Art Kit Magazine Issue 3

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Yo u r Gu i de to Art + Community

CONF LUENC E Issue 3

Special Double Issue!

REFUGE

FERESHTEH TOOSI Shoebox Lunch, designed for people with low or no vision, is a time capsule of memories that celebrates family, food, heritage and migration history. By engaging the senses of touch, taste, and smell, this interactive audio documentary highlights soul food traditions, their southern roots, and connections to Black history.

Top photo: People with high vision wear eye masks in order to participate in a live performance of Shoebox Lunch.

Bottom photo: The Archeworks design lab in Chicago hosted a launch party for the Shoebox Lunch project.

Rebellion

Photo: Julia Bray as the motherly, trash-eating sea creature Sona in her one-woman play Matter is Mother.

JULIA BRAY

I recognize and humbly accept that sharing my theatrical stories through my female, queer, earth-worshipping-body is an act of rebellion against the forces that seek to oppress the spiritual within us. Theater brings the spirit alive, lets the soul dance, and when people gather to worship this part of ourselves through storytelling and sharing, they are strengthened.

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Artists in Action

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Do It Your Damn Self

13-16

Display Case featuring:

17-23

Artalyst Interview:

24-25

Road Map:

26-27

Two Point Perspective

Art Kit

is a publication that highlights innovative and community-engaged artists, organizations, and projects to empower readers. The magazine provides practical tools, work spaces, and inspirational examples to help individuals enrich their own community arts practice.

We believe that art is for everyone and the arts build community. We aim to demystify art practices, gather knowledge from community leaders, and provide a creative springboard for all artists and would-be artists.

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Behind the Curtain

Tool 9-12 Belt: Resilience in Emergency Regina’s Door, Sacred Lattice, Attitudinal Healing Connection, FORCE, Ori Gallery, Public Annex Ridhi D’Cruz, City Repair Creating Possibility Through Emergence

29-30 Photosynthesis

Principles Art with Community: We approach learning and teaching with humility, and understand building sustainable movements requires deep relationships that increase agency for all.

Art for Community: We declare art can provide space for transformative experiences that bring healing, joy, fun, and refuge.

Art as Community: We view art as a connector which brings people together across boundaries and catalyzes movements that defy systems of oppression.

Art in Community: We believe art should build processes that reflect and include the diversity of their audience through an intersectional lens.

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EMERGENCE OF A THEME ALEX

So how was the process of creating this issue for you?

Behind the Curtain

EVELYN

The theme of confluence truly fits the process of how this issue came to be. Looking back at your brainstorm of topics, I can see the threads of so many ideas from “art’s place in responsible social system design” to the “intersection of health, nature, and art making us who we are.” I think this convergence of ideas is why this issue has resonated so deeply with me. I am constantly Magic a craving intersectional conversations around each where healing can be found in to focus our in perfect directly addressing how systems Contain our impact our experience. It’s been with space a true joy to bring together all Create us these elements and see them as the earth As time seems manifest through the incredible we turn inward artists and organizations highprotect, bless, lighted in this issue. Plus, I’m pretbody, mind, ty proud of how I reflected the We take conjure powerful balance of refuge/rebellion in the Accept design!

ALEX

as we journey to the

I agree! So many personal interests of mine came together in the sourcing and writing of the material that there’s really no word more appropriate than confluence. I am proud that this issue is a solid snapshot of the diverse field of socially-engaged community art, and features folks and orgs that I find moving and powerful—people that are deeply invested in making their communities better, those who lead with their spirits, those who are taking huge personal risks and are just living with creative fervor. And yes, the process of combining our ideas allowed us to create our own little ecosystem, which is like...yeah, we modeled what we wrote about! And I LOVE how your design came out.

I also would like to mention that I wrote and performed a ritual at a performance art gathering last fall (featured here), which was about creating a space in one’s life for a new area of interest or project to come together. Pretty sure for me, this issue is the direct result of that work. So I would like to give a big shout out to the God/dess.

ALEX

What are you taking away from this issue?

EVELYN

This issue really brought home for me that refuge and rebellion are not in opposition; that in fact they are in a bubble regenerative loop (to steal a phrase from our Artaof us, lyst Ridhi D’Cruz). Even more, that by embracing intentions love and trust. all of life’s energies, seeing their interlocking and creations loosely interdependent nature, we create conditions for to grow, resilience amidst change. In order to sustain the a sanctum rebellion, we need to seek refuge in community; grows cold. to slow and communities of radical belonging, spaces of toward shadow, holistic being that transcend narratives of limitaand fortify tion and division. Living this truth is a process of and soul. healing and an act of rebellion. I am so thankful this space to new plans. for the opportunity to bring the social, artistic, our gratitude spiritual, and ecological together in this issue, and together experience firsthand how they thrive in hinterlands. connection.

ALEX

Yes. I am with you on ALL that. One profound effect this issue has had on me is helping me to discern the threads of sacredness already present in my every activity: every walk or drive, every conversation I have, every book I read and song I listen to. Call it synchronicity, flow, or plain coincidence, but so many things have aligned for me in the past six months spiritually and creatively, and I think that owes to seeing how many artists and organizations are practicing holism and just sort of letting myself be carried into that current. We co-create this amazingly complex web of life. I am part of it, you are part of it, beauty, conflict, pain, and people with whom we don’t see eye-toeye are part of it. Unbreakable, unbounded connection. That’s what I’m taking away from this issue.

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To see the rest of Art Kit : Issue 3 order a copy at artkitmagazine.com