Report and Documentary Highlight Benefits of Artworks for Civic Engagement Four Projects in South LA Represent Shift Towards “Art As Infrastructure”

Some Place Chronicles is a creative placemaking project that features the people, histories and cultures of East Rancho Dominguez, Florence-Firestone, Lennox and Ladera Heights/View Park/Windsor Hills.

The Department of Arts and Culture's Civic Art Program is pleased to present the 2016/17 Annual Report. In FY 2016/17, a total of 62 civic art projects were actively managed and covered 60 communities reaching over 8,500 community members throughout the County. Read The Report

Read our report on the 2016-17 Research and Evaluation Plan: what we did and why, and some key lessons we learned along the way.

Artist Sandy Rodriguez was placed as an artist in residence at the Recuperative Care Center at the Martin Luther King Medical Campus in Willowbrook, CA, in 2016/17. This residency was part of a $1.6 million investment in Civic Art funded through the LA County Percent for Art policy. A final evaluation report on the residency is available now.

This report outlines the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative, an 18-month public process that led to the development of 13 recommendations to the LA County Board of Supervisors to ensure that everyone in LA County has equitable access to arts and culture, and to improve inclusion in the wider arts ecology for all residents in every community. 

This study analyzes the demographics of the arts and cultural workforce in Los Angeles County—specifically, staff members, board, volunteers, and independent contractors associated with 386 cultural nonprofits, most of which receive funding from Arts and Culture, and/or seven other municipal funders in the County. The findings presented in this report are based on 3,307 unique responses to the DataArts Workforce Demographics survey, conducted from May 2016 - July 2016. Among the key findings:

In 2012, 35,076 volunteers worked nearly six million hours at 386 nonprofit arts organizations in LA County. This report explores the role of volunteers in arts nonprofits. 

Recent research has found that across the US, arts audiences are declining, while arts participation is on the rise. How can both be true at the same time? This review of the literature on Public Engagement in the Arts explores this question.