Can Artists Change Government From the Inside Out?

In government agencies across the U.S., artists are reimagining what the public sector can accomplish and painting a picture of a world that does not yet exist.

In the Twin Cities, artist-in-residence Amanda Lovelee spearheaded the Art and Policy Project for the Metropolitan Council, a regional planning agency. Lovelee left the Metropolitan Council in November and is currently the U.S. Cultural Policy Fellow at Stanford University.

“When I introduce myself, I say, ‘I’m an artist and my medium is government,’ it usually either makes people stop wanting to talk to me or stare blankly at me,” she quips.

For the council’s Imagine 2050 plan, Lovelee wanted to use creativity and play to imagine the future of transportation, housing, parks and water.

“Policy writing is science fiction writing, right? It’s like dreaming of an unknown future. And who better to do that than artists?”

The resulting project commissioned 13 artists to reimagine the future of the Twin Cities through community engagement projects and visual art.

In the process, Lovelee pushed back against pre-existing assumptions about the role of artists in government.

“When I started talking with environmental services — the water team [was] like, ‘What if it’s an infographic of what happens when you flush the toilet? And I was like, what if it’s not?’” she says.

Instead of a plumbing infographic, artist Kao Lee Thao designed a watercolor water bus with images drawn from Hmong folktales, celebrating the Twin Cities’ status as home to the country’s largest Hmong population. A dragon, representing the dragons believed to exist at the bottom of lakes, wraps around the entire bus.

Lovelee was worried that the environmental services team would hate the bus — but they ended up loving it.

“Sometimes when we try to bring art and government together without an intermediary like me being like, ‘We’re gonna trust the process. We’re gonna trust the artists,’ it can turn into a glorified infographic,” explains Lovelee.

Thao’s bus was one of four each representing a different part of the Imagine 2050 plan.

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Nine artists produced community engagement projects. For one, artist Peter Haakon Thompson conducted flag-making workshops where participants sewed flags representing their vision for the future of parks in the Twin Cities. Flags representing community priorities were hung in the council chambers.

Artist Luis Fitch created a series of posters inspired by Dia de los Muertos that were turned into a bus stop scavenger hunt. The posters were later silk-screen printed and also hung in the council chambers.

“Maybe to the outside, that seems small, but there’s never been color in that space, right? And there’s never been color from other cultures,” says Lovelee.

More than just community engagement

The biggest impact that artists can have in government is often internal, believes cultural strategist Mallory Rukhsana Nezam. She co-founded CAIR Lab, Cross-sector Artists in Residence, with Lovelee and Johanna K. Taylor.

There’s a misconception that the purpose of artists in government is to do community engagement. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle.

“We really have to hammer that home… that a lot of the change that is really going to be meaningful is going to be internal, because people will resist that,” says Nezam. “They don’t want to change. They want you to do a project externally and make the community happy. That’s what they want artists to do — make something cute, make something cool.”

At the Washington State Department of Transportation, artists Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome noticed that maintenance — an indispensable but often overlooked part of transportation infrastructure — often went uncelebrated both inside and outside the department. In response, they created a newspaper dedicated to maintenance, as well as a bumper sticker reading “Maintenance is sexy.”

“A theme there that I see artists often doing is visibilizing the invisible and also helping government workers love their work — fall back in love with public service,” says Nezam.

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There’s the example of Alan Nakagawa, a sound artist who embedded within the Vision Zero initiative of the L.A. Department of Transportation in 2016.

Nakagawa used poetry and perfume to reimagine bus stops and pedestrian safety. But he also conducted a storytelling workshop for traffic engineers, helping them tell the stories of those affected by traffic violence. Traditionally, engineers have relied on numbers and data about traffic deaths and injuries, rarely confronting the human impact of their decisions.

Famously, Nakagawa got a roomful of traffic engineers to cry.

“Artists can humanize systems that seem just like these abstracted things and really bring the human, lived, experiential component into government work,” says Nezam.

Unfortunately, LA has failed to reach its goal of zero traffic deaths by 2025 (Nakagawa’s role with LADOT ended in 2017).

Could artists break silos?

Government in the U.S. is notoriously siloed — could artists be the key to getting people from different departments to work together?

Artists have “sophisticated methods of collaboration,” according to Nezam, often pulling people from different departments to work together on a project.

“We teach that people should be doing their civic jobs — really the lines are so definitive, and that is just obviously very unnatural. And artists don’t even really see those lines,” she says.

Next year, the Art and Policy Project continues with community conversations and a celebration of the adoption of Imagine 2050.

As part of the ceremony, Thompson, the artist who created flags as community engagement, is making one big flag representing all the community comments he heard, to be flown as a council member plays the bagpipes.

Just this act of celebration is a step toward imagining a better world that does not yet exist, says Lovelee.

“What if all planners thought of themselves as science fiction writers? What would urban planning look like?” she asks. “Maybe too weird. Maybe there would be dragons everywhere.”