Practice
The architecture of participation
Socially engaged art, also called social practice or community-based art, is made of dialogue, gathering, participation and time as much as it is made of pigment. What follows is the architecture of a participatory mural: what the material is, who authors which part of it, and what remains once the work is installed.
Statement
Painting as a way to restore presence and integration
I am a socially engaged artist working primarily with participatory paintings. The process uses interdisciplinary arts to bring people into storytelling and into dreaming about the future; collaborative paintings are the final productions.
I grew up between two faces of the Southern side of the Americas, an Andean cloud forest and cities of concrete and glass. Raised in a family devoted to community service, and in a time when Colombia’s armed groups fought over land, power, and resources, I found excitement in the art room, piano lessons, school choir, and my aunts’ theatre productions. Later, as an adolescent in the 1990s, along with thousands of other Colombians forced to migrate, my family relocated to Guatemala City, a place with pronounced division of wealth, class, ethnicity, and access to opportunity. Defying imposed social norms as a minor, calumny and defamation were used against me, and I was left exiled to the northern side of the continent, where the marks of colonization were present too. Sovereignty, place, and identity shaped my inquiry as a young adult, and they are what the work keeps returning to.
I came to socially engaged art through a critique in my final year of university. A professor challenged why I would claim that my paintings could open space for the subaltern to speak, at a time when I was drawn to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and its argument that Indigenous women are doubly silenced. That contradiction in art, claiming to be mirrors, sent me to participatory methods: ways of making room inside a painting for people to tell their own stories, so the stories are not filtered through my authorship. The following two decades went into that work. The further I went into co-authorship with thousands of non-art professionals, the further it carried me away from the white cube. Expanding authorship changed not only who could contribute to a painting, but what the painting could become.
What she is interested in
Creating platforms for diverse voices to speak from lived experience on subjects that matter to them challenges dominant narratives, deepens collective understanding, and expands who gets to shape our shared future.
Working collectively through a shared creative process connects the self internally, and within social relationships, place, and cultural values.
Bringing large groups together to envision collectively opens possibilities for reimagining the paradigms that shape our world and creating more compassionate, equitable, and interconnected futures.
How she facilitates
Transformation unfolds when collective reflection and imagination lead to new ways of relating and acting. Looking back reveals how inherited histories and power structures shape present pain; looking forward makes other possibilities imaginable. Transformation takes root when a group puts those possibilities into practice: building relational practices, redistributing power, and creating the conditions for a hopeful future.
Designing the whole participatory process through a lens of power makes each stage, from outreach and workshop design to community development and dissemination, an opportunity to practice more equitable ways of relating. Engaging leaders as participants in a shared creative process shifts who speaks, who listens, and who makes decisions, moving relationships from hierarchies toward circles of shared responsibility. These experiences become rehearsals for ways of relating that participants can carry into daily life long after the project ends.
Engaging the senses through music, rhythm, storytelling, imagination games, theatre, clowning, and visual arts creates multiple pathways into participation. Each is woven intentionally throughout the process to support self-regulation, raise energy, strengthen relationships, build confidence, and access imagination. Together, they help restore creative agency.
Degrees of participation
Above and below the waterline
Calls for public art ask for community engagement more often than they define it. Three depths are in common use, and the home page sets them out as icebergs: what a project shows of its participation above the waterline can be most of what happened, or a small fraction of it.
The same question, in the field’s own terms
Pablo Helguera sorts participation into four degrees by how much of the work the participant authors: nominal, where a visitor contemplates; directed, where they complete a task; creative, where they supply content inside a structure the artist set; and collaborative, where they share responsibility for the structure itself. The three depths set out on the home page are about where the artist stands. Helguera’s four are about where the participant stands. On this practice the two line up at conceptualization, which is the only phase where a group outside the studio sets the structure, and the reason that phase is described first and at length.
Helguera declines to rank his four, and so does this page. A project can be excellent at the second degree. What matters is that the work says which degree it is operating at instead of implying the deepest one.
Five phases
The architecture, phase by phase
Select a phase to read how it is run.
Conceptualization
An advisory group of at least five people, representing every angle of the community, co-authors the guiding question and the overall image. They work through visual questionnaires, metaphor and storytelling rather than analysis. They decide what the image should be, which voices it must carry, and what everyone else will be asked. The image is an emotional vessel, usually a portrait, built to hold the question rather than answer it.
Skills building
Local people who are emerging facilitators or emerging artists join the project as facilitators, on a paid scholarship placement. They are trained in holding space, and their responsibilities are built around their own comfort level and strengths. This is deliberate infrastructure: the capacity stays in the place after the project has gone.
Community engagement
The painting becomes the platform for community development. Public interventions, structured workshops and drop-in spaces, designed so that people build relationships and become co-creators of the work. Every activity is intentional. From the lighting to the music to the food, each detail is designed so that anyone, at any skill level, can take part fully.
Production
Studio mode, under one rule: add the least possible additional paint, to lift the quieter contributions, temper the louder ones, and restore the vessel image, in a way that leaves every hand legible in the finished surface.
Dissemination
The unveiling is a moment for participants to celebrate what they made and to speak directly to a wider audience about their experience and their story. Then the painting takes its own flight. Exhibition, custodianship, the partner who takes the work on, and the years in which it keeps addressing people who were never in the room.
The phases in photographs
The same five phases, in several places
Worked example
Ursuline Heritage Alive
Chatham, Ontario, 2023. The engagement was the method in miniature. I interviewed the Ursuline sisters one by one and gathered their accounts. Those accounts then went to the high school, where students translated them into image.
That translation step, an older generation’s memory rendered through a younger generation’s eyes, is not an engagement component attached to a finished concept. It produced the imagery. Neither group made the work, and neither could have made this particular work without the other. It is the clearest answer this practice has to what the third doorway looks like.
The same architecture runs through the three lines of work: community-engaged art for health, commemorative participatory murals, and collaborative public art.
Authorship
Some of this work is not searchable under my name, on purpose
Several projects were made inside movements led by other people. The travelling mural that accompanied the Lummi Nation’s totem pole journeys, and E Ala E after it, were made alongside the House of Tears Carvers and the poles carved by Jewell James. On those I asked not to be individually credited.
Putting one artist’s name across an Indigenous-led campaign would have erased the collaborative nature of the work. That erasure is not hypothetical. Collective authorship in Indigenous art and history is routinely narrowed, or left out, in the record that historians, researchers and academics write. I am a person of European descent whose grandparents settled in South, Central and North America. Declining the credit was the accurate description of what happened, and it was the one decision available to me that did not add to that pattern.
That was a decision about where authorship sits in a particular context, not a general position that artists should disappear. Renunciation is the weakest available answer to the authorship problem in this field, and it is not the one taken here. On commissioned work I sign, invoice and carry responsibility in the ordinary way. Holding both is the point.
The consequence is worth stating plainly, because a panel that searches will meet it: for some of the strongest work in this portfolio the public record names the collective endeavour and does not spell my name. The Alberta Sweetgrass report on the mural reaching Beaver Lake Cree Nation does not name me. Neither does the Truthout account of it at the Carnegie, nor the Seattle Globalist photograph of it hanging at the blessing. That is what the decision looks like from outside, and I would make it again.
Six principles
Each is a movement from one thing to another, each runs through all five phases, and each was learned from someone.
Speaking for into Speaking with
Nobody’s story is carried into the work by somebody else. The person tells it, and the painting holds it in their own hand.
after Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Perfectionism into Authenticity
The brief is never to make it good. A mark made honestly stays in, and the composition is built to carry it.
after Gabor Maté
Extraction into Reciprocity
A community gives its stories and gets back training, authorship and the work itself.
learned from Jewell James
Competition into Being in relation
Sharing one surface means making room, and layering colour over somebody else’s marks. Being in relation becomes something people practise together rather than something they agree to in principle.
after Maya Angelou
Witnessing into Integration
Being seen is where it starts. Sessions are paced with rhythm, movement, music and quiet so that what rises can settle in the body and be metabolised, rather than only spoken about.
after Resmaa Menakem
Resistance into Emergence
Naming what does not work is one step. The steps after it build a picture of what could be, so a group has a destination in its imagination to move toward.
after Otto Scharmer
Biography, for curators and programmes
Melanie Schambach is a socially engaged artist working in participatory painting. Her medium is large-scale painting and her material is the gathering that produces it. The proposition underneath it, that every person is an artist and that a society is something people make, is the one Joseph Beuys called social sculpture.
Since 2004 she has built the conditions in which a community authors its own work, in permanent and travelling murals and public interventions made with health services, municipalities, universities, museums and Indigenous-led movements across the Americas. The question underneath all of it is how art can be a portal to human revitalization, restoring presence and integration in the face of dissociation and divisiveness.
Her work is held in the City of Vancouver Public Art Registry and by the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers, and the practice has been written about in Atlantis and the Canadian Journal of Action Research. Her grandparents came from Colombia, Guatemala, Canada and the United States, four countries she has also lived in. She is based in Denver.