Health, Healing and Connection
Work made with people living through recovery, isolation, displacement and crisis, often alongside health services and university researchers.
Read moreSocially engaged and participatory public art
Art that moves the public from observers to co-creators
Large-scale painting made at full scale with the people whose lives it concerns. The canvas bears witness, archives the moment, and turns a public space into meaning.
Melanie Schambach is a social artist from the Americas, with grandparents from Colombia, Guatemala, Canada and the United States, four countries she has also lived in. For twenty two years she has explored how art can be a portal to human revitalization, restoring presence and integration in the face of dissociation and divisiveness. More than ten thousand people have co-created these paintings with her, across a hundred and fifty partnerships. Based in Denver, Colorado.
Twenty years in a hundred seconds
What participatory painting looks like
Rooftops, gymnasium floors, cathedral walls and a canvas carried across a continent. Twenty years of socially engaged public art, made with the people whose stories it holds.
Why the work is made this way
Social integration, at every scale it reaches
Social integration is what the whole practice is for, and it happens in six places at once.
- In a person
- A space to know thyself, and to begin stitching back the parts of a self that were once fragmented, by rediscovering our own creative agency and expanding frameworks of identity.
- Between two people
- Sharing and witnessing each other’s perspectives until they fill out a bigger picture of a shared reality, and compassion arrives by holding space for someone else’s expression of their humanity.
- In a community
- Painting alongside strangers rehearses what an ideal community could be: everyone able to see and hold complexity, with unity and collaboration taking priority.
- Across sectors
- Rehumanising the organisations, businesses and institutions that are led and run by people, and reconnecting them with their purpose through being seen in creative vulnerability, while learning and collaborating across sectors.
- Through systems
- Every stage is designed as a relational practice, so the systems around it, funding and authorship among them, are invited to question and redesign default systems of competition and to explore relational ways of being, such as collaboration and giving.
- In ideas
- Diverse visual stories challenge the narratives that divide us, while relationships across radical difference unsettle the social structures that no longer serve us. Through this shared work, art becomes an act of reimagining the cultural values that shape how we think, influence how we act, and define how we live together.
The form
Participation is the form
Before there is an image there is a question, and the community writes it. An advisory group rooted in the place decides what the work will ask: what the overall image should be, which voices it has to carry, and what to ask everyone who paints into it. Then the painting goes to where people already are. What they paint changes the composition.
Participation is the essence of the work, and the materials are all of the arts. Singing, rhythm, dance, storytelling, theatre, games and imagination are how a group arrives at the story or the dream it wants to make visible, and how the senses come in long before a brush does. All of it distils, at the end, into one image that embodies dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of individual images.
Attend
The public is invited at the surface. People offer an opinion, a story, a piece of context. They do not shape where the work goes, and the making happens elsewhere.
Add
Community members add to the artwork itself, inside a concept that is already set. The decisions rest with the artist.
- This practice
Design
Participation fills the work. The question, the overall image and the composition come out of the room. What the artist brings is the architecture: a spine running the whole height, and everyone else fills it.
Teal is what the community authors. Ember is the artist’s part. In the third, the artist’s part is the spine running the whole height, and participation fills everything around it. The Practice page sets out what that takes, phase by phase.
Read the practice and praxisThree lines of work
Where the practice concentrates
Memory, Legacy and Commemoration
Migration histories, centenaries and Indigenous-led journeys, made permanent by the communities whose history it is.
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Systems and Sectors
Many organisations building one artwork together, sharing the question, the budget and the composition, and in one case putting the wall to a public ballot.
Read moreSelected recognition
- City of VancouverThe Belonging Action, permanent, 350 W Cordova Street, 2012Public Art Registry
- Carnegie Museum of Natural HistoryKwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line!, Pittsburgh, October 2017 to March 2018Collective mural among the exhibited objects
- Lummi Nation House of Tears CarversTravelling participatory mural, totem pole journeys, 2014 to 2021Totem Pole Journey record
- TEDxGrandJunctionSocial Art: Pushing Painting Into Regenerative Community Building, 2024Talk
- Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice“Relational Practices in Arts-Based Research”, 45.2, 2024Peer reviewed
- Guelph Arts CouncilThe Mural Project: Art in Hard Times, 2020Independent coverage
10,000+people have painted into the work
150+partnerships
22years of practice
500facilitators trained