ART INTO ACTION
SINCE 2007, I have been working with my partner, Betsy Renfrew, to analyze specific issues of interest to us and see how particular actions could be taken to resolve chronic, under-addressed matters we've observed in our community. We found ourselves looking hard at matters affecting literacy, refugee issues, art, food, community and cultural diversity. We've teamed up with others to gain their insights and together work on solutions. Often, we've discovered solutions are not expensive (see below, the Fat Wallet Project) and to us as designers and artists, obvious. But quite often single solutions require significant amounts of time — in our case, two years of observations, interactions, reflections — to understand the Bigger Problem that has emerged from countless unresolved and unaddressed small ones. Part of our work is to convince invested parties to reconsider long held assumptions about what is and isn't possible.
As artists, designers and educators, we bring a unique perspective to these matters and a unique set of skills to problem-solving social issues. We don't see art in itself as an end point. Rather, it is a perspective that needs to be heard in conferences and groups whenever broad regional and societal issues are the focus. We want to to be clear: We don’t see our role as artists to be idle speculators or dizzy dreamers. We’ve taken on many complex undertakings that required formidable paperwork, planning, and supervision.
Refugee Resettlement in the Piedmont
A broad examination of how the refugee system works in our region. Since 2008 we've worked with the panoply of professional, faith-based and ethnic community organizations, gotten to know many refugee families and their stories, talked with sponsors, organized cultural events, taught in an ethnic community organization and worked in job development to really immerse ourselves and understand the problems refugees face when they come to the area.
• A white paper on refugee reform for the Bryan Foundation
• The 2010 Census and Guilford's Montagnards, a newspaper article
ESOL
We work with Reading Connections and the Montagnard Dega Association to understand adult literacy problems and English for non-native speakers, especially refugees. We've taught through both programs, working with Spanish speakers and Southeast Asians of many tribal and ethnic backgrounds. We have also helped to develop related health literacy and language-related employment skills.
We cross from language into culture easily. For us, drawing is as easy as writing. To engage and motivate and communicate with adults from distant countries we use language, images, drawings, diagrams to talk about their interests. Inspired by Daniel Woodham, then ESOL Director at MDA, we embraced the language of food and agriculture and their relation to cultural values to engage our students, many of whom were farmers.
• Newspaper article on refugees, food and social justice.
• Photo documentation of a class of refugees working in a garden and learning English.
Employment
• The Fat Wallet Project We noticed that many immigrant and refugee men had enormously thick wallets because they carried almost every contact, former employer's name, and job lead with them. When it came to filling out forms, especially job applications, the table would be covered with bits of paper, scraps, and business cards pulled from the wallet because this was the only reliable method they had for keeping track of American contacts. In response, we conducted extensive interviews and helped create standard resumes for each. An obvious solution (to us) that provides refugees with a work history and goals they can study and review prior to job applications and interviews, as well as learning material appropriate for ESOL classes.Straddling the Pyramid Project
The top of the social pyramid includes the area's leaders, its academics and its so-called creative class. The bottom includes the working poor, including refugees. We've about thought reasons why the Piedmont seems to regard opportunities as difficulties and how this affects the entire region's prospects for the future.• Social Capital Can Pay for Human Capital, a newspaper article on connecting the top to the bottom of the pyramid
• Time, language, collaboration. Some observations about how the pyramid's top and bottom seem to share similar difficulties that contribute to the Piedmont's inability to change fast enough to meet technological, economic and social challenges. These thoughts are informed by work with the Piedmont Triad Partnership, Center for Design Innovation, and exchanges with the area's tech and design students.
Community Building
• Health literacy: Blood Pressure Clinics. A collaborative effort among health volunteers, Reading Connections, Montagnard Dega Association, and ethnic churches to stage simple health awareness clinics and provide culturally sensitive information about foods in the Southeast Asian diet that contribute to health problems.• Census 2010. A collaboration with Southern Justice Coalition Network, MDA, the Asian-American Justice Center, local Faith House, Montagnard pastors and leaders to finally count Montagnards as a distinct ethnic group.
• Translation model. The above project included reach out to leaders and other educated community members to produce translations of the census form, audio, and video information appropriate for a population that cannot read the five major languages shared in the community. The objective was to demonstrate that translation costs could be reduced by adopting appropriate technology. Without the most basic information about daily life (schools, health, employment, housing, etc), refugees and immigrants cannot make informed choices.
• Weaving Project. An extensive effort working with the North Carolina's Community Folklife Documentation Institute, Greensboro's Caldcleaugh Multicultural Arts Center, Green Hill Center for NC Art, Newcomers School, community leaders and women in the Montagnard and other Asian refugee communities to preserve traditional backstrap weaving methods. This project has moved from research and documentation methods, public shows and demonstrations of techniques to the formation of a women's group to share and practice weaving.
• A Montagnard Education Center. Our push to encourage academics, refugee experts, Vietnam war veterans and Montagnard leaders to realize a physical facility before artifacts are lost and memories fade. In our view, the history of Montagnard resettlement, although unique to the Piedmont, represents the region's stuttering efforts towards a greater community that will be diverse and multicultural.
Food Convergence Project
• Food, health and nutrition. A number of us who taught were concerned about the number of stories ESOL students told of unexplained illness and in some cases, the deaths of seemingly healthy community members. There seems to have been a long history of these problems, yet little has been done to address community concerns. In response, we gathered as a group of academics, refugee experts, teachers, and health professionals to review possible grants, university studies, and other projects that could yield objective data.• DATS 2010 food theme. The proposal to the Center for Design Innovation, the 2010 host to the Design, Arts, and Technology Symposium, to explore the theme of local food and food culture. This year's Winston-Salem setting at the new Sawtooth is being developed with the deliberate goal of broad inclusiveness, to link technology, innovation, cultural diversity and food systems with more traditional notions of food.
