Keswick Multi-Care Arts and Crafts
In between 2012 and 2013, I worked with the senior citizen residents of the Keswick Multicare Center. During my time there, I conducted interviews that were related to The Home Project. These series of conversations about what home means were complimented by workshops where participants/collaborators created images that were representations of what home means to them.
Call and Response
A collaborative art project that included young people from Sandtown Winchester and Cherry Hill in Baltimore, young people from Ghana, and senior citizen residents at the Kewick Multicare Center.
Jubilee Arts
From 2011 to 2012, I served as Artist-in-Residence at Jubilee Arts through the AmeriCorps volunteer program. Click here to visit the Jubilee Arts website. Here are some snapshots of the projects that I organized, and facilitated during my tenure at Jubilee:
Jubilee Arts Martin Luther King Day Parade Float
Jubilee Arts Community Art Fair 2012
During the sumer of 2011, I co-faciliated art making workshops at the Club at Collington Square.
Below is just a small glimpse of the art projects we created in collaboration with the young people who participate in this free summer enrichment program.
Artscape 2012 with The Club at Collington Square
My co-facilitator and I worked with the young people who participated in the summer program at the Club at Collington Square. We developed a project that was an integral part of a pyramid curriculum that we implemented over the summer weeks. The project at artscape was... Vision-Mask Making!
The young people from the Club did an amazing job in their roles of leadership that day...
Black is Never Quiet
A public performance of private experiences.
On August 11th 2009, 7 people from the American and German African diaspora began an artistic project that explores what it means to be part of the African diaspora on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall falling.
We sought to explore and begin to deconstruct the socio/spiritual/psychologogical fabric that make up the walls that are still present today.
This is an artistic expression and interpretation of the walls that are still present in 2009. As race and culture, are a performance, and nationality are decided from the random borders created by world powers, we decided to perform our ciphers in both public and private realms.
In 2007 I became a volunteer for the Red Poppy Arts House; a performing arts organization based in the historic Mission district of San Francisco. I worked on the Family Art Project, a weekly daylong Saturday program that provides free art instruction to children ages 3-18. Admission is open to anyone who shows up. Many of the children discovered the program by simply walking by and seeing other children painting and drawing.
The racial and class divisions of residents in the Mission were greatly diminished during Family Art. Families who did not interact with each other on the street due to language and cultural barriers came together at Red Poppy. Everyone, children and adults, become engaged in the process of creating art.
After volunteering for several months, I was hired as the Coordinator for the Family Art Project, where I developed the concept for an evolving collaborative mural. The mural is mounted on the ground-level wall outside of the Red Poppy. The concept is a variant of the idea of traditional public art. But, instead of being viewed by the audience, the mural is created by the audience – the residents of the community who resides there.
During my tenure with Our Oakland Eastside Stories, I co-organized a community storytelling day in East Oakland where more than fifty community members came to share their stories. Community media organizations were present to document the occasion including Youth Uprising, BAYCAT, and First Voice.