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Building Up and Raising Funds

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Building Up and Raising Funds
September 19, 2022

Saturday was the perfect day for our annual Art of Work Gala! Guests were absolutely blown away by the music and the acoustics in the mural building. Delicious food and drinks, amazing friends and supporters. And we're so grateful to be experiencing the mural from all three levels. If you missed it this year, we hope you can join us next September!

See photos here.

Many thanks to the generous support from our Gala sponsors: Scope Construction Company, Kaman Corporation, Northwest Community Bank, Hartford HealthCare, and R&M Insulation, with additional support from Elyse Harney Real Estate.

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Ellen’s Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
September 2022

All summer long there has been nonstop action at AMP. All the kids’ programs came to an end in the first weeks of August, which usually silences the place. This year, we are welcoming visitors Friday–Sunday every weekend, and the general hum and laughter continues. On the few days I have been in the mural building during visiting hours, I have had an absolute blast meeting adults and kids, answering their questions, and asking them for their thoughts on ways to make the experience more fun.

Abigail and Ben, our visitor services staff, together with our amazing volunteers, have been phenomenal. They are all over the place, up and down the three levels assisting visitors. They seem to know far more about the mural than I do.

And now, here comes the Art of Work Gala on Saturday, September 17. I was lucky enough to attend many of the rehearsals, and hearing Chorus Angelicus in our giant brick and steel cathedral is so moving. We are also going to hear the special piece Sandra Boynton wrote and Mike Ford arranged expressly for AMP.

Hope you have your tickets. This one is going to be memorable.

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Ellen’s Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
August 2022

July was spent dividing time between meeting the kids in our camps and continuing to work on plans for installing more of our collaborative projects created across the country in the Ramp Gallery. It is hard to work when so many fabulous things are happening at AMP—admiring the skills of all of our teaching artists as they create murals indoors, make magical music with the campers, plant native pollinating plants, and build new amazing structures outdoors.

As far as my work, I am really psyched about what is happening on the back ramp. Every section Justin and I tackle brings back so many memories for me, some from 15 years back. I am reminded of all the people we have been privileged to meet on this project and all the singular experiences we have had in so many magical places in this country. And the best part of all this is happening now. Every time we hammer up another group of assembly pieces we are including more and more of these experiences and sharing with all our visitors all these faces of America, all these creations, all the contributions others have made to AMP. This mural becomes more robust and powerful every day as more and more of the people all over this country become part of it.

I can’t wait to finish this up so we can unlock the back ramp and share it with everyone.

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Art at Work: Education

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Art at Work: Education
July 27, 2022

We are excited to welcome the Sphero Bot program to AMP this week as a complement to CHAMPS @AMP! The kids use various materials to design armor for small, round robots that they control with an iPad. They enter the ring and compete to try and pop one another's balloon. Top designs included a balloon entirely protected by a thick layer of duct tape, and another with a tight fence of popsicle sticks. Big thanks to the The Kids of Summer Foundation for funding this exciting program!

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Ellen's Work Blog

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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.”

 
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