Week 5: Continuing the Journey Through the Sea of Information

This week I found a number of studies on community- based art projects many of which came from England and most of which addressed projects in Urban or inner city settings. Interestingly, articles on Urban Regeneration and the arts are plentiful. While much has been written on the subject of inner city community- arts projects and not so much on the rural , I am inspired by projects such as Olivia Gude's Spiral Workshop(2009) and Mel Alexenberg and Miriam Benjamin's approach to participatory art in their "Legacy Thrones", presented in the paper: Creating Public Art Through Intergenerational Collaboration (Alexenberg& Benjamin, 2004) both of which are in urban settings. Another article/study that I discovered, by Karen Hutzel,
Hutzel, K. (2007). Reconstructing a community, reclaiming a playground: A participatory action research study. Studies in Art education, 48(3), 299-315.
describes the transformative effect of the arts and arts education on forgotten inner-city neighborhoods. Hutzel proposes that a community-based art curriculum should be “intended to engage the community in an asset-based approach to art creation and social change “(Hutzel, 2007)“ I mention these three because they are concrete examples of projects that work . Many of the issues that face inner city communities occur in rural communities. The rural community off the beaten track are often overlooked because they are not as easily seen.