The Community Art Lab (CAL) is a research and experimental production centre that stimulates increased understanding and sustained quality enhancement of community art. To accomplish this CAL organizes public events and encounters between artists, students, policy makers and others interested in community art.

CAL blatantly places the power of art and culture smack in the middle of society. It does not have the illusion to provide instant relief to social tensions but it is convinced that art and culture add an indispensable dimension to daily life that anyone should be entitled to. CAL is particularly interested in art that is produced in more or less intense cooperation between collectively minded artists and people who are more or less excluded from middle class cultural life. The aim of this practice is not to imitate mainstream, commercial or avant-garde art, but, on the contrary, to develop new respectable art forms to which the power and the creativity of these people as well as the cultural and physical places they live in, are central.

What is the CAL?
The Community Art Lab is a research workshop, which at least once a year organizes new public events and encounters. Its chief activity is conducting research on how Utrecht-based arts partners practice community art and how this relates to similar initiatives elsewhere. In doing this, the Community Art Lab positions itself squarely on the cutting edge between art, welfare, education, and community development to explore how these worlds collide and interact and how researchers in these worlds are thinking and writing about community art. The CAL does not avoid controversies, because even among those who professionally reflect on community art there is disagreement on:

- the reliability of measuring the social or psychological impact of community art on individuals or neighbourhoods. Watch the movie and hear what François Matarasso has to say about this.

- about how – within the community art spectrum - the notion of quality shifts the closer you move from art to welfare, education, or development.

- or about how - within the overall art world – the notion of quality shifts when you move from individual to collectively created art that is produced in marginal neighbourhoods.

Read what Sandra Trienekens has to say about this.

Read what Grant Kester has to say about this.