Giving Compass' Take:

• Ms. Elizabeth Hamby explains the value of artists working in municipal agencies to create communication outreach strategies. 

• How can funders work to dispell the stigma around spending public funds on art?

• Learn how and why to fund impactful art. 

Government work is changing, and as Toni Cade Bambara said, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” I use my skills to illuminate and facilitate new ways of working both within government itself, and between government and communities. This suits my practice far better than working from the outside, looking for partners on a project-by-project basis. It allows me to build long-term relationships and develop greater trust, which in turn results in more creativity and more impactful work.

There is no special funding for my projects, but one of my skills as an artist is re-purposing things. “Communications campaigns” are opportunities for murals, posters, or comic books. “Community engagement” funding can support festivals and the development of arts-based tools. Evaluation budgets can be used for oral histories. The artist Jill Magid describes her experience pitching an art project to a police department: “We do not work with artists,” she was told. But, Magid wrote, “A few weeks later I returned with the same proposal. This time I represented myself as a designer within my own corporation; my pitch did not speak of ‘Art’ but ‘Public Relations.’”

One of my recent projects, a Dungeons and Dragons-style adventure game about structural racism, was designed as a “staff development tool” to support internal transformation work to help my agency confront systems of oppression. The game drew upon the diverse expertise of my agency colleagues—in social epidemiology, history, research—and built on my experience creating projects that make complex histories legible. More importantly, it created space for agency staff to talk about the ways that government has actively and passively created systems of inequality and oppression.

Read the full article about bringing artists into municipal communication efforts by Ms. Elizabeth Hamby at Americans for the Arts.