Applied Arts Engagement

I have both the professional and personal privilege to work with Midland’s art collections. They continue, for me, to be one of the most emotive ways in which we can reflect on who and where we are. While I now work nationally, when I encounter a piece of art from a midlands collection on tour, it’s very much as if I’m bumping into an old ‘friend’, a return to ‘home’: this is a personal yet powerful reminder to me how Midlands’ art collections function within my own life.

The application and articulation of what ‘arts engagement’ is can be nebulous – it is specific to a piece, audience, or project. In this essay, I reflect on my positionality as an arts educator, and I explore how four different artworks I’ve used in engagement activities can help me tell a story about what applied arts engagement can look like. I return to the power of the personal in helping me here: my refection is as personal as the artworks themselves – offered with deep care, not as finite but rather as a window of sharing into the application of my practice, perspective, and its emotion. Four key provocations for me articulate what arts engagement is all about: asking for and deserving trust; the words we use matter; collections need communities more than communities need collections; access is an ongoing conversation.

Collections need communities more than communities need collections

Beautiful Birmingham? – the title of this postcard [fig. 1], held in the collection of Birmingham Museums Trust, isn’t a question, it’s a statement. The artist behind the card is unknown, yet they offer a monumental conversation on how art can offer a sense of place. A forest of black chimneys emerges from a layer of fog, lazily belching smoke, merging, and weaving across an almost impressionist industrial landscape. Faint hints of gabled factory roofs and the glow of fires that would have burned near constantly form a sweaty, acidic, suffocating haze of merging colours. It’s a remarkable early-twentieth-century piece rarely on display: damage to the object offers a deeper texture of wear that amplifies the emotion within.

Landscape as something ‘pretty’, ‘neat’, or ‘bucolic’ is challenged here. The postcard seeks not to idealise the industrial landscape. It is uncompromising, both in content and title. Is this piece a criticism of Birmingham? A sarcastic parody perhaps? Or instead, a defiant and confident statement of place within art – designed to be portable and affordable to the working class? This artwork, which has clearly been in contact with human hands, radiates a power that can be matched by the city of Birmingham itself – communicating, for me, one of the most successful depictions of an industrial landscape and the beauty we can find therein.

Considered as a tool of arts engagement, it’s a deeply emotive reminder of the power of place and community. Without galleries to reflect their own identity, hopes, dreams, fears, and loves, communities will create heritage for themselves on their own terms. This postcard was not designed for an art gallery setting – it sought to be posted, written on, personalised, kept, treasured, or thrown away. It is curation of art in the hands of the consumer, not a designated institution filled with designated masterpieces. Our art collections exist within historically unequal power structures between institutions and the communities they serve. A beautiful, damaged, and overlooked postcard like this, reminds me that the power balance should always rest with communities.

Arts engagement in and with communities is not about ‘rescuing’ culture via the benevolent involvement of a powerful institution. It’s about finding and holding relevance, asking for space with equality, kindness, and productive purpose. Artworks and collections can become tools for advocacy in the hands of constituent voices, so long as practitioners and institutions remember the following things. 1) Artworks grow and are held in trust with people not for them. 2) It is for the collection and institution to demonstrate their relevance to the lives of others, rather than communities to ask for relevance within the collection. 3) Communities accessing on their own terms supports the relevance and evolution of the collection.

Asking for and deserving trust

Trust is not a given or expected in arts engagement, rather it’s earned through trustworthy actions. Actions of transparency and integrity are needed. Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust holds an object that for me radiates a conversation on trust – gaining and holding it with others. The curatorial description is my starting-point: ‘a seventeenth-century sycamore wood gingerbread mould; slightly wormed.’ Slightly wormed – the tactility and vulnerability of this catches me. Dated to the seventeenth century, this piece of stylised folk-art is, to me, reassuring and charming. Gingerbread-making was a medieval tradition that expanded in the seventeenth century – a treat of valuable spices associated with celebrations such as Christmas. Decorative, sculptural moulds produced biscuits that could have been colourfully and intricately decorated. Edible works of art that we can only imagine are preserved to some degree in this mould. This mould has been treasured, has weathered but rests in survival through emotion. It mattered to people. It was used, of value, domestic, personal – special. An object like this rests in a human connection, a relatable story: in this case eating a biscuit.

I used this artwork for a community consultation in 2023 at Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust – my intention was to earn trust from the community, and in turn, gain valuable guidance from them on collections access. Booking this object out of storage to be with us in the room was symbolic and sensory – it offered a way to tell a story about care. We shared some real gingerbread to eat, a human moment of connection generated from the art itself. Participation in the session was a gift not a requirement, the main aim was to enrich those who visited and see what flourished from togetherness. Compared to the huge pieces of internationally renowned art in the collection, this object may seem humble. Yet it’s as rich in emotion as the spices it once held. Using the mould as a conversation starter was designed to enrich the participants more than the institution, an act of intent to hold trust. With this piece, emotive sharing happened: we discussed why our heritage matters and how it can be explored in new ways.

The words we use matter

Words have the capacity to uplift us, shape us, and perhaps wound us. Often, it’s not the content of a collection that lingers in memory and emotion, it’s the way in which it is spoken or written about. Interpretation can hinge at times on a single term and how it speaks to an audience.

Take the words ‘queer’ and ‘queering’ for example. These are perhaps known as reclaimed terms for LGBTQ+ audiences. Beautiful, bouncy, and boisterous words for some, potentially exciting, useful, and descriptive of being part of a community. Seeking not to erase individual identity within LGBTQ+ communities, they show that (as in life) lines blur and we are never defined by one part of ourselves. Here and Queer, a 2023 exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall also demonstrated that ‘queer’ can be a practical term of activism: no permission sought rather a space held for purpose.

Yet, for some, queer is a truly painful word to hear and use – perhaps associated with violence they have directly felt. A spiteful slur, thrown casually, with lasting damage across generations. Using this word in a gallery may cause such a visitor to wince, pull back, or become defensive: words matter in art engagement. I had the privilege to work with the exhibition Here and Queer and central to this was defining the word queer as a working term, making space for multiple reactions to it. Queer communities are not a monolith, nor too are the words they use. Detailed time was taken to show that language was designed to be inclusive, positive, and about demonstrating the exhibition’s values.

One artwork featured in the exhibition reminds me of the duality of language: R.B Kitaj’s Man with Matisse Tattoo, 1978 [fig. 3]. It’s a large and commanding piece of art which radiates a distinct sexuality. Kitaj drew on the Tom of Finland model (highly sexualized and fetishized masculine male gay forms associated with leather) to hold our gaze directly. Phallic association through the cigarette in the mouth completes an overtly queer male aesthetic. Yet look deeper and you will see that the muscular, stereotypically masculine, body is covered in a stylised female figure, modelled on artwork by twentieth-century artist Henri Matisse. Thus, a hypersexual masculine-presenting form is covered in and radiates feminine-presenting iconography. The duality is deliberate, compelling, and directly challenges the binary within. Two forms in synergy, open to labelling with gendered language yet denying us a finite binary description. No one word will ever fit – perhaps an analogy for the queer experience itself. Queering is framing the words we use – not seeking to find consensus but instead purpose through arts engagement.

Access is an ongoing conversation

Midlands’ art collections are as dynamic as the communities they sit within. The impact of accessing work by an artist such as Richard Billingham is arguably amplified when meeting it within the region that formed an artist’s identity. Billingham (born in Birmingham) and widely exhibited nationally, is a noted feature of Midlands art collections. Exploring growing up in economic deprivation, addiction narratives, and violence, pieces such as Untitled (Ray’s a Laugh, 16) 1994, move us, educate us, involve us. Considered within social justice narratives, they speak at an intersection of so many lived experiences, and with it the opportunity for connection, advocacy, and expression.

This offers a powerful proposition for arts engagement – if regional art collections can amplify connecting and personal narratives that are both positive and negative, how is this facilitated with care and consent? Inside arts institutions, sometimes it’s the person that stands next to the piece offering a human connection that becomes a ‘voice’ for that piece and gallery. That voice is both personal, institutional, and political. In my own arts engagement work, I ask: 1) Am I the right voice here? 2) Is the dialogue framed within safeguarding for all? And 3) What is the potential professional /emotional toil of this?

I’ve used Billingham’s work to explore social class and identity within my own practice – an emotive privilege I treasure- and I always ask: why am I opening this dialogue? What does this engagement ask of me and the audience? Ongoing consent is key to sharing, as arts engagement is never prescriptive or a pre-determined destination, it can take us to laughter, joy, pain, perhaps togetherness or division. It’s slow personal learning that can take a week, month, perhaps a lifetime to digest. Safeguarding ourselves and others within this engagement is vital, recognising that an emotional reaction is the piece of art working. Billingham’s work reminds me that wellness is not an add-on to arts engagement, its central, and that access is an ongoing conversation rather than an assumed status – the ability to leave a conversation is just as important as the ability to start one.