The City is Our Museum
The City is Our Museum is a mobile app created by the public art and urban planning non-profit LAND Studio.
The project began during the COVID lockdown of 2020 and quickly became a major curatorial intervention. The app offers users walking tours of six Cleveland neighborhoods with over 100 didactic texts.
Created and written primarily by a graduate student in the CWRU department of Art History, the inaugural Keithley Fellow in Community-Engaged Art History, the app is an example of how art history can be put into action in the city and has been profiled here and here.
More recently, I have partnered with LAND Studio to consider how diverse community voices can be incorporated into the app in the form of oral histories.
Undergraduate and Graduate students in a course titled “The City as Museum: Monuments and Memory” (Spring, 2023) are interviewing groundskeepers, sanitation workers, administrators, and other community members whose contact with public art is not often recorded for posterity.
Together, LAND Studio and CWRU students are considering how these curatorial interventions might expand the audience for the app and add greater cultural and racial nuance to how we understand our neighborhoods.
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