Art and the Community: ArtBu Comm.

The Academy of Visual Arts (AVA) is a leading international academy for teaching and research in visual arts. The Academy offers interdisciplinary study and connectivity across a broad range of formats, media, approaches, concepts and methodologies. The GE capstone course ‘Art and the Community’ was initiated by AVA through one of the three interweaving strands of practice-based and theoretical inquiry into public art and socially engaged practice, which is a primary research area at the academy and with a focus on social context and the dissemination of practice-based research within a wide range of formats, spatial types and locations. In The GE capstone course ‘Art and the Community’ students address specific community problems, social issues and global discourse which is informed by knowledge and practice in community art, socially engaged art, inclusive design and other visual arts practices. Through a cycle of discovery, action and reflexivity, students seek to achieve the needs for the community and the public while developing specific skills and a deeper understanding for themselves through experiential learning, such as identifying social problems through fieldwork, working with the community, addressing social change through artistic and design practices, and through that to strengthen their interpersonal skills, leadership and citizenship. The course requires students to engage in a community project through which visual arts practice creates better awareness of a particular social issue and examines how to engage the public in that social issue through visual arts. This book documents the eleven community art projects developed and implemented by HKBU students within the GE course ‘Art and the Community’, in 2021-2022.