Dec. 9 Akron Public Art Commission meeting
Covered by Documenter Simone Walton (see her notes here)
At the end of a year spent photographing and researching public artworks in Akron, design agency Art x Love is preparing to hand over its Public Art Inventory to the Akron Public Art Commission (APAC).
In total, Art x Love cataloged 701 works of art that are owned by the City of Akron, city-funded or on city property.
As Mac and Allyse Love visited and researched each artwork, they built a database of information and images about each work. During their Dec. 9 presentation to the APAC, they demonstrated StoryMaps, which will be publicly available on the commission’s website. StoryMaps is a geographic information system (GIS) that combines text, images and location data to enable users to explore art by location, type of artwork, artist name and more.
Mac Love explained that StoryMaps will be a tool for discovery and education, enabling Akronites to locate and learn more about the people and stories behind Akron’s public art.
StoryMaps can also be a tool to encourage tourism in Akron, helping visitors find sites of interest. The database also includes an internal-facing side where the commission can keep track of maintenance issues and whether or not pieces are currently accessible to the public.
The StoryMaps database can also form the basis for an app, which the commission hopes to develop through collaboration with students at the University of Akron.
Read more about how the Public Art Inventory got started last year.
Next steps for the inventory
The commission hopes to expand the database to include more public artworks. Akron features many public pieces on non-city property. For example, the Lock 4 murals are owned and maintained by the Akron Civic Theatre and therefore are not included in the database.
Akron Public Schools and Akron-Summit County Public Library branches also feature many public-facing art pieces that are not represented in this iteration of the inventory.
The database is intended to be a “living” project, requiring regular updates as new public art pieces are unveiled and as existing pieces are moved into storage or taken down for repairs.
Akron Cultural Plan led to APAC’s creation
The Akron Public Art Inventory is the result of more than 10 years of investment in arts and culture in Akron and Summit County by the GAR Foundation and the Knight Foundation.
A planning process facilitated by ArtsNow led to the Akron Cultural Plan, which laid out a vision and plan for artistic and cultural development. Recommendations included creating the Akron Public Art Commission (passed by the city in 2020) and conducting the Public Art Inventory.
