Co-curator Xander Marro points to executive director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council Roberto Bedoya’s definition(s) of Creative Placemaking as a guiding principle for the Streetside Sculpture series. Bedoya describes the labor of placemaking as the “cultural activities that shape the physical and social characteristics of place,” with a crucial attunement to how such installations resonate with our sense of belonging (or dis-belonging) in such places. As Bedoya points out, placemaking is work: it “enacts identity and activities that allow personal memories, cultural histories, imagination, and feelings to enliven the sense of ‘belonging’ through human and spatial relationship.” It’s not enough to drop a sculpture in a space and cross our fingers for transformation; the hope and plan is for artwork as an opening to relationship—through memory, culture, history, imagination—to elusive “belonging.” 
 
This resonates with Tillyer’s conception of himself and the function of his works. Like the spirit of the Works Progress Administration artists or the Art Workers Coalition of the 1960s and 1970s, Tillyer is more comfortable describing himself as a “creative worker” than an artist: “it is artwork, after all.” Lately, he resonates most with Honoré Daumier, the nineteenth-century satirical illustrator and cartoonist, so influential to the French Realist and Impressionist movements. Known for his incisive political critique, certainly Daumier’s lithographs, paintings, and sculptures and cartoons do something, which is what Tillyer wants more than anything else from artwork.

Tillyer works on different registers. He is the Founding Director of the New England Visionary Artists Museum, located in the Anchor House of Artists in Northampton, MA. The Anchor House, founded in 1997, works toward “just equity and financial parity,” supporting artists with neurodiverse conditions and fighting associated social stigmas. The House offers subsidized studio spaces so that artists can “redefine their lives for who they are as artists.” The New England Visionary Artists Museum conserves the legacies of “artists who lived on the vividly prescient edge of life,” educates on the artists’ lived experience, and provides opportunities in the research of visionary art. The mythos of the divergent artist is all around us, but the conditions of the artworld which might fetishize such makers is not necessarily the same that will support and preserve them. Finally, the Open Creative Education Center offers art instruction and support from professional artists, regardless of income status. In short, Anchor House is a place for belonging.