Studio: "One Place After Another"

Mary Jane Jacob was an art activist for the city of Chicago. In 1993, she and a local organization team brought art to a public space that allowed passerby's to engage with the art across the city that acted as the canvas. A wide range of art events was celebrated in the streets; parades and block party festivities, creating a candy bar, fundraisers for HIV/AID and tents filled with artists doing demonstrations. Spectators were neglected from the chance to really interact and understand the creative and skilled process of making art. The articles claims that, "In fact, Jacobs desire to shift the role of the viewer from passive spectator to active art-maker became one of the central goals of 'Culture in Action'" that began a widespread concept for similar public art installations of "similar scale and ambition". This gave national artists the ability to design and install art installations with no intervention from outside architects/ artists. It is important for individual artists to express and direct themselves throughout their project's process and to encounter problems and overcome them. The artist's mentioned in the article tend to gravitate towards mundane places to showcase their work and address everyday issues. This builds a relationship of engagement between the artist and the audience that potentially could be the artwork. New genre public art is a visual art that uses both traditional and nontraditional media to communicate and interact with and is now receiving a broader cultural acceptance, "...critics now register their desire to better serve and engage the public, to further close the gap between art and life, by expressing a deep dissatisfaction with site specificity" (108).
"'In 'Culture of Action', however, the artists' projects refer not primarily to sites, but to social issues that are of common concern to the artists and to the communities in which they have chosen to work'" (109). These sites display the artists interpretation of the social issues and how the transformation of the physical location brings positivity and impact the lives of the community. The spaces celebrate and give them social visibility and political power.