All posts in The Art of Placemaking Conference Videos

15Jan

Putting Creativity to Work (video)

In The Art of Placemaking Conference Videos by Tim Blankenship / 2015/01/15 / No Comments

Creative Placemaking with People at the Center

Since 1975, writer, performer, director and activist Marty Pottenger has created multidisciplinary placemaking performances, plays, arts-based civic dialogues, and community arts projects throughout the United States.

In this captivating talk Marty Pottenger shares her experiences bringing the arts into lives the ordinary citizens who might not normally have opportunities to engage in creative placemaking.

“What if [the principles of creative placemaking were] applied to municipal practices? What if the Federal government starts freezing up? The state government starts freezing up? And the challenges only increase? Who’s going to be really on the dime to actually figure out what to do, and I came up with municipal governments to figure out how to incorporate and integrate arts making and arts projects to tackle non-arts problems.”

Her work with Art at Work in Portland, ME has taught her the importance evaluating how creative projects influence their audiences, “who brings their family, who talks about it, who talks to you about it, how are they experiencing the culture?” The Thin Blue Lines: Police Project was a national initiative to strengthen community resiliency and municipal government through arts projects and municipal staff, unions, politicians, the public and artists.

25Mar

Sponsorship Research for the Placemaking World (video)

Measuring What Matters in Sponsorship Research

While it’s great to attend a conference and hear from all the experts from within your field, it can be even more useful to hear from experts who work in other fields. At The Art of Placemaking conference we invited Jed Pearsall, founder and president of Performance Research, a global leader in marketing and sponsorship research for Fortune 50 brands, to share his experiences in working with companies that sponsor the Arts. Performance Research’s mission is to help clients capture and measure the value of sponsorship and experiential marketing and reveal the essential truth about the impact.

There was lots of great information in this session. Here’s the continuum of sponsorship research that increases in importance as you move along it from left to right.

Sponsorship research

Jed cited David D’Alessandro, CEO, John Hancock Insurance, and author of Brand Warfare, as being particularly applicable for placemakers:

“Arts & cultural sponsorships have two enormous advantages. First, they represent one of the last kinds of sponsorships where consumers give you credit for just showing up…Secondly, they allow you to be distinctive and win attention by doing something unexpected.”

Many audience members expressed surprise when Jed advised that in all their years of conducting sponsorship research on arts properties, visitors have never expressed concerns to Performance Research about over-commercialization despite this being the biggest fear of art organizations and a hurdle in keeping many from entering into valuable partnerships with corporations. Consumers understand and appreciate that many events and exhibitions would not take place without corporate sponsorship.Read more →

The Art of Placemaking Conference. Photo by Tim Blankenship

30Jan

The Art of Placemaking Conference – Session Videos

In The Art of Placemaking Conference Videos, Videos by Tim Blankenship / 2014/01/30 / No Comments

As part of our collaborative learning lab we will be posting videos from each of the sessions at our 2013 Art of Placemaking conference. The Art of Placemaking conference featured speakers discussing a wide range of topics from measuring and evaluating creative placemaking’s social impact to sponsorship research and social media for the arts. We had speakers from ArtPlace America; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism; the Kresge Foundation; and many other local and national organizations. You can see a full listing of speakers and their presentations on the Art of Placemaking conference website.

To kick things off we have posted the session video from Anne Gadwa Nicodemus’ presentation Indicators, Metrics, and Evaluations, Oh My! Anne Gadwa Nicodemus is the founder of Metris Arts Consulting where she is a researcher, writer, speaker, and advocate for creative placemaking. In 2010 she co-authored Creative Placemaking, the report for the Mayors’ Institute of City Design that defined the field.Read more →

The Art of Placemaking Podium. Photo by Jonathan Waugh.

29Jan

Welcome to Placemakers.us

In The Art of Placemaking Conference Videos by Tim Blankenship / 2014/01/29 / No Comments

In 2012 WaterFire Providence received a major grant from ArtPlace America to launch a public art incubator to create new art works and public programs with a wide variety of arts and culture organizations to experiment with original ways to add vibrancy and economic impact to the city of Providence.

We began to plan and build a learning lab, this project will exist in two dimensions. In the real world our learning labwill take shape in a former U.S. Rubber warehouse that we purchased in December of 2012. In this physical place we are planning on creating an enviroment where art, science, learning and making all coexist. This building will not only house WaterFire Providence’s operational and day-to-day apparatus, but will also become a home to art installations, workshops, lectures, performances, and maybe even a little roller derby. As part of creating our learning lab we hosted a unique conference in Providence on November 7th – 9th of 2013. The Art of Placemaking conference included placemakers, artists, urban planners, community developers and researchers meeting to discuss impacts of using art to build and transform community.