Low-income and disenfranchised populations face a variety of barriers to access in their daily lives. One of the least discussed but powerful barriers they face today is access to art and art education. Regular exposure to experiences in the arts and culture can empower and inspire an audience, and when some populations are excluded from these experiences they lose the opportunity to be inspired to be creative themselves. More importantly, they are sent the message that art belongs to those that can afford it or that have access to it, and that if they don't belong to that group they can't participate in interacting with and creating art.
Our project attempts to bridge the gap between these populations and affordable, local art experiences. By allowing the user to search for art experiences near them, and to filter that search by price and distance, we hope to connect those with little access to art with free or cheap options in their area. This reduces the necessary cost and travel time involved in seeking art experiences, and hopefully informs users about how art is available in their local community. Using our search engine, users can find local artists, formal and informal exhibitions of art, and art education opportunities in their community.
We utilized Google's Place API and coded in HTML, CSS, Node.js, and Bootstrap to create Find x Art. We ran into some challenges in calling the API, and in calling multiple APIs at once later in the project. We also had some trouble with transferring user input data between pages, such as taking the user's preferred location and radius and moving it to the Search Results page. Although we ran into a lot of challenges in creating our project since none of us had much web dev experience, we all learned a lot from mentors and other hackers and had a great time putting the project together.
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