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As Los Angeles muralist Judith Baca asserts, “In some productions where you are going for the power of the image, you can get a massive amount of input from the community before the actual making of the image, then you take control of the aesthetic. That’s one model. Another is a fully collaborative process in which you give voice to the community and they make the image. Both of these processes are completely valid, but there’s little room for the second because artists take such huge risks becoming associated with a process that may not end up as a beautiful object. The confusion is massive when you talk to people who are writing about it--whose art is it, the kids’, the homeless people’s, or yours?” (Quoted in Suzanne Lacy, “Mapping the Terrain: The New Public Art,” Public Art Review, Fall/Winter 1993, p. 33) Los Angeles artist Kim Abeles has established situations in which young people are encouraged to develop relationships with senior citizens, whom they later honor in large installations. Frankenstein’s Hearts is a piece she worked on with youths from Los Angeles and San Francisco. Each teen interviewed a community elder, then created an icon, an assemblage sculpture, a representative pattern, as well as panels of textual fragments, from the interview. The various artworks inspired by the interviews were then installed in horizontal bands circling the gallery. In the center, a large sculptural woman was composed--Frankenstein-like--from parts of each of the elders’ accounts. Rather than depicting a frightful monster, the giant woman represents the healing integration of communities and generations through the recounting of personal stories. Joyce Kohl was called into relationship with the people of Zimbabwe while on a Fulbright in 2001. A noted California ceramic sculptor, Kohl initially traveled to Zimbabwe to advise on the development of an art department in the local university. But when she learned that two out of five people in the country has AIDS and that social mores have led to pervasive public denial about the disease, Kohl was compelled to initiate a community building artwork inspired by the AIDS quilt. She visited a local tile factory and asked several of the tile painters to design images about the impact of AIDS on their lives. The individual tiles were so powerful, that she determined to create a large public work based on them. Kohl secured a site on the walkway between the art museum and the nearby park, commissioned a local man to build a structure, and helped the tile artists to create murals from their initial designs. At the same time, Kohl was working with AIDS orphans. She helped them create their own tiles, which were incorporated into a bench near the Zimbabwe AIDS wall.
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