Social Arts
The social arts of co-creation include many art forms that support people to see themselves and engage more intensely in changing the patterns that limit development. These are art forms that invite collective engagement, deepen relationships, ignite activism, and strengthen courage to move toward fresh possibilities. These resources illustrate a wide range of social art applications that include the visual arts, story quilts and story telling, artifact making, Social Presencing Theater, community engagement through art making, and other art forms.
Social Arts Have A Part
The social arts bring vitality to our social change work. Participatory art forms strengthen and deepen our relationships in the making of more inclusive spaces. The social arts help awaken our imagination and move us toward inspired creative action. Here are some resources related to bringing the social arts into our work.
Journey to the Beloved Community
A two year “social arts” collaboration between the Chatham Savannah Citizen Advocacy Office and the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia makes visible the arts of social change; the creative work of doing justice by those who use creativity and the arts to engage people in strengthening right relationships.
Urban Innovations
Illuminating the co-creation of countless neighborhood opportunities for people to step into valued roles and memberships. This profile illustrates a pattern of community building that generates an astonishing array of ways for people to experience inclusion: to belong and contribute.
Social Presencing Theater
Social Presencing Theatre (SPT) encourages people to see and sense current reality and possible futures of a social system. Arawana Hayashi and Beth Mount have co-created these theater performances to reveal ways that people with disabilities, elders and their organizations are “stuck” in old ways, and then make true moves toward expanded possibilities.