Environmental Justice through Public Art

Abstract

The purpose of this practicum was to assess how nonprofit reorganization and adding environmental justice learning could strengthen Public Art Workz, a small public arts nonprofit in Northwest Detroit. In order to reach that goal, I first studied how nonprofit reorganization helps PAWZ, my client, achieve its mission of art education and community beautification. The second part used employee and volunteer interviewers and the organizations’ literature to compare and contrast PAWZ and similar Detroit public arts organizations to three other major public arts organizations. These three organizations were: The Social and Public Art Resource Center, in Los Angeles, California, The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan. The third component analyzed how public art contributes to environmental justice learning by studying the previously mentioned interviews, organizational and programing structure, and one public art piece from each organization that contained environmental justice themes. My preliminary findings indicate if PAWZ completes a nonprofit reorganization, it could increase its mission’s impact. Second, in the comparison and contrast section, each organization had different financial and marketing strategies, but shared a similar social justice purpose and process of creating public art. Third, I recommend how environmental justice and public arts organization can work together to make a clear environmental justice message in public art. I then offer suggestions on how PAWZ and similar Detroit organizations can improve through status quo, reduction, and/ or sustainability scenarios. Fourth, I realized one cannot solely learn about environmental justice from public art. If one already has an environmental justice awareness, then she/ he can apply it as a means to analyze a public art piece’s. Public art best applies to environmental justice when its process, motivations, collaborations, and output are community and social justice based. Through the previously mentioned processes, a mural of other type of public art could be considered an environmental justice art piece because it amplifies the human environmental experience and create more environmentally just urban landscapes.