The Arts Council of Indianapolis, in partnership with Near East Area Renewal (NEAR), is requesting qualifications from Near Eastside artists who are interested in aesthetically engaging community members and each other to plan community and public space arts projects that help increase public safety in the Rural/10th Street corridors. Four artists will team with four community members and four East District police officers to form a cohort that will train and work together over a period of about 18 months. Each artist will be compensated $13,000 for their part-time work and will receive additional hourly stipends for time in training.
Deadline for Submissions
Monday, December 18, 2017 5:00 p.m. (this is NOT a postmark deadline!)
Informational Workshop (optional)
Tuesday, November 28, 2017 6:00-8:00 p.m. John H. Boner Community Center, 2236 E. 10th St., Indianapolis, IN. A light dinner will be provided. RSVP to Lindsey Lord, llord@indyarts.org
Eligibility Requirements
To qualify, artists and artist teams must:
Artists living, working, or with professional experience in the Indy East Art Peace project area (see photo) are particularly welcome to apply.
Project Context
Until the 1980s, the Near Eastside of Indianapolis was home to middle-class families with good-paying manufacturing jobs. With the decline of this economic sector over the next 25 years, the area faced dwindling community investment, resulting in its current high levels of unemployment and poverty, increased crime, and physical deterioration. In 2012, the community developed the Near East Quality of Life Plan to help guide its future; in 2015, the federal government designated the Indy East Promise Zone as an area with assets and activity that merited special attention from programs designed to improve livability and spur growth. Creative placemaking was identified in both of these plans as a desired approach, to help bring “out of the box” thinking to seemingly entrenched challenges, particularly the type of crime that was keeping the neighborhood from attracting opportunities for jobs and economic growth.
Meanwhile, the East District of the IMPD had identified the area around East 10th and Rural as an area to pay special attention to, due to the number of violent crimes occurring there. With new leadership the department has emphasized the idea of “community policing,” in which the community and law enforcement partner to create a positive physical and social environment that emphasizes problem-solving for prevention rather than reactive arrests. A set of strategies often applied in community policing is Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED), which employs techniques focused on art, architectural design, and the social environment to make a neighborhood more crime-resistant. Many East District officers are CPTED-certified. Other techniques highlight working with youth at risk and those re-entering the community after having been incarcerated.
Indy East Art Peace was created by NEAR and the Arts Council, with support from the City of Indianapolis, to combine these community- and city-based efforts with the creative energy of the arts community, known for its ability to inspire activity that brings community together, to promote positive use of public space, and to look at challenges in a completely unexpected way. The project intends to take advantage of these three different streams of expertise by providing training, guaranteeing compensation, and allowing sufficient planning time, and by bringing together residents, artists, and police officers who can work in productive teams to take action.
Project Area
The project area is shown on the attached map. It is approximately one square mile in the heart of the Near Eastside, and includes portions of six neighborhoods: Brookside, Springdale, Rivoli Park, St. Clair Place, Englewood, and TEAR United. Intersections along Rural St. include E. 10th St., E. Michigan St., E. New York St., and E. Washington St. Activity can take place anywhere within the indicated area.
Project Activities
Creative placemaking is a discipline that brings people, culture, and place together to enhance and support communities as they reach toward their goals. Through Indy East Art Peace, three particular groups of people will work together, each bringing their unique perspectives to the common challenge of public safety to an area where a wide range of people live, work, shop, and play.
Four Near Eastside artists, four residents of the six neighborhoods that are part of the project area, and four East District police officers will form a working cohort for about 18 months. They will all be trained in the disciplines of creative placemaking and CPTED, learning together and meeting regularly for conversations, community walks, and idea sessions.
Four mixed teams, each consisting of one officer, one artist, and one community member, will then propose and test ideas for arts-based projects that will address hyper-local public safety challenges. The teams will present their concepts to the community at large at a “pitch-night” style event in January 2019; the community will select the ideas they like best and the teams will work on creating plans, budgets, and designs to get them ready for funding and implementation.
It is not expected that the artists will come into the project knowing the exact approach they will take: increased familiarity with creative placemaking, CPTED, the project area, the officers and neighbors also participating in the project, and the communities in it will likely drive the nature of the artists’ activity.
In addition to placemaking plans, the project will result in a toolkit so other neighborhoods can engage in similar activities, and a set of metrics designed by professional evaluators to help understand and further direct the positive effect of creative placemaking on crime prevention.
Compensation and Project Budget
The selected artists will each receive a fee of $13,000 for their participation and engagement over the project’s 18-month duration, plus additional compensation of approximately $15/hr for time spent in CPTED and creative placemaking training sessions. For the purposes of compensation, an artist team or artist-based organization will be considered as a single artist and will receive one fee and one training compensation. A small budget is available for materials testing and mock-up prototyping. The required time commitment will be about 6 hours a week, on average. Much of the work will be able to be done according to the participants’ individual availability.
Resources
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), through its Our Town program. For more information on Our Town and the NEA’s approach to creative placemaking, visit https://www.arts.gov/exploring-our-town/
Information about the impact of creative placemaking on public safety can be found in the ArtPlace America/Urban Institute Public Safety Field Scan, downloadable from https://www.artplaceamerica.org/blog/public-safety-beyond-field-scan
Selection Process
Artists may indicate their interest in the project by submitting their professional information and project history according to the requirements listed in this Request for Qualifications. No designs or engagement plans are required as part of the artist’s application materials!
Submitted information will be reviewed by a selection panel, composed of representatives from Near Eastside stakeholders and professional artists, arts advocates, curators, administrators, and other arts and community development specialists. The selected artist group will represent a diversity of life experiences, community perspectives, and artistic approaches.
Selection Criteria
Four artists/teams will be identified, based upon the following criteria:
Project Timeline
This timeline represents the project as it now appears. Changes may be necessary as the project progresses.
Submission Process
Artists must submit the following information digitally:
Delivery of Submissions
All submissions must be received at the Arts Council before 5:00 p.m. (EDT) on Monday, December 18, 2017.
Submissions may be delivered electronically via file transfer link (Dropbox, Box, Hightail, WeTransfer, or similar), or burned to a CD and either mailed or hand-delivered. Due to an inability to accept large attachments, we will not accept emailed submissions. We will not accept directions to a website in lieu of a formal application as outlined above. Submissions time-stamped after 5:00 p.m. on December 18 will not be reviewed.
CDs may be delivered or mailed to:
Arts Council of Indianapolis
Attn: Indy East Art Peace Artists
924 N. Pennsylvania St.
Indianapolis, Indiana 46204-1021
File transfer links must be sent to Julia Moore, jmoore@indyarts.org
For questions and assistance preparing the application, contact Julia Moore, Director of Public Art, Arts Council of Indianapolis:
jmoore@indyarts.org or (317) 531-3301 x240
Indy East Art Peace
Applicant Artist Information Form
Please limit the information provided on this form to one typed page.
Artist Name:
Mailing Address: City/State/ZIP:
Day or Mobile Phone: Evening or Home Phone:
Email Address: Website (if applicable): Twitter handle (if applicable):
Facebook or Instagram page (if applicable):
Please explain the nature of your connection to the Near Eastside.
How do you see this project fitting in with your past work, artistic interests, and experience?
Demographic information
(all questions are optional; if the applicant is a group or organization, please mark as many as apply to the artists who will be participating in the project)
How do you describe your preferred gender identification?
Which of the following categories describe(s) you? (check as many as may apply)
What is your age?
Do you identify as a person with a physical or mental disability?
Are you a veteran of any branch of the U.S. military?
