My Sweet Tooth for Public Art

Liesel Fenner

We had a variety of best practices covered during our annual Public Art Network (PAN) Blog Salon this week.

Let’s wrap it all up with a major thanks to our ‘lucky’ 13 bloggers who shared their experience and lessons-learned of best practices from across the country.

According to Jimmy LeFlore’s post, we can have cake and eat it, too. If only public art were so easy to produce: mix ingredients, stir, set timer for one hour, ding, it’s done!

And cake baking requires partners as Jessica Cusick espoused, for the creation of all public art ‘Takes a Village!’ However, as Jimmy also said, we can’t eat our cake if we don’t if we go to the (best practices) gym.

Other lessons covered this week included:

• Potential worst practices in the field.
• A reminder to make sure you take care of yourself when working on any aspect of public art projects.
• Artist selection was a big umbrella for the inclusion of lots of ideas on how best to administer the process, including best practices in RFPs.
• The thorny issue of copyright must be addressed in contracts before completion of a project.
• How well pieces will be maintained and conserved is vital. Dare we dictate a de-accessioning date?
• No public art administrator must go it alone.
• Remain connected to the PAN and form a regional group of colleagues in your locale.
• Our networks are how we not only get technical assistance and shore-up support, but it’s the critical lynch-pin in marketing your program and projects. 

In the coming year, the PAN Council will continue to amend and add to our existing Public Art Best Practices documents. As with so much of what we do in the arts, guidelines are a work in progress and require community input from you—public art professionals deeply engaged in this exciting and dynamic practice that drives us to create compelling work for the public sphere.

You could say I’ve always had a ‘sweet tooth’ desire to experience public art. So, keep the work coming! PAN will be here to help make it happen.

(Editor’s Note: Speaking of marketing, don’t forget about our annual Public Art Preconference in Pittsburgh this June and our Public Art Year in Review which will open up for nominations for 2013 at the end of February!)