Thursday, January 13, 2011

New Public Art Tweet for this Blog


We've decided to continue this blog in 2011 after some soul-searching.  It will not be directly following the work of the Creative Corridors Coalition, other than an occasional comment as warranted.  Even though much of the theory behind their initial planning is discussed here in our earlier articles, if you are interested in that effort, we encourage you to follow them on their website.

We do think there remains a need for a public art advocacy in our town independent of the Arts Council and our traditional local arts patronage structures.  I am a historian by training, and a community advocate by interest and passion.  I am an admirer of the arts and quality urban design by acculturation and experience.  I want our town to have a public arts commission: to involve, by citizen representatives, the whole community in the selection, creation, and enjoyment of public art works.  That's infrastructure building, and value assessment, by a community. We're not there yet.  I'd like for us to be.

To that end I have, after ending our "arsurbi" Twitter account, begun a new "arsurbi2" Twitter feed where, a couple of times a week, I will highlight stories from the web about public art and its appreciation, creation and struggles from our state, region and the world.  We live in a place of information overload.  But we also live in relevant-information decision-making deserts sometime.  Maybe the Tweets and this year's blog will help our community with that.  That's the hope anyway. More next week.
Photo of Northumberland sunrise from FreeFoto.com