“What Can Public Art Teach the Public Humanities?”
My presentation examines social practice art and what its precepts can teach those of us who practice “public humanities.” The lessons of the arts could help the humanities in their quest to become more “public” and to think about the consequences and possibilities of that move. Social practice art operates in three methodological and ideological vectors. The art begins and remains public and community based; process is as important as product; and all the art is collaborative. In addition, its approach is rooted in social justice activism and it takes up issues of racial and gender inequality as well as the sources and amelioration of poverty.
I first learned about social practice art in a storefront on Westminster Street in Providence, Rhode Island. New Urban Arts, an after school arts mentoring program and artist community, as described in the connected case study, seemed the opposite of Providence’s Ivy League university “on the hill” and across town where I worked. But the lessons I learned there have helped me understand the ways in which universities, their researchers, their students, should approach their public work, how we should practice the humanities in the 21st century.
Susan Smulyan is Professor of American Studies at Brown University and the Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. She is the author of Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting and Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century, and co-editor of Major Problems in American Popular Culture. Susan has also served as chair of the board of directors of New Urban Arts, a youth mentoring program in Rhode Island.