Aesthetics and Creativity in Youth and Community Arts

Abstract This chapter describes how creative experiences are organized by YouthSites, what arts traditions they emerge from, how they changed over time, and what range of purposes they afford for participants and audiences alike. The chapter begins with an overview of forms of expression enjoyed and practiced by socially marginalized groups that influenced youth arts practices in London, Toronto, and Vancouver. It then explores how these arts practices derive from interconnections between lived experience, philosophies of self-realization, the role of community, relationality, and, above all, the relationship between making/performing/exhibiting art and social change. Key to the chapter is the way that forms of community arts reframe the relationship between audiences and practitioners, giving prominence to modes of expression as well as types and ranges of voices that are frequently excluded by the high culture tradition of the arts in both Canada and the United Kingdom.