The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

Sommer (Harvard faculty and founder of Cultural Agents: Arts and Humanities in Civic Engagement) reviews a number of arts-based interventions aimed at civic agency in support of democracy, many taking place in Latin America over the past 20 years. A jumpy mix of first-person brief reportage on particular projects (some of which the author was involved in through her organization) and rather summary academic citation of contemporary cultural theorists, this brief volume would have benefited from strong editing to unify episodic reporting into more accessible themes and arguments. Without this overall clarity and without a clear audience—the general public? other academics? activist artists?—it is hard to say who will find this material inspirational. While there has been wider reportage on some of the activities the author covers (art used to transform the violence in Bogotá, for example), her attempts to relate these activities to philosophical theorists of the role of art in human society will be lost on many. The discussion of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Arts Project, in the most structured chapter in the book, seems like an odd fit with the rest of the coverage, added to provide some historical precedent.