Community Building

In the Spring semester I was awarded a Pratt Fellowship to work on community building activities with the Communications Committee, the Grad ComD student group. Camille McMorrow and I decided the best way to create community was to introduce skill-sharing workshops where people could also recycle all of their discarded prints to create beautiful art. The first workshop was a bookmaking event, and for the second one we did collage. We also threw in some great finds from Materials for the Arts, which I was actually interviewed for by PBS! In the video below my interview is around the 1:45 mark. It is such a fabulous organization because it provides art materials to schools and community groups absolutely free of charge. The only thing you need to do is write thank you notes, which admittedly was a big pain. Still, an amazing place.

Watch the full episode. See more SundayArts.

These are the collages I made to promote the Save Your Scraps collage event. Sasakisan is a huge inspiration.

I'm taking a studio painting course on the Brooklyn campus right now, and my professor doesn't seem to like collage all that much. I guess the argument is that artists can hide behind collage, instead of showing their full selves with brush strokes. Ok, point taken. I still love collage as a legitimate medium, especially as a graphic designer who works with paper every day!

Community involvement is key to combat the loss of public spaces from branding and the loss of culture from globalization. I wonder if my thesis could explore the creation of an online blog template for communities to transmit real-time updates. This would of course include a large map of the area for organization on where events and meet-ups are taking place. I'm beginning to think that anything can be made into a map of some sort. I'm starting to have some interesting paintings that I will post soon, on the subject of abstract mapping.