Survey of 868 Participatory Artists 1

Note: I read a bunch of reports on artistic participation, social impact of art and project reports during my doctoral studies. There are a few pretty good ones from the UK that I will talk about them once in a while.

Artworks is a mid-long term research initiative funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to develop practice in participatory settings. They actually supported the ITAC3 conference I wrote about previously, and I think the research helped to gather the right people at the conferences. Google them yourself and see the archive of research, events and meeting records.

In 2014, they published the results of an in-depth survey of artists involved in participatory practices. 868 surveys were completed and provide a core sample for understanding how artists in this practice work and think. And this is not some outsider-surveying-insider thing. No, the survey and the follow-up interviews were conducted by people who know the practice.

The survey design and results are especially excited for me because I find that these people really know artists who make their living doing participatory work.

So what kinds of artists are included in this survey? They artists who work in community, participatory and socially-engaged settings, and…

• Gender: 72% (625) female; 25.3% (220) male; 2% as others, prefer not to say and no response
• Age: 20–29 (23%), 30–39 (21%), 40–49 (23%), 50–59 (17%), 60+ (14%) [that is a wide and balance distribution]
• 5.4% considers themselves to be disabled
• Primary practice
• Primarily working through exhibiting/performing/publishing 12.9%
• Primarily working with communities/participants 35.6%
• Both 50.3%
• Artforms
• Music 24%
• Visual Art 23%
• Dance 11.3%
• Theatre 9.6%
• Craft 3.5%
• Media/Digital 2.9%
• Literature 2.1%

Compared with Hong Kong, the practice is wide and well established involving artists of different career stage, age and form. If you study the income level, you will see that many of them do make a living form the work.

Just to give a taste of the survey, here is one screen capture that shows a good set of questions:

Figure 20: Experience in different settings
Thinking about your practice in community, participatory or socially-engaged
settings, to what extent do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?

Two great things about this set of options:

a) There are some artists who are known for their dedication to a single place. Their ‘dedication’ is highlighted while artists who are able to and do work in different settings are overlooked. So this chart shows that working in multiple setting is actually a skill and asset.

b) “I am not always confident that I know what to expect and how to handle participants in certain settings”. I love this option to acknowledge our uncertainties. There are not enough opportunities to talk about our weaknesses.

Another section I really love is the list of keywords generated by the interviewees and compiled to reveal important values and aspects of the practice. I took the set of keywords to discuss with Hong Kong practitioners and we some pretty interesting discussions.

Overall, if you are interested, I highly recommend that you go download it and read it yourself at their site.