Placemaking Week 2024

In this session, alumni, faculty, and staff of the MFA in Community Arts and Community Art Collaborative programs will discuss a selection of place-based, community-engaged projects in Baltimore City and beyond. Presenters will share best practices and lessons learned through selected projects which engaged participants as leaders, centered collaborative design processes, and archived individual and community histories.

The MFA in Community Arts program prepares artists to utilize their artmaking as a means of civic, youth, and community development, activism and education. The program provides students with a social justice and critical pedagogy framework as a theoretical and practical foundation for working in and with the greater Baltimore community as artist, scholar, and neighbor. An investigation into one’s self, one’s art practice, one’s connection to others, to the city of Baltimore, and global community is centered in the duration of the two-year experience, and beyond. Students that attend the MFA in Community Arts Program are expected to provide quality arts workshops infused with justice, care, and creative engagement. Through the program, students assist community members with nurturing their own creative identity, and the communities, in turn, inspire the students' own creative expression.

For over two decades, several programs at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) have offered opportunities for community-engaged, place-based artmaking in Baltimore City. The MFA in Community Arts Program and the Community Arts Collaborative Program offer two distinct points of entry for artists to connect deeply with Baltimore.