Subversive Creativity Lab

Subversive Creativity Lab is a design and arts workshop dedicated to the study and creation of alternative, non-conformist, and counter-hegemonic visual and material interventions in the public sphere. Lab contributors are tied together by an ethos of Radical Public Service. We study visual-rhetorical expressions in public spaces and the resulting dialectics between arts <—> culture. Our work lives at the praxis between communication design, urban environments, and community engagement. Arizona ranks 46th in the nation for child well-being. Recent statistics show that the state’s residents were more likely than average to live in poverty and only a third had earned a college degree. To address these and other social justice issues, our goals include:

1. generate scenarios that give voice to those traditionally silenced;
2. provide resources and asset-based frameworks by which communities can author their own creative solutions;
3. facilitate ethical community engagement exchanges using arts and design methodologies;
4. capture and celebrate the cacophony of visual expressions made by citizens in their own communities;
5. design stand-alone artifacts for public places;
6. explore opportunities to train future arts and culture professionals for socially impactful careers;
7. decolonize design education through participatory design practices in social, cultural, and community contexts.

Phoenix Mural Project

Phoenix Mural Project started as a digital archive of the city’s ephemeral world of muralism—see lots of images, plus more than 500 points on our map at phxmuralproject.org. While Phoenix has had an active mural-painting scene for many years, it hasn’t been well-documented or studied. Indeed, outside Arizona, Phoenix often goes unnoticed as a hub of arts + culture. Due to this isolation, local artists created a visual style different from other “art cities.” The project’s multi-faceted nature offers many avenues for audience engagement—website, maps, images, interviews, documentary film, exhibition, tours, and public interaction with artists. This is a resource for residents, visitors, scholars. It preserves art, collects stories, and celebrates grass-roots street art culture, and improves the national and international visibility of Phoenix as a world-class creative city.

Public Art Road Trip [MOWART] (field notes)

I traveled over 12,000 miles to conduct a survey of art in public places throughout the Western United States. The goal was to observe as much as possible in a wide variety of locations from urban to suburban to rural, and identify themes across categories that emerged as the investigation evolved. These are some questions that arose from this process:

1. What is the relationship between public art and the community’s values? Who/what is celebrated and why, and in what ways?
2. What kinds of public art are most successful? What are good metrics for assessing the success of a particular work or a whole program? How do we decide what is successful, anyway?
3. How do cities view their own public art collections? Why are they collecting art in the first place? How do they promote them (mostly they don’t)? How can they make it easier for the public to engage in their collections? Why are the vast majority of cities doing such a poor job of making their collections accessible to the public?
4. How can public art be useful in providing citizens with a conduit to nature? Assuming the concept of biophilia is accurate (lots of evidence shows it is), then can public art help get people outdoors and improve health, happiness, and everyday quality of life?
5. What is the role of landscape, land-use policy, environmental design, and public art in place-making and community belonging?