The Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s inaugural Open Spaces grantees embarked on a journey to create three highly ambitious and community-driven visions for temporary public art in 2017. From West Oakland to San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point, the projects, showcased in the video below, addressed pressing community issues, such as gentrification, unequal air quality, and systemic oppression.
Each artist sought to push the boundaries of public art and how we perceive it. This included: People’s Kitchen Collective hosting a 500-person meal in the streets honoring shared struggles and resilience of people of color; Rosten Woo and the Exploratorium creating a network of sculptures that simultaneously collects particulate matter data and creates a representative soundscape; and Zaccho Dance Theatre producing a large-scale immersive community art experience reflecting a neighborhood’s dreams.
With the projects now completed, we’ve wondered: What does the lasting impact of such art look like?
To start the conversation, we asked a professional writer to interview the artists about their projects, the community engagement process, the lessons learned, and the lasting impact of their work. While the projects exhibited at specific places and times throughout 2018 and 2019, they live on in the form of new relationships, new conversations, and new collaborations.
Click among these conversations, and then join in the conversation by adding your comments on Medium.
