Art Community Engagement Essay

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Museums, memorial centres and other heritage institutions use various strategies to evoke an emotional response that serves to elicit empathy with the historical events and actors that are portrayed in exhibitions.Speaking from personal observations i have been working at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) for a little over 2 years now. Community engagement and representation is huge in the curation of the gallery. The UICA is one of 11 contemporary art galleries in the nation and opened its doors to the public 40 years ago. It began as a small institution ran by volunteers, who wanted to help nurture a local developing art scene. That nurturing has allowed the institution to double and size, and has also become more rigid in expectations, not only of the institution, but the quality of the art and the narratives they wish to engage in. According to Carol Duncan’s reading, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those who were most interested in art museums, where they were for or against them were but a minority of the educated- mostly poets and artists. in the case of the twenty century, the serious museum audience grew enormously. However, this growth is something, that the art community is still trying to vitalize.

People who do not regularly go to museums, …show more content…

The UICA does this by not housing a terminate gallery. There is a reoccurring gallery show titled Coming Home, where successful artists with a Grand Rapids or Michigan connection have an exhibition space. (as well as other special topic shows)The UICA leads in small led gallery tours, exit space projects that bring artists to the city to paint large scale pieces in the ‘not so pretty’ sides of town, and with Open Projector Night, a small but growing educational and networking opportunity for local and national film makers that share a Michigan

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