Two of St. Petersburg College’s civic engagement centers are teaming up to present a final out-of-classroom student learning opportunity connected to the 2016 election. This one enters Art’s silent and often subtle messages expressed by politically-minded artists in contrast to today’s noisy political landscape of chirps, buzzes and beeps from tweeting electronic devices.

The Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions and the Center for Civic Learning and Community Engagement on Nov. 1 will jointly stage The Art of Politics: A Silent Message in a Tweeting World. It will be from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE. Admission is free, but advance registration is requested at http://solutions.spcollege.edu.

The event should be of special interest to students studying art, government, political science, public policy or communication. As with all Institute events, sign-in tables will be available to document attendance.

Art is a powerful medium of political expression – and has been since the beginnings of recorded history. But in a political arena saturated with terse, ephemeral electronic messages, does art – especially public art in an urban environment – still have legitimacy in fostering civic consciousness and building social capital?

Dr. Tara Newsom, Associate Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and director of the Civic Learning Center, will moderate a panel discussion of that question as artist Derek Donnelly creates an original work of art on stage. Featured speaker will be Peter Kageyama, St. Petersburg author and community development consultant. He is the author of For the Love of Cities: The Love Affair Between People and Their Places, which was named a Top 10 Book in urban planning, design and development by Planetizen in 2012.

Donnelly is a St. Petersburg artist who has created large-scale murals around St. Petersburg and Tampa with an alliance of artists and community leaders through Public Art Project Inc.
That art is a form of political expression cannot be denied. The earliest cave drawings are expressions about human supremacy over animals – or of one tribe’s dominance of another. Political art takes many forms – from dictators’ propaganda banners lining the streets to insurgents’ graffiti surreptitiously sprayed on outdoor walls to Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, a most powerful anti-war painting. Certainly much of Salvador Dali’s work in St. Petersburg’s Dali Museum is infused with political meaning.

But in the 2016 political arena, dominated by tweets, texts and Instagram posts, does public art have the same impact it once did to generate public emotion and influence political opinion? The panel will join in discussing the impact of art not just as a form of political expression but also as a statement about the urban landscape in which we live.

By David Klement
Executive Director
Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions
St. Petersburg College