I worked with a great community organizer and leader, Lucious Murchison to put this piece together. I had left my number with the organization to volunteer to teach ultimate frisbee and got a call looking for someone to do an art project about "Peace Art." Ok.Objective: Create a dialogue with two local populations to address recent violence in the neighborhood: 1) a group of 8 local teens working as summer camp counselors, 2) general youth attending a community block party event at the end of the summer.
Product: An indoor installation to represents the teen's discussions about violence, peace, change, and healthy communities, and that represents the thoughts and voices of the youth in the community.
Method: Workshops to get the teens to brainstorm & prep for the community party activities: Visualizations, lessons about symbolism, metaphors, public art, exercise to photograph the aspects of their community that they are proud of, that they really like. They made individual collages those printed photographs to make a Mission Hill out of all of the "best parts" of their environment.
Themes:
Birds: Peace, community
Cranes: Japanese tradition of wishing for something important
White cranes: Community members who have passed, whose voices and memories still matter
Feathers: Each feather carries a youth's wish for their community
Colors on the large birds: after talking about the positive parts of the neighborhood, we created a graffiti mural about aspects of the community the teens would like to change, paired with agents and symbols of change, the mural was folded into the three birds, representing the ability to identify and transform your circumstances into something unexpected and purposeful.
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