What is community engaged practice?
“…art today cannot be called art if it does not reach into the heart of our nature and initiate transformation...”
Community engaged practice refers to a form of collective or collaborative creative practice that is centred around working within a community, or communities, that may result in activity, engagement or artwork together to address social conditions or issues. In community engaged practice ‘the audience, previously conceived as a “viewer” or “beholder”, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant’ (Bishop, 2011 p. 2) and is encouraged to adopt an ‘empathic way of seeing through another’s eyes’ (Gablk, S in Lacy, 1996 p. 82).
This form of practice develops relationships between participants, is likely to take place outside traditional arts settings (Bourriaud, 1998; Lippard, 1997; Osborne, 2014) and frequently engages with diverse, underrepresented, communities (Baldauf, 2016; Becker, 1994; Lacy, 1996). Our practice is ‘interested in creating a kind of collective art that affects the public sphere in a deep and meaningful way’ (Helguera, 2011 p. 7) that ‘actively involves people in artistic process or in the production of a work of art” (De Bruyne, Gielen and Baal, 2013 p. 20).
In the second half of the Twentieth century, individual artists (for example: John Latham, Allan Kaprow, Judy Chicago, Joseph Beuys), art movements (for example: Artist Placement Group, Situationists, Fluxus, Dadists), and socio-political movements (for example: black rights, alternative schooling , environmental, feminist) increasingly attempted to redefine the role of art in society as a tool for effective political change. Since the 1990s a new cohort of socially engaged artists, acting as ‘charismatic agents’ (Bishop, 2011), connected communities to the arts to increase ‘the social capital and community capacity fundamental to civic and political engagement’ (Bishop, C in Malm, 2017 p. 84).
This is an arts practice that ‘positions community members … as the primary actors’ (Ingamells, 2010 p. 2), has a focus on relational dialogue and has sought its inspiration from people-centred humanist approaches (Buber & Smith, 2014; Hirschhorn, Gibson & Bishop, 2012) and social and emancipatory ways of thinking (Illich, 1971; Freire, 1997).
Community arts was founded on the strong belief that communities would benefit by getting involved in the arts (Coult & Kershaw, 2002; Jeffers & Moriarty, 2017; Kelly 1984; Morgan 2003) and that as ‘it actively involves people in artistic process or in the production of a work of art.’, it is, ‘therefore, at the very least relational art’ (De Bruyne, Gielen and Baal, 2013 p. 20).
“Community engaged practice ‘involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations well beyond the institutional boundaries of the gallery or museum…….these exchanges can catalyse surprisingly powerful transformations in the consciousness of their participants.”
Community engaged practice can embrace the terms Socially engaged practice, community arts, public practice, new genre public art (Lacy, 1996), collective aesthetics, teaching artistry, aesthetic-pedagogical-political practice (Cartagena, 2019) and relational practice (Bourriaud, 1998). It is ‘simultaneously a medium, a method, and a genre’ (Thompson, 2012 p. ) where ‘legitimacy is based, not on the universality of the knowledge produced through the discursive interaction, but on the perceived universality of the process of human communication itself’ (Kester, 2013 p. 109).