IN THE FIELD
The “e” word doesn’t have to be scary; these groups make it part of the creative process BY RACHEL ENGH
IN THE FIELD
big, complex words that many people associate with stress, fear, or annoyance. But measuring the impact of your art-related work doesn’t have to be a necessary evil that rears its ugly head when you’re rushing to get grant paperwork out the door. In fact, evaluation can be an integral part of the creative process. Ask Noël Raymond. She’s co-artistic director of Minneapolis’s community-based Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T). My company, Metris Arts Consulting, recently collaborated with PH+T to develop fresh, creative, even enjoyable ways to evaluate the impact of their public art programming. According to Raymond, the essence of evaluation is “the rigorous process of asking hard questions and staring them in the face, seldom being able to answer them fully but beginning to see nuanced angles and layers in them that lead to deeper, richer, knottier questions.” She found that the evaluation tactics we developed together were “much like the creative process involved in making theater—I never would have imagined that evaluation practice mirrored creative practice.” Each of the three Minnesota examples in this article infuses evaluation efforts with creativity, and vice versa. As a researcher supporting these projects, I found that there’s no magic one-size-fits-all approach to evaluation. Although it’s challenging, evaluation is well worth doing, and creativity can make it stronger, more engaging, and fun. MEASUREMENT, ASSESSMENT, EVALUATION:
Pillsbury House Theatre: Data Is Art, Art Is Data Two of PH+T’s public art programs, Arts on Chicago and Art Blocks, support neighborhood-based artists who engage in a range of projects, including a stilting club, artistic bike racks, puppet shows, and photographic portraits of neighbors displayed in local businesses. PH+T had seen some of the results of their work and heard stories about its impact— how conversations had been sparked by it, how community members had discovered new resources in their neighborhoods, and more—but they wanted to dig deeper to see if their anecdotal data was substantiated. But how do you measure this? We sifted through data PH+T had already gathered, including information that participating artists provided on all the connections they made during their projects: with community members, other arts professionals, business owners, and so on. Using this data, we worked with a social network analyst, a specialist in graphing and analyzing different kinds of human connectivity, to visually illustrate which artists contributed most to bringing together disparate community members. The Art Blocks artists gather monthly for dinner. At their May 2015 dinner, they pondered our social network analysis and then drew their own personal maps of what a healthy, thriving community looks like. We also integrated participating artist Peter Haakon Thompson’s The A Project into a door-to-door survey. We
Image courtesy Metris Arts Consulting, 2016.
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 27 | NO. 2 | ISSUE 54 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
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Project Evaluation as Art