Vol. 8 (2016): Creative Placemaking

“Simply put, ‘creative placemaking’ is the ways in which communities use the arts to help shape their social, physical, and economic characters – cities and towns literally change when you bring artists to the center of them.”  -Rocco Landesman, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts

With the retirement of Dr. Tom Anderson, JAfL created a special issue dedicated to the far-reaching impact of his scholarship.  Dr. Anderson has spent his career engaged in the practice of creative placemaking.  His work with art criticism focuses on how we creatively craft spaces for aesthetic engagement, while his interest in the social foundations of art and education centers around creative movement within education places. Likewise, his concern with social justices issues encourages us to carefully and creatively navigate the social places we inhabit, and his inspiring work with environmental sustainability supports an awareness of the physical places we live in. Most recently, his socially conscious selfie project playfully explores the development of a sense of place and community through the collective documentation of self in the environments that most move you.