The Curating Cities Database is looking to expand its global coverage of eco-public art projects and invites submissions from researchers, curators and creative practitioners who are engaged with this dynamic area of artistic practice.
The database has been developed as a resource for all those interested in public art, including specialists and the broader community. Generally, we interpret public art as a creative art form produced for non-gallery contexts (exceptionally, it may include gallery exhibitions with an explicit external engagement focus). We define “eco-sustainability” to signify an evident interest in ecological, sustainable and/or environmental concerns. It is not our intent to police the definition of eco-sustainable public art: we are keen to include work that challenges definitions and expectations. As a general indication, we are interested in substantial work that actively engages with its environmental context (rather than in work that merely represents or symbolises an environmental concern).
We invite interested authors to email [email protected] with details of the project they would like to submit to the database. The database entries should be concise but go beyond the short profiles readily available on other sites. To that end, authors will be provided with a template and guidelines designed to elicit key information regarding the circumstances of an artwork’s production. Recognising that public art is not always well served by bureaucracies, entries may also record useful information on external constraints and how these were negotiated. All submissions are peer-reviewed.
Contributors are welcome to profile their own work, either by evaluating their own project or by referencing a larger study or thesis written by them on the same subject. We also invite academics that research and teach in this area to encourage student submissions. We are happy for the template to be used for course assessment exercises and can confer with lecturers regarding the process by which a batch of entries from a class can be peer reviewed/considered for inclusion in the database.
Editorial Committee
Jill Bennett, Felicity Fenner, Lindsay Kelley, Veronica Tello, Laura Fisher, Alison Groves
Sustainability Consultant: Jodi Newcombe
International Advisory Committee
T.J Demos (University College London), William L. Fox (Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada), Ian Garrett (York University/Director of the Center for Sustainable Practice), Natalie Jeremijenko (New York University/Director of the Environmental Health Clinic), Sacha Kagan (Leuphana University Lüneburg/Founder of Cultura21, Network for Cultures of Sustainability and the International Summer School of Arts and Sciences for Sustainability in Social Transformation), Adrian Parr (University of Cincinnati)
This database has been developed by the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at COFA, UNSW (Sydney, Australia) in association with the City of Sydney and Carbon Arts as part of the Australian Research Council linkage project Curating Cities.
