Serving Carlisle and its Residents Through the Creation of Public Art

Carlisle, PA is a thriving community that is also home to a private liberal arts college, world renowned youth ballet program, and Army War college. The diversity of people’s cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds makes our community unique, but also presents numerous challenges. To help unify the vast differences in socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, we as community members and educators seek to strengthen Carlisle, and its residents, by providing an ongoing initiative that ties students, children, families, and individuals together to support the development, creation, and upkeep of public art.

The Color Carlisle: Mural Project is an unincorporated group formed to address needs of focused attention on safety and building maintenance/upkeep as well as providing targeted measures for increased safety and awareness in various neighborhoods in Carlisle, PA. The goal, through a community art initiative, is to create sustainable living spaces by updating strategic locations with public art. With the implementation of our program, we have the ability to tackle objectives set forth by Borough focused on increased safety and awareness in neighborhoods, creating spaces that are welcoming for community residents and visitors while also improving upon neglected commercial and residential property spaces. Additionally, the Color Carlisle project will continuously profile community members and business owners through a social networking stream in order to provide an intersectional approach to the creation of the art and the community that helped to bring it to fruition. Through the creation of public art and the connectivity of our digital marketing, we can enrich the community’s presence while also enhance an individual’s personal health and positive mindset about their neighborhood.

The Importance of Public Art in Communities

As stated by Mark Stern, Professor in the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, “Investment in the arts and cultural resources can benefit local and state economies by supporting job growth, stimulating commerce and sustaining neighborhoods by stabilizing property values. The benefits are especially great in communities that don’t have highly visible art identities but do contain rich cultural resources.” He goes on to say, “Communities benefit in multiple ways when there is a vibrant arts and culture base… we can combine information on a full variety of measures of well-being in a neighborhood, including arts and culture, to see where in the city there are major barriers to having neighborhoods that are affordable, livable, safe and healthy.”

In a program studied by Professor Stern, “researchers looked at data from the city health department on the well-being of children 15 years of age and under. They found a strong relationship between the presence of cultural resources in neighborhoods and a much lower level of social stress in the children, even controlling for income. Another study used data from Philadelphia’s Human Relations Commission to establish that there are lower incidents of racial and ethnic harassment in neighborhoods that have a significant number of cultural resources.”

How The Future of Carlisle Benefits from Public Art

As documented by the Borough of Carlisle in a recent Census study, the community residents feel that there is need for focused attention on safety and building maintenance/upkeep as well as providing targeted measures for increased safety and awareness in various neighborhoods. Our goal, through a community art initiative, is to creates sustainable living spaces by updating overlooked or neglected spaces with public art. With the implementation of our program, we can tackle both objectives set forth by Borough, by creating spaces that are welcoming while also improving upon neglected property. Through the creation of public art, we can further enhance the community’s presence while also enhancing an individual’s personal health and positive mindset about their community.

With the implementation of a community mural program and social networking campaign, we are striving to generate an ongoing proactive approach to maintaining a positive and connected community that focuses on healthy, sustainable, and safe living spaces that celebrate the diversity in our population, both racially and socioeconomically. With an intersectional approach to our project, we are able to connect community members through various workshops and social media profile pieces so that as we continue to fulfill our mission, neighbors, community members, and business owners are able to converse with their fellow neighbor in an open and positive space.

To launch Color Carlisle, our core project was established as an artist in residency program hosted through Carlisle Area High School. The high school art students worked with a professional mural artist to complete a piece that was brought to the community. The students hosted community based workshops for residents in Carlisle to help create and finalize the piece. Our vision was that this initial project served as the beginning of our goal to “canvas the city of Carlisle” with inspiring and community driven works of art. We believe the students and youth within the Carlisle Area are our future and through each project, we allow them to grow into leaders, taking pride and ownership of their community and the public works of art they are creating. We hope through the development and creation of mural works and other various public art projects, we are able to create safe and welcoming environments for families and children for current and future generations.