Collaborative Community Creation

GCPF is a partnership between Surel’s Place, visionary neighboring business owners, artists, art lovers, and countless volunteers designed to empower new opportunities for public art and creative placemaking in Garden City.

At the core of its mission, Surel’s Place and GCPF supports artists and champions their role in our community’s future. The fund is designed to ensure local, emerging, and POC artists have paid opportunities to create public-facing art and spur the kind of creative placemaking efforts that will keep our community vibrant, unique, and vital to the Treasure Valley while also providing opportunities for artists to grow, learn, and create together!

 

Miguel mixes paint while working on his Zion Glass Studio mural

 
 

BSU Students explore and discuss the impact of new murals in Garden City

 

Here and Now

The Live-Work-Create District is changing rapidly with growth and development, but residents and business leaders are acting through this and other efforts to corral and preserve the artistic and creative energy that has shaped the neighborhood over the past several decades. Dozens of artists have lived or kept studios in the district, and their contributions to the culture and economy are significant and worth preserving, protecting and enhancing. 

Unlike the surrounding City of Boise, Garden City currently has no established arts department or funding apparatus. Our private-sector/non-profit collaborative aims to fill that gap, to connect with business leaders and developers to create new art-based placemaking opportunities, and lay the groundwork for potential public-sector collaborations with the city, law enforcement, urban renewal districts, federal agencies and more.

 
 
 

Focused on Creative Placemaking

The placemaking art projects and partnerships this fund will create won't directly affect rapidly rising prices and development, but they can help shape future development and encourage a sense of community and collaboration that will spur creative solutions to affordable housing, live-work spaces, educational opportunities and more. 

The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, funds creative placemaking not only to preserve arts and support artists, but because research and experience shows that it strengthens communities and “can be deployed as a strategy to address a wide range of community issues or challenges from public health to safety, economic development to housing.”

By bringing artists, developers, business owners, civic leaders and nonprofit organizations together with the families who live in this mixed district and others who work, recreate or enjoy cultural and social opportunities here, we believe the Garden City Placemaking Fund can foster many of the societal and systemic benefits experts attribute to creative placemaking.

 

Creative Placemaking:

 

Amplifies

…by bringing new attention to the voices of residents, to local history and to a community’s cultural infrastructure.

Energizes

…by injecting new resources, activity, people and enthusiasm into a community, its issues and its economy.

Intensifies

…by connecting communities, people, and places to increase economic opportunity. 

Empowers

…by helping community leaders envision new possibilities for how the community can overcome challenges and approach collaborative problem-solving.

Artists and volunteers meet before and afternoon of color blocking at 33rd and Stockton

 

Artists Miguel Almeida and Ashley Dreyfus work on murals with the help of community members and volunteers

 
 

Lorelle Rau in front of her mural at Coiled Wines