COMMUNITY ART – A LOOK AT PUBLIC ART IN AMERICA
Summer | Fall 2018 | MartinArts 19
In addition to project funding from
Martin County, the county was awarded two
National Endowment for the Arts Our Town
grants to implement the artistic component of the
project.
In 2014, Martin County and the Arts
Council of Martin County (another partner in the
project), with input from the community, selected
environmental artist Lucy Keshavarz to work on
the Ripple project. “She is definitely the leader
of the project,” Kores said, noting the unique
occurrence of having an artist rather than a civil
engineer lead an ecological/engineering project.
“She truly understands the logistical side and the
artistic side. Lucy is married to an engineer, so she
really understands the engineering aspect and its
function as well as being an artist. She’s done other
projects like this before, so that also plays into her
total conception of how the project should work
and what it should look like.”
Engaging with the community involved
many meetings, including a community potluck
to talk about the project in a less formal setting, as
well as community charrettes, or workshops, to
gather information, questions, and suggestions
regarding the proposed project. Keshavarz even
created a “community tree” as a vehicle to gather
information. She provided prompts for Old Palm
City residents to respond to in order to learn more
about how they thought about their neighborhood.
Residents could then write their responses on
leaf-shaped pieces of paper and attach them to the
community tree.
The information gathered from these
community gatherings was then synthesized to
build conceptual design drafts, which married
artistic proposals with environmental protection,
all tying back to the community’s connection to
the river.
The conceptual designs will be reviewed
by the community before they are finalized, but
Keshavarz suggested that “some of the ideas are
to create walking trails within the stormwater
infrastructure…and to integrate interpretive
messaging in the art forms and functional
amenities that speak to the history, environment,
and sustainable efforts unique to Old Palm City.”
The second phase of the project,
supported by a second NEA Our Town grant, will
focus on additional community engagement to
finalize the plans, as well as on the development
of an implementation plan for completing the
construction of the project. Since it is about
halfway through the process, it could be another
few years before the public art project is completed.
The important thing is the involvement
of the community every step of the way—after
all, they are ones who will be living with the final
result long after the artists and contractors leave.
“My big-picture philosophy is about
facilitating connections: our human species
connections to each other and to our natural
environment. With eco-art projects such as Ripple,
I am illuminating connections that bring solutions
for a particular community and place, and then
documenting this through the art form as a result
of the process.”