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ASU’s New American City Uses Art to Generate Talks on Arizona’s Future
This feature is the third and final in a series highlighting the recipients of the 2007 President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness.
When most people think of local politicians, urban planners, high school students, and university faculty, the term “art connoisseur” doesn’t usually come to mind. “When you have partners from a variety of different disciplines, they bring their knowledge, their ideas, their questions, and their communities into our space and raise the level of conversation we can have.” – Heather Lineberry, Head Curator of the ASU Art Museum
But for Heather Lineberry and John Spiak, the curators of the ASU Art Museum, these and other diverse community members were the ideal people to collaborate with from September 2006 to January 2007 for New American City: Artists Look Forward, a university-community partnership designed to explore the role artists have in helping Phoenix become a vital city.
“When you have partners from a variety of different disciplines, they bring their knowledge, their ideas, their questions, and their communities into our space and raise the level of conversation we can have,” states Lineberry, senior curator of the museum. She feels Arizona is experiencing a renaissance of artists whose projects comment on many issues facing Arizona’s future, including urban growth, social fragmentation, and state identity. Unfortunately, because the general public is rarely involved in artist events, very little dialogue has taken place traditionally between artists and the greater community.  Re-inhabited Circle Ks Photo Essay: Paho Mann, a graduating MFA student at ASU and featured artist at New American City’s anchoring exhibition, displayed a series of photographs depicting how local Arizona businesses affected the evolution of a certain Circle K building design.
In an effort to generate such dialogue, New American City was created as a forum to bring artists and the general public together through a series of art exhibitions, seminars, and outreach programs. By participating in these events, community members gained a greater awareness of the role artists play in a society’s growth, while artists gained a new appreciation for the ways they could create and share their work with the community.
For the anchoring exhibition held at the ASU Art Museum, 23 local artists were selected from 150 proposals to share their commentaries on Arizona society.
For Wellington Reiter, this meant creating sketches that speculated on how Sky Harbor Airport might appear in the future. Drawing inspiration from current security and tourism issues, Reiter, the dean of ASU’s College of Design, offered a dark vision of an airport with devices powerful enough to detect hostile thoughts, as well as a more optimistic vision where the airport is a virtual city complete with bike paths and a swimming pool on the runway.
“Art allows you to think the unthinkable – it alerts you to things you were not paying attention to,” says Reiter, adding that his imaginative drawings contain enough hints of truth to generate serious talks about relevant issues.
This proved true for many city officials, developers, and council members who attended the exhibition and decided to use the drawings as conversation starters for their meetings. While Reiter admits it is unlikely his sketches will produce a swimming pool at the airport, he does feel such talks will help instigate positive changes at Sky Harbor.
Other projects, like Matthew Moore’s model of a housing subdivision built out of crops, illustrate the way Arizona’s growth is exchanging agriculture for urbanism, prompting strong responses from a local politician, according to Spiak.
“Joan Schaffer, the mayor of Surprise, came to an event we organized at Moore’s family farm. I think she ended up getting a new understanding of the role development is playing in a city known for its agriculture by talking to the people in attendance,” he recalls. “She gave a speech where she talked about urban development and mentioned how she’d like to dedicate a park system to this theory of farms.”
For Vincent Palladino, a senior at Chandler High School, the exhibition helped him see his city in new ways. He remembers seeing photographs by artist Paho Mann of Circle K stores taken over by local businesses. While each storefront reflected the corporate architecture of Circle K, the owners also redesigned the buildings to fit their needs, revealing how unique identities can exist in a mass-produced culture.
“The exhibition made me look closer at the community,” states Palladino. “I used to see those Circle Ks all the time and not pay attention to them, but now every time I drive around Phoenix, I can see the evolution of a community by what gets left behind.”
Palladino and several other students got a chance to use such insights in New American City’s Video Outreach Program – a semester long educational project facilitated by the ASU Art Museum and high schools across Arizona that enabled students to develop video art projects communicating their own ideas about community. Several of these videos were later displayed in a separate presentation at the museum.
To reach even more community members, New American City helped facilitate seven concurrent art exhibitions throughout Phoenix. With the aid of art collectives, local companies, and restaurants that hosted the programs, ASU was able to promote works by other local artists that comment on Arizona’s society. For many artists, this extended collaboration encouraged them to continue sharing their work with the general public.
“ASU went out of their way to publicize our art collective,” raves Kate Timmerman, a mixed-media artist and board member of eye lounge, an artist-run, contemporary art space that fosters emerging and established visual artists in downtown Phoenix. “They inspired us to produce a catalogue of our work and shared a mailing list to people across the United States so we could let them know about the Phoenix art community.”
Other artists feel conversing with the public encouraged them to work more closely with the community on future projects.
“The strongest benefit I got from New American City was the shift in the way I thought about my work and where I wanted to put my work – it had always been for a gallery but now I’d like to shift to larger audiences in exhibitions like New American City,” states artist Paho Mann, who enjoys seeing how his work connects with fields such as urban planning and social geography. “Recently, I was fortunate to be commissioned to do a public art piece for the City of Phoenix in a downtown neighborhood so I’ll be able to see how art can function in a more public space.”
Notably, New American City also provided unique opportunities for several ASU faculty members. Since many of the program’s lectures attracted audiences made of artists, researchers, and diverse community members, ASU faculty who gave talks at such events were able to communicate ideas they would not be able to in other settings.
“My interest is in the relationship between the city and people and how we can improve the city so that it’s a place where people can thrive,” states Nan Ellin, Director of the Urban and Metropolitan Studies Program in the School of Public Affairs, who spoke at the program’s final networking event. “In the past I’ve talked about the role of artists in urban revitalization or the city as a work of art, but because of the diverse audience at New American City, I was able to combine these two topics for the first time.”
Ultimately, both Spiak and Lineberry are pleased with the way university and community members took advantage of the opportunities offered by New American City.
“Artists have a history of creating gathering places where people from all walks of life gather and talk,” states Lineberry, “And in creating New American City, we realized there were local artists who were not only talented, innovative, and ambitious, but also engaged in issues, concerns, and ideas that are part of our societal makeup. So the work in the exhibitions raised great opportunities for conversations about Arizona in strong ways.”
Learn more about the artists and programs featured at New American City by visiting the ASU Art Museum web site.
ASU Team Members:
Community Partners:
Michael Jung, ASU in the Community feature writer
Learn more about how ASU is engaged with the community by visiting ASU in the Community’s Program Database which connects you to a wide variety of specific ASU outreach efforts.
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    Enlarge imageHeather Lineberry and John Spiak, curators of the ASU Art Museum, work closely to design new programs for the museum. The success of New American City has encouraged them to involve other university departments and community organizations in some of their upcoming programs. Photo by Eliza Gregory 
Enlarge imageASU Art Museum affiliates, artists, public officials, and community members talk with Matthew Moore at the Sycamore Farms event, just one of New American City’s ten community outreach events. Visitors got a chance to see Moore Estates, a large-scale model of a housing subdivision Moore built entirely out of crops to show Arizona’s shift from agrarianism to urbanism. Photo by John Spiak. 
Enlarge imageVisitors experience a Noah-like flood through Flooding Phoenix, a piece by artist Dan Collins that projects an eight-minute animation of an exaggerated flood over a topographical model of the Valley to showcase what could happen if changing weather patterns and rising global sea levels transformed Arizona into an inland sea. Photo by Bruce Peterson 
Enlarge imageCommunity members become works of art in Pillars of the Community, a project created by coLAB, the multidisciplinary studio of Matthew and Maria Salenger. Each pillar contains a photograph of an individual from the Phoenix metropolitan area, their living room, and an interview explaining how their living space connects them to the city and defines their character – revealing the pursuit for individuality through personal space. Photo by Bruce Peterson 
Enlarge imageNew American City’s anchoring exhibition at the ASU Art Museum attracted community members from all walks of life – from local politicians to high school students to university researchers. Photo by Daniel Swadene 
Enlarge imageASU printmaking masters student Melissa McGurgan’s More or Less Campaign adopted an interactive approach to art by asking visitors to the ASU Art Museum to write down what they would like to see, hear, or feel more or less of in Phoenix, and then posting the results in the gallery and on the ASU Art Museum web site. Her work challenges audiences to consider the ramifications of choosing more or less of one thing or another. Photo by Bruce Peterson  |
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