Ellen’s Work Blog
July 2022
This past week was one of the coolest weeks ever at AMP. Three programs going on simultaneously—Create @AMP, Outdoor Design & Build, and Digital Story Work—with kids inside, outside, and all over. Abigail and Ben were greeting visitors at the front desk. Ted and Vance were leading the Digital Story Work interns, Morgan and Sam, who were moving around filming on the ramps as visitors came in. Michelle, our education programs director, was alternating between inside and outside programs. Justin, John, and I were making noise that no one seemed to hear as we installed plywood on the back ramp, readying for more collaborative projects to be added to the mural in the coming weeks. And Sam Posey’s voice echoed through the building on a video voice-over for one of our collaborative project videos that visitors were watching in the video viewing room. Our teaching artists, Shana, Christine, and Chip, were just knocking it out all week. I talked to each of the kids in our Create @AMP program, and thanks to Shana’s incredible energy and talent as a teaching artist, these kids were fired up. Teens are not usually given to high energy enthusiasm but, in this group, not one person was tentative at all about telling me what they were trying to create, why they chose the materials they chose, and what they wanted in the final outcome.
If I had one dream about how cool it could be on a given day at AMP, last week was it in spades. “Build it and they will come.”
