St. Louis Wants More Artists to Drive Civic Engagement

Bringing the community into conversations about commemoration opens new ways to present public history. The Paper Monuments project in New Orleans asked residents to draw monuments that they would like to see replace the four Confederate monuments removed in the city. The project brought organizations like the New Orleans Arts Council and New Orleans Public library together with community members to re-imagine new narratives, installations, and representations of local history.

By leveraging technology, artists living above the 60th parallel are increasing indigenous representation in filmmaking. In Yellowknife, Canada, aRTLess Collective’s Dead North Film Festival uses live streaming to reach thousands of residents across remote—and otherwise largely inaccessible—northern areas. The film festival connects and empowers indigenous northerners to represent themselves and their culture through film.

The Spanish-Language Community Advisory Network works with a performing arts center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to bring in Latino audiences by showing culturally-relevant films, reducing language barriers, and even inviting the films’ cast and crew to the screenings.

A sold-out drag show at the Leeds Center for the Arts in Winchester, Kentucky, raised over $12,500 for the theater and its programs. The money raised came from ticket sale proceeds, performer tips, and donations.

Bringing people of different ethnic backgrounds together to create art and express themselves helps war-torn societies cope and grow. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Most Mira program helps people touched by the horrors of the Bosnian war grapple with issues of memory and identity by engaging in theater. The theater troupe consists of Bosnian and Serbian high school students who participate in a multi-year program.

Dario Calmese’s Black Art Yearbook captures candid portraits of curators, collectors, dealers and other people who support the creation of black art. In this way, Calmese is making a historical record of an exciting moment as well as commemorating people that are often marginalized or erased by the creation of ‘official’ art history.

Minneapolis’ Twin Cities Black Film Festival highlights the work of black actors and filmmakers for the last sixteen years. It also helps grow the next generation of filmmakers through workshops as well as helping to expand the audience for film by offering subsidized transportation to screenings.

Museums all over the country are trying to attract diverse audiences. One of those is the Frick museum in New York which has a program called the Ghetto Film School project. Twenty students from the Bronx are selected to attend a weekly discussion-based seminar. At the end, students must write a script. “The winning script is turned into a movie and filmed at the museum.” “People should feel they can go to museums, learn something, and improve their lives in doing so.”

Collecting movies shot on cellphones, the Mera Karachi Mobile Cinema captures every day life in Karachi as seen through its residents. The films are projected in non-traditional spaces for Karachi residents as well as through the use of a rickshaw-powered projector.

India Lost and Found is a crowdsourced photography project that documents India's thousands of overlooked historical monuments through volunteer contributions. Launched in 2018, the initiative recruits volunteers through university partnerships and social media to photograph, research, and share stories about lesser-known historical sites. The project has grown to 500 active volunteers across Indian cities, with 30-35 new volunteers joining monthly and over 80,000 Instagram followers. The visual archives are also being used to drive structural assessments and restoration when needed.