10 - Examining Public Art in Parks and Recreation’s Pawnee, Indiana

Summary

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the role of public art within the television series Parks and Recreation (NBC 2009–2015). I look to key moments where public art affects the narrative of the show as well as the styles quoted within the series to examine how public art develops the fictional town of Pawnee as a place. I argue that these fictional public artworks – both as narrative vehicles and as components of set design – are key architects of the show's diegetic universe, sarcastic/sweet comic tone, and politics.

Keywords: Parks and Recreation, television, public art, production design, murals, sitcoms

In the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009–2015), the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, is both a satirical pastiche of the American Midwest and the object of the blind and faithful love of the show's protagonist and feminist hero, Parks Department Deputy Director Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). What, by all accounts, seems to be a rather unsavory place to live (between the raccoon infestations, bullying local candy industry, fickle electorate, and rampant obesity epidemic) gradually earns the same love and devotion from the audience as from the eternally optimistic Knope. One continuing plot thread that develops Pawnee as a distinct place is public art: murals done in the Regionalist style pepper City Hall; local monuments are erected or vandalized; and controversy arises around censorship and committee-designed projects. Public art both reveals the legacy of colonial violence and historical oppression in Pawnee (and American public art more broadly) and functions as a key vehicle for affective production of place for both viewers and characters.

This chapter analyzes how Parks and Recreation deploys public art to both develop Pawnee as a place and examines the fraught relationship between public art, national identity, and diverse publics. Public artworks – both as narrative vehicles and major components of set design – are key architects of the show's diegetic universe, sarcastic/sweet comic and affective tone, and liberal pluralist politics. Who is represented, what is repressed, what is allowed, and who decides are all questions that recur frequently in public art controversy, and controversy fuels much of Parks and Recreation's engagement with public art. Despite the headaches and blunt reminders of a disturbing past that Pawnee's public art frequently elicits, Knope's favorite place on earth is the mural of wildflowers in City Hall.