Public Art Commission

Salem Public Art Commission 98 Washington Street Salem, Massachusetts 01970 (978) 619-5685 KIMBERLEY DRISCOLL MAYOR Public Art Commission February 28, 2023, 6:00pm Meeting held remotely via zoom MEETING MINUTES Note: All proposals, presentations, and/or documentation to be reviewed and discussed at this meeting can be viewed online at the following link: https://bit.ly/SalemPACProposals • Meeting called to order at 6:12 pm. • Roll Call PAC: John Andrews, Janine Liberty, Carly Dwyer-Naik & Gwen Rosemond in attendance. The Public Art Commission welcomes new member James Bostick. Absent: Norene Gachignard. • Meeting Minute Approvals o January 17, 2023 Meeting Minutes- John entertained a motion, Janine made a motion to approve the meeting minutes, Gwen seconded. Motion carried unanimously. ● Making it Public Temporary Sculpture & Vote On Monday, February 13, 2023 a team of 4 community members gathered as our Artist Review Committee to review the 15 eligible applications received in response to the City’s “Making it Public Temporary Interactive Public Art” Call for Artists. From these 15 submissions, 3 were identified to move forward as finalists. Those finalists were Donna Dodson, Roberley Ann Bell, Ange Sarno. Following interviews conducted with all finalists, the Artist Jury/Review Committee is recommending the selection of artists Donna Dodson & Andy Moerlien, “The Myth Makers” for this grant award. The two artists create larger than life bird like structures out of bamboo and zip ties. The structures are interactive with archways and windows giving kids access to playing around the sculptures. Their proposal includes multiple owl sculptures built onsite at Patton Park which gives the potential for community engagement as well. As stated previously, this was the winning recommendation from the Artist Review Committee, and voting and discussion is needed in order to move forward with this grant. John entertained a motion to approve Donna Dodson as the recipient of the Making it Public sculpture grant. Gwen moved. Carly seconded. Motion passed unanimously.  Janine asked about the timeline for installation. The artists will be installing the piece beginning April 3rd, continuing about five or six days. Janine also asked about creating examples of excellent online submissions for future applicants. Can this submission be classified and used as an example for future applicants? And are there any takeaways from this discussion that will help for next time? Julie answered that there already are a few good examples posted on the website, Ana Dugan and another previous submission was used as quality examples, but it doesn’t hurt to update the website with other examples. Julie called upon John for his thoughts on the process as she is always open for input. John believed the process to be very thorough, especially having various community members with different roles and experiences to offer their thoughts and input. John’s only gripe was that the artistic part of the process seemed to be skipped over because of other types of questions and input. He felt that after the review, he wasn’t sure if the committee thought the piece was cool. He questioned if he had stated to the committee and the artist that he liked the look of the submission. John commented that the submissions that made their way to the top were interesting and deserved to be investigated further. He didn’t think that anything impacted the results of the top submissions or the process. In the future, to question the panel on the way that the submission made them feel would evoke more discussion and make sure everyone is on the same page. Jim asked about the reasoning for the location of the sculptures. He is concerned as a neighbor of the park knowing that there are already 5 trees there and limited space. Julie said that the artist will be meeting onsite with her and the DPS crew and is willing to relocate if need be. This was one of the parks that the PAC had recommended as part of the call as “away from the downtown area”. Julie will be meeting onsite prior to talking with Park and Rec and calling Digsafe to make sure that the pieces that they envisioned will work in that space. Jim commented that there is a lot of family traffic, commuter traffic and says that it will be a great addition to that space. ● Lynn Music Foundation Performance Proposal and Arts Fest Proposal for Funding This is a proposal for the use of the remaining funds received through outreach by City staff to intentionally seek diversified programing. PAC can decide on the exact timing of when we would like to see these happen. We could also decide that we would like to do this for the April/Spring activation and use the other $5,000 for additional/different performances. Serendipitously, Kylie Sulivan has reached out to the PAC about exploring funding for a mentorship program relating to Arts Fest and Salem High. Kylie had been denied funding by the Salem Cultural Council for funding a mentorship program between a student at Salem High that was interested in public art, and had asked the PAC to possibly fund. The PAC has $5,000 unallocated funds to use up by June 30th, 2023. The proposal would be to allocate $5,000 to the Lynn Music Foundation for spring activations in April and May for a series of three performances. The second proposal is to allocate the remaining funds in downtown activations to the art project to augment the opportunity for a stipend to be paid to a young artist as a mentor and to support the young public arts  membership program and ultimately community art. John commented that there are local creators that could utilize the support and funding but he believes that we can have that conversation with the organizer to make sure that we are incorporating Salem specific performers as well since Salem doesn’t have this type of program. He commented on the community art project that there is a very interesting conversation happening with a specific community artist that we have worked with previously. Many community art programs have come to the conclusion that no one really has the budget or funding through the Arts Festival to truly compensate the community artists as much as we would want. The question that came out of the conversation was “Can we foster and prepare young artists with mentorship, support and understanding instead of relying on a professional to do it at a discount? Can we work with a young artist to create a mentorship for a youth community artist?” Jim asked if the Lynn Music Foundation only worked with Lynn based performers. John answers that they’ll create programming with some of the folks that they already work with. If they do an open mic night and we know someone who leans into hip-hop specifically, from Salem, they will absolutely work with them, provided that they are engrossed in the genre. John entertained a motion to approve $5000 from the spring downtown activations budget to approve funding the Salem Arts Festival Community Arts Project. Moved by Carly and Seconded by Janine. Carly and Janine both voiced their concern with the way in which these proposals were acquired, feeling like we are playing a game of “insider baseball” as we know and have worked with these organizations or people previously and they know how the PAC works. Julie reminds the PAC that we had previously discussed working with organizations to diversify programming that was happening and having a more robust partnership with Arts Fest. Julie had purposefully reached out to Lynn Music Foundation based on previous PAC meeting conversations around diversifying community programming and supporting activities that were already happening in a more meaningful way. There is currently a call out for reviewing individual project proposals for the March Meeting. John entertained a motion to approve $5,000 to fund the Lynn Music Foundation’s proposal this Spring for three events. Moved by Janine. Seconded by Carly. Motion carried unanimously. ● Public Art Work Plan Updates - Making it Public Temp Sculpture Project was voted on and approved tonight, so next step Julie will be following up with Parks and Rec to get an approval for installation in April. - Rotating sculpture garden has been approved for Leslie’s Retreat. Because of the amount of activations being installed in April, we may want to push some of the spring activations back to May to have it spread out a little more. - Charlotte Forten Memorial Project- Julie has secured all of the funding for the project with a huge thank you to Tom Daniel and our team at the planning department for finding the grants to fund the project. A $30,000 grant has also been secured by Julie for implementation for this sculpture. A draft before the March meeting to review the call for artists to see if it’s hitting all the value marks to approve the content for soliciting the creation of a life sized bronze statue in the likeness of Charlotte Forten herself implemented in her namesake park. - CLC mural project has been completed- Ana Dugan has completed her huge, all encompassing, wrap  around mural down at the Community Life Center last week, If you have not had a chance to view it, it is strongly recommended. She did a wonderful job. John has acquired pictures of the mural completion in process, and will send them over to Julie. Lots of positive feedback from community members praising her work. - Winter Activations- We sponsored $2,000 to Salem So Sweet for live window paintings from two local artists. - Arts Row- Tenants will be opening their doors in May. Claudia is the new public artist in residence. - Gifts of Art policy- has not been touched as the office has been very busy, but Julie is confident that the new policy will be available for March’s meeting to be reviewed. - Vacancies to the PAC- We have two chairs open, and postings were put on the Salem website. Please spread the word for new PAC members. - RFP for Charlotte Forten Park Activations- Ongoing activations they are looking for someone to engage with the space full time (besides October) The hope is that the space gets activated and engaged frequently. It does not preclude programming that is already in place. RFP should be out soon. - Shade structure at CFP is also currently in the works. - Old Town Hall: We are looking to do more programming and call for artists to populate and build out the programming in that space, creating different opportunities and projects for that space for groups to engage. ● Other Business- The Nathaniel Bowditch statue that is on Artists Row is going to be disposed of, if you know anybody that may want the wood to reach out otherwise the statue will be scrapped early next week. Nathaniel has been the victim of very aggressive squirrels, and no longer has a face. ● Public Comments- None ● Adjourn- John motioned to adjourn. Moved by Janine, seconded by Gwen. Meeting Adjourned at 7:17 pm. 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