Adapting Visual Thinking Strategies as a Tool for Evaluating the Impact of a Work of Public Art

This article presents the development and application of an approach for evaluating audience response to and meaning-making from large-scale public murals, created as part of an art-science-community engagement project. The project adapted Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) facilitation, a common technique in visual arts education, with a focus group style interview to investigate if the murals generated the intended meaning-making among members of the communities they depicted. We piloted a VTS-centered focus group discussion with three groups of community residents in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Thematic coding of observations in the discussion groups suggest that a VTS-centered focus group is an effective approach to evaluate audience meaning-making by prompting slow looking, protracted discussion, and offering a structure for discussion that keeps the facilitator from shaping topics of conversation. The affordances and limitations of this approach as a tool for research and evaluation of learning through public art and exhibitions is discussed.