Ground
Works

"Forms of Freedom" was a two-year participatory research project that explored how Black and Indigenous creative collectives evolve to sustain themselves over time. To explore this question, we invited members of three collectives to assemble for visitation, reflection, skill, and idea exchange sessions over a nine-month period, and over Zoom, due to the global pandemic. These collectives were Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths, Fire in Little Africa/The Space Program, and The Aadizookaan. Months later as the pandemic receded, we reassembled these collectives for a People's Sound Studio collaboration in New York City. The People’s Sound Studio was an opportunity to create together in person, practicing in public how we move, sound, organize, and collectivize in the now. Our assembly was held by care and familiarity among us as convenors and among our collaborators, sharing genuine desire to strengthen existing connections, deepen the love, and expand solidarities across new relations. We understood this assembly as a minor experiment in Black study (Harney & Moten, 2013), one that emphasized aesthetic performance. This exploration generated a shared archive of materials from participants and ourselves as artist-organizers: ritual performance scripts, sound compositions, conversation recordings, voice memos, video montages, in situ practices, photographs, and beadwork. We assembled these creations into an ensemble, an apparatus of movements suspended in time by digital space (www.formsoffreedom.com). This ensemble provides multivocal, incommensurable performances propelled from the initial research question.

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.