Keynote Lecture of “The Art of Community “ by Dr. Theron Schmidt’s, recorded live at the ICAF NEW MKRS Festival’23 in Islemunda, Rotterdam.
Community art often engages with an existing community in order to undertake a creative expression of its identity or represent challenges that the selected community faces. But in doing so, it also makes community, and reveals that community is not something that exists in a fixed way in the world but is always made through processes of identification and representation. Indeed, alongside whatever art that is made, the first thing that community art makes is the community itself. What can community art learn from other approaches to intentional group formation, such as from social movements and collective activism? And, just as importantly, how can creative methods of community art invite us to think more expansively about how we might gather together, whether or not that is an a specifically “artistic” context?