Practice and praxis
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, in the face of dissociation and divisiveness
In search of answers to my own healing, I began exploring how to turn my paintings into the restoration of real, heartfelt connection.
The first time I laid out a large canvas on the floor like a carpet and invited people to sit on it, talk and doodle, I felt a sense of connection among strangers that had tremendous value. The painting took over the whole room. While there was a verbal conversation happening, there was also a visual one, where the textures, colours and shapes expanded our truths and our quality of listening.
Communities co-author large-scale paintings as living documents of their voices, stories and futures. The process is participatory from start to finish, rooted in co-design and co-creation, and ownership is shared with participants rather than with institutions or partner organisations. In production I add the least possible additional paint, through lights and shadows, so that every contribution remains legible.
By engaging leaders as part of the collective process, power dynamics shift from triangles to circles, literally. A chief executive or an executive director steps back to witness, and the process balances the spotlight across everyone’s voices, including those most often misrepresented. Witnessing and sharing the expression of our humanity increases our resonance capacity, and that opens room for paradox, for uncertainty, and for collective 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
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, and each runs through all five phases, and each was learned from someone: speaking-for into speaking-with, after Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; perfectionism into authenticity, after Gabor Maté; extraction into reciprocity, learned from Jewell James; competition into being in relation, after Maya Angelou; witnessing into integration, after Resmaa Menakem; resistance into emergence, after Otto Scharmer.
Biography, for curators and programmes
Melanie Schambach works in the lineage Joseph Beuys called social sculpture: the proposition that every person is an artist, and that a society is something people make. Her medium is large-scale painting and her material is the gathering that produces it. 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.