What is the impact of centering artists in collaboration?
There's no one single definition or characteristic of an artist, but artists are often the ones in a room that offer alternative points of view, don't conform, create structure or shape from blank pages, or bring joy or beauty. They can change processes in subtle ways, introduce new or different thinking, and/or give us the infusions of hope, joy, healing, or creativity that we all need to keep going. They are one aspect of diversity.
Municipalities have recognized the creative potential of partnering with artists for decades. New York’s 40+ year-old PAIR program is one of the most consistent in the country, pairing artists with different gov’t agencies around their questions or goals. Qualitative interviews tell us that the program is powerful. But maintaining such programs and demonstrating impact is hard, and they are often the first to go.
We think this is partly because today's systems do not see creative freedom as a source of innovation and public well-being. Instead, they are designed to incentivize and value linear causes and effects that might be easier to measure in quantifiable outcomes but fundamentally devalue non-linear effects of creativity and what it takes to actually foster it. For example:
Processes — grounded and creativity and guided by justice — are rarely taken seriously. They are either undervalued, skipped altogether, or hidden.
People are not important — product is. We end up centering the things artists produce without thought for the person producing it. This isn't unique to artists, but because the things they produce don't always have “functional” value, their contributions are easily dismissed. Artists become forced into unstable gig work and contracted to do short term projects with specific outputs. Or, they take jobs that suffocate their creativity in order to survive or access health insurance.
These bad incentives are the result of a broken system. We think artists like us interested in designing our financial and organizational systems as works of art might be the best collaborators to solve it. But we also need to design collaboration programs that work, in some part, within the status quo if we want artists to make a living.
Street Works Earth is developing a program between artists and climate experts to start figuring out how to best support collaboration and bridge building between artists and different disciplines. Drawing on tools by the Municipal Artists Partnership, our hope is to scale “cross-sector” collaborations over time in which artists are valued and radical creativity helps us light paths to the future we want.
