Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric Jan 2020 Open Access

Public Art as Social Infrastructure: Methods and Materials for Social Action at Environmentally Contaminated Sites

Jason Peters

Abstract

This article analyzes the capacity for public art to build a “métis” infrastructure (Grabill 2007) capable of supporting local experiential and performative knowledge about the environment. The article describes the work of UPPArts, a small, nonprofit arts organization focused on promoting environmental awareness. Their long-term cultivation of partnerships with state agencies, NGOs, and community residents resulted in a robust collaborative arts program that engaged the public in making “nonexpert” (Simmons and Grabill 2008) knowledge based on the embodied experience of living within a contaminated urban watershed. Using field research conducted over the course of the author’s work with the organization, the article presents a thick description and rhetorical analysis of UPPArts’ annual culminating event, a parade known as the Urban Pond Procession. The article argues that the representation and performance of community knowledge in the form of community-made arts projects like the Urban Pond Procession helped mobilize a community into a public that could advocate for its right to environmental remediation and protection. The lesson of UPPArts is that the material dimensions of artistic method matter. The close attention that art-making forces us to pay to how we use materials to make things with each other can reconfigure social relations around the idea of a watershed as a rhetorical common-place (Druschke 2013).

Journal
Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric
Published
2020-01-01
DOI
10.59236/rjv19i2pp106-129
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
Topics
rhetorical criticism collaborative writing body and rhetoric
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References (28) · 2 in this index

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