UC Santa Barbara

Agonism in the Artistic City analyzes hegemonic and counter-hegemonic choreographies of public art and placemaking in the Southern U.S. city of Louisville, Kentucky. Placemaking is examined as the choreographed rehearsal and performance of aesthetic public space by key political actors, ranging from elected officials and corporate art curators to protestors and playwrights. Five discrete choreographies are presented through theoretical examples and real-life models of bureaucratic, embodied, digitally augmented, virtual, and agonistic placemaking. A foundational case study of bureaucratic placemaking provides the basis for a comparative analysis of the 2020 Louisville Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements’ radically embodied model of placemaking.

This dissertation argues how, following the tragic police killing of Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home, Louisville protestors re-made the city a more racially just and socially inclusive urban space through collective occupations of streets and public parks, re-iconizations of civic monuments, and mobilizations of makeshift memorials and mutual aid. The conclusion elucidates how radical, agonistic placemaking can be sustained to resist ongoing legacies of structural racism, white supremacy, dynastic wealth, and corporate funding infrastructures that spatialize social, racial, and class divisions in neoliberal Louisville and other cities across the United States.

Interviews with curators, artist-activists, and other city actors contribute to this contemporary performance historiography of the 2020 Louisville protest movement. Oral histories surrounding the art and protests also inform a critical examination of Louisville arts leadership and institutional aesthetic production. Artistic City profiles the bureaucratic placemaking of Louisville Metro Government, the digitally augmented placemaking of 21c Museum Hotel and the virtual placemaking of Actors Theatre of Louisville. It also analyzes the individual performances of administrative, critical, and creative producers across the arts: Sarah Lundgren, Alice Stites, Robert Berry Fleming, Nancy Baker Cahill, Brianna Harlan, Hannah Drake, Josh Miller, and Idris Goodwin. Artistic City addresses the lacuna in theater, dance, and performance studies scholarship of Louisville as an understudied artistic geographic region.

Building on the embodied dance and performance studies methods of SanSan Kwan, Susan Leigh Foster, Jessica Nakamura, Joseph Roach, and Christian DuComb, Artistic City employs walking and protesting in the city as a resistant urban practice. Observations of everyday pedestrian movement at civic sites supply corporeal evidence of how bodies tactically counter-produce urban space. A close analysis of urban and arts policy text and visual design schematics demonstrates the ways in which “invisible” administrative and curatorial labor produces aesthetic place. Such research provides the basis for this investigation into how Louisville arts policy and urban renewal histories have informed hegemonic and bureaucratic placemaking in the recent past and how contemporary activists performed artistically and agonistically against hegemony during crisis.