Relationships Within Artpark and the Question of Its Success as a Democratic Art Space

For my senior thesis project, I intend to develop a relational database of the artists in residency at Artpark throughout its history. I will map out and visualize the network of connections between artists, staff, and the museums and art institutions these artists passed through both prior to and after their time at Artpark. A broad goal of this project would be to better understand the complex interpersonal and institutional relationships involved in the network and how it has evolved over time.

To compile information, I will use annual visual arts program catalogs from the Burchfield-Penney's Artpark Archival Collection as well as other easily accessible, inventoried materials including media releases, surveys, and administrative employee credentials. For example, from the surveys it is possible to tell which artists recommended other artists to come to the park, and from employee credentials it is possible to discern how the staff’s outside institutional relationships may have influenced the network of artists over time. Another dimension we are interested in would be determining the relationship between artists who were selected for the “major project” category (formed for avant-garde artists) and the "crafts" category and how the balance in the numbers between each category has changed over time.

An extensive historical chronicle of Artpark and its significance among outdoor sculpture park has been conducted through the former UB gallery exhibition “Artpark 1974-84.” The thesis for this contextualized Artpark as "a radical experiment in artist-public interaction and site-specificity that successfully balanced a populist mission with the creation of experimental art”(Firmin 2010).  According to curator Sandra Firmin, the park welcomed artists of diverse backgrounds and allowed them to experiment with art in a spectacular geographic and mythic location. By uncovering the complex network of relationships between chosen artists, staff, and outside institutions, my working research question will be to determine to what extent Artpark adhered to its populist principles. To what extent was Artpark turly the democratic arts program it aimed to be?


Artpark 1974-1984

Firmin, Sandra Q. Artpark 1974-1984. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.