Nashville Public Art Community Investment Plan
The Metro Arts Public Art Community Investment plan is a multifaceted strategy for evolving from a traditional public art program to one that rests on new partnerships – with the arts community, with other Metro agencies, and with neighborhoods throughout Nashville – to promote equitable engagement with public art, access and agency for artists to participate in public art opportunities, and an emphasis on shared spaces in the service of the community’s identity, vision and purpose.
Date | 2016-2017
Client | Nashville Metro Arts
Collaborators | Via Partnership
Nashville’s Public Art Community Investment Plan signals an important new direction for public art, advancing the vision that “every Nashvillian experiences a creative city.
With a clear focus on cultural participation and community vitality, the plan offers an ambitious agenda for carrying forward the goals of the NashvilleNext comprehensive plan and of Crafting a Creative City, the Metro Arts strategic plan.
With its emphasis on promoting equity, the plan aligns Metro Public Art with the newest thinking about public art funding and program design. When it was completed in 2017, it was one of the first local government public art plans anywhere with this focus.
And with an aspiration to strengthen the public art ecosystem—the networks of artists, organizations, and communities that create public art—the plan looks to use City resources to catalyze a robust, sustainable system for public art for many years to come.
The Public Art Community Investment Plan demonstrates how Metro Arts public art program must look beyond current project models, operations funding structure, to achieve this new vision:
• Casemaking for new directions in public art, expanding beyond traditional site-based works.
• An inventory of new tools for working with artists and developing projects.
• Outlines of programs that build the capacity of artists, communities, and organizations to sustain this approach to public art.
• Recommendations for the funding, staffing, and governance necessary to realize this new direction.
• Frameworks for new approaches to collaborating with key departments in Metro Nashville government
