genealogy of arts and community engagement - Rhodes

What changed about your understanding of community-based arts after reviewing this genealogy? What questions emerged for you? What new connections became clear? Post your writing on our class blog. 

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It's really interesting to see the evolution of popular art centered on viewership to modern art that is focused so much on process. Theater as the middle ground between sculptural or wholly visual experiences versus art that makes you consider the process of creating the piece and the artists' motivations. The socially conscious theatre with the goal of eliciting a response made by the Federal Theater Project & Newspaper Theater may be the first true form of community engagement art before Kaprow's happenings in the 1950's.
I hadn't before considered site-specific art as community engagement due to the lack of observer participation that usually occurs in large scale art pieces like that. The engagement of the material with the landscape is an entirely new way of thinking that I find really interesting and refreshing, where maybe nature or the setting can be determined the real audience. It's a cool shift of perspective from theater and film where so much of the planning and process is catering to an audience and how they see the work or how easily we need to break down concepts without laying it out for them.