Artists energize places. But how? And for how long?

Over 19 days, beginning on September 19, more than 300,000 people will saunter through the center of Grand Rapids, Michigan—enjoying, judging, and responding to art works and arts activities spread across a three-square-mile area.

The visitors—from Michigan and in some instances far beyond—will vote for the pieces they like the most. They’ll get acquainted, or reacquainted, with what this Midwestern city of 189,000 people has to offer. And they’ll leave approximately $15 million behind—in revenue for restaurants, shops, hotels, and other enterprises.

Grand Rapids’ ArtPrize, an open competition now in its fourth year, has become one of America’s most notable local programs aimed at enticing a broad population to interact with art, in venues benefiting selected geographic areas.

Connections between art and place are increasingly on the minds of artists, urbanists, and economic developers. These links are being nurtured in communities throughout the US, thanks to a multitude of local organizations and to ArtPlace, a national program that awarded its first grants, totaling $11.5 million, in June and July of 2011.

“What every mayor wants to do is create opportunities for people in his city, opportunities for people to prosper,” says Carol Coletta, who organized ArtPlace after six years as director of CEOs for Cities. Art and artists bring vibrancy to a place, Coletta believes. And vibrancy does good things for a block, a neighborhood, a downtown—and its inhabitants.

A “citywide conversation”

Grand Rapids’ ArtPrize is probably the most generously funded of the programs that integrate art and place. Rick DeVos, an heir to the Amway fortune, founded the Michigan initiative in 2009, helping, as Mark Stryker wrote in the Detroit Free Press, to jump-start “a citywide conversation about art—in the town square and cyberspace—in ways impossible to reproduce in a museum or gallery.”

During ArtPrize’s nearly three-week burst of activity, anyone who has a property in downtown Grand Rapids is authorized to turn the space into a venue and to invite artists to put on displays or performances there. This year, 1,517 artists will compete for prizes of $5,000 to $200,000, awarded by popular vote. Another $200,000 in prizes will be awarded by professional jurors. Curators take over vacant buildings, J. Bennett Rylah wrote last October in Metropolis Magazine. “Sculptures start appearing on street corners, in parks, in storefront windows.”

Urban design consultant Jeff Speck served as a juror one year, and thinks “it is exactly the right sort of intervention at the right time to change the public’s perception of a downtown that is making a real comeback.” Says Speck: “The event gives tourists and locals alike an opportunity to enjoy an increasingly walkable downtown that some of them have not visited in many years. They come for the art, but they will come back for the urbanism.”

“I was involved very peripherally in the project’s conception,” Speck says. “One question we faced was whether to scatter the art throughout the city or keep it all in the downtown core. The funders were quick to realize that ArtPrize would have a more profound impact if it was all accessible by foot in the walkable center of the city.”

An analysis found that last year’s ArtPrize program generated an economic impact of $15.4 million. The long-term effects, however, are difficult to pin down precisely.

Sharon Evoy, executive director of the Grand Rapids Downtown Alliance, a business improvement district, says “there’s more energy in downtown Grand Rapids than there used to be.” Through ArtPrize, “people find out how to access the downtown, and they engage the downtown—eating at the restaurants, going to cultural institutions.” On the other hand, she acknowledges, “it’s hard to say what [businesses] came in specifically as a result of ArtPrize.”

Measuring vibrancy

Gaining a clearer sense of the impact of art and artists on conditions at the neighborhood level is one of the things Joe Cortright, principal economist for Impresa in Portland, Oregon, is now trying to do. Cortright has been commissioned by ArtPlace to develop “”vibrancy indicators” that measure the effects of artistic endeavors on a place. He is looking at three main kinds of indicators: people, activity, and changes in real estate value.

Cortright hopes to accomplish two things:

• First, devise an evaluation tool that ArtPlace can use—one that would determine whether there are measurable changes over time.

• Second, provoke interest in the idea of vibrancy—get people in other realms interested in it.
“Discerning cause and effect is really challenging,” he admits. “There are a lot of variables out there.” Nonetheless, a key fact, in his view, is that “art is a socially embedded thing; it’s connected to the community in which it takes place.”

To get a better understanding, he says, “We want to encourage a lot of experimentation out there.”

Economic integration

Coletta thinks that one of the ways in which artistic activity can benefit a lagging place is by bringing people of differing income and education levels together. In doing that, art can foster greater economic integration and help lift a community up, she believes.

This May, ArtPlace, which is supported by several foundations, awarded its second round of grants: $15.4 million for 47 projects in 33 communities, from rural to small town to big city. Among the projects that ArtPlace presents as case studies are these:

• “Swarm Street,” an installation of interactive lighting along an eight-mile bicycle and pedestrian path that will connect the residents of Indianapolis to five cultural districts and every major art, cultural, heritage, sports, and entertainment venue in downtown. 

• “Art & Culture Temporiums” in Washington, DC. In four of the city’s “emerging creative neighborhoods,” vacant or underused storefronts and empty lots are transformed into artist showcases for three to six months. The first such “temporium,” called LUMEN8 Anacostia, brought performance art to languishing sites and provided illumination of streets in Anacostia, a poor, predominantly African-American neighborhood, said Kimberly Driggins, Washington’s associate director for citywide planning, during an arts forum sponsored by the  Municipal Art Society in New York in April.

• Anpetu Was’te Cultural Arts Market in Minneapolis. A drab area around the Franklin Light Rail Station, in a neighborhood that’s said to have the nation’s densest concentration of American Indians, will add space for artist vendors, public art, food trucks, performances, and gathering spaces.

• “CreateHere” in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In December 2007, a 24-hour festival known as MainX24 was launched on Main Street and in the adjacent, dangerous Southside residential area. The event has since grown to have 5,000-plus participants and 80 events per year.

“Next, CreateHere relocated 27 artists to the five-neighborhood area surrounding Main Street using a $15,000 forgivable mortgage tool called ArtsMove,” ArtPlace reports. “This initiative resulted in more than $4 million in residential real estate activity.” Through a cross-disciplinary grants program called MakeWork, 85 creative individuals received $665,000 worth of funds and training in marketing, business skills, and a networking. Partly as a result, Southside now boasts 17 galleries and studios.
ArtPlace grants are organized into categories such as “Using Art to Accelerate Transit Oriented Development,” “Using Art to Spark Redevelopment,” and “Integrating Art and Design into Creative Citymaking.”

At the forum in New York, Kevin Stolarick, who has worked with “creative class” thinker Richard Florida at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, said many government officials have a simplistic attitude along the lines of: “Get some gays, a bike path or two, and some arts projects, and we’ll solve our problem.” Stolarick said revitalization is not as easy as that. “Now that the times are not so good,” advocates need to prove the worth of their techniques, he said. “We need to measure the impact.”

Stolarick held up the capital city of Texas as a model, saying, “Austin doesn’t have the SOBs [symphony, opera, ballet]” but is “funding the ‘street corner strange.’” His metaphor: Use a shotgun, not a rifle, because there are no “silver bullet ideas” that guarantee success.

“It takes 100 little things,” he declared. “A lot of them will fail, but others will succeed.”