February 25 - April 18
CAMDEN
Past, Present, Future
The making of a waterfront mural Noreen Garrity Camden: Past, Present and Future presents original artworks and the finished design for a 685-foot mural on construction fencing around the Camden Waterfront development site. Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (RCCA) collaborated with the developer Liberty Property Trust to have the mural created through artist led workshops at four Camden Schools: Dr. Charles Brimm Medical Arts High School, Creative Arts Morgan Village Academy, Thomas H. Dudley Family School, and Holy Name School.
Liberty Property Trust approached RCCA about creating a mural with Camden students for the. American Water office tower then under construction on the Camden waterfront. When RCCA staff walked the site perimeter in February 2017, we discovered that the fencing was nearly 700 feet long. We decided on printed mesh fencing material, durable enough to withstand the
constant wind from the Delaware River, and allowing for vibrant printed color. The mural designs would be created by Camden students under the direction of professional teaching artists, assembled and collaged by the artists, and printed onto banners. It took three months to draft, edit, and approve a budget and scope of work, or contract, and then execute the project. At Liberty Property Trust, John Gattuso, Anne Cummins, Chardai Jackson, and John Spitz, worked on different aspects of the project. Chardai Jackson attended artist meetings and visited classrooms, and was involved in every step of the project. Kate Blair, web designer for the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences, pieced together the high resolution images of the original designs into 66 digitally formatted panels, 57 of them 120� x 93� and 9 longer panels of varying lengths. Kate measured every individual fence section and oversaw the correct order of panels during the installation, and liaised with Walter’s Signs, who printed the beautifully finished panels.
Carmen Pendelton
The selection of schools was based on long-standing relationships with Camden teachers and principals who over the years have understood how art enhances their curriculum, teacher development workshops and parent literacy and art programs. The schools all committed to 10 classroom visits. The teaching artists worked in 3 to 4 classrooms with 20 to 25 students per class that included Spanish-speaking, bilingual, and special needs students. Every student was eager to learn how to create art that would communicate their unique vision of Camden: Past, Present and Future. This project also enabled team building and helped develop research skills and creativity. The artists were selected based on their expertise in creating murals, their experience in working
with the youth of Camden, and their bilingual-bicultural ability and professionalism. The art residencies were completed in November 2017. I met with the artists in January 2018 and decided to use the Delaware River as a common element to blend the panels together. Each artist took their students’ work and pieced it together to create a collage, which would fit onto several panels. After taking high-resolution photos of the collages, the work was pieced together, formatted and printed under Kate Blair’s supervision. Kate and I supervised the 2-day installation to ensure all printed materials were placed in the correct order. I coordinated the participation of students, teachers and principals for the dedication.
The Liberty Property Trust mural project demonstrates the power of art transforming the lives of the students and teaching artists who created the work, and enriching the viewing public’s understanding of the city of Camden. The project called on all my organizational skills and decision-making abilities honed as the community arts manager; it demonstrates how together with our dedicated
partners we were able to transform a construction fence into a work of priceless art for a short time. The students however will cherish the memories of this experience for a lifetime.
Artist Statements
Donna Backues A few years after finishing her in Studio Art and Graphic Design from Southern Illinois University 1985, Donna Backues and her family moved to the island of Java in Indonesia. Java is a geologically island yet in spite of the volcanoes’
foreboding presence, people want to live on or near these beautiful fire mountains because they also bring so much goodness and fertility to the soil. By using different inks and different papers, Donna Backues obtained different
effects of black, recreating the look of old pictures of volcanoes from the colonial period. While in Indonesia she pursued drawing and painting, working in such media as watercolor, pen and ink, monotypes, and mix media collage. Returning to Philadelphia, Donna Backues resumed working as a
painter and illustrator. She earned an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2010, and an MA in Urban Studies & Community Arts from Eastern University in 2017. She is active in teaching artist residencies and in community arts within her own South Philly neighborhood and Camden. The seven classes that she oversaw each made 3 panels: the first represents the richness of the past, the second celebrates the present, and the third envisions the future. Each panel had a predrawn template, with the idea of the river flowing throughout,
and matching up at each end. Students worked independently and collaboratively, to draw and paint their own individual images and then put the images together onto the mural panels. The Holy Name mural has the “future” paintings collaged above the river and the “past” collaged
below. The river represents the “present”. The eyes are placed in the river looking to the future at the same time as looking at the past. The past, the present and the future are each represented by several panels in the Creative Arts Morgan Village Academy mural. The river runs behind the images tying them all together. The high school students chose to create drawings in black and white to achieve the level of detail that they wanted. The river and sky colors present a contrast with the black and white drawings, and they will be easily read from a distance, since they are so graphic.
Doris Nogueira-Rogers This project consists of a series of panels designed by students in Camden schools to be reproduced for a fence mural surrounding Liberty Property Trust’s construction site in Camden, New Jersey. I worked with two local schools, Thomas H. Dudley Family School and Dr. Charles Brimm Medical Arts High School. The inspiration for our project was the history of Camden City. We created images using mixed-media techniques such as black ink drawing, painting, sponging and stamping on paper, and then collaged them onto a large scroll.
The elementary school students’ focus was Camden prior to the arrival of the Europeans and Africans. With this in mind, we painted designs from the original inhabitants, the Lenni-Lenape, and native fauna and flora. The high school students focused on Camden following the arrival of the Europeans and Africans and beyond: colonial times, industrial Camden and visions of Camden in the future. There were two aspects of this residency that I found challenging and exciting as well. Due to changes in the elementary school schedule we found ourselves in a bind for time
- what to do to get the work done to meet our deadline. Parents stepped up and helped with the collage portion of the project. We worked in the Parents Room. The excitement was contagious. There was a feeling of pride about the work produced by their children but also I could see the pride felt by the parents for being active participants. After seeing how beautiful the panels turned out, the reaction at the end was noticeable by the number of selfies and group pictures taken in front of the art works. One of the 3 high school classrooms I worked with on this project was comprised of a mixed group which included special
needs students; another group was made up of students within the autism spectrum ranging from hyperactivity, non-verbal to non-verbal and motor. They were wonderful, some surprisingly artistic; all of them contributed to the panels’ design.
Cesar Viveros Cesar Viveros has been creating public art in the United States and his native Mexico for more than 20 years. He has collaborated with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program since 2000. His public work is inspired by the communities he serves. He has become the narrator of a community’s stories, relying primarily on documentary
work that helps him to visually articulate individual stories for a broader audience. In 2005 he created the first public mural in Philadelphia that recognized and represented the Mexican migration to the city, adding a visual component to the newly mobilized Mexicans who are
working to defend their rights in the United States and helping to bring about political change in Mexico. He believes that the history of America is made up of the stories that come from small towns. They can be told proudly when individuals or communities are given the opportunity of expressing their narratives in public settings.
Viveros recorded dozens of interviews for the 2012-2013 series of murals in the “Imagining Frankford� project. The interviews were used to communicate the ideas championed by the mural project. In Camden NJ, Viveros has spent more than a decade making sure that the good side of the story is told too, in a city once
labeled as the most dangerous in the country. He writes about the Camden: Past Present Future project: I had a great experience working with students at both Dr. Charles Brimm Medical Arts High School and Creative Arts Morgan Village Academy. We worked on long pieces of brown paper where initially the students had to create their art around the main shared component, the Delaware River. That artery has been a major contributor to the growth of the City of Camden from its origins and through its development as an industrial hub. Students chose their own theme to represent the past, present, or future of Camden, either signaling elements that made Camden great in the past, current
events that were influencing their lives, or their hopes or aspirations for themselves or for their City. At Creative Arts they were painting on two single long sheets; sometimes their images overlapped those of the student working next to them, creating a natural collage. At the Medical Arts School, they were working on individual pieces, not sharing any space with the student next to them. The pieces were in that sense of a more personal nature. In both schools, students showed interest for the 3 main Camden themes deciding themselves how to interpret what Camden means to them. In this way they can fashion for themselves a future in the City of Camden.
All works courtesy of the artists DONNA BACKUES Explosion Grid, 2011 Watercolor on paper 32 x 32 Moonscape, 2018 mixed media on paper 26 x 40
Urucum X 3, 2016 mixed media on canvas 36 x 36 White Lace, 2016 mixed media on canvas 36 x 36
The Visitation, 2019 mixed media on board 16 x 16
CESAR VIVEROS Coatlicue, progenitora de la luna, las estrellas y el Dios de la Guerra Azteca Huitzilopochtli, 1999 (Coatlicue, progenitor of the moon, the stars and the Aztec god of war Huitzilopochtli) acrylic on canvas 96 x 48
DORIS NOGUEIRA-ROGERS Blue Moon, 2016 mixed media on paper 36 x 36
Seguimos de pie, 1999 (We Still Stand) acrylic on canvas 70 x 47
Carnaval Moon, 2016 mixed media on paper 38 x 32
Una Miradita al “mundo perdido,” 2000 (A glimpse to the “lost world”) acrylic on canvas 93 x 158
Peletusan, 2018 mixed media on paper 22 x 30
Of Womanhood, the Sun and the Moon, 2016 silkscreen and cotton fiber on fabric 120 x 78
Xochipilli II, mi princesa de flores duerme, 2019 (Xochipilli 2, my princess of flowers sleeps) acrylic on canvas 69 x 46
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY−CAMDEN
Carmen Pendleton
Phoebe Haddon
Community & Artist Programs Manager
Chancellor Miranda Powell Howard J. Marchitello
Arts Education & Community Arts Program Assistant
Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Zulma Rodriguez RUTGERS−CAMDEN CENTER FOR THE ARTS
Administrative Assistant
STEDMAN GALLERY CATALOG PHOTOGRAPHY Cyril Reade
Carmen Pendleton
Director
Donna Backues Cesar Viveros Doris Nogueira-Rogers
Nancy Maguire Associate Director for Exhibitions
CATALOG DESIGN Ariel Adels
Noreen Scott Garrity Associate Director for Education
Rutgers−Camden Center for the Arts exhibitions and education programs are made possible in part by an award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; Subaru of America Foundation; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; and other generous contributors. The Camden Waterfront mural project was sponsored by Liberty Property Trust.
CAMDEN