And Then What?...Measuring the Audience Impact of Community-Based Public Art

Audience response has been identified in recent years as a key issue in public art, as many assessments of public art’s value are based on assumptions about the “public's” undocumented or anecdotal responses to the artwork. Community-based public art organizations tend to have the clearest social or educational goals for public art, but tend to evaluate their projects mostly according to short-term impact on participants.  Is there such thing as an “audience” for this artwork, and if so, how do we know that the art is engaging audiences? Through interviews with a wide range of organizations that produce community-based public art, I found that most have goals for reaching audiences. A few organizations have undertaken audience response or neighborhood impact studies, but these have tended to be too time and resource-intensive for most arts organizations. In addition, audience response to public art must be evaluated on a project-by-project basis and it is difficult to make generalizations about best practices.  I did identify trends in which types of organizations tend to value audience response most highly, and which are best equipped to conduct audience impact research. Based on these trends, I chose to conduct a qualitative audience response study on a series of murals created in partnership by Weeksville Heritage Center and Groundswell Community Mural Project, organizations with clear target audiences and goals for reaching audiences. I found that not only did this research provide valuable insights about the impact of the public art, it demonstrated that audience response research does not have to be seen as a burden for most public art organizations, but should instead be thought of as one of many possible tools to engage audiences with the artwork and ideally, with other arts and social service opportunities.