community development table? Here we explicitly look at how artists engage, take risks, invest time, talent, and commitment. And we look at how the community across sectors can understand the value of artists’ perspectives, creativity, and experiences. Creativity help participants reach across the table, move across the street, and across community sectors.

Participants will:

Identify creativity and the creative process as powerful tools for community development including the notion of “process over product”.
Define the concept of artists and their personal agency as a powerful element in community context and development.
Analyze how artists work with communities and what constitutes authentic community engagement.
Synthesize concepts of communication, culture, creativity, and collaboration as parts of the big picture of community development.

This module includes:

A webinar
An interactive worksheet
A quiz

Continue to Module 3

Artists at the Community Development Table: Module 2 Worksheet

Roseann Weiss

Creative Advisor

Roseann Weiss is a creative advisor and strategist about the intersections of art and community working independently as ART +. She has 30 years of experience in arts leadership in nonprofit arts institutions, community organizations, and gallery settings. Her expertise centers in arts-based community development, community and public arts, artists' professional development, and grant-making. For 14 years, she guided the Community Arts Training (CAT) Institute at the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, which is an innovative, cross-sector program designed around art as a powerful agent for social change. Among her current projects are Lead Educator for Arts as Civic Engagement program at the Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement at Washington University and working with Americans for the Arts to create guides, webinars, and workshops for “Artists at the Community Development Table.”

Website: https://www.roseannweiss.com/

Email: roseannweiss@gmail.com

Con Christeson

Community Artist

Con is an artist exploring communities. She experiences community by observing pools of knowledge and experience that exist alongside historical rootedness and the complex concept of place. It is a topographical map of wind, weather, and time. It is the science of hard scape. It is multiple layers of memory and story. It is individual and institutional. It can reinforce or bury the human experience.

Con’s work is at the intersection of space and place, a collaboration between consciousness and creativity. She works locally, nationally, and internationally because those virtual lines drawn by humans on the surface of this planet are not real. And yet, she believes they slow us, confine us, stop us, turn us away from each other.

Email: con-sult@juno.com

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