About the Boston AIR Program

The Boston Artist-InResidence Program (AIR) asks how the work of Boston city departments can be more responsive to the needs, life experiences, and imaginations of its many communities and residents.

As creators, community organizers, teachers, and cultural strategists, artists can be intermediaries between government staff and community members who are all striving for a more just and vibrant city.

AIR is a 15-month residency that embeds artists in a City department with a City partner to collaboratively research, strategize, and create in that Department. It offers a program on civic art practice, a cohort to learn with, funding for materials, and a stipend.

Artists bring their creative approaches and artistic expertise, while the City partners act as subject matter experts and bring their experience working in City systems. Together, they create a community-engaged project that tests more caring approaches to City processes, policies, and practices, while making space to explore entrenched problems and improve City services for people most underserved and underestimated.

This year, the Program included a participatory action research artist-in-residence for the first time, in an effort to evaluate the work of the program to date and potential opportunities for the program in the future.

How do you evaluate artistic collaborations in City government?

From the public health field, a tiered evaluation model helps us see the different levels of intervention. We propose an art-City intervention evaluation model that is rooted relationships and presence.

CO-PRODUCING AN INTERVENTION

What are you making? How is it received by its audiences & is it effective? Does it change perception, reframe questions, energize action or choices that advance social justice and civic life?

Practicing Artistic Collaboration

Are you trying and learning? Are you showing up and following through for your partner? Are you climbing your own learning curve and making space to listen

The Artist Is Present

The presence of an artist-in-residence in City government, as a paid artist job, is already a new social arrangement that can inspire change. Are you present with the people, building trusting relationships, learning, asking perhaps deeply to your artist / City partner and their working style? Are you open to trusting, periods of ambiguity, and pivoting? uncomfortable questions? Are you listening, open to teaching, setting boundaries?