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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
May 2022

April has come and gone with appropriate showers, daffodils, and not so appropriate sleet, wind, and cold. Now here comes May, my favorite month, everything in bloom and a very strong chance for wearing shorts on a daily basis.

I have been working this past month on yet another incredible collaborative project we did in 2005, in Japantown San Jose and Manzanar, California. (For historical reference, Manzanar is the site of one of ten American internment camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, from March 1942 to November 1945.)

This project took more than a year to organize and would never have happened without help from a few key people in both locations.

In San Jose, Kathy Sakamoto took my phone call, listened to my pitch and, miraculously, stayed on the line. She agreed to work with us and began inviting family, friends, and neighbors in Japantown to come to a fellow artist’s studio for the project. Over two long days, people all over town showed up with memorabilia and created personal messages and artwork on our long rolls of rice paper.

In Manzanar, we planned our arrival to coincide with a weekend pilgrimage to the concentration camp site. People came to the desert from all over northern California—many had lived in one of endless rows of barracks, all using communal bathrooms, no stalls, no doors for two or three years.

My sister, Judy, an award-winning photojournalist, took photos of everyone who participated, and a few are up on our website. She brought her daughter Taylor who skipped school to be on the trip. In exchange, Taylor agreed to write a paper on the internment camps. She interviewed everyone—and I know the experience of listening to people describe their lives in the camps is embedded for life.

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Art at Work: Education

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Art at Work: Education
April 26, 2022

AMP partnered with SOAR, Salisbury Central School (SCS), and twenty2 wallpaper + textile factory of Bantam, Connecticut, to create an all-school mural commemorating the 20th anniversary and legacy of SOAR’s after-school enrichment programs and the program’s founder Zenas Block.

Students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade at SCS worked off of a prompt to create art focused on the work they would like to do when they grow up. Students visually explored their dreams and aspirations for their future work—from teachers, hair dressers, and bus drivers to astronauts, botanists, athletes, and more.

SOAR Executive Director Linda Sloane, AMP teaching artist Jessica Russell, and SCS art teacher Gayle Christinat oversaw the more than three hundred art creations, which were scanned and digitized by twenty2 and turned into high-end wallpaper that covers the length and width of the hallway—80 feet long by 8 feet high—outside the art room at SCS.

Absolutely stunning!

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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
April 2022

April—come on spring! As I anticipate work ahead, I want to accomplish way more than is remotely possible between now and when we open the doors to visitors in June. I dream about getting all of our collaborative projects assembled and installed, and I’m confident they will all come together in the year ahead. Now, the flip side.

As I close in on a finish of the Illinois collaborative project, I slide right back to 2005. The project took place at Hope Meadows, a revolutionary foster-care community created by Brenda Eheart as a solution to the overwhelmed foster-care system in which she’d been working. After petitioning the Pentagon for five years, Brenda gained their permission to use the eighty homes on an abandoned Air Force base for the community that is now home to families who agreed to adopt kids who failed to make it in the regular foster-care system. Seniors also live in subsidized housing there, in exchange for six hours of weekly service in the community. The seniors have become like grandparents to the kids.

Our project honoring this work involved doing wax rubbings of anything and everything meaningful to each participant. As I move each piece around to find a suitable fit in the composition, I remember every kid, each teenager, their foster parents and all the “grandparents” in this idyllic community. I remember Ryan’s topsiders, how he struggled to create an acceptable facsimile, and Miss Irene’s birdbath, her broom, her handicapped license plate on the Buick, and her porch swing, all her students running around making rubbings of everything inside and outside her house. And, ta da, Crystal’s flip flop with multicolored ribbons on the toe thong.

Completing a work of art for any artist is the culmination of hours of thought about how to best present their gift to the viewer. In Hope Meadows, every brick, every fern and flower, every spatula, cross-stitch needle, and pair of scissors is art. I included every piece given and, together, they will be a great gift to behold for future visitors.

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In the Studio

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In the Studio
March 13, 2022

Ellen's working on the Illinois collaborative project that was done in 2005 at Hope Meadows, a revolutionary foster-care community created by Brenda Eheart as a solution to the overwhelmed foster-care system in which she’d been working. After petitioning the Pentagon for five years, Brenda gained their permission to use the eighty homes on an abandoned Air Force base for the community that is now home to families who agreed to adopt kids who failed to make it in the regular foster-care system. Seniors also live in subsidized housing there, in exchange for six hours of weekly service in the community. The seniors have become like grandparents to the kids.

In the collaborative project with AMP, the Hope Meadows residents—children and adults together—made rubbings from objects in the community, including tree bark, house siding, garden plants, manhole covers, basketball jerseys and running shoes for Ellen to collage together into the mural.

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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
March 2022

After two months dyeing border strips and sewing batik pieces together, I put the last seam in the last of 77 kids’ batiks to complete the Indigo Squares quilt that will hang in the Ramp Gallery at AMP. We did this collaborative project over a weekend in 2004 at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, with students from four schools in the Lowcountry.

These past eight weeks, I have had plenty of time to think about all those kids, their parents, their teachers, and the artists at Penn Center, to remember Arianne’s batik demo for all of us, Randy’s hand-painted pants, Reverend Small’s quiet comments about the magic of the place, the sunlight in the morning through the hanging kudzu, and the sunset on the screen porch where Martin Luther King wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech. All 123 of us were all there together for three special days—and at last we have this 11x17’ quilt, clear proof it was not a dream.

Now, as we head into March, the excitement builds at AMP. John and Andy are back installing third-floor railings, Adam and Amy are working on finishing last details on the mural building renovation plans, and Herbert’s crew is working on the new kids’ program room upstairs.

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In the Studio

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In the Studio
February 14, 2022

First was the layout, then the ironing, and now Ellen is sewing together the indigo squares to make this massive element for the mural. Lots of labor and many types of creative work go in to each and every section of the mural.
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Work on the mural installation is made possible with the support of the Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts.

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Art at Work: Education

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Art at Work: Education
February 10, 2022

A huge shout out to Marcus Sanford, our special guest teaching artist for the CHAMPS after-school program this week. Marcus is a warehouse manager by day and graphic novelist by night, who aspires to teach. He joined the crew at AMP to learn about lesson planning then did a fabulous job leading a program in the art of cartooning. So great to see everyone having fun developing and drawing characters!

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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
February 2022

As we head into February, we are starting to count down the months until spring, then summer, then getting the doors open for visitors who will see the mural for the first time on all three levels. Giant thanks to Cory Violette and everyone at Kone Elevator, Jamie Fox and everyone at Scope Construction, and John Jacquier, Andy, and Matt for all the work accomplished in the last few weeks. The elevator and first floor railings are in and the whole thing is exquisite.

The work ahead is already more than I can accomplish before our summer opening moment. I continue to unearth collaborative projects, created across the country, packed away for years, every one so expansive and suggesting possibilities. How do I organize all these pieces so visitors will see the places we have been across the country, wonderful friends we have met, and the invaluable contributions they have made to AMP?

As I assemble these projects, I think back on the diverse groups we’ve worked with—both kids and adults—and how our goal from the beginning has been to create these pieces together and honor working Americans across the country. For the last two decades, we’ve brought together different people and groups who may not have had the opportunity to meet one another otherwise, to solve challenges, experience new perspectives, and discover that art forms a connection to one another and the community. There’s much more of this to come in the months and years ahead with our education programs and future collaborative state projects. I can't wait.

 
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