Community Art

This fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective, using the example of the Free Form Arts Trust whose founders were determined to use their fine arts visual expertise to connect with working-class people through collaborate art projects. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities, who have traditionally been excluded from the world of gallery art, a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice itself was significantly transformed. In their thirty-five year history the Free Form Arts Trust played a major role in the struggle to establish community arts in Great Britain and Community Art gives their story worldwide relevance. It examines how this experiment reimagined the place of the artist in the making of art and challenges common understandings of the categories of "art", "expertise", and "community" as well as the place of the individualized practice of the gallery artist.

Kate Crehan is Professor of Anthropology, College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, City University of New York.