The project was proposed by Renee Piechocki, Director of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s Office of Public Art, and Liesel Fenner, Manager of Public Art at Americans for the Arts, as co-sponsors and was conducted under the guidance of an advisory board of public art administrators and professionals in related fields. The evaluation tool is derived from a variety of logical thought processes including utility theory, systems engineering, social psychology, and other program evaluation methods.
It is designed as a flexible self-evaluation tool for public art programs to define their goals and reflect on the success of their artistic interventions. It is the hope of the project team that the evaluation tool will lead to more confidence and ease in evaluating public art, and a greater ability to show stakeholders why public art is important, deserves funding, and should be involved in the process of community planning and development. By investing the necessary time in evaluation, public art professionals can give credence to claims about public art’s benefits to both individuals and communities and its contribution to the advancement of the field of public art as a whole.
