An Evaluation of Ambassadors project, Social Art Library (2021)

By

Lawrence Bradby / Axis

A screenshot of the front cover of the report, which is orange and blue, with a photograph of people hiking, from Gabriella Gay’s project ‘Taking Up Space’. The cover text reads: ‘An Evaluation of Ambassadors project, Social Art Library (SOAL). Evaluator: Lawrence Bradby’.

An evaluation report of the Social Art Library Ambassadors programme, which ran from October 2020 to March 2021.

The Social Art Library Ambassadors programme ran led to 19 new social art projects being uploaded and archived in the Library. Through these new uploads, the Ambassadors project achieved 4 of the initial aims of the project. These were to:

contribute to an online system of archiving for social art practice;
archive responses to the Covid-19 crisis;
contribute to the ongoing collective creation of a history of social practice art;
help to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 by supporting social projects.

A fifth aim was to build new knowledge about creative forms of archiving. Only four of the uploaded projects tried new and creative forms of archiving, so this aim was only partially met.

In the next phase, SOAL will develop its focus on creative archiving while continuing to involve social artists in the design of the platform.