“Given that we evolve by sharing our stories and insights, web projects about community art initiatives contribute to collective knowledge and to the production of community-based histories. Through sharing our projects on-line we can learn from and celebrate a diversity of projects and exchange our approaches to generating healthy communities.”
There are many different motivations for wanting to document a community arts project, and there are many ways to go about it. Artist, art educator, and researcher Pohanna Pyne Feinberg of Inspire Art has taken a close look at approaches to documenting community arts projects and shared the results through a free online toolkit called Documenting Community Arts.
Created in partnership with SKOL-CEDA Community Projects, this resource for community artists presents key ideas related to documenting a project. Inspired by actual community projects and designed for participants of community art projects, this guide will be particularly useful for groups who want to document their projects but don’t have a budget or strong technical skills. These groups will appreciate the basic technical tips and info about tools that are free to use. Included are ideas for how to document work in different mediums (photo, video, text, audio), and some useful resources for pulling everything together and sharing it online. This info is paired with actual examples of image and text-based documentation from SKOL-CEDA projects.
The section about planning for documentation, discussions to have with participants, the sample Distribution Agreement, and notes about inclusive documenting are all relevant to participants of community art projects. For anyone who is interested in learning more about the dynamics of documenting collaborative creative projects, Pohanna Pyne Feinberg’s thesis paper, Making the Invisible Visible: Documenting the creative process, examines documentation in relation to public memory, shared authorship, and social agency.
To learn more about Documenting Community Arts Projects and Making the Invisible Visible, please visit the ArtBridges Resource Portal. To learn more about Pohanna Pyne Feinberg’s work, please visit Inspire Art.
-Skye Louis, ArtBridges Info Resource Developer
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