Informal Art Making: Individuals vs. Communities

 

Abstract

Does the emotional response to informal production of art differ between the individual process and the community setting? A research inquiry such as this will combine aspects of solitary and group art making, and measure the emotional responses for both; in order to determine any changes that occur. The “informal arts” (or unincorporated arts) is a broad term that encapsulates the various experiences, such as, acting in a church play, a poetry reading at a bookstore, or at a friend’s house drawing the cat (Wali et al., 2002). Whereas the formal arts should be understood as the training and schooling that takes place in a credentialed organization, school, or university. The theory this paper seeks to prove is that informal art making will lead to a more positive product in both the individual and group setting than formal art education could because of the freedom to make what they please with any materials they please. Finally this research paper will use the experiment to compare the responses from the participants to support or refute the argument that informal art production is creatively superior to fostering inspiration when contrasted with formal art education.

 

Informal Art Making

As previously mentioned, the informal arts represent the artistic times that rely outside the formal arts setting commonly seen through the traditional public school/university lens. According to (Smith, 1999), examples of informal art take place beyond the recognized education situations but rather in the unprecedented activities all humans find themselves in, outside of work and school. Without a person to direct the art making, a creative instinct may appear. As Janice Samoray stated in her doctoral research, the increase in coping she gains from any hardship she faces (2005). During an interview between Gharib and Strang on what goes on within the brain while making art, Christianne Strang a neuroscience professor at University of Alabama Birmingham stated, “Creativity in and of itself is important to remaining healthy, remaining connected to yourself and connected to the world” (Gharib, 2020, para. 6). Connection to the world and yourself through art allows for the uninhibited, unbiased, artistic furthering of the individual.

 

Individual Benefits

In a psychotherapy study assessing reward perception from visual self-expression, performed by the Drexel University Office of Faculty Development and Equality, an experiment was conducted from small drawings and the participant’s belief in themselves. Ultimately, after the projects, the perception of their personal abilities overall increased when asked about their ability to generate ideas, imagination, and solutions (Kaimal et al., 2017). Regardless of the amount of instruction, across the board participants felt more confident about themselves after the art making. Art is a communicative tool, the book, Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Benefits of the Arts explains (McCarthy et al. 2004, p. 60). The authors describe the process of communicating as a series of steps that start from an individual’s own unique and mysterious artistic experience and is unveiled to the world.

Christa Stephens is an example of an artist that relies on improvisation to create her work and that the unknown and experimentation drives her creativity (Stephens, 2017). The individual benefits like improvising, experimenting, and problem solving that informal art making seems to provide, are worth further study and deserve a space in art education. The findings of these testimonials not only apply to the individual experience but to the development of communal art formation as well.

 

Community Benefits

Artistic benefits within communities have been around for centuries and it has brought forth cultural relevance, tradition, and strengthening of the arts. A report on the Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College divulges into the cultural benefits informal arts maintain in the community (Wali et al., 2002). This is an important document that provides a scope of formal and informal arts in a community setting using real qualitative data. Ultimately the authors concluded that the informal arts should be included and connected to urban development in order to give empowerment to a community (Wali et al., 2002, p. 233). This empowerment could be huge for a community and bring together more people across all races, socio-economic status, and occupations. It seems that communities that give more access and opportunity for these informal activities create stronger bonds between people outside their inner circles.

 

Informal vs. Formal Art Education

The “formal art” making can be understood as the direction, learning, and training within a school sanctioned setting, or a museum, commercialized building, or public venues (Langley, 2018). Informal art can be thought of outside of the established places, instead it is found in unstructured locations. The previously mentioned report from Columbia College in Chicago argued that the formal and informal arts are connected in such a way where they help each other out (Wali et al., 2002, p. 3). The informal arts have had certain terms that give a certain connotation and understanding that sometimes do not give accurate credit. Art outside of structured schools or museums sometimes is judges as a hobby, amateur, or recreational. I make the argument that informal art making holds just as much weight as a credentialed, educated artist. It is my opinion that respected art that people feel proud of and enjoy making, can come out of individuals and groups from diverse backgrounds in informal settings.

With this project, I am in no way trying to prove that informal art is better than formal art. I am actually just trying to see what the emotional responses are from participants that are put into a scenario without much direction. I think with less direction the more freedom participants will have but I worry that freedom will bring more uncertainty for those that do not do well with open-ended choices and lack of structure. There have been debates about the content versus process within the education system (Litts, 2015). Does the final product of a science experiment prove that you understand the topic? Choice-based on the other hand attempts to teach students to think like an artist creating studio habits of mind like: observing, exploring, developing craft, expressing, reflecting, persisting etc. (Douglas et al., 2018). If you show your proof of work, the product, and where it went wrong, did you learn? The following experiment is a small-scale comment on these questions and theories; with a small group of participants I ask the question: does the emotional response to informal production of art differ between the individual process and the community setting?

 

Experiment

Based upon these above realizations, this experiment was created in hopes of exploring how participants feelings change depending on the external influences surrounding art making. The experiment itself included 5 consenting individuals: Seth, Andrea, Olivia, Monique, and Hendrik. It was set up as follows: 2 sessions, each 1-hour long with a mid-point check in with myself, the data collector. The first session was the individual art making time with no real guidance on what to do except explaining that they can use any found materials indoor and outdoors as well as the provided materials. The provided materials were: chalk pastels, magazines, scissors, glue, acrylic paint, watercolor, rhinestones, glitter, aluminum foil, bottles, brushes, markers, pens, charcoal, canvas, silly putty, and cardboard. The second session the only change I made was to tell them they were to create one artwork together as a group that everyone agreed to make.

Before each session I asked a few questions listed below (Figure 2.1), after 30 minutes I asked one question (Figure 2.2), and after the full hour was completed I asked my final summative questions (Figure 2.3). These questions were purposefully repetitive to provide me with some consistency to show me that the only thing that changes, potentially, are their answers. I found that this really gave my strongest case to show the change of feelings for each person, but I did have to reach out for some clarification, post-experiment because I needed clarification on some answers to be sure I am accurately describing the participant’s feelings. The experiment went surprisingly well, but of course there are some aspects I wish I could have changed to possibly get stronger outcomes.

 

Participant Outcomes

It was mentioned that the participants were Seth, Andrea, Olivia, Monique and Hendrik. None of the participants would describe themselves as professional artists, but all of them have had some version of education in the arts. Most of them seemed excited or apprehensive upon beginning this project as I think most people are before they do not know what is going on. As you can see in the below figures, the emotional responses from start to finish in both the individual and group scale changed in just about all participants. I think there were a few things that I really thought were interesting that I will go into. As you read the responses for each participant it almost tells a story and you can see where things go up or down for them.

 

Seth

Seth’s was interesting because he went from really excited to feeling disappointed in the individual session and then ‘blasé’ to very excited in the group session. One thing I asked Seth post-experiment was if the responses for the final feelings in each of the sessions were about his feelings about the final product or the art making. They were about the final product. So that was an example of what I would change for my experiment questions because I wanted the feelings to be specific about the art making to determine if the participants enjoyed art making alone or together.

 

Andrea

Andrea’s progression proved not to be a huge transformation. She remained fairly positive throughout the entirety of the project. Knowing her, this was not all that surprising; she is a very creative person and was tremendously excited for the experiment. One response worth noting was that she disliked the initial brainstorming with the group because she did not feel in control and that made her apprehensive. This was a common theme for a few of the participants, there seems to be an aspect of pressure they felt to pick something everyone was excited about and it made people either retract or push forward. Ultimately her feelings from her responses remained, for the most part, consistently optimistic.

 

Olivia

Olivia had some ups and downs during the sessions. She mentioned that she had an interview in the morning and I think that caused her to feel a bit anxious. Her individual session went pretty poorly and I reached out to her and she just said she didn’t like what she made. This reminded me of Seth’s feelings; although I think they were being a little hard on themselves- I do understand feeling frustrated with the end product. The group session went exponentially better for Olivia; she started out dreading it and ended up feeling elated.

 

Monique

Monique was one participant that I do not know as well and I was very curious how her results would turn out. She was a participant that proved to be positive throughout the experiments, although she was frustrated with the time limit. Monique was also the only one that took college level art classes so I was looking to see if she had a particular feeling about having freedom to create and freedom of materials. The time limit was an aspect of the experiment that I didn’t like doing but felt that I had to for the sake of the participants. Ideally informal art making would not have that limitation.

 

Hendrik

Hendrik was the only one that moved from away from the 2D projects during the individual session. He always has his camera on him and he decided to test out the video function of the camera and came out with a really unique artwork. It was fun to see him running around the house moving things around and filming. His responses to the questions were not as positive as I thought they would be. But overall he was not too negative and I think he enjoyed the individual project more even though the group project was fun for everyone. He is an independent person and it was clear he knew exactly what to do when he was alone but with a group he retracted a bit.

 

Summarized Outcomes

I told them to make a project together and that they had to have one cohesive artwork. They looked around the holiday décor in the house and Seth said, “We should make a Christmas decoration for the house!” (Seth, personal communication, Session 2, 11/20/2020). Then Olivia added, “Let’s make a snow globe.” (Olivia, personal communication, Session 2, 11/20/2020) Everyone seemed very excited about this idea and moved forward with it by each volunteering to make an aspect of the snow globe that they could create individually and then bring it all together at the end. This wasn’t really what I thought they would do, but I also knew I couldn’t direct them in order to stay in true informal art making fashion. But after they started everyone was checking in with each other and asked for help or ideas. So in a way there was collaborating even though it was not what I thought would represent a community art project.

 

The other thing I thought was interesting, 75% of the solo projects were a holiday themed artwork and 100% of the group project had a holiday theme. I have to wonder if this would be the case if we were in a plain room with no decorations or context of season. Arts and culture give the ability to express a shared cultural experience (Borrup, 2009). I think this could explain the group’s natural inclination to create something everyone was familiar with. With these unique outcomes, one wonders how this would look on a larger scale. Does place and context determine the subject of an artwork?

 

Reflecting

The emotional state of everyone was very interesting to me. The results showed 80% of individuals started off feeling excited for the independent project and by the end the results were 20% positive. From what I gathered, it was more about the end product that they did not enjoy as much as they thought they would at the beginning. It is fair to say around the board everyone felt on the negative side of feelings at the beginning of the group work but all switched to 100% positive feelings. I think the only thing I can really see as to why the results flipped was the positive collaboration that the group had. It was just overall very interesting to Seth for example, go from elated to disappointed and then blasé to so excited. Hendrik mentioned he was glad to be doing this because he felt cooped up from the isolation of the pandemic, relating that to my beginning paragraphs that art and creativity can give you connection to the world and yourself as well as coping mechanisms to get you by. The fact that it helped someone get out of the negative effects of isolation during a global pandemic is a proud moment of the experiment.

 

After looking through all of the responses there were a few things that I think could be summarized as the summative results of the experiment. The individuals liked parts of the experiment that forced them to make something, have freedom to make whatever they wanted, try new materials, and just physically make something. But individuals did not like the group brainstorming, lack of time and materials, no tutorials, overall frustrations. One of the big takeaways is that group art making, if done right can be really rewarding for everyone. Whereas making art, as a solitary act is such a wild card, it may go really great or it may go really awful for individuals. The difficult aspect of informal arts is that it occurs sporadically and is for the most part is unplanned. This is challenging to capture and research in an accurate unbiased way.

 

Final Analysis

There is an overwhelming amount of research on formal arts and the benefits it provides, we just truly need more data for the informal arts. The purpose of this study was to determine the emotional state of people when making informal art alone and together. To give us some understanding of what a group of diverse people thinks about making art alone and together and if there is some relationship there we should examine further. Formal art education has already begun leaning to a more student driven approach through Choice-Based Art Education or Teaching Artistic Behavior. My art education training relied pretty heavy on Discipline-Based Art Education and only briefly touched on the alternative practices. I think after I graduated I became more and more interested in creative education rather than learning the same elements and principles of design every year of school. The process of art making provides benefits of self sufficiency, self-expression, and decision making that occur when making art independently (Litts, 2015). Upon completion of the first session of the experiment, the benefits were seen in the individuals as everyone something from nothing.

 

After analyzing these results I feel that the only aspect the experiment could prove was that with positive collaboration, a small-scale community project could improve the emotional states of participants. There is also something to be said about how negative most participants felt after completing the individual project. Without a time constraint I do question if that would make a difference. If there was more time for trial and error with the art making then participants would be able to alter what they were making for a more favorable outcome. Could Seth and Olivia have had time to make something else that they liked? If so the final outcome of their feelings for the individual session may be different than what was reported in this study.

Overall I think this project was moderately successful, without giving direct instruction or structure to the group and individual sessions there was bound to be some undesired results. There were also aspects of the experiment that were out of my control but I wish I could have changed. With the pandemic still raging we are not encouraged to have a lot of large group meetings. This was something that worked against me during the planning stages of the experiment. I wanted to do a traditional community project with a bunch of people that I didn’t necessarily personally know but that stumbled into working on the project. But as I said that proved to be not the best idea given the circumstances. Even the individual project, it felt like I had to have people in the room to really observe the findings and make sure everyone was on the right track with the experiment. It would fascinate me to see how this would play out in a more isolated, long term study for an individual session as well as a long term, large scale community project.

 

My viewpoint is still remains the same; with more freedom there will be more creativity. I think that it was clear that although the participants did not enjoy the brainstorming time in the group session there was a huge pay off to working through that, and that seemed to be joy. They used communication, decision-making, and creative problem solving to come up with an idea that everyone felt good about. While I realize this would not be the case in every community project, I think it just goes to show that it could work and be really positive and affirming for all of the individuals even if it seems hard or uncomfortable at first. Although the individual session did not go as well as I thought it would, upon checking in on the participants that struggled, I learned that it was mostly about the final product rather than the art making aspect. This means that they didn’t hate the actual production of the art just the product. As an educator I wanted to tell them so many times that it really is more about the process and if you enjoyed working with your hands and expressing yourself or letting yourself get into a good flow. With so many variables with both situations, it needs to be studied on a larger scale. I think the results of this experiment would, even on a larger scale, still mirror my initial findings

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