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 socially engaged artist working in participatory painting. She builds the conditions for a community to co-author a work at full scale: who decides, who is trained, who owns, who paints, and what the image is permitted to ask. Many of the paintings are permanent and publicly sited; others travel, or last only as long as the gathering that made them. She works across the Americas, with family roots and a life lived in Colombia, Guatemala, Canada and the United States. 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. Some are permanent, fixed to a building to stay. Others are canvas, rolled and carried; or panels painted flat and mounted to a wall; or hundreds of individual pieces composed into one digital image.
The framework
One person, six fields
Social integration is what this practice is for, and it happens at six scales at once. A painting made with a hundred people does its work on each of them: on the person holding the brush, on the two strangers deciding what goes between their marks, and outward to the ideas a culture lives by. Every project on this site is designed for all six.
- In a personA space to know thyself, and to stitch back the parts of a self that were fragmented, by rediscovering our own creative agency.
- Between two peopleWitnessing each other’s perspectives until they fill out a shared reality. Compassion arrives by holding space for someone else.
- In a communityPainting alongside strangers rehearses what an ideal community could be, with unity and collaboration taking priority.
- Across sectorsRehumanising the organisations and institutions that are led and run by people, and reconnecting them with their purpose.
- Through systemsFunding and authorship included, the systems around the work are invited to question competition and explore relational ways of being.
- In ideasDiverse visual stories challenge the narratives that divide us, and art becomes an act of reimagining the cultural values we live by.
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.
Who is in the room is composed deliberately. An advisory group is assembled to hold every angle of the place. Emerging facilitators and artists are recruited locally and trained into the project, drawn from different starting points on purpose: artists looking for community practice, organisers looking for an art form, researchers, retirees, young adults taking on responsibility for the first time. The training stays in the place after the painting is finished.
The invitation to paint is extended with the same deliberation. The participatory format is designed to meet people at their skill level, context and place. The convening is the first act of making.
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 practiceThree 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.
Read more
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