some ideas for santa fe city hall artist's residency

A few of the ideas that I pitched to the Mayor a few weeks ago

• Perform an on-going project of writing songs for city employees and elected officials

• Set up a tarot reading/advice table outside of city council meetings

• Establish a “City Hall Welcoming Booth” at the main entrance of City Hall. Offer guides, maps, and materials produced from products of conversations with city employees and other observations. Brochures can include city council agendas, photographs of city employees complete with interviews and job descriptions, etc. Provide information on scheduled guided tours...

• Offer scheduled guided tours of City Hall to unfamiliar constituencies
  

• Instigate a public project involving signs, taking non-traffic-necessary signs, replacing them with more meaningful and useful messages to be determined

• Obtain video documentation of city council meetings from the past 10 years (or however far back they go). Remix them into an informational music video about how to participate in local government

• Research former Mayoral candidates of the past 10-20 years. Make an entertaining children's book out of the products of that research. Give it to the city clerk, if appropriate.

• Get a group of high school government students to perform a mock city council in city council chambers. Require that participants attend 2 or more city council meetings in advance and interview one councilor. Document the entire proceeding with the official cameras they use in real meetings, and compare performances.

• Institute trade-a-day-with-a-city-employee-day.

• Institute trade-a-day-with-an-elected-official-day.

• Find a way to perform an audit in a friendly and interesting way

• Write a letter to every person who publicly bad-mouths the city or city employees correcting them, based on my experiences and observations. Make a book of the correspondences

• Host artist-in-residence office hours at least once a week in which employees can sit down and talk about whatever they want to, as well as offer ideas and feedback. Attempt to execute every artistic request within reason and boundaries

• Read the 20-some-odd zoning overlays that exist in Santa Fe and make interpretive drawings of them

• Create a public line-up of free classes, lectures, and events presented by city employees on subjects that are personally meaningful to them

• Start city vs. county vs. state government sporting matches

• Produce a how-to-participate-in-local-government manual for citizens

• Curate a cumulative art show inside City Hall at the end of residency, featuring project documentation, city employee work, and educational materials. Get the Mayor and City Councilors to have an open constituent day, where anyone who wants to talk to them about anything can.