Avivo Artworks Program—Jes Reyes—Adults—4 hours
This week I went to Avivo to work with the artists there on designing a mural for a wall in the entryway to the art studio. I worked with three artists who are part of the collective to try to generate a mural design which we can outline on the wall ahead of next Friday’s mural painting workshop. I began by showing the two murals that I have completed, and then showed images from local artist’s, Greta McClain’s, website. I wanted to talk about Greta’s work because she often does community murals and does a really great job of including people with a wide range of art abilities’ work in the final mural, something that the collective members and I are keeping in mind for the workshop. I asked the three artists to discuss key words and phrases that they felt were important to their experiences of Avivo’s artworks programming and wrote them down on a large sheet of newsprint. After that, we briefly discussed what visual elements we could use to communicate the words and themes that we had discussed, and then each artist broke off with their own sheet of newsprint to do a rough sketch of what their ideal version of the mural would look like. Afterwords, we came back together and each artist presented their sketch to the group. From there we decided that we wanted to focus on including a circle, tree, and rays of words related to the program. Folks learned how to collaborate with multiple artists as well as how their personal art practices can translate into community art practices.
