Creative Placemaking

This past Thursday I attended a symposium in Lexington on Creative Placemaking presented by LexArts' Art Means Business Forum and the Gaines Center's Lafayette Seminar in Public Issues.

There was an earlier presentation in the day presented by Anne Gadwa Nicodemus who works as a consultant at Metris Arts Consulting, has co-authored, Creative Placemaking (2010) and authored, Fuzzy Vibrancy (Cultural Trends, 2013).

The symposium was set up as a round table discussion of the 'movers and shakers' in Lexington as well as business professions, a lawyer, a professor, and financial guru for Downtown Lexington.

Since 'creative placemaking' is still in the early stages of being develop as a term and accepted in the world of art history as well as community, there was a very interesting beginning discussion about what this ACTUALLY means. Many phrases were thrown out like: organic collaboration, highlighting assets of a community, cultural, heritage, and cross-sector organization.

Ms. Nicodemus' defines it as this: In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, nonprofit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, tribe, city, or region around arts and cultural activities.

This discuss took me down many different roads of what this 'placemaking' can be. We discussed not only PLACE but RITUAL such as WaterFire in Providence, Rhode Island where the community comes together at random times to light lamps along the river side and other coordinating events.

All of this discuss has got me thinking about Georgetown College's Create Places --- do we have any? if so, where are they? if not, how do we make them? what people are involved?

Field Study: Civil War history, memory, and placemaking

Where is that oh-so-typical hero on the horse? 

For the past two weeks I have been off campus conducting research on Civil War memory and placemaking. This Civil War research is related to my larger project on a Kentucky-born sculptor (see previous post here). Needing to incorporate a much broader geographical area, I found myself in need of a field study. Field studies involve data collection and information gathering outside of the traditional research confines of museum, gallery, research library, or archive. A field study moves outside, into the field figuratively, in that you're moving beyond the four walls of a research lab or space.  And, in my case, I was, literally, wandering through fields, as evidenced above.

My research for these past two weeks contributes to the primary research project that I mentioned above and serves also as preparation for a talk that I will give next month in Louisville as part of the Kentucky Historical Society's week-long symposium "Torn Within, Threatened Without: Kentucky and the Border States in the Civil War." My presentation and the site visit I will lead to Louisville's Confederate Monument will be one of several events for the National Endowment for the Humanities 2013 Landmarks of American History and Culture Teacher Workshops. For more information on my presentation or the NEH program, click here.