Editor’s Note

Public art’s potential to unify and bring communities into shared spaces, to engage in a form of reciprocal dialogue with the environment and with each other, is not lost on those of us charged with managing its care and preservation. The articles collected for this issue of VoCA Journal are inspiring in the recognition of the importance that access to such spaces provides.     

In the contributions by Makeda Best and Magdalena Dardel Coronado, we are offered two examples of outdoor museum spaces where a sense of community, collective memory, and meaning is created and shared. Best describes the existing and past murals on display that have comprised “the Chalkboard,” a public outdoor programming initiative at the Oakland Museum of California, as a welcome invitation to the diverse community to participate and engage with the temporary and changing installations. The author makes an argument that it is through these forms of engagement that community identities are reinforced. Dardel Coronado provides us with an alternative example in describing the history and manifestation of The Museo a Cielo Abierto de Valparaiso (MaCA) a collection of twenty abstract murals created by the artist Francisco Mendez’s workshop that, with municipal support, formalized a route through the steep hills of the Bellavista neighborhood. In this case, the colorful murals are both in dialogue with the surrounding landscape, while also functioning as a record of the process of engagement and collaboration that occurred between the students of the university and the inhabitants of the neighborhood. 

Joseph Altshuler and Lillia McEnaney provide, in their own distinct voices, interesting and complimentary views of public art spaces that address accessibility in creative forms. Altshuler is pragmatic in breaking down the various types of structures that can be created in a public space and the ways that these can encourage engagement and inclusion. Providing us with a new vocabulary of Gizmos and Platforms, either Operable or Adaptable, the author illustrates the possibilities that these forms can take on and the manners in which they engage and provide access is, he argues, as endless as one’s imagination. McEnaney’s description of the traveling public photography exhibit centering on the voices and experience of Diné community members in New Mexico provides an elegant illustration of access through storytelling and conversation. The inclusion of the differing positionalities and perspectives that shaped the project models “one of the exhibition’s primary goals: to dismantle the curatorial voice of authority to create tangible spaces for the multiplicities of meaning that emerge in community contexts.” For both Altshuler and ALL REZ, the results are refreshing and profound.

The active preservation and conservation of public artworks are discussed in the articles by Martha Singer and Sophia Zweifel. Themes of collaboration and conversation jump to the forefront in these projects. Singer, along with her colleague Jean Dommermuth, incorporates the voices of her co-collaborators to help describe the development of the Art Advisory Committee and its importance in overseeing the conservation treatment of the Nevelson Chapel in Saint Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan. The establishment of interpersonal connections and an underlying foundation of trust was essential in creating an environment where thoughtful discussions and decisions around the care of the Chapel could be made. Similarly, Zweifel provides us with an additional model for approaches to the care of contemporary public art, outlining very tangible and practical ways that collaboration with the artists, community, and local technicians and caretakers can enhance the process of public art fabrication and long-term care.    

As someone who has been immersed in the preservation of outdoor sculpture in one capacity or another for decades, I appreciate each of these examples as they broaden the focus beyond the material, offering a more holistic approach of working with networks and communities in finding solutions that suit the unique context of a particular place and time. The dynamic projects and conversations in this issue illustrate and interrogate this widened vantage point, exploring who the public is that the artwork is serving, and how connections are being made between communities and spaces through public art. The compilation of these many voices is inspiring, and sets a stage for questions and conversations yet to come.