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The founding organizer decided the summer of 2006 was the moment
to move Artists Now from an often for-loss, ad hoc project to a not-for-profit community organization. During that summer,
the founding organizer partnered with two other community members
and together they are developing the future of Artists Now. The
ensuing flurry of activity—from forging community partnerships
and organizational structures to developing a logo and a tag
line—was tunneling toward an October 24th fund raising dinner,
a sort of “coming out” party for Artists Now as an
institution.
The organizers had generally thought about Artists Now’s
public representation in terms of public talks, event invitations,
and flyers to school children’s parents. Planning
for the billboard asked them rethink their public representations
as they become visually locked in time and place, across a 45
x 6 space that is controlled by competing local politicians. The locking of this message both coincided with and gave greater
urgency to the creation of Artists Now’s message, and
requires looking at Artists Now’s history and desired future.
Despite being around for several years, Artists Now was just coming up with its logo, a logo that evoked this organization's previous name "Artists Now!" The organizers dropped the exclamation point once they started writing grants and business letters, recognizing that the screaming of the “!” made the organization seem unprofessional. While officially the exclamation point had been excised, images of it remain in the logo; in the negative space of the block above the words “Artists NOW” is a stylized exclamation point.
Whereas the logo captures
traces of Artists Now’s past,
the imagined billboard captured hopes for Artists Now’s future;
a successful future this billboard implied is already established
in the present. This future depends on many factors, and
one that particularly interested Artists Now’s three organizers
was what the billboard might mean to potential donors attending
the October 24th fund raising dinner: That Artists Now organizers
could make things happen, which might encourage potential donors
to be part of this up and coming arts organization? That Artists
Now spends a significant amount of money on advertising, and
implicitly not programming? The anticipated response of a still
unknown audience profoundly shaped the future of this billboard.
This textually depicted future that the billboard sought to create exposes how Artists Now was in the process of being institutionalized and how the organizers were in the process of becoming professionalized. Analysis of this multimodal billboard, therefore, should attend to the multiple networks that shape local community building as well as contemporary needs and possibilities for literacy. Such an inquiry into the everyday reasoning of rhetors requires a mapping of both the broad cultural-historic factors that shape the production of institutions and people and of the ways these productions become enacted in local contexts. As this case study makes clear, CHAT can facilitate such a project.
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