Exploring key issues for the anthropology of art and art theory, this fascinating text provides the first in-depth study of community art from an anthropological perspective.The book focuses on the forty year history of Free Form Arts Trust, an arts group that played a major part in the 1970s struggle to carve out a space for community arts in Britain. Turning their back on the world of gallery art, the fine-artist founders of Free Form were determined to use their visual expertise to connect, through collaborative art projects, with the working-class people excluded by the established art world. In seeking to give the residents of poor communities a greater role in shaping their built environment, the artists' aesthetic practice would be transformed.Community Art examines this process of aesthetic transformation and its rejection of the individualized practice of the gallery artist. The Free Form story calls into question common understandings of the categories of "art," "expertise," and "community," and makes this story relevant beyond late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Britain.

This edited collection offers global perspectives on the transverse, boundary-blurring possibilities of community arts education. Invoking ‘transversality’ as an overarching theoretical framework and a methodological structure, 55 contributors – community professionals, scholars, artists, educators and activists from sixteen countries – offer studies and practical cases exploring the complexities of community arts education at all levels. Such complexities include challenges created by globalizing phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; continuing movement of immigrants and refugees; growing recognition of issues related to equity, diversity and inclusion in the workplace; and the increasing impact of grassroot movements and organizations. Chapters are grouped into four thematic clusters – Connections, Practices, Spaces and Relations – that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education not only shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life but redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community.

This book provides a narrative exploration of community art therapy woven from its rich practice roots, theory, the multiple ways that it can be applied in practice, and through practitioner reflections. The applications of community art therapy are numerous, and this book provides knowledge to practitioners, guiding them in their own work and grounding their theoretical approaches. The community approaches presented in the text have been developed through careful research, strategy, and implementation. Community Art Therapy is for the benefit of art therapists, community artists and psychologists, and anyone interested in learning more about the stories of community art therapy.

"Art and the City" explores the contentious relationship between civic politics and visual culture in Los Angeles. Struggles between civic leaders and modernist artists to define civic identity and control public space highlight the significance of the arts as a site of political contest in the twentieth century.