Displacement, Gentrification & Creative Placemaking at NPN/VAN's Annual Meeting in Austin, TX

Well, that was a blast. This past week I had the pleasure of attending National Performance Network/Visual Artist Network's Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas - an amazing conference for folks working at the intersection of the arts and justice. The theme of this year's conference was displacement and gentrification, which was exemplified all around us in the city of Austin. We brainstormed, planned, acted, and performed around issues of displacement. Not only was this one of the best actively anti-oppression gatherings I have been a part of, it was a massively talented, raucous, informed exploration of craft. And they really know how to throw a party.

Getting down with some Austin grub with my new heroines from Forklift Danceworks.

I had the honor of being included on a panel entitled, "Equitable Creative Placemaking", along with Jess Solomon of Art in Praxis, Taylor Payer of All My Relations / Native American Community Development Institute and moderated by Javier Torres of ArtPlace America. We each shared about our work and discussed how we engage with community through place-based arts practices.

A slide from Jess Solomon's work through Art in Praxis.

Javier shared with us ArtPlace America's wonderful definition of Creative Placemaking:

"Successful creative placemaking projects do four things:

1. Define a community based in geography, such as a block, a neighborhood, a city, or a region
2. Articulate a change the group of people living and working in that community would like to see
3. Propose an arts-based intervention to help achieve that change
4. Develop a way to know whether the change occurred"

Lots more incredible resources on this work here. I look forward to applying these steps further in my home community at Quail Springs Permaculture as our creative placemaking work deepens.

Many thanks to all who danced, organized, and connected at the Austin Annual Meeting.

Working with Young Women: Papermaking from the Borderlands

It was such a pleasure to spend our second summer holding Spiral: Young Women’s Permaculture Summer Program at Dig In Farm in Massachusetts. We spent the month of July exploring permaculture design, farming, jumping in waterfalls, and diving into work around justice.

As part of the program, we spent time learning about the US-Mexico border, as well as structural causes of inequality, bias, and injustice. This summer we dove deep. Beyond learning about these larger patterns, we explored the personal and the local. 

As part of Mending Patriotism, we engaged in making paper from clothes collected on the border. After a few years of making quilts, we have lots of small scraps saved up that are ideal for incorporating into recycled paper. The students blended pieces of used paper with tiny squares of the clothes, creating beautiful, petal-like forms. 

Our hope is to brainstorm what might now belong on this special paper. Could we write letters to our representatives? Print stories of living on borders, literal and figurative? The ideas were numerous
and inspired…we will report back what happens!

Thank you to all of the incredible Spiral participants who helped with this project!

Cross Border Literature Class at Cal State University Channel Islands - Papermaking

It was an honor to return to Cal State University Channel Islands this week for a workshop with their Cross Border Literature class. These students were an incredible group studying works in both English and Spanish that center on life in borderlands. 

For the workshop, we brainstormed, discussed, wrote, and worked with clothing collected from the border.

Our main project was creating paper using recycled pieces of paper and tiny scraps of fabric from the border. Hilariously, we held this wet, messy, and loud process in their campus library. Good thing we had tarps! Students used traditional handmade paper-making techniques to craft sheets of colorful paper.

We also spent time thinking about what kinds of letters, stories, or drawings would appropriately grace these pages. Students spent time writing in English and Spanish about their experiences with the border, experiences of being outsiders, and ideas about patriotism. 

Many thanks to professor Margarita Lopez Lopez and Director of Community Engagement Pilar Pacheco of CSUCI for making this possible.

Exhibition: “At Home in the World” and a residency: 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, New Mexico

It was a great privilege (and lots of fun) to spend a week installing quilts, creating new work, and holding a dyeing workshop at the wonderful non-profit art gallery 516 ARTS in Albuquerque. This residency was made possible through the support of the National Performance Network’s Visual Artist Network - an amazing organization focused on small-scale arts organizations working for increased equity.

This was part of a show called “At Home in the World”, featuring 9 artists from around the country and internationally who are working with themes of migration and national identity.

Part of my time there was spent creating a new work, DIY Carpet Shoes. DIY Carpet Shoes is a replication of the slip-on shoe covers used by some migrants crossing the US-Mexico border to avoid leaving footprints. Carpet shoes are often sold to migrants on their way to the border, and can be found discarded or lost near migrant trails. These carpet shoe replications intend to concretize the clandestine nature of border crossings and personalize the many people involved in one person’s crossing, including the shoe’s makers. As a knock-off of an original, DIY Carpet Shoes explores the commodification of emblems of struggle and predicts a possible way that migrants’ history could some day be told. 

DIY Carpet Shoes are made from clothing collected from the US-Mexico border. The clothes were dyed with Albuquerque chamisa, California madder root, and cochineal with the help of participants in a Mending Patriotism workshop at 516 Arts.

Finally, the exhibition included the debut of our video documenting our collaboration with DouglaPrieta Trabajan in making two folklórico skirts with clothing from the border - grateful to all who helped with this project!

So many thanks to the wonderful team at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque.