Ground
Works

Realm of the Dead (“Realm”) is a mixed-media installation performance where the installation can also be given separately as an art exhibit. A blend of social work and arts research, Realm incorporates practice-led, engagement, and design research – visual and performance art practices actively involving both research collaborators and audiences. Grounded in social work research and content, Realm explores my life, the life of an immigrant to the United States who grew up in Brazil at the time of the military dictatorship (1964‒1985). Realm connects social work research content as it explores personal and social consequences of psychosocial issues: grief and loss, gender nonconformity, sexual orientation, and undocumented immigration status. Using critical autoethnography along with visual art and performance, in Realm, I aimed to: (1) excavate my life experiences through self-analysis; (2) develop text and artifacts (assemblage sculptures) representing those experiences, and (3) share the results as performances and art exhibits. Drawing on Popular Education – as advanced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and by Augusto Boal (1932–2009), founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, Realm requires audience participation and fosters social transformation. Realm is based on Marília, a one-person play that was performed on Theater Row New York City where it won the United Solo Festival (2016) Best Documentary Script award. Realm represents the cemetery where Marília, my sister, who died in an accident at the age of three, was buried. Realm is my journey out of a childhood of poverty, sexual trauma, and domestic violence. Arriving undocumented in the United States in 1987, I ultimately built a life as a United States citizen and out, gender non-conforming gay “man.”

ArtPlace America (ArtPlace) was a ten-year collaboration among a number of foundations, federal agencies, and financial institutions that supported the field of creative placemaking – the intentional integration of arts, culture, and community-engaged design strategies into the process of equitable community planning and development. Within this mandate, ArtPlace conducted the “Translating Outcomes” research initiative from 2015 to 2020 – an incremental, segmented approach to building creative placemaking knowledge for and with a diverse range of community development practitioners. Recognizing that comprehensive community development is composed of many professional disciplines, ArtPlace identified ten segments of the field that are often separated out as distinct municipal agencies, university departments, or funding streams: Agriculture & Food, Economic Development, Environment & Energy, Health, Housing, Immigration, Public Safety, Transportation, Workforce Development, and Youth Development. The Translating Outcomes research design took this segmentation as its road map and set out to analyze, make legible, and give language to how arts and cultural practitioners have long been partners in helping to achieve each of these sectors’ goals. For each of the ten sectors, ArtPlace engaged countless partners to conduct research, convene cross-sector working groups, publish field scans, and create resources specific to each sector. The effort was explicitly participatory, designed to elevate the knowledge and expertise of community residents, artists, and community development practitioners through interviews, convenings, and research review. As a hybrid institution straddling funding, policy, advocacy, and grassroots spheres, ArtPlace occupied a unique and privileged platform that allowed it to catalyze multidisciplinary research and action at the scale of this initiative. After providing a review of the published outputs and the work it has seeded in other sectors, I share in the following a reflection on both the conditions required to cultivate such cross-sector communities of practice and the opportunities for further scholarship that may impact vibrant ecologies of research.