This Social Art Map is an A1 poster developed with artists, commissioners/curators and participants of social art practice in 2015.
It aims to act as a starting point or resource for people interested in social art practice, including those engaged in producing, commissioning, curating, collaborating and participating.
You can order you free copy by contacting s.hope[at]bbk.ac.uk
This website is also acting as a site for a growing network of practitioners and researchers. If you have any feedback or would like to get involved contact us on the email above.
By using the contested term ‘social art’ we refer to contexts where artists work with people in the co-creation of a public outcome.
This mini-resource focuses on five commissioned projects that took place in London within the field of social art practice in the last five years. By mapping the project’s timelines we aim not to present a model of best practice, rather a range of portraits that provide windows into the different processes, hurdles, motivations and experiences of artists, commissioners/ curators/producers and locals/ participants/ collaborators involved.
Through this six month piece of research these labels were contested, as were the terms ‘social art’ and ‘socially engaged art’. Rather than foreground these terms, we have therefore referred to the names of the people and the capacity in
which they were involved with these processes.
To avoid flattening out the complexities and nuances of the projects or squeezing them uncomfortably into a neat definition of social art, we have tried to maintain the detail, keeping the seemingly mundane aspects alongside crucial moments of
decision-making. With this in mind, we hope to reflect the vital complexity of the processes involved and avoid one dominant version of events being told.
Emily Druiff (Peckham Platform) and Sophie Hope (Birkbeck, University of London) came together, supported by funding from Creativeworks London, to do this mapping of commissioning processes in order to understand better these often hidden procedures. Over several meetings we made collective timelines of each project with the artist(s), commissioner/producer/curator(s) and local/participant/collaborator(s).
We hope you will use this document and the network of people that emerge from it, to inform your work, challenge assumptions and invite further critical conversations with practitioners, collaborators, researchers and educators.