Nana Projects
This semester I was thrilled to be able to work at Nana Projects. This non-profit organizes directs the Great Halloween Lantern Parade in Patterson Park. This year we had 5,ooo participants carry lanterns in the parade. This parade reaches across generations as well as cultural backgrounds to bring community members together.
While working at the organization Cait, Myung, and I, along with other volunteers, were helping families and friends learn how to make lanterns in workshops at the Creative Alliance, and the Patterson Park Public Charter School.
The workshop days were very long sometimes lasting from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30p.m. During a one-day workshop we assisted 250 to 300 people in learning how to make lanterns. A variety of community members came who were veterans at lantern making, some who had never participated before, and some who already had the design planned out ahead of time and brought their own decorations. These workshops were a great way for families and friends to hangout and create something fun and exciting. It has become a tradition for many people. Despite the long days I never walked away feeling completely exhausted. All the workshops ran very smoothly without chaos. I walked away from the workshops feeling refreshed with a new perspective on what community art can accomplish.
With the way this site is setup, there is not that much interaction with the community. There are the 3 or 4 marathon workshops but there isn’t consistent interaction to allow relationships with community members to build. For me this was an adjustment compared to other CAP cites that I’ve worked at where every week I was interacting with the community I was working in. However, working at the NANA Projects taught me about planning, organizing, communication, and advertising for an event.
We also got the opportunity to work in the NANA Projects studio for a couple hours during the week. We worked along side Molly (parade director), Annie, and Elizabeth (studio assistance), with whatever was needed for the parade. After the parade we were put in charge of organizing an informational binder about the event. This part of the job was definitely less exciting than preparing for the parade. However it gave us more knowledge and experience about what it takes to plan for this event realizing the paper work and research is involved.
I remember when I went to this parade for the first time last year. I was amazed and just so happy to actually witness the cause and effect of community art within a community. Now I’m so thrilled to have been able to be apart of the process this time. I admired the people that I worked with as community leaders and artists.
-Susan Hurite, Fall 2007
CAPfest
Going into my 4th semester as a CAP intern, I tried to find a way to integrate community arts with my personal work and ideas. My first year at MICA I had a difficult time adjusting to this very different environment, and I think that was partially because I didn't have a way to interact with it. My CAP internships and the Finding Baltimore class helped me to start getting off campus and to experience the community, and honestly, it made me feel so much better. Suddenly I wasn't a tourist anymore, I actually knew a little bit about my surroundings.
So now that I'm a tier 3 intern, I decided to take that a step further. Over the summer I did a lot of work at the Leadershape conference with my personal visions and goals, and steps I wanted to take to "change the world." As cliché and after school special as that sounds, it gave me a lot of insight, and I realized I wanted a way continue to blur the line between MICA and BALTIMORE using what we all know best... art (duh). It just seemed so silly to me that a community of artists were so cut off from everybody around them when art is such a great tool to connect with and reach out to people. Hence, CAPfest was born, using an old CAP event, The Spring Festival, as a jumping off point. The old event included a parade of artwork made at various site, free art workshops, food, and live music. I wanted to recapture some of that spirit, and start that tradition rolling again. My main goal with the fest was to get people from the community and MICA students to interact with each other, in hopes of establishing new connections and relationships.
And what better way to promote this connection between MICA students and community members than to display the artwork they make together in a gallery on campus? It seemed like an obvious collaboration between my ideas and the project Anna Ishii had been planning for her France Merrick Fellowship, CAPtions.
Using a grant from the Student Affairs Community Service Fund and the help of our awesome volunteers, we were able to set up some small make and take art activities for the fest, and the other France Merrick Fellows, Hannah Baker and Margaret Hull, were able to have a silkscreening table going. The screenprinting was a huge hit for the MICA students, and the Bolton Hill kids loved the face painting and sidewalk chalk. Everybody was really into the exhibition, we even managed to get the Senior Art Club from the Marlborough Apts. to the reception.
Overall I'd call the event a success, but I definitely have more ideas for the future. This won't be the last you hear of Cait Byrnes and CAPfest.
Maps & Directions