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Keyword: Placemaking | In his 2012 article, “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging,” Robert Bedoya writes: “What I’ve witness [sic] in the discussions and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment….” Further, Bedoya asserts, “its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you

“An artist organizes a political rally about a local issue. The project, which is supported by a local arts center in a medium-size city, fails to attract many local residents; only a couple dozen people show up, most of whom work at the arts center. The event is documented on video and presented as part of an exhibition.

Keyword: Equity | Choosing a term buried within one of the summit themes, inequity, I choose to isolate part of that word for the keyword “equity.” In light of the current massive world debt bomb, preceded and/or partially precipitated by the financial meltdown, derivatives explosion and off budget U.S. war spending, the term equity creates an association first with financial equities (stock equities,) home equity (depleted,) and secondarily to the concept of equity in human terms: fairness.

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts partnered to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit. This annual conference in New York brings together cultural producers–including artists, critics, writers, and curators–to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. Summit themes this year included Inequities, Occupations, Making, and Tactics.

Keyword: Occupations | What is an Occupation? The word’s connotations are phenomenological, political and cultural in their scope. The Occupy movement has come to symbolize widespread dissatisfaction with the corporatization of democracy throughout the Western World. This dissatisfaction is no doubt shared by many in the Global South, particularly in the large democracies of Brazil and India.

Keyword: Expectations | I have been thinking a lot about expectations lately- as a mutable, sliding scale barometer for how things are going. They seem to be an ever present but difficult to acknowledge measuring device used by all on a daily basis. Are they being met, exceeded, upended or not met at all. What can we expect as a public?

Keyword: Making | Sweet etymology reveals that the root of Poet is a Maker. In the historical sweep of what we say and do, this linguistic link from the practical to the lyrical, embraces our survival, management, creativity, resourcefulness, connections, communications and all that jazz broadly labeled “culture”.  Art, as everyday ecstasy, ingenuity, occupation and pre-occupation, is a basic activity that, like language, belongs to all, but alas exercised in a inexhaustible variety of ways, delicious to disruptive, dismal to dynamic.