Plains Art Museum CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

Defiant Gardens for Fargo-Moorhead, a series of innovative, artist-designed collaborative landscapes, has seen tremendous advancement thanks to Community Innovation Grant support and has culminated in profound community leadership. For example, the projects related to this initiative have provided inspiration for additional civic garden space in Moorhead (MN), a community space called The Fargo Project, the creation of the Arts and Culture Commission in Fargo, and socially engaged theatre performances by Theatre B. The most impactful piece of the Plains Art Museum’s initiative is the Museum’s Pollinator Garden and its innovative Buzz Lab program, which empowers teen participants as both learners and teachers of the importance of pollinators. The engagement surrounding Buzz Lab has been transformative for the participants but also the Museum. This group initiated collaboration with the area’s Sudanese community in a robust way that has led to continued engagement with the community beyond Buzz Lab. Another project within this initiative is the Heritage Garden in Moorhead, a project that has come to symbolize the resilience of, and opportunity for public art in our community.

2. Thanks to the generous Community Innovation Grant, a dialogue has been propelled between artists and communities in intentional and productive ways that will help shape our city going forward. One way we initiated this dialogue was through the Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) exhibition in 2014. The Museum supplemented this international exhibition, co-organized by Creative Time and Independent Curators International (ICI) with Nato Thompson as lead curator, with regional, socially engaged artists and projects. During the run of this major exhibition, the Museum hosted weekly artists-in-residence who led circle-based conversations and participatory programs. These programs were offered to our audience free of cost, and sparked remarkably frank and open dialogue on a wide variety of issues, ranging from land and water stewardship to homelessness food systems and health issues. These conversations have helped advance the sophistication of dialogue concerning public art in Fargo-Moorhead, as well as the field of creative place-making.

Another important piece to the progress of creating vibrant public spaces and community life in Fargo-Moorhead was the Central Time Centric: Art and Social Practice in the Midwest symposium offered in 2014. This weekend-long program provided a forum for very important conversations concerning social practice art, with particularly honest conversations about artists working with low-income communities and communities of color, and the ethics of social practice. The conversations reverberated throughout blogs, networks, and regional summits and symposiums, and have prompted dialogue concerning the intersection of white privilege and social practice art, attitudes and cultural biases, and the distribution of funding for socially-engaged work. Like Living as Form, this symposium furthered the trajectory of the Museum as an active civic player and introduced artist leadership in community life – an orientation that will continue to propel this important initiative. Ensuing conversations were safe, inclusive, and participatory, and were each sparked by thoughtful, leading questions by each visiting artist.

Key lessons learned

X 1. In 2015, the tremendously ambitious, artist-designed Heritage Garden was profoundly vandalized. Other public art projects in the region were also vandalized around the same time. Without any suspects in the vandalism cases, it is difficult to understand the motive behind them. We have learned that we must be sensitive to the fact that public art and social practice in Fargo-Moorhead are relatively new initiatives. Furthermore, Fargo-Moorhead is located on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. When considering each state’s distinct sociopolitical environments, the metro area is a very important confluence of differing views on funding for the arts and the value of shared spaces. The Museum is aware of this dichotomy, and it only makes it more important for our work to continue in our efforts to bring diverse people together. While the vandalism was a significant setback, as noted, the overall impact of our efforts has led to a growth in the sophistication in and the surrounding dialogue of public and socially engaged art in the community.

2. One component of the original project was discontinued by Museum leadership. The anticipated expenses of the originally proposed Fern Grotto project, designed by artist Mark Dion, came in much higher than originally anticipated. This realization forced the Museum to discontinue that project during its planning phase, but allowed us to think about building on what will be the most successful components of the initiative. We decided to shift those resources into (1.) successful continuation of the Buzz Lab program and the related Pollinator Garden, and (2.) the recovery, completion, and engagement of the Heritage Garden. While unforeseen circumstances can be expected in any endeavor with the ambitiousness of this initiative, we would not characterize this circumstance as a failure: it was an opportunity to evaluate what has been successful within the initiative, most importantly the Pollinator Garden and Buzz Lab programming, and to focus on sustaining.

Reflections on the community innovation process

Other key elements of Community Innovation

Educational programming and community engagement have been important to lay the groundwork for the project. Currently, the most innovative component of this initiative is Buzz Lab, due to its holistic, collaborative, and leadership-building approach. Buzz Lab empowers a diverse group of teens who are interested in the arts and sciences to think about what they can do to impact their neighborhood, community, world, and environment. Interns are provided with free transportation, healthy meals, and leadership opportunities as a part of the Buzz Lab experience. By meeting periodically throughout the year, their engagement with this program and role as pollinator advocates is sustained. The next step for Museum innovation is to explore how our community engagement efforts transform our more traditional museum functions, such as collecting and exhibiting art. Thanks to this project, we believe that innovations will surface across Museum functions with an open orientation to working with the public and creating dialogue about issues that affect our community and its intersections.

Progress toward an innovation

Creating artist-designed spaces in collaboration with the community is a growing and evolving field in the arts, and Plains Art Museum has found itself to be uniquely positioned to help meet expressed community needs. Thanks to Museum expertise, generous support, community leaders, and the project artists, the spaces designed and the initiative’s related programs are truly visionary. The greatest breakthrough in addressing a community need to date has been the success of Buzz Lab and our Pollinator Garden. The program, which actively responds to the global pollinator crisis, empowers paid teen interns by transforming them into community educators through projects and public events like the Pollinator Party. This program is unique, effective, and innovative, and gives us the confidence to proceed with other community projects like the Heritage Garden. This garden is an innovative collaboration between a North Dakota based organization (Plains Art Museum) with neighboring Moorhead, MN, who expressed a need to redevelop riverside spaces with public art and civic space.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

Like the Pollinator Garden, which was led by artist Christine Baumler and the Museum, and its related programs, the Heritage Garden has a unique opportunity to be an innovative community space. The Museum is committed to the success of this project. A plan summary is enclosed summarizing our adjusted timeline for completing, launching, and programming the Heritage Garden. These steps include: (1.) re-engaging and energizing partners, (2.) working with local partners to finish planting, and providing seating at and interpretation of the site, (3.) plan for sustainable engagement of the space with openness to new uses and programs, and (4.) making the space an important part of the Museum’s identity.

What’s next?

Continuation of this project will include the completion of site work on the Heritage Garden (as summarized in our enclosed documents) as well as sustaining the Pollinator Garden and related programming. The project components that have been completed to date are vibrant, meaningful, innovative, and sustainable. Following the completion of Heritage Garden and continual, vibrant programming surrounding both Gardens, the next steps will be to create a meaningful connection between these community spaces and other Museum functions. How does Buzz Lab inform our exhibition program and vice versa? How do our temporary exhibitions and programs inform the Heritage Garden and vice versa? How do social practice artists inform and interact with our other Museum initiatives, like our Creativity Among Native American Artists program? By intentionally focusing on these questions, we aim to make these initiatives a strong and sustainable part of the identity of Plains Art Museum.

If you could do it all over again…

The most successful components of the project have strong local participation and community leadership that is in direct collaboration with core Museum staff to meet an expressed community need. After the initial planning stages of the Heritage Garden project, for example, we learned that having a local community artist-leader who is engaged early and often is crucial. Moorhead-based artist Su Legatt has been and will continue to be integral to the realization of Heritage Garden: she organized volunteers, informed and involved various networks, and solidified relationships with the City of Moorhead, Moorhead Public Service, and various local businesses and neighborhoods.

One last thought

The Museum has begun a transformation that matches the growth and transformation across much of our community. Fargo-Moorhead’s rapid growth coincides with an increased need for collaborative and open conversations about city design and how we interact as citizens. Plains Art Museum is an active partner in many facets of community life, laying the groundwork for future partnerships to meet community needs. We cannot overstate our gratitude to the Bush Foundation for its Community Innovation Grant program and for enabling this work to begin and grow for Fargo-Moorhead!