While the western US suffers through worsening wildfires and battles over water rights, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) wants residents to keep an eye on a risk that looms large even in dry and hot years: flooding.
“Only about 7% of structures in high-risk zones are covered by flood insurance,” says Margaret Doherty, a senior specialist for Fema’s Risk Mapping, Assessment and Planning programme whose jurisdiction covers Colorado, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana, an area collectively known as Region 8. “It is [Fema’s] job to convince people that they have a risk and should consider mitigating it.”
Fema is funding art through its ArtWorks programme to communicate the benefits of planning for potential environmental hazards and encourage community resilience. Its Region 8 headquarters are in Denver, Colorado, so Doherty started there, meeting with several art spaces and organisations, from the immersive art attraction Meow Wolf to Denver Public Art. Then, in 2021, ArtWorks announced a call for art and ultimately selected a project by Matt Barton called Community Forms (2021), a site-specific outdoor installation that encourages diverse interactions. Its curvilinear, topographic forms are often treated as a playground by pre-school children while skateboarders use it as an unconventional skatepark. “Legendary pros, like Daewon Song and the Adidas team, were there last month,” Barton says. The installation also operates as a bioswale, draining rainwater that previously flooded and puddled in an asphalt lot by the Platte River.
When Barton responded to Fema’s call, he was already developing Community Forms as an artist fellow with Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum. Cortney Stell, Black Cube’s executive director and chief curator, helped research Denver’s floodplains along the Platte River so Barton’s design proposal could also mitigate an existing problem. The Platte last flooded in 1965, killing eight people and destroying homes, businesses and infrastructure. A 1969 report by the Department of the Interior classified that flood as the result of a 100-year storm: an event with a 1% chance of happening in any given year. Black Cube negotiated a site agreement with Taxi, a work-live community near the river, to permanently house the work and mutually maintain it. Fema was one of three funders Black Cube brought together to realise Community Forms, which received nearly 55,000 visitors in the year following its installation.
Community bonds
Audience size is one way Fema is measuring the ArtWorks programme’s success, as well as surveying neighbourhood residents before and after a project is installed. Beth Osnes, a professor of theatre and performance studies at the University of Colorado and the author of Performance for Resilience: Engaging Youth on Energy and Climate through Music, Movement and Theatre (2017), argues that quantifying art experiences is an overvalued metric that undervalues art in climate communication. “What do people get from art in terms of understanding the mitigation of a flood zone?” she asks. “Sure, you can test for that. Art offers a designed experience with many benefits, but it also builds resilience.”
Resilient communities are those that survive a disaster well, meaning that there are fewer deaths and greater population retention during the rebuilding process. Resilience is the result of increased social capital, according to Dan Aldrich, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University, reflecting a sense of connection and trust that often starts with involvement in a local school, sport, faith-based organisation or simply knowing one’s neighbour. In the event of a tsunami or hurricane, when there is a warning period for people to evacuate, Aldrich observed that communities where people stayed to help neighbours to safety not only had low mortality numbers but also recovered better because they provided resources such as information or shelter during the rebuilding process.
“A creative act is community-building,” says Osnes, noting that someone besides the artist must be engaged, such as the stakeholders in the case of Community Forms. “Organising people, building consensus, having a plan, it is all a lot of work, but art spaces and art programming do it really well,” she adds.
Learn, explore, connect
For Fema’s 2023 ArtWorks programme, the artists Nathan Hall and Drew Austin travelled to four Denver neighbourhoods in the floodplain with a temporary interactive sculpture. Their Floodline Chime Pavilion (2023) features 100 aluminium chimes swaying from a steel frame, waiting to be struck by a wood clapper carved from Platte River driftwood. The length of each chime represents the potential flood depth in the corresponding area, with some chimes reaching 5ft in length. Hall also wrote music for singers to perform at each site, with lyrics pulled directly from flood mitigation language. “I wanted the music to feel like an invitation to learn, explore and connect,” he says.
Much like Barton with his installation, Austin and Hall found children were the most active participants in their project. “Children innately grabbed a striker and hit the chime,” Austin says. Their enthusiasm often converted adults from observers to collaborators. But if the goal is to inform the public about flood mitigation, are children an effective audience for the messaging embedded in Fema’s commissions?
“Kids are influencers for their parents,” says Maxwell Boykoff, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado. Research shows children demonstrate meaningful communication power to change the thinking of their parents and extended family. Kids are good collaborators, great at adapting and are trusted messengers, Boykoff adds, “like weathercasters and first responders. When a child brings home information about flood or wildfire risk, we see all kinds of positive effects in a targeted community.”
Art is also very efficient in terms of facilitation costs and return on investment, with each visitor, photograph and article published amplifying the initial investment. The administration of President Joseph Biden agrees. In his 2022 executive order, Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services (14084), Biden said that efforts to tackle the climate crisis are bolstered through federal and social support for the arts and humanities.
Unsurprisingly, then, Fema’s budget for ArtWorks continues to grow, as does its geographic mandate. The programme’s latest presentation, the group show FEMA Climate Resiliency, Photography and Storytelling, is on view at Ogden Contemporary Arts in Utah (until 13 October). Doherty says the programme is in early talks with Fema officials in Region 9—which includes Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada, plus the Pacific Islands and 148 Tribal Nations—to potentially have a call for art in 2025.