Community and Participatory Art

Why can participating in community art can produce positive outcomes:


Being seen
Having a Voice
Problem Solving


Participatory art can bridge the gap between production and consumption.  "Participatory arts agendas have focused on creative production and active engagement in the consumption of art associated with a range of fine and applied practices alongside a focus on ‘widening participation’ to encourage artistic expression from more excluded social groups." (Clements 2011).

Does an average group of elementary age children count as an excluded social group? Often in today's society the voices of the 'excluded' social groups become so loud the 'average' actually becomes equivalent with the unseen. These children will grow up to be tomorrow's handlers of society.  I'm interested to see what they will produce with the voice of photography.


"The suggestion of the term participant is that the person has an active role in the creation of the work of art, whereas the truth of much participatory contemporary art is that the participant simply becomes the medium for the artist to express whatever it is he or she is expressing. " (Street, cited in Clements 2011)

Create an atmosphere of dialogue and encourage self-directed learning by turning passive audiences (in this case children) into active subjects (Clements 2011) .

Take the children from

Consumers,
to Collaborators
and finally Producers of art.


Visual literacy is a child first language. 





CLEMENTS, Paul. 2011. 'The Recuperation of Participatory Arts Practices.' International Journal of Art and Design Education.  30(1) 18-30.

Shaw, W. (2009) Antony Gormley and Snobbery (online). Available at: www.artsandecology. rsablogs.org.uk/2009/03/24/antony-gormleyand-snobbery (accessed 8th July 2009)