2020 Conference Schedule

Main Hall

“STORY CIRCLES ON PUBLIC ART AND PARTICIPATORY DESIGN” (Arlene Goldbard)
A Story Circle is a small group of individuals sitting in a circle, sharing stories from their own experience on a common theme. As each person in turn shares a story, a richer and more complex story emerges. By the end, people see both real differences and things their stories have in common. Story Circles are a great way to explore a theme without getting into an argument, holding space for multiple truths. Artists have used Story Circles to capture and explore imagery for murals, discover incident and dialogue for theater, and many other creative uses. In this session, we’ll take part in Story Circles designed to surface moments when projects embody the best and highest in creative practice and moments when challenges threaten to derail projects. The stories that surface will lead us into a conversation about what can be learned from our collective experience. When you leave this session of learning by doing, you’ll have all you need to lead Story Circles for your own communities and projects. 

Main Hall

“HORIZONTES PROJECT: IMPLEMENTING A LARGE-SCALE COMMUNITY-BASE ART PROJECT” (Armando Minjarez)

Artist and community organizer Armando Minjarez will give an insight look at some of the biggest challenges in implementing a multifaceted community-based art project that involves painting the largest mural in North America. The presentation will cover topics such as effective strategies for grassroot engagement, de-centering “white” narratives and production logistics of large-scale projects.

“Teaching as Collaboration: Making Art With Educational Structures as Project Architecture” (Eliza Gregory)

Maximum # of attendees: 30

In this two-hour session we will talk about making art through teaching. We will explore the constraints and possibilities when an artistic goal is layered onto the existing goals of a semester course. We will also question various conventions of contemporary art education, while also examining precedents for this kind of work and this kind of thinking. By balancing case studies and interactive experiences, we will tap the knowledge of the participants, get people connecting with each other, and collectively evaluate a project that took place at Sacramento State University in the fall of 2019.

Main Hall

“History of Community Built Work” (Tom Arie Donch)   

A talk on the ancient origins of community built work and the more modern emergence of the community built professional. The founding and history of the CBA will be shared along with other parallel organizations. 

Main Hall

“Community Build Across Borders” (Donna Billick)
Todos Artes, is Studios in Todos Santos, Baja Sur Mexico, bringing collaboration and community build across borders.  Geo political dynamics, have divided us from our neighbors. Todos Artes is creating murals, workshops, and an educational platform to unite, heal and reach for world peace, one relationship at a time. Donna Billick will map with videos and presentation, to tell the story about how this can be done.

Main Hall 

Willow Glen

Down to Earth: Using Natural Building Materials for Community Resiliency (Lola Ben-Alon)

Maximum # of attendees: 15
Earthen building materials offer a minimally processed, non-toxic, and community self-sufficient alternative to conventional building materials. Constructing with these materials engages local communities, regardless of skills, including families and children, while maximizing the potentials of freely available resources.
In this workshop, participants will gain both theoretical knowledge and some hands-on experience in using natural materials for alternative building modes with the community. We will learn how to formulate appropriate building mixtures, and learn simple methods for testing construction soils. Lastly, we will discuss benefits and challenges to using these materials, as well as future directions for using ecological construction to benefit communities in the face of climate change, an emerging field in sustainable architecture. We will finalize the workshop using the Carnegie Mellon New Metaphors Toolkit, equipping participants with new metaphors to reframe problems they are facing during their collaborative work with each other and with the community. 

Willow Glen

“Ready? Go!” Making art mobile to prompt interaction through making and participation (Peter Haakon Thompson)

Maximum # of attendees: 25
Do you want to make your art mobile and take it public to create conversations? Learn about practical and conceptual strategies to translate your art into a mobile tool* that can be used to engage community and prompt interaction.
Ready Go is a resource based in Minnesota from Springboard for the Arts that connects neighborhoods, cities, businesses and organizations to artist-created, mobile tools that are purpose-built to pique curiosity and prompt interaction through making and participation. The current roster consists of 21 mobile tools that range from a teardrop trailer containing a pop-up park to a bike-towed mobile drawing station to a screenprinting cart modeled on a paleta/popsicle cart. 
This workshop will share examples of Ready Go tools, describe multiple situations in which they have been used and give attendees an opportunity to brainstorm, workshop and outline a basic framework for a mobile tool that matches their interests, needs and context. Additionally, attendees will be provided access to a Ready Go toolkit to further your mobile tool help seed a movement of mobile art in your place.
Visit ReadyGoArt.com for inspiration.

Main Hall

Art with a Message: A Public Artist’s Challenge (Jos Sances)
Jos Sances, printmaker, ceramicist, muralist and public artist discusses his practice. Working both with communities and privately, he creates work that is infused with his political and social concerns. He will offer a perspective on his long history of creating silkscreen posters supporting political activism, promoting community cultural events and challenging authority. Among his many public installations are a library, a juvenile justice center, a housing complex for formerly unhoused individuals, a cultural center in Palestine, and a 51-foot, life-size drawing on scratchboard. He has worked with high school and college students, Palestinians under occupation, community build projects, activist artists, labor unions and political campaigns.

Main Hall

“Investigating grassroots placemaking through creative practice: Lessons learned throughout an ongoing participatory action research project”     (Saskia van Kampen)
When searching for ways to build community and turn non-places into places grassroots initiatives tend to be exemplars demonstrating social conscience, empathy, and inclusivity. Citizens make change on a daily basis through creative-practices and these changes directly affect their neighborhoods and communities. Design Wo/ManisfesT.O. 2020 is a participatory action-research project in Toronto, Canada that has an inclusive design focus that expands our thinking about accessible environments by considering cultural, ethnic, racial, physical and other diversity. While never losing site of the fact that inclusive placemaking must happen from the inside and work out—it must come from the people who live, work, and play in those places—some of our initial approaches retained aspects of colonial methodologies that impeded the participatory engagement we were looking to foster.  This presentation will share some of the lessons learned throughout this ongoing project—as researchers we have evolved our process for data collection based on observations and participant behavior during forums, panels, and workshops. By sharing these lessons learned at the CBA conference we hope that we might help inform other community-based projects. 

Main Hall

Perhaps Big is Small, After All (Mark Lakeman, cofounder of communitecture and the City Repair Project)

While the design and construction of HUGE things may not build community at all, on the other hand community place making can inspire and activate huge numbers of people to build lasting community networks and ongoing benefit. This presentation will show how powerful it can be to focus our attention on building what really matters and actually lasts, the social culture of a place. We will also take a good look at how creative community building community can lead to systemic solutions that address systemic isolation, houselessness, and community housing, while we also gear up to confront climate change.

Main Hall

Values and Ethics of Participatory Arts Practice (Arlene Goldbard) “Values and Ethics of Participatory Arts Practice” (Arlene Goldbard)
Values and ethics aren’t carved in stone. Like so many things worth having—excellence, love and democracy, for instance—they emerge from collaboration and negotiation, from real-life experience. That’s why the values and ethics shaping our work depend on who we are and what we are trying to do: what’s right for one set of people and circumstances may be quite wrong for another. The key is being able to size up each situation and respond with skill and flexibility. That skill comes with practice. Thinking and talking about values and ethics strengthen our self-knowledge, giving us ethical “muscles” to handle future challenges. Engaging with these questions, we become more present, skillful, and creative. Then, when ethical challenges arise—as they inevitably will—by knowing ourselves, by together exploring meaning and value in the situation at hand and achieving common understanding of what’s at stake, we can find mutually acceptable resolutions and move on.

Main Hall

Main Hall

“(Dis)placemaking: The Story of the East 9th Project in Lawrence , Kansas” (Dave Loewenstein)

I will trace the roots of this Artplace funded project, the conflicts that it gave rise to and the (ongoing) reimagining that allowed the project to move forward. I hope that this will be especially interesting to artists, arts administrators and arts organizers who have or plan to work on Placemaking funded projects.

Willow Glen

“GROUP DISCUSSION: CREATING INCLUSIVE AND EQUITABLE SPACES” (Armando Minjarez)

Artist and community organizer Armando Minjarez will facilitate a group conversation about how to create more inclusive and equitable spaces within community art practices. We encourage attendees to join this discussion with an open mind and a full heart.

Main Hall

Kim Anno  Professor, CCA

Kim Anno has been making social practice films and performance projects in South Africa, Cuba, UK, and California for the past 8 years. She will speak about her current project in the neighboring town of Pacifica, and the experience of engaging government and divided citizenries, as well as the difficult topic of Sea Level Rise adaptation for coastal communities and the potential for cultural resiliency from artists. Cultural resilience has become more and more important as the reality of sea level rise is globally tangible. Her work with the climate music project was recently written about in the science section of the New York Times, November 2019 and she appeared on BBC Radio Suffolk for her interdisciplinary project : Water City, Ipswich.

Willow Glen

Willow Glen

“Learning Full Circle: A Community Approach to Healing” (Naomi Even-Aberle)

Maximum # of attendees: 30

Learning Full Circle is a new juvenile diversion program presented and facilitated in partnership between Full Circle Martial Arts Academy and Pennington County Juvenile Diversion Services. Learning Full Circle utilizes the martial arts and community-building strategies to build self-confidence, develop and establish new peer to peer, and peer to elder relationships while encouraging healthy living and providing a safe outlet for youth within the Juvenile Diversion system. Learning Full Circle uses an evidence-based community focused curriculum that is designed to improve academic achievement; school attendance; and problem behaviors such as substance use, violence, suspensions, disruptive behaviors, and school dropouts. Its three main goals are to improve self-image/self-confidence, strengthen community relationships by engaging in physical coping skills, as well as provide a community of support to assist with refusal skills and stress management. Its concepts are universal and effective for all populations and socioeconomic levels. The skills are taught through a four-month course where the participants work collaboratively to learn, demonstrate, and test to their first martial arts belt while integrating the four main goals throughout the learning process.

 Main Hall

“A Mural is a Book of History Without Words”  (Claudia Bernardi)

Will address a collaborative and community-based mural designed and painted by undocumented, unaccompanied Central American migrant minors currently detained in a maximum-security facility in the United States and a mural created as part of the Peace Process in Colombia painted by ex-combatants of the Colombian guerrilla armed forces FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) working in collaboration with civilians victims of violence during the 52-year-long civil war.

Willow Glen

“Conversation Markers: Tactics for Listening” (Ellen Christensen)                                                                                             

Maximum # of attendees: 20

How can design function as a tool of attention and care? This is a hands on conversational and making workshop to explore the potential of design as a method of active listening and empathy. Conversational data will lead to experimental infographics in order to provoke self reflective discussion. By doing so, together we will examine the potential of interpersonal engagement to create community in a time of increasing digital distraction.

Main Hall

Willow Glen

Exploring the Spaces Between: Listening for the Murmurings of a Movement (Sandra Kern Mollman) 

It feels like we are living in a country more divided than ever. We find ourselves living in completely different worlds from family and friends that we have known for years, speaking from so far outside of the others’ ideologies that we no longer recognize each other. While this separation is an illusion, the illusion feels real, which makes it real to our experiences today. How do we break through our illusions of separation toward fostering human connections in a world that feels so vastly divided today?
Community-engaged work creates spaces for people to gather, explore, experience, expand; imagine, re-imagine, listen with the willingness to change; and to be awakened. Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed explored creative spaces for “practicing revolution.” How can we create spaces for “practicing evolution” toward compassionate awareness, altered realities and perspectives, employing inclusion with the honest, difficult, playful exchanges necessary for enriching and fostering human connections in our communities, in our world? In this presentation/workshop, we will explore processes for discovering the spaces between understanding; the spaces between people, ideas, ideologies, and realities.  How can we create processes for breaking through the worlds that we see before us toward experiencing the world that we can become?

Main Hall

Community-Based Public Art Chronicles: Greatest Successes & Biggest Bloopers: A “Fishbowl” Panel Discussion
An open format panel discussion led by Jeff Mather, Sam Kornhauser, and Saskia van Kampen. Together we will share stories and reflect on our practices/projects. We’ll look at both the successes and challenges (biggest bloopers) that help guide our work and things that we can laugh about (now). How can we continue to learn, improve, and grow from our own experiences and the experiences of others and roll with the unpredictability inherent in community-based work?