The City of Rochester (“City”) recently submitted an application to the first round of the Bloomberg Public Art Challenge. The City is seeking organizations and artists to collaborate with the City on further development of the project proposal. In the event that the City is selected as a finalist and invited to apply to the second round of the Bloomberg Public Art Challenge this spring, the organizations selected through this RFQ would be Partners (“Partners”) in the second round application.
Given the unique, multi-faceted nature of this project, the City is soliciting qualifications from:
Artists
Organizations with one or more of the following capacities:
o Arts management
o Art therapy
o Youth development or engagement
o Community outreach
o Project management
It should be noted that the City is not looking for specific public art proposals or specific program ideas for engaging youth at this stage. Those ideas will be developed at a later time, after the City has selected a team of Partners who have demonstrated their qualifications and capacity for helping develop and coordinate the Project.
For the first round application, the City submitted a project concept titled “Centering Youth: Acknowledging Trauma and Healing through Public Art” (the “Project”). The topic of youth trauma gets to the heart of many issues in Rochester: youth in Rochester experience trauma from violence, disparities in education, multi-generational poverty, and most recently, the pandemic. With this Project, the City intends to explore art as a tool to address these issues.