Watch Your Artists Grow Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

May 13 2021

Location: 

Great Bend, Kansas

For the past 20 years, Great Bend school district art teachers have been letting their students collaborate on an art project at the Barton County Historical Society Museum. This year, they will ground their efforts in working together to make a mural. Their teachers are trying to instill the fact that art builds community, as it has here for the past two decades.

External sources: 

https://www.gbtribune.com/news/local-news/students-share-art-dreams-community/
Posted by nahlahabdur on May 13 2021

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Activates (people)Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
Does nothing (at all)Doesn't really have an impact, beyond possibly expressing the artist-activist's dissatisfaction with the world.
OtherHelps bring about change in a way not accounted for in the options above. Please describe how it does this in the text box below.
Provides (a useful service)Provides a useful social service.
Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.
Sustains (change)Support and celebrate change that has already been won and needs to be sustained.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
Building community through a decades long annual tradition of middle school art students collaborating on making something for their hometown.

Notes

Not effective in anything specifically, but helps students connect with themselves, one another, and their community.