As I described in my January 2012 article “Public Art and the Challenge of Evaluation,” however, gathering reliable data on a public artwork’s impact at the audience and neighborhood level is difficult. When I first started researching this topic as a graduate student in 2007, interviews with leaders in the field indicated that little was being done to document how many people experience a work of public art, or their responses to it. Similarly, little effort was put toward providing interpretive materials that might enhance visitor understanding or participation. Such endeavors were seen as too costly and complex for most organizations.

Today, just six years later, web and mobile technologies offer new learning opportunities for organizations and audiences alike. Myriad interactive public art websites, social media platforms, podcasts, mobile audio tours, and smartphone apps allow people to easily find, learn about, and interact with public artworks. These tools bring comprehensive images and information literally to users’ fingertips. Can they also provide valuable information on public art’s audience, telling a broader story about public art’s community impact? Can they help us evaluate as well as promote and explain public art?

Through interviews with public art organizations innovating with interactive technology, close analysis of several organizations’ social media pages and online photo albums, and my own experience curating the FIGMENT sculpture garden, I discovered that it is difficult to evaluate the impact of public art itself on audiences apart from the impact of the engagement tools. Yet while not a substitute for more formal research techniques like audience surveys, these tools can play an important role in the evaluation process if used to their fullest potential.

How and why is interactive technology currently used to engage people with public art?

Information-sharing online

Increasingly sophisticated public art websites help people virtually experience public art. Most public art administrators seem to agree that documenting and sharing completed public art online is important to generate interest and funding for new programs, and to enhance public art tourism and appreciation in a region. Over 80% of respondents to a 2012 survey and focus group conducted by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF)’s Public Art Archive (PAA), reaching 60 public art collections nationwide, reported that they have put at least part of their public art collections online, or plan to do so in the future.

Screen shot of a sample collection from PAA. PAA’s mission is “to provide a sophisticated, free, online, searchable [web and mobile] database of public art in the United States and Canada.” PAA puts all types of public art collections online and now hosts works from over 250 collections across the U.S and Canada.

Web technologies also allow public art organizations, like museums, to set up online “curated” public art tours; close-up explorations of specific artworks; lesson plans (as seen on the New York City Public Art for Public Schools “teacher” section and an increasing number of other public art sites); and interactive quizzes and activities, each with robust audio and video components.

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program (MAP)’s website has online mural tours organized by themes like food, social justice, or black history. MAP’s site exemplifies the trend of, in the words of Philadelphia’s Association for Public Art (aPA) director Penny Balkin Bach, having “authentic voices… people from all walks of life who are personally connected to the [public art].” aPA and MAP both offer downloadable public art tours narrated by artists, curators, civic leaders and community members.

Philadelphia Mural Arts Program’s Mural Explorer allows viewers to zoom in to murals like the above Heart of Baltimore Avenue by David Guinn, and click on each “character” in the mural for a related video. Source: http://explorer.muralarts.org/#/mural/heart_of_baltimore

Information-sharing at public art sites

While online public art tours allow the art-curious to have multi-sensory experiences with art from all over the world without leaving their homes, mobile tours put information at the fingertips of those who incidentally encounter public art on site. Many public art organizations give walking, bike or bus tours of their collections. However, scheduled tours often require a fee to participate and do not necessarily engage “the spontaneous viewer [who] typically has not planned ahead, paid a museum admission, or signed up in advance for a cultural tour” (in the words of Penny Balkin Bach).

QR codes, links, or phone numbers on physical signage at public art sites can direct passersby to download or dial for more information on a particular public art piece, locate additional art nearby, and, in the case of apps like Kentucky’s Take it ArtSide! Museum Without Walls, locate other cultural tourism activities in the area.

An ongoing project of professor Christine Huskisson of the University of Kentucky and her students, Take it Artside! pinpoints different public art locations around the state, and provides data on cultural institutions, gallery walks, and arts events. The app has several game features: visitors can earn points based on the art sites they “check in” to, and track their fitness routines through an ArtFit game that integrates public art into workouts.

Promoting social interactions and dialogue

In contrast to websites and mobile platforms that house comprehensive archives on public art, social media and photo-sharing platforms can promote ongoing dialogue and activity around the artwork. These sites help public art organizations keep their followers informed about both the art and other related content. For example, NYC-based community mural organization Groundswell often posts articles related to the social justice issues or community organizations depicted in its murals on its Facebook page. Social media also invites visitor-uploaded content (more on this below).

These virtual archives, tours, and apps clearly provide the public art visitor more information about public art—but how can we use those same technologies to learn more about the visitor, and ultimately evaluate the public art itself?  It is first worth looking at previous efforts to capture and quantify audience response to public art.

How have public art’s audiences traditionally been studied?

Art historian Harriet Senie has long considered the question of how to study people’s reactions to and behaviors around public art. Each semester, her students at City College of New York are assigned to do a “public art watch.” Every student selects one artwork to study over the course of a school semester, at different times of the day and week, using the following research methods:

• Observation of people’s behavior at public art sites
• Surveys of random passersby in front of public art, through open-ended interview questions such as “Do you know the purpose and significance of the artwork?”, “Have you noticed it before?” and “What do you think of the work?

Similar evaluation laboratories have been conducted by a handful of arts organizations in recent years, usually in partnership with universities or independent researchers. For example, Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program and researchers at the Yale School of Medicine are undertaking a rigorous program evaluation of MAP’s Porch Light Initiative, which uses mural-making to achieve public health objectives in target communities.  Trained volunteers conduct interviews with random community members at each completed mural, offering transit tokens as an incentive.  In a spring 2012 study by the Arlington Arts Council, a group of graduate students interviewed passersby at public art sites to determine their interest in and preferences for future public art.

In late 2012, the New York City Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Urban Art Program conducted onsite interviews and online surveys to gauge public interest in this nearly five-year-old public art program and advocate for its continuation into a new mayoral administration. DOT required a dedicated manager to oversee the project and train volunteers in conducting the on-site interviews.

Purely observational studies can also yield meaningful results. In the June 2012 issue of Public Art Dialogue, urban design professor and researcher Quentin Stevens details his “empirical observations of [Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial] and visitors’ [often inappropriate] actions around it”—i.e. climbing, striking silly poses, smoking or drinking at the memorial. Stevens observed people’s behavior under different daylight and weather conditions throughout 25 different visits in May and July 2006. This “50 hours of discreet observation…yielded 5000 photographs and 200 video segments documenting the actions of many hundreds of individual visitors.” Stevens concluded that a majority of visitors were perhaps missing the artist’s intent, and ignoring instructional signage nearby.

Interviews and observation require specialized training and sufficient on-site presence to reach a good number of respondents. These methods work well in academic environments or targeted case studies, but are not practical for most arts organizations to implement on a regular basis. Furthermore, they work best when organizations can easily identify both specific audiences to target and specific outcomes to measure using accepted methodologies in a given field. However, many organizations do not know where to begin in identifying such outcomes and indicators, and may not have a need for such in-depth evaluation on an ongoing basis anyway. Still, they might benefit from collecting some kind of visitor feedback after each completed project or across many projects over time. This feedback might start to hint at some possible outcomes and indicators that could eventually direct a more structured study. Can the interactive technologies described earlier, many of which have components that collect users’ responses and track their behaviors, serve this function while simultaneously engaging audiences in dialogue with the artwork itself?

The goals of public art projects and organizations vary widely, as do their definitions of “audience” or “public” (for the sake of this article, I am using the two terms interchangeably). However, there are certain common research questions that typically drive studies of permanent or long-term public art installations:

1. WHO are the audiences of public art? What are their demographics? Are they already involved in the arts? What is their reason for visiting a public art site?

2. HOW MANY people stop and notice the public art/take an interest in it during a given time frame? Does this vary according to factors like time of day or season?

3. WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK of public art? Do they like and identify with it? Do they want to see more public art?

4. WHAT DO PEOPLE KNOW about public art? Do they understand its meaning or significance?  Do they want to learn more?

5. WHAT DO PEOPLE DO with public art? For example, is it a meeting place, a backdrop for photos?  Do people interact with an artwork in the way intended by the artist/organization? How does the public art impact the public’s experience of an overall site?

6. WHAT DO PEOPLE DO AS A RESULT of public art experiences? For example, are they inspired to find out more about related topics, programs, or places? Do they engage in commercial activity in a given region? Do they recommend the public art to friends?

7. WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT? What type of public art would they like to see most in the future, and what types do they favor over others?

What can we research through interactive media?

In researching this article, I have sought to discover the potential of interactive tools and new technologies to help answer the above questions. So far, they seem most effective at the following:

Tracking the number (and demographics) of users of the tools themselves

Most public art websites and apps have built-in systems such as Google Analytics which track how many people visit in a given time period, which pages get the most traffic, and how people are referred to the sites. Mobile app vendors such as iTunes track number of downloads, while phone companies keep a count of callers. aPA’s Penny Balkin Bach recently reported over 50,000 “audience engagements” with public art via the organization’s Museum Without Walls website, mobile app, and phone tours. Such metrics have assisted in securing funding for Phase II of the project, which will add more artworks and tours.

The fact that “about 90% of aPA’s callers listen through to the end of an audio” is considered strong evidence that the tour content is engaging enough to hold one’s attention; according to Communications Director Jennifer Richards, “It is significant if people stop for three whole minutes on the street next to a public art piece to listen to information about it.”

Unfortunately, this does not allow us to measure the total number of people who experience public art without interactive tools. Capturing the numbers who do, however, still has benefit. Organizations can compare people’s engagements with different public art pieces to hypothesize which are considered most interesting or eye-catching, helping to fine-tune and promote the engagement tools themselves and inform future programming choices.

Portland, OR’s Public Art PDX mobile app has a mechanism for users to submit suggestions for artworks they feel should be added to the online collection, or corrections for mis-located or mis-labeled artworks on the app’s map.  Tools like this help gauge general stewardship of public art.

Organizations can also look at how often public art websites, or URLs/QR codes on public art signage, refer visitors to related sites, or vice versa. For example, tracking the number of people who access public art-related content within cultural tourism apps can help make a case for the importance of public art to regional tourism.

Most organizations using interactive tools have not taken the next step toward analyzing who is using these tools, and why. Some mobile apps do ask users for basic profile information like their zip code and email address, and could easily ask for more before allowing usage. Without collecting detailed user data, it is difficult to determine audience members’ cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds, prior knowledge of/interest in art, or motivations for using the engagement tools – all information that is usually gathered in more formal public art audience surveys. Yet in a field where collecting any kind of quantitative data has traditionally been deemed problematic, having this free and user-friendly way to begin to quantify audience engagement with public art is refreshing.

Collecting written anecdotes, comments, and stories

While they may churn out impressive statistics about people interacting with public art, what can these new platforms tell us about how the art impacts the public? Most leaders in the field whom I interviewed agree that collecting and analyzing meaningful qualitative responses via these tools is trickier than simply counting views or “likes.”

Posting images of public artworks on Facebook can generate feedback on what people think of an artwork and what they might like to see in the future. From the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit and Urban Design’s Facebook page. Artist: Tricia Keightley.

Even so, feedback gleaned through interactive media can answer some of the questions typically asked in formal public art audience interviews. For example, in the above Facebook comment thread about an artwork in the NYC Arts For Transit collection, Jeff Konigsberg’s response suggests not only his approval of the artwork, but imagery that he and perhaps others would like to see in future subway art. Some of the commentators on the below post, also from the Arts for Transit page, speak to the role that public art plays in riders’ everyday lives; others express intent to visit the artwork again, or tell friends about it. According to Arts for Transit director Sandra Bloodworth, such feedback, while not analyzed or reported formally by her staff, helps “affirm the public’s appreciation” of the work.

A September 3, 2012 post on the MTA Arts for Transit page, featuring Owen Smith’s “An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders.”

While most other organizations I interviewed are not formally reporting social media feedback, New York City’s Public Art Fund, which commissions several large-scale long-term public art installations per year, cites comments collected on Twitter and Instagram in email newsletters as one way of demonstrating public interest.

In the Public Art Fund’s May 29, 2013 e-newsletter, this Twitter feed is meant to demonstrate public “excitement” for the organization’s installation Ugo Rondinone: Human Nature at NYC’s Rockefeller Center

Image from Public Art Fund Facebook page, featuring artwork by Monika Sosnowska.

Feedback that could be interpreted as negative (such as the above example from Public Art Fund’s Facebook page of one user’s interpretation of an artwork’s intent) is less common on social media. Most people probably would not be comfortable bashing an organization’s content on its Facebook wall, for the same reason they would not insult artwork hanging in their friends’ homes in front of their friends. In addition, someone who does not enjoy or care about public art is unlikely to follow a public art organization online.

Comments to news articles and blog posts, however, reveal a more diverse range of opinions. Within the last year, writeups on controversial murals, on Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and The New York Times’s City Room blog cite lively discussions on Facebook reflecting a broad public’s reactions, and prompted further reader comments. Online comment threads like those above can be mined to identify the most effective arguments for and against an artwork, the same way Facebook and Twitter feeds are commonly used by the news media to cite the public’s reactions to more mainstream debates.

The question is how to spark such rich dialogue online about public art that is not controversial, or especially current and newsworthy. For some organizations, generating any kind of dialogue, positive or negative, is an indicator of a public artwork’s success. Groundswell Executive Director Amy Sananman explains, “We can perhaps look at which murals have been most successful with audience engagements via social media to find out what types of future projects might cause the most discourse.” For an organization like Groundswell that aims to spark dialogue around social issues through public art, this type of analysis could be important in shaping new programming. Groundswell, like many organizations, is still figuring out how best to utilize online comment forums.

Best practices in collecting written feedback

In addition to posting pictures, or signs inviting comment at public art sites, it is important to engage with users’ normal communication channels. Jennifer Richards of The Association for Public Art believes social media is the most natural forum for sparking dialogue. Both aPA’s Museum Without Walls smartphone app and dial-in audio tours have mechanisms for people to share stories about their experiences, but according to Richards, the mobile tours generate only 1-2 voicemail comments per month. By contrast, people comment much more frequently than that on social media posts.

The wording and formatting of posts also matters. Perhaps the main shortfall of many invitations to participate via these interactive tools is their open-endedness, which may inhibit both participation in the first place, and the formulation of meaningful responses. In designing interactive platforms, whether online or mobile, it might be wise to follow Nina Simon’s observation in The Participatory Museum: “Participants thrive on constraints, not open-ended opportunities for self-expression.”

“Name that sculpture” post from August 2012 on the Association for Public Art Facebook page that gauge visitors’ knowledge of historic public sculptures in Philadelphia.

“Name that sculpture” post from March 2013 on the Association for Public Art Facebook page that gauge visitors’ knowledge of historic public sculptures in Philadelphia.

Some organizations are employing such constraints with what seem to be meaningful results. For example, quizzes like the above posted by Association for Public Art on Facebook not only test people’s prior knowledge of public art, but can inspire comments about their opinions and personal experiences. Based on my study of about 10 different organizations’ social media pages, this approach seems to solicit more discussion than simply asking visitors to leave a comment, or advertising a new project with just a photo and title. According to Penny Balkin Bach: “The whole point of our social media effort is to encourage appreciation for CONTENT; so we don’t ask people what they like — we ask them what they know.”

Public Art Fund uses Twitter for its “Trivia Tuesday” contests highlighting current public art exhibitions.

Of course, it is unclear whether these public art quiz examples are truly evaluating the public’s prior knowledge of public art, or engaging them in a quest for more knowledge. Yet regardless of how participants arrive at the “right answer” to a quiz question, it is revealing that so many are interested enough in the art to seek further information about it.

By contrast, posting traditional questionnaires on social media or in mobile apps does not seem to be very effective. So far, the surveys I have seen organizations use on social media have not yielded enough responses to draw any conclusions. A Public Art Fund multiple choice question on Facebook asking people to select their favorite aspect of its Fall 2012 “Discovering Columbus” installation had only five responses, a week after it was posted. Marketing Director Janet Cooper of Dublin, OH’s Dublin Arts Council similarly reported very little use of the feedback survey on the council’s Facebook page.

Interactive media may fail to excite people about taking traditional surveys, but we might consider it as an alternative, more organic means of unearthing public opinion. People who view filling out questionnaires as a chore may be much more likely to engage in a conversation, or play a game, about an artwork on Twitter or Facebook. Freed from answering leading prompts or selecting between limited multiple-choice questions, they might be more likely to offer up unexpected and surprising information.

It is worth noting that several organizations have reported positive outcomes when soliciting responses to public art surveys across multiple interactive channels, with social media as one element in the mix. The City of Albuquerque’s public art program, for example, recently succeeded in collecting both demographic data and opinions about public art from 1300 tourists and local residents through two public art questionnaires, the results of which are summarized on the city’s website and incorporated into a strategic plan. The survey link was “distributed through local and national e-mail listservs and subscriptions, local print and digital news media and tourism outlets,” but director Sherri Brueggemann cites a partnership with a local tourism bureau as especially important in getting so many people to take the survey.

Determining what people are doing with public art: inviting photo and video submissions

Just like stopping to listen to an audio tour or commenting on a social media post, stopping to take and post photos of public art is an indication that the art has caught one’s attention. For the Public Art Fund and Association for Public Art among other organizations, directing visitors to photo-sharing links via signage at public art sites has been especially effective at soliciting user submissions.

Public Art Fund’s Director of Communications Kellie Honeycutt reports, “Visitor-submitted photos help us see how people are actually interacting with the artwork.”  I first experimented with this concept as the co-artist of Pallet City, a complex interactive sculpture made from recycled shipping pallets for the 2010 FIGMENT Sculpture Garden on New York City’s Governors Island. The sculpture had different components that each encouraged a type of action, indicated by signage. In addition, my collaborator and I put signs up all over our project telling people to email pictures of themselves interacting with the sculpture. To our pleasant surprise, we received an average of three submissions each weekend the project was open. This was enough to convince us not only that people were noticing the project but that we were achieving our goal of fostering a range of participatory experiences. People were clearly noticing the signs on the sculpture that labeled each section’s intended purpose. For example, we received many photos of people doing somersaults, dances, and even juggling on a stage area labeled “perform.”

Photo competitions can be an especially efficacious and easy way to get a wide range of photo submissions in a short time. Association for Public Art recently held a competition asking for the best photos of the iconic Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture in Philadelphia submitted via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. aPA offered gift cards as prizes to three winners and a free printed poster of all the photos to the general public. According to aPA’s Jennifer Richards, “I almost wish we had told people to submit a picture of a public art work they ‘love’ the most. Then we would have known better what types of public art people love and why.” The competition was set up using a Facebook contest feature that allowed page visitors to vote on the winners.

Example of user-submitted photo, and voters’ comments, at the Association for Public Art’s “Love ” photo competition: https://www.facebook.com/assocforPublicArt?ref=ts&fref=ts

Example of user-submitted photo, and voters’ comments, at the Association for Public Art’s “Love” photo competition

While the “Love” competition did not lend itself to comparisons between different types of public art in Philadelphia, the 180 submissions give a glimpse into the range of ways people view and interact with the sculpture–from using it as a backdrop for marriage proposals and photographs in formal wear, to sporting it as a tattoo–and the sculpture’s important role in placemaking and boosting civic pride. Some photo submissions prompted additional comments from Facebook users—many speaking to their “love” of Philadelphia (see above).

How do we analyze and make use of all this feedback?

Filtering through all of this information on a regular basis to find evidence of public art’s impact is a challenge, particularly when individual comments don’t comprise anything close to a representative sample of a broad public’s opinions or experiences.  However, those comments suggest ways in which a larger group of people might be impacted, and could be the basis for designing more structured logic models or questionnaires around public art.

Each time a new substantive comment or photo comes in from any source, it could be archived by topic, resulting in a collection that can be periodically analyzed to discover trends, or mined for juicy quotes. Jennifer Richards from aPA suggests establishing 3-4 “buckets,” or different categories of comments, and having someone assign each online comment to a different bucket as it comes in. This is not something the organization has put into practice yet, however.

Richards also stresses the importance of storytelling, not just number-crunching, in  reporting on the impact of one’s work. While they may be used infrequently, the mobile tour “leave a comment” channels have produced some good anecdotes commonly used in grant proposals for the audio tour program itself, such as the following audio-recorded message a local trolley driver left after he took one of the cell phone tours, which, according to Penny Balkin Bach, “reinforced the broad reach of MWW:AUDIO”:

“I drive a Philadelphia trolley, and drive pass number 12 (the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors) everyday…and I think it’s wonderful that you have this program set up. It was educational. It was educational for me, and emotional, as an African-American. It makes me feel much better to be a part of Philadelphia.”

Comments like this are certainly evidence of the reach of a tour, but could also be considered evidence of the ability of the public art to connect to local residents, once they know more information about it.

Further questions and suggestions

Interactive tools can be tweaked to be more directed towards evaluation, as can our methods of analyzing the feedback that comes in. The tools still cannot replace rigorous, formal evaluation initiatives. Organizations must consider the following points when determining how to factor interactive media into an overall evaluation plan:

Reaching a more random audience sample

The audiences who take surveys or make comments via an organization’s Web site, social media page, or mailing list are most often people who are already supporters of, and familiar with, the organization’s work. In some cases, especially when the art is very much rooted in a local community, an online commentator may have actually participated in helping select or create the artwork.

Also, not everyone has access to interactive public art engagement tools, or chooses to use them. The City of Albuquerque’s public art survey, for example, found that while “70% [of respondents] feel that public art would be better served with signage and/or interpretative information associated with public art…97% say they have never used a public art smartphone app.”

Emily Colassaco, manager of the NYC DOT’s Urban Art Program, believes the best way to reach the broadest public is still through in-person surveys with random passersby at public art sites. The majority of respondents to DOT’s web-based survey were already familiar with the program.

Yet even if the majority of comments or photos do come from people who already support an organization, or have even participated in public art creation, these comments can still help tell a valuable story, and inform the questions that can be asked of a wider sample of the public, if and when the time is appropriate.

Distinguishing between evaluating the impact of public art on its own and evaluating the impact of learning about public art via these new educational tools

So far, most organizations using these new tools cite goals and metrics that may assess audience response to the engagement tools themselves, rather than audience response to public art. As an alternative to studying responses to interactive platforms designed by public art organizations, looking through visitor-uploaded photos of public art on a platform like Flickr, or simply Googling the name of a public art piece and seeing what comes up on a wide range of websites, might be a possible way to study the public’s unmediated experience of the art.

However, often education and evaluation go hand in hand. If we go out and ask for people’s comments about a public art piece, we’re also opening up opportunities for people to ask and learn about the artwork, the surrounding community, and the commissioning/partnering organizations. By giving people accessible information about a public art piece, we are in turn empowering them to speak about it and other public art in a more informed way. It may be advantageous to integrate evaluation of art projects into an organization’s outreach or communications activities, rather than treat it as a separate expenditure of time and resources.  Yet because education or evaluation are likely to happen simultaneously, it is especially important to set clear goals for what we are trying to evaluate, and which tools are appropriate to use.

To give an example, if an organization’s goal is to use community murals to educate  local communities about important issues, it might be a stretch to post photos of two completed murals on Facebook at the exact same time, and conclude that the one with more “likes” or comments is more successful at achieving this goal. It is difficult to know what external factors motivate participation online, and if the people participating are even members of target communities. But perhaps it is possible to compare how easy it is to design engaging posts, mobile tours or web pages or around certain artworks over others, and look at the content of users’ responses to these engagement efforts to find evidence of both planned and unexpected learning outcomes.

Project specifics and organizational capacity

It is easier to launch, and evaluate, a big user participation campaign for a hyped-up public art installation that only lasts a few months, like the Public Art Fund’s Discovering Columbus in NYC’s Columbus Circle, than it is to determine whether people notice, or care about, a sculpture or subway mosaic that was created years ago. To invigorate interest in Philadelphia’s historic public art collections, aPA worked with a special grant to develop Museum Without Walls; many permanent public art collections do not have this type of support, and are more focused on the regular commissioning of new work.

Final remarks

Though their effectiveness as evaluation and engagement tools may vary based on the specifics of a public art organization or project, platforms like social media and photo-sharing sites are almost universally accessible and widely used, as are website analytics. While there is still the challenge of sorting through the overwhelming amount of feedback coming in through so many different sources, these free tools can be useful knowledge-gathering mechanisms for public art organizations. In addition to engaging people in new ways with public art, they are effective at collecting stories, photos, and, in some cases, even numbers that can at least hint at possible impacts of public art that were previously much more difficult to document on a regular basis. These platforms are also beginning to integrate public art evaluation into people’s everyday lives, by linking public art commentary to social, enjoyable activities in which the public is already actively engaged.

Characteristically, MAP founder and champion Jane Golden has fought back against the bad vibes, and frankly, $1.5 million $1 million a year in city money for a program that has now produced over 3000 murals and contributed considerably over time to Philly’s identity and reputation strikes me as a pretty ridiculous bargain. But rather than get too deeply into the merits of MAP here, I’m more interested in this broader notion of “bad” public art.

Mural by Jane Seymour (yes, that Jane Seymour) and Cathleen Hughes

A few years ago, I had this fantasy of starting an anonymous photoblog featuring user submissions of ugly public art. (I guess if I do it now, it won’t be so anonymous!) Think a Regretsy for public art – and judging by the number of my artist friends who are fans of that website on Facebook, I’m guessing there would be an audience for it. Because, let’s face it, not everything we do in this field is drop-dead amazing. And sometimes, the ravages of the elements can take their toll on outdoor artworks over time. In the worst cases, I do believe that public art can actually be (or become) a form of blight in its own right. Having a forum for people to call out the prime offenders encourages us to raise our game, or alternatively, invest in needed funds for maintenance and repair.

But more than that, I sometimes wish we wouldn’t take what we do so damn seriously all the time. Maybe this is coming from someone who’s spent too much time on Roadside America, but I think that by pretending that all artwork is sacred, we unwittingly make failure (acknowledged or not) unacceptable. Of course art is subjective, but that’s precisely the point. Maybe it’s okay to hate a specific piece of public art, if that’s one’s honest response. Maybe we should be encouraging honest responses. Especially to public art, which, unlike a bad performance, is still there the next day and, unlike bad museum or gallery art, is visible to you whether you want it to be or not.

Anyway, don’t worry, I’m not going to start that website. But no guarantees that someone else won’t – Huffington Post has already got us started down this road, and given the success of Regretsy it’s probably only a matter of time. Even if you hate this idea, you might not be able to escape it. Kind of like bad public art.

[UPDATE: in the comments, Philadelphia’s Chief Cultural Officer Gary Steuer clarifies that the city’s annual investment in MAP is closer to $1 million, not $1.5 million as has been widely reported.]

Steve Powers, “Look Look Look,” Part of the “A Love Letter for You” project, commissioned by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2009-2010. http://www.aloveletterforyou.com

In the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Public Art Review, Jack Becker writes, “There is a dearth of research efforts focusing on public art and its impact. The evidence is mostly anecdotal. Some attempts have focused specifically on economic impact, but this doesn’t tell the whole story, or even the most important stories.”

Becker’s statement gets at some of the main challenges in measuring the “impact” of a work of public art—a task which more often than not provokes grumbling from public art administrators. When asked how they know their work is successful, most organizations and artists that create art in the public realm are quick to cite things like people’s positive comments, or the fact that the artwork doesn’t get covered with graffiti or cause controversy.

We are much less likely to hear about systematic data gathered over a long time period—largely due to the seemingly complex, time-consuming, or futile nature of such a task. Unlike museums or performance spaces, public art traditionally doesn’t sell tickets, or attract “audiences” who can easily be counted, surveyed, or educated. A public artwork’s role in economic revitalization is difficult to separate from that of its overall surroundings. And as Becker suggests, economic indicators of success may leave out important factors like the intrinsic benefits of experiencing art in one’s everyday life.

However, public art administrators generally agree that some type of evaluation is key in not only making a case for support from funders, but in building a successful program. In the words of Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) executive director Jon Pounds, evaluations can at the very least “help artists strengthen their skills…and address any problems that come up in programming.”  Is there a reliable framework that can be the basis of all good public art evaluation? And what are some simple yet effective evaluation methods that most organizations can implement?

This article will explore some of the main challenges with public art evaluation, and then provide an overview of what has been done in this area so far with varying degrees of success. It builds upon my 2007 Columbia University Teachers College Arts Administration thesis, And Then What…? Measuring the Audience Impact of Community-Based Public Art.That study specifically dealt with the issue of measuring audience response to permanent community-based public art, and included interviews with a wide range of public artists and administrators.

This article will discuss evaluation more broadly—moving beyond audience response—and incorporate more recent interviews with leaders in the public art field.  My goal was not to generate quantitative data on what people are doing in the field as a whole with evaluation (according to Liesel Fenner, director of Americans for the Arts’s Public Art Network, such data is not yet available, though it is a goal). Instead, I have reviewed recent literature on public art assessment, and interviewed a range of different types of organizations, from government-run “percent for art” and transit programs to grassroots community-based art organizations in New York City (where I am based) and other parts of the United States.  I sought to find out whether evaluation is considered important, how much time is devoted to it, and the details of particularly innovative efforts.

The challenge of defining what we are actually evaluating

The term “public art” once referred to monumental sculptures celebrating religious or political leaders.  It evolved during the mid-twentieth century to include art meant to speak for the “people” or advance social and political movements, as in the Mexican and WPA murals of the 1930s, or the early community murals of the 1960s-1970s civil rights movements. Today, “public art” can describe anything from ephemeral, participatory performances to illegal street art to internet-based projects.  The intended results of various types of public art, and our capacity to measure them, are very different.

In the social science field, evaluation typically involves setting clear goals, or expected outcomes, connected to the main activities of a program or project. It also involves defining indicators that the outcomes have been met. This exercise often takes the form of a “theory of change.” Since there are so many types of public art, it is exceedingly difficult to develop one single “theory of change” for the whole field, but it may be helpful to use a recent definition of public art from the UK-based public art think tank Ixia: “A process of engaging artists’ ideas in the public realm.” This definition implies that public art will always occupy some kind of “public realm”–whether it is a physical place or otherwise-defined community—and require an “engagement” with the public that may or may not result in a tangible artwork as end result. This process and the reactions of the public must be evaluated along with whatever artistic product may come out of it.

The challenge of building a common framework for evaluation

In 2004, Ixia commissioned OPENspace, the research center for inclusive access to outdoor environments based at the Edinburgh College of Art and Heriot-Watt University, to research ways of evaluating public art, ultimately resulting in a comprehensive 2010 report, “Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation” (see a helpful summary by Americans for the Arts).  The guide’s emphasis and content was shaped by feedback from Ixia’s Evaluation Seminars and fieldwork conducted by Ixia and consultants who have used its Evaluation Toolkit. Ixia provides the most comprehensive resources on evaluation that I have encountered, with two main evaluation tools, the evaluation matrix and the personal project analysis. These are helpful as a starting point for evaluating any project or program.

The matrix’s goal is to “capture a range of values that may need to be taken into account when considering the desirable or possible outcomes of engaging artists in the public realm.” It is meant to be filled out by various stakeholders during a project-planning stage, as well as at the midpoint and conclusion of a project.

Ixia’s “personal project analysis”is “a tool for process delivery that aims to assess how a project’s delivery is being put into practice.”  I will not analyze it in detail here, except to say that something similar should also ideally be part of any organization’s evaluation plan, as it allows for assessing how well the project is being carried out.

Personal Project Analysis from Ixia’s “Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation”

Matrix from Ixia’s “Public Art: A Guide to Evaluation”

Ixia’s matrix identifies four main categories of values:

1. Artistic Values [visual/aesthetic enjoyment, design quality, social activation, innovation/risk, host participation, challenge/critical debate]

2. Social Values [community development, poverty and social inclusion, health and well being, crime and safety, interpersonal development, travel/access, and skills acquisition]

3. Environmental Values [vegetation and wildlife, physical environment improvement, conservation, pollution and waste management-air, water and ground quality, and climate change and energy],

4. Economic Values [marketing/place identity, regeneration, tourism, economic investment and output, resource use and recycling, education, employment, project management/sustainability, and value for money].

The matrix accounts for the fact that each public artwork’s values and desired outcomes will be different depending on the nature of the presenting organization, site, and audience.

It is unclear how widely these tools have been adopted in the UK since their publication, and I did not encounter anyone in the U.S. using them. Yet many organizations are employing a similar process of engaging various stakeholders during the project-planning phase to determine goals specific to each project, which relate to the categories in Ixia’s matrix.  For example, most professionals I interviewed cited some type of “artistic” goals for the work. Some organizations prioritize presenting the highest quality art in public spaces, in which case the realization of an artist’s vision is top priority (representatives of New York City’s Percent for Art program described “Skilled craftsmanship” and “clarity of artistic vision” as key success factors, for example).

By contrast, organizations that include a youth education or community justice component may rank “social” or “economic” values higher. Groundswell Community Mural Project, an NYC-based nonprofit that creates mural projects with youth, asks all organizations that host mural projects (which may include schools, government agencies, and community-based organizations) in pre-surveys to choose their top desired project outcomes from a range of choices, as well as identify project-specific issues. Groundswell does have a well-developed theory of change behind all its projects, relating to the organization’s core mission to “beautify neighborhoods, engage youth in societal and personal transformation, and give expression to ideas and perspectives that are underrepresented in the public dialog.” However, some project-specific outcomes may be more environmental—for example, partnerships with the Trust for Public Land to integrate murals into new school playgrounds–while some relate to “crime and safety,” as in an ongoing partnership with the NYC Department of Transportation to install murals and signs at dangerous traffic intersections that educate the public about traffic safety.

Groundswell Community Mural Project, signs from “Traffic Safety Program,” a partnership between Groundswell, the Department of Transportation’s Safety Education program, and several NYC public elemenary schools. Lead artists Yana Dimitrova, Chris Soria, and Nicole Schulman worked with students to create these signs installed at locations identified as most in need of traffic signage.

Groundswell is just one example of many public art organizations that set goals at the outset of each individual project, based on each project’s particular site and community.  While individual organizations may effectively evaluate their own projects this way, crafting a common theory of change for all public art may be an unrealistic expectation.

The challenge of reliable indicators and data collection

The Ixia report discusses the process by which indicators of public art’s ability to produce desired outcomes may be identified, with the following questions:

1. Is it realistic to expect a public art project to influence the outcomes you are measuring?
2. Is it likely that you can differentiate the impact of the public art project and processes from other influences, e.g., other local investment?
3. Is it possible to conduct meaningful data on what matters in relation to the chosen indicators?

For example, in studies seeking to measure any kind of change, good data collection should always include a baseline—i.e., economic conditions or attitudes of people BEFORE the public art entered the picture. Data collection methods ideally should also be reliable, unbiased, and easily replicated.

The “Guide to Evaluation” does not go into detail about any concrete indicators of public art’s “impact.” Therefore, the matrix seems to be most useful as a guide to goal-setting. As the Americans for the Arts summary of this report points out, “Ixia directs users to [UK-based] government performance indicators as a baseline source, but that is where the discussion ends.”

Liesel Fenner of Americans for the Arts’s Public Art Network mentioned in an email to me that while PAN hopes to develop a comprehensive list of indicators in the future, which can be shared among public art presenters nationally, “developing quantitative indicators is the main obstacle.”

According to my interviews with both on-the-ground administrators and public art researchers, many busy arts administrators find the type of data collection recommended in Ixia’s guide difficult, costly and time-consuming. It can be a challenge to get artistic staff to buy into even basic evaluation; says one community arts administrator, “artists are paid for a their leadership in developing and delivering a strong project. Many artists don’t see as much value in evaluation because, in part, it comes in addition to the difficult work that they just accomplished.”   It is also uncommon to spend precious training resources on something like quantitative evaluation techniques.

Some are of the opinion that even if significant time were spent on justifying public art’s existence by “proving” its practical usefulness, this would still be a losing battle that could lead to the withdrawal of support for public art, the production of bad art that panders merely to public needs, or both. One seasoned public art administrator asked me: “Is architecture evaluated this way? The same way public buildings need to exist, public art needs to exist. It’s people looking to weaken public art who are trying to ask these questions about its impact.”

The challenge of evaluating long-term, permanent installations

Glenn Weiss, former director of the Times Square Alliance Public Art Program and current director of Arts League Houston, posits that economic impact studies are “most possible with highly publicized, short-term projects like the Gates or large public art festivals.”   Indeed, the New York City Mayor’s office published a detailed report on “an estimated $254 million in economic activity” that resulted from The Gates, a large installation in Central Park by internationally acclaimed artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, based on data like increased park attendance and business at nearby hotels, restaurants, etc.  However, most public art projects, even temporary ones, are not as monumental or heavily promoted as The Gates, making it difficult to prove that people come to a neighborhood, or frequent its businesses, primarily to see the public art.

Visitors crowd Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” (2005) in Central Park. Photo by Eric Carvin.

Weiss also believes that temporary festivals are generally easier to evaluate quantitatively than long-term public art projects. For example, during a finite event or installation, staff members can keep a count of attendees (some of the temporary public art projects I have encountered in my research, such as the FIGMENT annual participatory art festival on Governors Island and in various other U.S. cities, use attendance counts as a measure).

The few comprehensive studies connecting long-term, permanent public art to economic and community-wide impacts, conducted by research consultants and funded by specific grants, have led to somewhat inconclusive results. For example, An Assessment of Community Impact of the Philadelphia Department of Recreation Mural Arts Program (2002), led by Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert of University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP), cites the assumed community-wide benefits of murals outlined in MAP’s mission statement at the time of the study:

The creation of a mural can have social benefits for entire communities…Murals bring neighbors together in new ways and often galvanize them to undertake other community improvements, such as neighborhood clean-ups, community gardening, or organizing a town watch. Murals become focal points and symbols of community pride and inspiring reminders of the cooperation and dedication that made their creation possible.

Yet when asked to “use the best data available to document the impact that murals have had over the past decade on Philadelphia’s communities,” Stern and Seifert found that

this is a much more difficult task than one might imagine. First, there are significant conceptual problems involved in thinking through exactly how murals might have an impact on neighborhoods. Second, the quality of data available to test hypotheses concerning murals is limited. Finally, there are a number of methodological problems involved in using the right comparisons in assessing the potential impact of murals. For example, how far from a mural might we expect to see an impact? How long after a mural is painted might it take to see an effect and how long might that effect last?…Ultimately, this report concludes that these issues remain a significant impediment to understanding the role of murals.

By comparing data on murals to existing neighborhood quality of life data, Stern and Seifert considered murals’ connection to factors like community economic investment and indicators of more general neighborhood change (such as reduced litter or crime, or residents’ investment in other community organizing activities). The study also measured levels of community investment and involvement in murals. However, the scarce data available on these factors, according to the authors, are difficult to connect directly to public art in a cause and effect relationship. Stern and Seifert’s strongest finding was that murals may build “social capital,” or “networks of relationships” that can promote  “individual and group well-being,” because of all the events surrounding mural production in which people can participate. It was more difficult to show a consistent relationship between murals and other theorized outcomes, such as ability to “inspire” passersby or serve as “amenities” for neighborhoods. The study recommends that “more systematic information on their physical characteristics and sites—‘before and after’—would provide a basis for identifying murals that become an amenity.”

A more recent 2009 report on Philadelphia’s commercial corridors by Econoconsult also demonstrated “some indication of a positive correlation” between the presence of murals and shopping corridor success. Murals are described here as “effective and cost efficient ways of replacing eyesores with symbols of care.” However, the report also adds the disclaimer that a positive correlation is not necessarily proof of the murals’ role as the primary cause of a neighborhood’s appeal.

So what can we assess most easily, and how?

My research revealed that quantitative data on short-term inputs and outputs of public art programs is frequently cited (sometimes inappropriately) as evidence of a program’s success in things like reports or funding proposals—for example, number of new projects completed in one year, number of youth or community partners served, or number of mural tour participants. However, in this article I am not really focusing on this type of reporting, as it does not address how public art impacts communities over time.

The good news is that there are several examples of indicators that are more easily measurable in certain types of public art situations, including permanent installations. These include:

• Testimonies on the educational and social impact of collaborative public art projects, from youth and community participants and artists alike
• Qualitative audience responses to public art, including whether or not the art provokes any type of discussion, debate, or controversy
• How a public artwork is treated over time by a community, including whether it gets vandalized, and whether the community takes the initiative to repair or maintain it
• Press coverage
• The “use” of a public artwork by its hosts, e.g. in educational programs or marketing campaigns
• Levels of audience engagement with public art via internet sites and other types of educational programming

Below I will summarize some helpful methods by which data is collected around all these indicators.

Mining the Press

Archiving press coverage of public art projects online is a common practice among organizations, as is presenting pithy press clippings and quotes in funding proposals and marketing materials as a means of demonstrating a project’s success. For researchers, studying articles (and increasingly, blog posts) on past projects can also provide rich documentation of artworks’ immediate effects, as well as points of comparisons. For example, the “comments” sections of online articles and blogs can generate interesting, often unsolicited feedback, albeit from a nonrandom sample.

One possible outcome of public art projects is controversy, which is not always considered a bad thing, despite now-infamous examples of projects like Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc being removed. For example, Sofia Maldonado’s 42^nd Street Mural, presented in March 2010 by the Times Square Alliance, provoked extensive coverage on news programs and blogs. The mural’s un-idealized images of Latin American and Caribbean women based on the artist’s own heritage led some women’s and cultural advocacy organizations to call for its removal. The Alliance opted to leave the mural up, and has cited this project as evidence of the Alliance’s commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. The debates led Maldonado to reflect, “as an art piece it has accomplished its purpose: to establish a dialogue among its spectators.”

Sofia Maldonado, “42nd Street Mural,” 2010, Commissioned by the Times Square Alliance Public Art Program. Image Source: http://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/project-archives/sofia-maldonado/index.aspx

Site visits and “public art watch” 

As an attempt to promote more sustained observation of completed works over time, public art historian Harriet Senie assigns her students in college and graduate level courses a final term paper project every semester that contains a

“public art watch”…For the duration of a semester, on different days of the week, at different times, students observe, eavesdrop, and engage the audience for a specific work of public art. Based on a questionnaire developed in class and modified for individual circumstances, they inquire about personal reactions to this work and to public art in general” (quoted in Sculpture Magazine).

Senie’s students also observe things like people’s interactions with an artwork, such as how often they stop and look up at it, take pictures in front of it, or use it as a meeting place.

Senie maintains that “Although far from ‘scientific,’ the information is based on direct observation over time—precisely what is in short supply for reviewers working on a deadline.” This approach towards challenging college students to think critically about public art has also been implemented in public art courses at NYU and Pratt Institute, and the aggregate results of student research over time are summarized in one of Senie’s longer publications.

I have not encountered any other organizations able to integrate this type of research into their regular operations; however, there may be opportunities to integrate direct observation into routine site visits to completed permanent public artworks.

In the NYC Percent for Art program, and its Public Art for Public Schools (PAPS) wing that commissions permanent art for new and renovated school buildings, staff members are expected to undertake periodic visits “to monitor the condition of artworks that have been commissioned,” according to PAPS director Tania Duvergne. Such “maintenance checks” can provide opportunities to survey building inhabitants or local residents about their opinions and use of the artworks.

Duvergne uses these “condition report” visits as opportunities to further her agency’s mission to “bridge connections between what teachers are already doing in their classrooms and their physical environments.” At each site, she tries to interview custodians, teachers, principals and students about whether the art is well treated, whether they know anything about the artwork (and are using the online resources available to them), and whether they want more information. Duvergne notes that many teachers use the public art in their teaching in some way, even if they do not know a lot about the artwork. While observing a public artwork during a site visit every few years is nowhere near as extensive and sustained observation as Senie’s class assignment, perhaps a similar survey and observation could be undertaken with a wide range of students and staff members over the course of a day.

Project participant and resident surveys

Organizations that create community-based public art usually have specific desired social, educational, or behavioral outcomes in project participants. Mural organizations Groundswell and Chicago Public Art Group describe thorough evaluation processes in which mural artists, youth, community partners and parents are all surveyed and sometimes interviewed before, during and after projects. Groundswell’s community partner post-project survey, for example, asks partners to rank their level of agreement about whether certain community-wide outcomes have been met, such as whether the mural increases the organization’s visibility, increases awareness of an identified issue, and improves community attitudes towards young people.

Groundswell’s theory of change (most recently honed in 2010 through focus groups with youth participants and community partners) articulates various clear desired outputs and outcomes for both youth and community partner organizations. This includes the development of “twenty-first century” life skills in teen mural participants. To measure this impact specifically, Groundswell has made it a priority to continue to track youth participants after they graduate, turn 21, and reach other checkpoints, according to Executive Director Amy Sananman. Groundswell recently hired an outside researcher to build a comprehensive database (using the free program SalesForce), in which participant data and survey results, and data on completed murals (such as whether any were graffitied, how many times they appeared in news articles, etc.) can be entered and compared to generate reports.

In 2006, Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program conducted a community impact study using audience response questionnaires as a starting point.  Then- special projects manager Lindsey Rosenberg employed college students, through partnerships with local universities, to conduct door-to-door surveys of all residents living within a mile radius of four murals. The murals differed by theme, neighborhood, and level of community involvement. The interns orally administered a multiple-choice questionnaire with questions ranging from general opinions of the murals to level of participation in making the murals to perceptions of changes in the neighborhood as a result of the murals.  They then inputted the surveys into a computer database specifically created for this study by outside consultants. The database not only calculated percentages of each response to murals, but tracked correlations between these responses and census demographic data, including income level and home ownership.

This research project was different from prior MAP community impact studies in that it assumed that “what people perceive to be the impact of a mural is in itself valuable,” as much as external evidence of change.

In 2007, MAP shared some preliminary results of this endeavor with me to aid my thesis research. At the time the research seemed to generate some useful data on which murals were appreciated most in which neighborhoods, and the correlation between appreciation and community participation in the projects. However, since then I have not been able to gather any further information on this study, or find any published results. I did hear from MAP at the time of the study that only 25% of people who were approached actually took the surveys, indicating just one problematic aspect of conducting such research on a regular basis. The database was also costly.

Most recently, MAP is partnering (page 160) with the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health & Mental Retardation Services (DBH/MRS), community psychologists from Yale, and almost a dozen local community agencies and funders with core support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on “a multi-level, mixed methods comparative outcome trial known as the Porch Light Initiative. The Porch Light Initiative examines the impact of mural making as public art on individual and community recovery, healing, and transformation and utilizes a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework.” Unfortunately, MAP declined my requests for more information on this new study.

Interviewing youth and community members can of course only generate observations and opinions, but Groundswell at least is also taking the step of also tracking what happens to participants after they complete a mural project. I am still not clear how to prove that any impacts on participants are a direct result of public art projects. Yet surveying project participants and community members about their feelings about a program or project, and how they think they were impacted by it, is one of the most do-able types of research (apart from the challenges of getting people to fill out surveys).

Community-based “proxies”

Groundswell director Amy Sananman has described some success in utilizing community partners as “proxies” for reporting on a mural’s local impact, effectively outsourcing some of the burden of data collection to other organizations. For example, the director of a nonprofit whose storefront has a Groundswell mural could report back to Groundswell on the extent to which local residents take care of the mural, how often people comment on it, etc.

PAPS, CPAG, and ArtBridge, an organization that commissions artwork for vinyl construction barrier banners, have described similar ideas for partnerships. ArtBridge hopes to implement a more formal process in which the owners of stores where its banners are installed can document changes like increased business due to public art. PAPS director Tania Duvergne also cites examples of “successful projects” in which public schools, on their own, designed art gallery displays or teaching curricula around their public art pieces, and shared this with PAPS on site visits.

There might be a danger in depending on community partner organization representatives to speak for the whole “community” or to provide reliable, accurate data. But if cooperative partners can be identified and regular reporting scheduled using consistent measurement tools, the burden of reporting on specific neighborhoods is lessened for the public art organization.

“Smart” Technology

Groundswell, ArtBridge, and MAP are all starting to utilize the new QR code smartphone application, which uses QR codes to direct public art site visitors to websites with more information about the art. Groundswell experimented this past summer with adding QR codes to a series of posters designed by its Voices Her’d Visionaries program to be hung in public schools to educate teens about healthy relationships.  Groundswell can then track how many hits the website gets through the QR app. In general, web activity on public art sites is an easy quantitative measure of public interest.

Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program has a “report damage” section on its website, where anyone who notices a mural in need of repair can alert MAP online. This is also a potential source for quantitative evidence of how many people notice and feel invested in murals.

Use of Interpretive Programming

Public art organizations are increasingly designing interpretive programming around completed artwork, from outdoor guided tours to curated “virtual” artwork displays. NYC’s Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit program provides downloadable podcasts about completed artworks on its website; other organizations include phone numbers to call for guided tours at public art sites themselves (as in many museum exhibits). Both in-person and virtual/phone tours can provide rich opportunities to track usage, collect informal feedback from participants, and solicit feedback via surveys. ArtBridge recently initiated its WALK program giving tours of its outdoor banner installations. After each tour, ArtBridge emails a link to a brief questionnaire to all tour participants, and offers a prize as an incentive for taking the survey.

A Philadelphia Mural Arts Program guided tour.

Concluding remarks: What next for evaluation?

While systematic, reliable quantitative analysis of public art’s impact at the neighborhood level remains challenging and undervalued in the field, new technologies as well as effective partnerships are making it increasingly feasible for public art organizations to assess factors such as audience engagement, benefits to participants, and community stewardship of completed public art works. The Ixia “Guide to Evaluation” offers a useful roadmap for approaching the evaluation of any type of public art project. At the same time, we should not forget the ability of art to affect people in ways that may seem intangible or even immeasurable, or, as Glenn Weiss puts it, “become part of a memory of a community, part of how a community sees itself.”