Assessing the full impact of public scholarship necessitates involving non-higher education partners along with students, faculty, and the college or university itself. Imagining America calls this integrated assessment, recognizing that too often assessment rests solely in the hands of the academic partners: students evaluating courses and tenure and promotion committees evaluating participating faculty. Integrated assessment considers the civic, social, and academic goals involved in public scholarship projects and all the stakeholders who make such work possible.
Profiles - Projects
Looking for a comprehensive list of Projects using the arts to create social change?
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San Francisco, CA
The musical voice of Arab America in the Bay Area is ASWAT, the Arabic Music Ensemble sponsored by Zawaya. True to Zawaya’s commitment to pluralism and inclusion, Aswat is a multi-ethnic and multi-racial music ensemble that reaches out to the diverse Bay Area community with folkloric, classical, and contemporary Middle Eastern music. Now on its 11th year anniversary, Aswat has grown from an informal community choir to a professional performing group with sold-out concerts.
Baltimore , MD
Axis Alley seeks through creative engagement to utilize the backyards of vacant properties and vacant lots as a canvas for creative works that transform, activate and revitalize the overlooked, under-attended areas of Baltimore’s back alleys. Doherty explores the intersections of art, architecture, urban spaces and technology through installation art and urban intervention projects. Installation works have combined sculptural materials, with video, computer controlled media and light to explore experiential and participatory art.
Baltimore, MD
Bearing Witness: Work by Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry was a multi-venue survey of more than 10 years of work by the husband-and-wife collaborative team Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. Organized by the Contemporary Museum and the Maryland Institute College of Art’s (MICA) 2009/2010 Exhibition Development Seminar, Bearing Witness had a dual mission. First, curators sought to present an exhibition that connected McCallum's and Tarry’s community and advocacy-based projects with their studio and gallery-based video, painting, and installation works.
Machias, ME
The Bees have spent 10 years developing an innovative and story-based education strategy that we share through a variety of interactive, image-based picture-lectures and graphic workshops. We believe that art is a tool for popular analysis, education and organizing and that the complex and overwhelming issues that face our world can be broken down and understood in simple pictures. In our workshops and presentations, we use giant, portable murals to deconstruct issues as far-reaching as globalization, climate change, colonization, and resource extraction.
Washington, DC
What objects serve as a town's "artifacts"—carrying the collective memories of citizens forward over time and telling their story? dog & pony dc's theatrical production—Beertown—places audience and performers on an even playing-field to actively explore the dynamic and tenuous relationship between individuals and their community. Beertown is an interactive exploration of American history, civic ritual, personal identity, community and memory, that incorporates live music, dance, group storytelling, and map making... and every performance begins with a dessert potluck.
New Orleans, LA
Before I Die is an interactive public art project that invites people to share their hopes and dreams in public space. Originally created on an abandoned house in Candy's neighborhood in New Orleans after she lost someone she loved, the project has since spread worldwide with walls created by communities around the world. The project is about remembering what is important to you and understanding your neighbors in a new and enlightening way.
BELONGING Year 1 - Belonging
Nevada City, CA
Belonging was about how people find a sense of belonging in relation to the land. Ruth interviewed 13 featured participants and created the Belonging film with Radu Sava, and used social media to engage the community in a dialog about their sense of belonging.
Chicago, IL
Organized and exhibited by The Renaissance Society (University of Chicago), the exhibition project Black Is, Black Ain’t dealt with issues of race and identity. It explored a shift in the discourse on race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and preserved.
Blue Mountain Lake, NY
Established creative and non-fiction writers, and artists not requiring exceptional facilities are eligible for our month-long residencies that run from mid-June through October 1. Blue Mountain Center periodically hosts special short residencies with specific themes. These sessions are developed through invitations, nominations and distinct application processes. Residents work on their individual projects as they do during the regular season; but they also are encouraged to share their perspectives, ideas, and approaches with one another.
New York, NY
Accountability is crucial to democracy. At a time when grave challenges threaten American democracy, only a groundswell of public engagement can restore American values and moral standing in the world.
Chicago, IL
both/and breaks the shackles of “either/or” in this semi-autobiographical short video play by Jamil Khoury. In both/and, the characters of Jamil, Arab Man, and Gay Man explore and explode the constructed borders between American and Arab, Arab American and gay, for profit and not for profit, and assorted other disputed territories.
New York, NY
Branding Democracy was a year-long multidisciplinary thematic exploration that gathered thinkers, artists, and the general audience around “democracy.” The project looked at the design and packaging of the concept of democracy and the multiple ways in which it is turned into a consumer brand. It intended to expose the reasons behind this commodification and to indirectly indicate a way out of the impasse of democracy. The exhibition OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding examined behaviors and desires generated and promoted by the brand of American democracy.
Montclair, NJ
Democracy is founded on robust dialogue, but somewhere along the line, politics replaced sex as the one thing in America we don’t discuss in mixed company – even amongst friends and family. Bring it to the Table is a participatory online platform, community engagement campaign, and webisode series aimed at bridging political divides and elevating the national conversation. The project is for those who are tired of hyper-partisanship. Here’s how it works: - We are taking a Table Tour to communities across America, where we will invite people to sit down and express their beliefs on camera.
Washington, DC
BrushFire was an arts initiative showcasing key contemporary artists whose public projects engage crucial social issues such as immigration, the war in Iraq, food, sustainable energy, housing, the electoral process, the economy, health, and the environment. Taking place in highly visible public settings such as state fairs, urban centers, public parks and highly trafficked recreational areas around the United States, BrushFire aimed to enrich the environment for public discussion about the value of democracy in the crucial run-up to national elections in November, 2008.
Blacksburg, VA
The Building Home project is a story of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from the Department of Theatre and Cinema at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, and community artists, actors, and musicians working in partnership with our regional planning office. Building Home use storytelling and theater-making techniques to facilitate and stimulate public conversation about the future of the New River Valley region of southwest Virginia. Through this, Building Home has facilitated community engagement with participatory democracy and civic practice.
Portland, OR
With the cities of Evanston & Chicago, Illinois, Hartford, Connecticut, and Portland, Oregon as lenses, BUILT explored the changing United States city, and the challenges of housing, infrastructure, neighborhood cohesion, and equity all present as our population continues to exponentially increase in the coming years. The public series of research, installation, dialogue, interview, and performance events of varied scale led up to a culminating theatrical event/production in Portland in September 2008.
Chicago, IL
Critical Encounters hosts Café Society meetings at campus galleries and exhibits. Café Society meetings are opportunities for students, faculty, staff, and community members to come together and talk about the larger implications of the images we confront and create.
Brooklyn, NY
Over the course of three Sundays in Fall 2011, the Asian American Arts Alliance (a4) will host Call & Response, a series of three events commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and announcing a4’s Locating the Sacred festival slated for fall 2012.
Call & Response provides opportunities for citizens of New York to come together at intimate gatherings to explore the sacredness that exists in the creative interactions we foster with each other.
Berkeley, CA
Can't Stop Won't Stop is a site that features the work of Jeff Chang, a writer of politics, culture, and the hip-hop movement. One of Chang's works is The Creativity Stimulus, which highlights the impact of the arts or creativity in promoting social change. This profile courtesy of Air Traffic Control.