What need does Street Work address?

Street Works seek to make justice normal in the cultural asset ecosystem by resisting or designing alternatives to systemic forms of injustice. We discuss four of forms of injustice below.

We know the arts hold a complex space in the funding landscape. As a system intervention, we rarely see the impact of the arts short term, and the freedom of individual expression that is necessary in the arts rightly defies coordinated strategy. But we need system solutions more than ever.

Street Works are meant to expand systems of art by and for communities and artists who are underfunded and underserved. By most measures, these are BIPOC communities.

As a system intervention, without short lines between cause and effect, the arts have been proven to make us healthier and more joyful. It is not some magic cure-all, but in joy, we’re able to heal, feel, and give and receive love.

So who has access to the arts? Whose art is shown and seen? And what is correspondingly true about health and happiness? Today, it should come as little surprise that we find ourselves in a world in which prolonged TV exposure predicts a decrease in self-esteem for all girls and Black boys, but an increase in self-esteem for white boys. And between ages 12 and 42, women, regardless of race/ethnicity, experience higher rates of depression than men, while Black, Hispanic, and Asian American women experienced depression at higher rates than any other subgroup.

We need arts practices that center BIPOC communities with consciousness of these system failures. Alongside new institutional models, we need new artist-leaders, guided by different values and willing to bring their radical to creativity to system design.

Street Works are meant to build stronger bridges between art and democracy. In service to this goal, we center co-creative arts alongside tangible resources to support civic action.

The arts have been proven to spark democratic participation. If systems of representation in the arts are designed to limit participation of diverse communities, what is correspondingly true about democratic participation? It should come as no surprise that voter turnout among Black, Latinx/Latine, and Asian voters is chronically low when compared to white voters.

Street Works is designed for a subset of underfunded and unfunded social practice artists who are going further than ever to build bridges between art, justice, and democracy. These creators are positioned to reframe art as co-creative, an experience of democracy as joyful.

Street Works are meant to be a departure from status quo artistic presentation models, including museums, that do not serve justice. That is why we focus on public space — shared space.

Many large arts institutions have colonial histories, and the infrastructure of the museum as we know it today is a Western concept. But legacy injustices continue; from trafficking in heritages and remains of BIPOC, to having an abysmal record on acquisitions and pay gaps, contemporary institutions continue to suppress, shape, or erase BIPOC narratives and advance wealth inequality. Still, 60% of arts funding went to 2% of large museums in 2017.

We need alternatives presentation frameworks and new institutions in which procedural justice is core to identity. One way is to make it as easy as possible to use our shared public spaces — where there are no barriers or fees — as the galleries of the future. We're figuring this out not just for us, but for other small arts groups.

Street Works are meant to center people in relationships, not transactions and objects. A sense of belonging matters more than the things created.

As artists, we love making things, and they often look like objects that you can feel, see, touch, smell, or taste. Sometimes, those objects live beyond us, and they get bought and sold as though they have virtually nothing to do with the person that made them. This is how an artist can earn way less than the buyer does from their own work. But like all systems and capitalism, centering the thing that gets bought and sold decenters everything else. Can the human relationships be the ultimate form of art, too valuable to buy or sell?

Serving justice in the arts 

It’s no secret that most major museums and art institutions have colonial roots, prioritize the interests of the super-rich, and are swayed by money. As these actions add up, they work against justice at all levels.

Here's how we think it works: Museums were created to house colonial histories, and the way they tell and present stories came from the points of view of wealthy collectors who were also looters or benefited from colonialism. Today, most wealthy buyers and institutions follow in the footsteps of these traditions: they’re often white/white-led, ascribe to Western, Eurocentric worldviews, and have ties to looters. They also play an outsized role in what gets made and seen, which artists get supported, stifled, and even erased, and which artistic assets are seen as valuable and devalued.

If you are an artist seeking to make a living off your work, this means that wealthy buyers are often your primary shadow-audience, even if you might be making for people that match your worldviews. For the artists among us, sometimes-subtle and sometimes-overt forces are in place to pressure the work to cater to the tastes and opinions of people in positions of power. This isn’t to say that we artists have no agency or don’t create things we believe in. But we can't factor out how the system influences the very content of art itself.

By extension, buyers control cultural production and shape it in their world view. By extension, their stereotypes, cultural norms, paradigms of beauty, and conceptions of value seep into our consciousness. Even if we don't ascribe to their worldviews, we feel the effect of resistance throughout our lives. They also seep into our bank accounts; artists of color are much less likely to earn money off of their work. Museum acquisitions clearly demonstrate that pattern.

We need new kinds of arts organization that are built on different values and operational models. Street Works strives to be one.

Serving justice in climate and environmental action

Racial bias and other forms of bias in media are well known. In climate change narratives — the climate worldviews that pervade mainstream media — these biases affect how we all think about and understand climate change. First, there’s evidence they don't spark action. Instead, they have caused depression and hopelessness among people that care and alienated those that can't relate to the cultural contexts that climate writers soak their stories in.

We also have reasons to be suspicious of dominant narratives. For example, as carbon removal sees more investment, there is evidence that the oil and gas industry is advancing such “solutions” to continue polluting and access precious public dollars for climate action.

Bias is human. We can all do our best to address it, but we also need spaces for the points of view that are suppressed, oppressed, or crowded out by larger, wealthier institutions with profit-driven motives. We need organizations that prioritize their narratives and center joy as the pathway to climate action. Street Works strives to be one.

Serving artists who center democracy

Imagine a large game or poll on the street in which multiple people can express their opinions, create something unique, have fun, and contribute to a collective idea or object. Street Works are for artists who co-create things like this with passers-by, in dialogue with social action.

The evidence is strong that art improves civic engagement and mental health. But in a time in which democracy is at risk everywhere and loneliness is becoming an epidemic, we hope for a home by and for social practice artists who seek to turn community participation and democratic action into something we can feel and take further — to the polls or elected officials — when we’re ready.

By blueprinting what these artists do, we hope we can support the development of Street Works all around the world that center BIPOC communities, and particularly Blackness and Indigeneity. Our first Street Work centers artists and volunteers who design for a neighborhood that is ~88% BIPOC and have family and ancestry in places that will be hard hit by climate change.

Serving BIPOC-led micro-organizations

We started Street Works, because we believed that art should be part of mutual aid — by artists, for artists — and that the basic operational and business models of arts institutions have advanced injustice for too long. We need them to get remade with the same care and radically imaginative thinking we artists put into our practices. Who better to do it than artists ourselves?

As a result, we naturally center artists — not artistic assets or products — in the way we think about business model. That's why the processes of our program are the works of art that we are focused on now. And we think that our processes will be the sustaining works of art that lead to many mysterious things. Here's an early glimpse of process as an art.

Centering people, not product, a characteristic of loving care, is also among reasons why we think place-based programming should be in the hands of local residents and agile community based organizations that can meet on the street, know their neighbors, and invest love, time, and capital in their homes. But they're not often set up to scale quickly for events, navigate public space, or sustain connection year-round. We need national platforms that structurally enable — without appropriating — the brilliance of micro organizations positioned to create Street Works near home.