Good news!

I haven't updated this since I was in Philly?! Oops.

First of all, the idea I talked about in my last post is beginning to come together.  I wanted to do a mural on fabric with my students here, ship it over to Madagascar, and have a Peace Corps Volunteer finish it up and install it in their village with their students and/or villagers.  Part International art project collaboration, Part a way to get word out about important topics. (The murals would have to do with Malaria prevention and be mostly visual communication for those who can't read). 

So the update is, I've gotten the "go ahead" from both my old supervisor from Peace Corps Madagascar AND the arts council I work for here.  People have responded really well to the whole thing, so that's exciting!  I've got a few 4th grade classrooms that are interested in being the pilot project!!! AND, a current Peace Corps Volunteer who wants a mural in their village! A perfect match!! Only thing is, the time that the 4th grade staff has available is in early December. That's like, a month away.  And I still have some questions and specifics to work out with the volunteer getting the mural....but they have  sketchy phone service and no internet.  They are relaying messages to and from me, bush-style, by relaying messages to people who know other volunteers who DO have those modern conveniences.  I definitely know what that feels like, and am sympathetic to that.  It's just that I don't have a ton of time to plan this thing.  I want my first project to be PERFECT and GORGEOUS and WORK SMOOTHLY so that it will bring many more murals for Madagascar....or Africa....or even more of the world!!!! ...Someday.

What I think is the strange part is this:

#1: This idea first hit me like a lightning bolt in the middle of the night and energized me like no other.

#2: The perfect match of having a classroom AND a volunteer be ready for it came at about the same time.

#3: The idea for the project logo came to me and got sketched in about 5 minutes. Unusually easy.

#4: I ordered the fabric that we will paint the mural on, experimented with it, and liked it.  But I needed some more.  Without my account being charged, I found another box of the fabric on my doorstep today. Shipped for free, by mistake. 

I think that something out there wants this project to happen and is using me to channel all the creativity and good luck that it can provide.  The universe seems to be on my side.  All good signs that I should pursue it. Cool.

Here is the logo I designed for the project (someday, organization?).  I painted this on some of the fabric we'll paint the murals on. I want to make sure it can adhere to a wall using glue made out of just rice.  Rice is something that Madagascar has PLENTY of, so it would be great to have a glue recipe that's super easy and affordable for people to help them install their murals. We shall see... I'll be making a trip to Eugene's graffiti wall this week with this puppy.  :)

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In other news, I'm getting my calendar filled out pretty good for teaching this year.  I was hired to teach art lessons for 3rd, 2nd and 1st grades this year at Holt Elementary.  And I have a few school mural residencies booked throughout the Winter and Spring.  While teaching my last lessons with my 3rd graders, something hit me: I get the same "high", happy, fulfilled, joyful feeling from teaching kids art, as I get from painting murals by myself.  Discovering...or rather acknowledging this to myself was really special.  This means, if I can just figure out how to combine BOTH a freelance mural painting business AND being a teaching artist into a full-time gig, I could probably be happy career-wise for my whole life.  That's pretty cool to figure out.  I've struggled so much with trying to find a direction.  It's been stressful and hard.  To just "do art as a career" seems like a direction, but it was too broad and I was scattered and not getting anywhere.  I toyed with trying to become a tattoo artist, an illustrator, a graphic designer, etc etc.  Now, I feel like I know where to put my energy and my motivation and feel that it's right in my heart.  I have a SPECIFIC goal, and it's cleared up my mind a lot and leaving space and energy that I'll need to make it all happen. 

Ok, rambling.... just wanted to share the good news for those of you who were so encouraging about my last post!  Thanks you all for your support.  It means so much, you don't even know!!

Corie

The forming of a new IDEA!

Late last night, laying in bed, my mind was wide awake for no particular reason.... I walked a lot yesterday, I should have been tired.  My train of thought looked like this:

"Hmm, that new Astrology book I picked up was pretty creepily dead on about a lot of things when I looked up people's birthdays. Weird. It said people with my birthday should either "create something unique" or "help people" to "win fame or fortune or be happy and fulfilled or all of the above". Create something unique.....help people...........Hmmmmmm.......
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Murals are a unique career.... WHAT IF I tell all clients I'm donating a percentage of my fee to some Peace Corps Partnership project? Hmm...... WHAT IF I could make that money go specifically to sponsor the Malaria awareness murals that Peace Corps Volunteers are throwing up everywhere now in Madagascar? Hmmmm......
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WAIT A SECOND, I JUST LEARNED THE "PARACHUTE CLOTH METHOD" OF MURAL-MAKING!!! (This is a method where the artist(s) work on sections of a special fabric that looks and feels like a thick dryer cloth, then paste it all up onto the wall in big sections, like a gigantic modge-podge project. It allows artists the options to bring the work all over to have lots of community members help paint it, to work in snow or rain because they are working inside, OR to do the work far away from the actual wall where it will be installed.) WHAT IF I use any donations and/or commission percentages to make the malaria murals myself and then send them in a tube over to Madagascar to be installed by Peace Corps Volunteers and their communities!!!!!??? WAIT, MORE THAN JUST MALARIA, I COULD DESIGN A WHOLE SERIES OF HEALTH EDUCATIONAL IMAGES!! (With the help of my friendly Peace Corps Madagascar Health sector staff connections to make sure all the visual info (for the many illiterate) and text was correct and as informative as possible) Hmmm....
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OMG WAIT, Current Peace Corps Volunteers could fill out a form if they wanted a mural in their community, specifying the size they needed it, the specific message they wanted, and telling me that for sure the community was on board. 
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WAIT, this has to be more than just ME.  WHAT IF, I used my connection to Lane Arts and my access to classrooms to get kids here to help me paint the murals!!! I could start off each residency with a little presentation and Q and A session with the kids about what it's like in Madagascar and why we're making these informational murals. Then we paint. THE KIDS GET TO LEARN ABOUT OTHER CULTURES, GIVING BACK TO THOSE WITH LESS THAN THEM, AND ABOUT OF COURSE, PAINT TECHNIQUE, ETC.!!!!! YES!!!! COMMUNITY MURAL PROJECT FOR A COMMUNITY ACROSS THE WORLD! TALK ABOUT CONNECTING PEOPLE!!! 

WAIT. The communities in Madagascar would have to be invested somehow. WE COULD LEAVE SOMETHING FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE VILLAGES TO FINISH PAINTING! SOME TEXT? A MADAGASCAR FLAG? SOMETHING WOULD BE LEFT FOR THEM TO FINISH UP, MAKING THIS POTENTIALLY THE WIDEST-REACHING COMMUNITY MURAL PROJECT EVER - 2 GROUPS OF PEOPLE LITERALLY ACROSS THE WORLD FROM EACH OTHER, MAKING MURALS TOGETHER TO HELP OUT COMMUNITIES IN NEED THROUGH THE CHANNEL OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION!!!!!!
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This all came together for me at 1am, when I jumped out of bed, turned on the lights, and wrote it down before I let sleep take me away. Then I called my sister and told her about it, for double-insurance I wouldn't forget. This morning, I've been working the idea around in my mind, thinking about details and trying to get it "gelled".  I need people on board with me if I'm going to do this. I would need Peace Corps Madagascar's full cooperation and help in coordinating the volunteer's requests. I would need Lane Arts on board and willing to let me promote a new kind of Artist Residency in the schools, where kids are helping work on this project, rather than painting the walls of their own schools. I would need them to go through so that I can get paid for these new residencies. I would need funding to buy supplies and pay for shipping. Now, I'm researching "Fiscal Sponsorship" where you can partner with a non-profit so that any donations can be tax-deductable and you can apply for grants given to non-profits. The larger organization handles all your stuff, and they take a small percentage from each donation for their admin fees. There are specific agencies that do this for artists and their projects, and it sounds a hell of a lot easier than setting up a non-profit. Still formulating....thinking.....

Dear blog-readers, I know there are at least a couple of you....I see it on my stats page. I haven't much cared about comments up until now, but for this post, I'm especially interested in knowing what you think about this. Any other "BUT WAIT, WHAT IF....?" moments happen for you while reading this? Any resources that could be helpful? Do you even think this is a good idea? Thanks for reading everyone! More to come on this soon, I hope!

Corie

And...more pictures!!

I'm on a role! More visuals for all the stories. :) This post's pictures go with this blog post here. It's the ghost story one. Super creepy. You kinda have to read it to understand what I'm going to show you here...otherwise the following pictures, although interesting, will not be nearly as much fun! ;)

 The first frame is a collection of all the sculptures that represent the people most deeply affected by the murder of the fictional victim. Family, friends, baby-mommas, etc.

 Oh the tangled webs we weave.....

 Each piece represents a person affected by a single murder.

 Some are a bit creepier, despite all the glitter.

 EVERY SINGLE sculpture piece of this whole thing is going to get a tiny LED light. Most are already rigged with them, but more need to be added. Imagine this piece in a dimly lit room, all lit up!

 There's a tiny light inside that styrofoam ball, the tulle on that heart, inside that glass box. Can't wait to see it all lit up!!!

 Working on wrapping the entire frame in sparkly, metallic gold and black fabric.

 This is the second frame. This one contains sculptures of those the least closest to the fictional murder victim....the "haters", the neighborhood drug dealer, the post man, etc.

Hope you enjoyed hearing about "The 94 Effect" a.k.a The Murder Project!!

Picture Post!!

So this is what I've been doing with most of my time here in Philly.  The "Murder Project" as it's been aptly nicknamed (The 94 Effect - I wrote about this creepy project in a previous post), is now basically finished and my muralist mentor and I are out of her studio and spending 100% of our working days here at the pool mural project in North Philly.  This is what it looks like so far....

This wall is the first and only to be finished so far. 

Pretty, right?

This wall isn't quite finished yet. Still needs the text. The whole mural will eventually have the text of a poem wrapping around 3 sides of the building. 

The assistant muralist (left) and the men hired from the work-release facility as a part of the Mural Arts Program's Restorative Justice program.

Workin' away!

 Hands getting steadier with every day that goes by!

 Another intern and I are working on the wall facing the pool. NO DUNKING! NO RUNNING!

 So many brushes....

 We mix all the colors beforehand to match the master design, assign each color to a number, and do the whole thing like a giant paint-by-number. 

 It takes a LOT of paint......

So there you go, a visual post, finally!! 

I think I need to make this happen.

So, I've had this idea cooking in the back of my mind for quite awhile now.  I think when I get home, it's gonna be time to make it happen for reals.  The exciting part is, I found a grant to apply to that might help me make this easier, and spend less of my own money to get going.

This is what I want to do:

Malagasy Cultural Night/Art Exhibit/Benefit:

- I'll finish my Madagascar painting series (trying to have like 10-12 BIG pieces, and some smaller ones). I've done a few already - they're all inspired by different aspects of my experience in Madagascar with the Peace Corps. Everything will be for sale, along with a ton of 8 x 10 prints that I'll sell for like $20.  All or most profits will go to the organization, PSI  (Population Services International), and will be directed towards their branch in Madagascar. (This organization provides health education, birth control education and supplies, hygiene education and supplies, and things like mosquito nets for families, etc. They're just awesome, and hands down the organization I was most impressed with while I was there....besides Peace Corps of course...haha).

- I have saved a huge pile of the best art that the little kiddos made while I lived in Madagascar. I have pictures of most of the kids who drew them, so I'll have some framed kid art on display also, with their photos and a short blurb about them, beside each one.

- I might give a little talk and/or have a slideshow running of my Mada pictures.

- Of COURSE, there will be Malagasy music going...so good!

- I might invite the UofO Peace Corps Recruiter to come and have a little table there if they want.

- Food, drinks, duh!

- No cover, but a donation jar for $$$ for PSI.

-Try to pick a venue that is on the First Friday Art Walk in Eugene, so lots of people come!


So, that's it! I must do this, no?  I've been chipping away at the series, slowly....painting when I feel like it....but I think this needs to happen soon, while Mada is still sorta fresh in my mind. Yay!!

The GHOST STORY of "The 94 Effect" Project

Ok, I've put it off long enough.  Gather 'round the campfire, kiddies, it's story time.

So If you've been reading this blog, you know that I'm an intern working under a muralist (I call her Andrea on here... not sure if I should use her real name) for the Mural Arts Program here in Philadelphia.  For 3-4 days a week, you can find us painting up the outside of a public pool in a North Philly neighborhood, usually in shorts and bathing suits, sweating and dripping in the Summer-on-the-East-Coast humidity. One or two days a week, we're in Andrea's studio, working on a different project.

This other non-mural project, is called "The 94 Effect".  The deal is, some psychiatrist had this theory that 94 people are affected by every murder that happens.  From the victim's neighbors to their math teacher to their sister, people all around a murder victim are somehow affected by it.  So the project was going to be a sort of anti-violence/awareness tool, and involve at-risk kids somehow.  So in the first stages, Andrea held a 5-day summer art workshop with some local high school juniors and seniors, at this "really CREEPY building" (her words. I was not here in Philly yet when they all did this). The kids all came up with a fictional murder story, victim, and 94 characters to be affected by it.  For each character, the kids gave them a name, a relationship to the victim, and a description of how they felt about the whole thing.  Along with this little write-up, each character got a "junk sculpture" to represent them.  The kids did a really great job and sounds like they had a blast making these things out of old bottles, glitter, shattered auto glass, sequined fabric, styrofoam shapes, etc etc....just super creative, fun sculptures out of all this crazy stuff.  Andrea and I's job, is to gather up all these sculptures and make them all into one cohesive piece to be displayed in the public (still not sure where it's going to be yet). So our solution was, we got 2 gigantic frames (like 4' x 8' - BIG) and wove all this string in them to create kind of a web. Then, we've been weaving these sculptures into the framed web. That's not all.... with the project budget, we also had enough to hire an engineer to make us these little LED lights that pulse slowly on and off - like a HEARTBEAT.  Each junk sculpture, representing a person, gets a heartbeat light.  It's gonna look awesome. And creepy. Which is the whole point. Also, we're gonna make a book of all the character's descriptions and display that, too, so people can read about everyone.  So, you're probably like, "cool, I guess that's creepy? Sorta?" No. Get this:

Creepy Thing #1: When naming her "fictional" character, one of the students named her character a name of an actual murder victim in Philly.  It was a strange name.  She swears she had never heard of the story before. They re-named the character something else in respect for the victim.

Creepy Thing #2: When the kids were thinking up the murder story, across the room from the student mentioned above, another kid simultaneously "brainstormed" the exact way that the actual victim from Creepy Thing #1, was murdered. Without knowing the story.

Creepy Thing #3: Every time Andrea went to this "creepy building" to do the workshop with the kids, she got severe stomach cramps and would eventually vomit.  Every day she was there.  After the workshop, as she was leaving the room by herself, she describes a "black mist" coming from the back of the otherwise totally bright and sunny room (it had large windows), moving towards her.  She ran from the building and hasn't been back, since.

Creepy Thing #4: One of the kids found an old teakettle in the basement of this creepy building they were working in, and used it to create their junk sculpture. As Andrea was moving everything back to her studio, this sculpture broke (multiple pieces, hot-glued together). She set the pieces aside in her studio.  The next day when she came into her studio, the pieces were re-assembled the way they were supposed to be originally.

Creepy Thing #5: Weird things have been happening in the studio since bringing everything there. While it was just us two working one day, a piece of glass fell off the table on the other side of the room, and shattered. Andrea was working one day and heard knocks at the door (no one there) and more stuff fell off the shelves.

Yes, so maybe the things falling were some weird minor earthquake things.  Maybe the black mist was some kind of weird mold, and that's what made Andrea sick.  Maybe it can all be explained away somehow, but I am one to believe that there's things out there that we don't have the ability to perceive (well, maybe some of us out there can).  Maybe some spirit or something is trying to make sense of this whole murder thing....maybe it's stirring up something painful and making someone mad.  I don't know, really, but Andrea says she could not be more ready to get this project done and out of her life.  Take from it what you will, but it's a crazy world, and nothing is black and white.

Until our next story,

Corie

Art in the Jail

Yesterday was a unique work day.  Instead of my normal schedule, I went to a place called The Detention Center.

I had signed up along with 6 other interns to help out with an art day event that the Restorative Justice folks had been planning at the jail (not state prison...more of a holding center for people awaiting trial).  Usually, the art classes that Restorative Justice (a branch within the Mural Arts Program) holds, are either at the state prison, the juvenile detention center, or the work-release facility.  The Detention Center though, needed some art too.  The classes are usually a series of 10-weeks and are actual instruction in general art.  The event I was helping out at, was planned to be more of a free-for-all style, art making, creative day for the inmates. There would be no formal instruction, just tables set out with projects and materials to work on, and us there for encouragement.  We all were asked to come up with ideas for projects the men could do, and my first thought was of a project I love doing with my students as a supplement to whatever wall mural we're working on - a cut-paper mural!

These were some cut paper murals that I've done with kids in the past.  All you need is a big sheet of butcher paper (I like blue - doubles as a sky and/or water), some construction paper, glue and scissors.  I use this sometimes to occupy whatever kids aren't painting on the actual mural at the time.  Kids love it, it teaches collaboration and team-working skills, and teachers love to display them.  So at my table, I was going to have the inmates make one of these, of Philly.

My friend, Dorothy is in town right now, so she tagged along with me yesterday, too.  A good way to spend an afternoon, right?  We arrived at the detention center in conservative dress, were patted down and put all our art supplies through the x-ray machine, and were led to what they called their library (with not one book on the many empty bookshelves).  There were 50 inmates waiting for us, who had signed up for the event.  We explained the projects: there would be a table each for my mural, sketching, card-making, and origami.  The men got up and moved around to the table of their choosing.  The ones sitting at Dorothy and my table, were chatty and engaged.  They seemed really glad to be talking to us, suggesting places to see in Philly, telling us some crazy stories, and asking us about ours.  At first they were really hesitant to start, afraid to "do it wrong" (same situation as my students oftentimes).  We had printed out pictures of the Philly skyline, so they were glad to have that as inspiration for the buildings they made out of the brightly colored paper.  After watching Dorothy and I start to work, they started getting into it themselves.  They combined colors interestingly, cut out intricate little window shapes, created depth by overlapping buildings, and made little billboards and signs of Philly places.  I was impressed by their enthusiasm and abilities.  One guy was telling us about how he's on "Psych meds" but doesn't actually take them (shh, don't tell), and how amazed he was that he was "feeling calm" and not "seeing red" at the moment.  Haha...uhhh....good?  I wish I could show you how their final piece turned out.  They didn't allow phones or cameras inside, or I would have taken pictures.  All glued onto the butcher paper was a big central river with a bridge over it, trees on either side, and buildings of all colors and shapes in the background, and clouds in the sky.  It really turned out awesome.  Everyone who worked on it signed it and shook our hands at the end, thanking us for coming out.  We were allowed to leave their mural taped up to the wall in that overwhelmingly boring room.  It felt good to leave that in there...a little bright spot. 

I was nervous in the beginning, to do this.  I thought it would be scarier than it ended up actually being, though.  I think the inmates were really glad to have us there - a change in their mundane schedules at the very least, and a chance for the artistically inclined to have access to some materials to make something great, at the very best.  Overall, a good experience and I'm glad I did it!

Next blog I really WILL type up the ghost story, I promise!

Corie