While the term creative placemaking emerged in the twenty-first century, the concept is much, much older. Art has shaped places ever since people have lived in them. Cultural evolution has always been driven by human creativity, and that creativity has birthed the art that has inspired and shaped communities. Long before Columbus’s arrival, people had already occupied these continents for millennia. Many Indigenous peoples, not only in North and South America but around the world, see their lifeways, including their arts, as intrinsically connected to the places they inhabit.

A New Relationship Between Government, Art, and Place

The year 2010 was a tense time in the United States. Despite the Great Recession’s “official” end the previous year, when gross domestic product (GDP) finally began a slow rise, much of industry and most Americans were still reeling economically. The budgets of many federal agencies remained stagnant, and some of them, like the NEA, saw their funding cut by more than 7 percent. The NEA’s newly appointed chairman, Broadway producer Rocco Landesman, recognized the need to figure out a new way to operate, founded on connecting the arts and government on the basis of place. In the recession’s aftermath, the two-year old Obama administration had been advancing place-based strategies — measures that addressed entrenched community challenges by looking at the livability of the communities as a whole, rather than just focusing on, say, education or public health. Landesman began making the case to his new colleagues that art could — and should — play a much bigger role in shaping and strengthening communities and thus enhancing livability. Drawing on the work of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, Landesman began laying plans for what would become the Our Town grant program, which would make significant investments in arts and culture projects with the specific purpose of shaping the future of places in the direction of greater livability, while incentivizing various sectors of local government, artists, and arts organizations to work together.

But the agency needed help. “We felt the resources at the NEA were very limited,” said Landesman in a 2014 Aspen Institute interview. “And we wanted to greatly leverage up and increase those resources and create an entity in the private sector that would work alongside the NEA in creative placemaking.” This is how ArtPlace was conceived. With contributions from his wife, philanthropy professional Debby Landesman, and NEA Deputy Chairman Joan Shigekawa, he sketched a plan to put the public-private partnership to work on the task of revitalizing communities through arts and culture. He hoped to eventually create a new field where artists, arts organizations, culture-bearers, and designers would all have a seat at the community planning table. With the help of Luis Ubiñas and Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation, Landesman convened a group of the heads of the nation’s largest foundations and pitched the idea, to which they enthusiastically agreed. Jamie Bennett, the current executive director of ArtPlace, often refers to this coalition as a “big bag of money and an idea.”

From Ancient America to the WPA, and Beyond

The influence of creative placemaking, an idea rooted in pre-colonial Native practice, can be found throughout the twentieth century. Beginning with the City Beautiful movement in the 1890s and early 1900s and the establishment of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, art and artists have been a deliberate part of modern U.S. urban policy. The establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the middle of the century, along with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of 1973 (CETA), which supported artists to work in community settings in the 1970s, helped a burgeoning community arts movement grow and deepen.

As these community arts movements were taking hold, there was an ongoing effort by artists and the arts sector to be recognized for their role in community and social change work. By the 1990s and early 2000s, urban economists had caught on and were heralding the value of arts and the creative economy, just as a broader movement back into cities began to spur new investments in urban spaces, and as cultural heritage tourism began becoming more popular, creating a renewed platform for rural revitalization. Moreover, in the latter part of the century and the early 2000s, in urban planning and community development spaces, conversations were deepening about the role of amenities, design, and creative economies in building communities.

Community organizing, which had a sporadic but meaningful history of layering in the work of cultural organizers and artist-activists, was gaining new prominence with Obama’s historic election, while at the same time the broader art field was increasing its discourse around “social practice” — the idea of artistic practice that focuses on engagement with people and communities. Some of these movements have at times been in conflict and sometimes in dialogue with each other. For example, creative economy work has different drivers than cultural equity work. Nevertheless, while there is not a cohesive, unified movement, there is a shared ability to draw on many different influences. With the NEA and ArtPlace, creative placemaking was to more formally position artists and their work as a vital resource for local engagement and community development.

What’s Ahead

At the time of publishing the basic infrastructure of the walkway is in place and Kunkel says that there will be “large Santo Domingo pottery work with both traditional and contemporary design, as well as paving that incorporates traditional turquoise inlay work with the Thunderbird motif into brick patterns. Mural works call out Santo Domingo culture along the path. Shade structures and seating areas allow people to sit in the landscape and enjoy the vistas.”

Considering the project as a whole, Kunkel alludes to the theme that opened this chapter when he reminds us that Native peoples have honored place since time immemorial. “The whole concept of creative placemaking has by now merged into a much larger question about Indigenous placekeeping,” he says. “But the term comes down to asking the question, what is the power of place when we think about development?”

And in the case of Santo Domingo, what is the power of the culture, of the community, of the people of the pueblo?” Cynthia Aguilar, Santo Domingo’s tribal librarian and a former board member of the Tribal Housing Authority, has some answers to that question. For her, the art that will soon line the walkway announces the pueblo’s place in space and time. “The students who come to the library where I work do not see themselves on the shelves,” she says. “Santo Domingo is not present in print. And at the same time, we are a visual people. So art is the best way to express who we are, how we are a part of New Mexico, the United States, and the world.”