If you take a walk in St. Paul, it's becoming more and more likely that you'll step on a poem.
The city's
sidewalk poetry program is in its third year of stamping poems into sidewalk squares as part of regular maintenance work. Residents compete in an annual contest in which 10 are chosen to have their work set in concrete. Now there are 30 poems in 300 locations across the city. Calls come in from as far away as New Zealand to inquire about the program.
It's one of the projects that got its start through another St. Paul innovation: the
artist-in-residence, a nontraditional approach to public art. Many public-art programs operate on the percent-for-art model, explains Christine Podas-Larson of the nonprofit Public Art Saint Paul. A capital project has already been designed and an artist is called in-- "usually at the end," she says--to add some art.
The artist-in-residence program in St. Paul stands that on its head. The artist gets embedded in the inner workings of City Hall. Not only the politics and administration but the day-to-day duties of all sorts of public servants.
The deal Public Art Saint Paul offered City Hall, she says, was this: We will pay for the position of artist-in-residence. You make room for the artist "at the big kids' table." (A $50,000 grant from the McKnight Foundation helped Public Art Saint Paul keep its end of the deal.)
That's how the
sidewalk poetry program was born. Artist-in-residence Marcus Young visited the Sidewalk Division of the Public Works Department and asked "What do you do?" It turns out the division spends a half-million dollars annually replacing the equivalent of 10 miles of broken sidewalk squares. Young already had a concept of the city as a book and the sidewalks as pages. Here was a readymade way to turn that into reality.
"We take a tiny corner of what they're doing anyway," says Podas-Larson says. "It makes maintenance artful," she says.
Source: Christine Podas-Larson, Public Art Saint Paul
Writer: Chris Steller