Social Practice + Community Collaborations
“Art is the one place we all turn to for solace.”
—Carrie Mae Weems
Artists Séan Alonzo Harris and Elizabeth Jabar have worked on numerous socially engaged art projects and community collaborations. Their process focuses on renewing civic spaces, building coalitions for social change and creating platforms to stir the social imagination to engage with complex problems. Through creative action, their work draws out challenging questions and holds space for complexity, nuance, and contradictions. Their endeavors build shared spaces to facilitate collective action, engage in opportunities for creative expression and to animate our connections with each other.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison
I Am Not A Stranger
As we move through the streets of Waterville there are both familiar and unfamiliar faces, but do we really see them? Do we know our neighbors and fellow citizens? I Am Not A Stranger, Portraits by Séan Alonzo Harris is a series of 50 community portraits of people who live and work in Waterville, Maine. The images will be displayed across the city from laundromats to the Colby College Museum of Art. Using a combination of photographic portraits and audio interviews, the project creates channels for telling the untold stories, capturing personal histories and building bridges across difference.
I Am Not A Stranger is produced by Waterville Creates and Colby College Museum of Art, and is partially funded by the Maine Arts Commission.
Visual Tensions
Visual Tensions is a collaborative photographic project and community dialogue that pairs people of color with members of law enforcement. African American photographer Séan Alonzo Harris worked with local residents and officers from the City of Portland, Maine Police Department to create photographic portraits as a means to confront and question cultural and racial assumptions, stereotypes and fears.
The project provides a platform to examine the relationship between people of color and law enforcement, to provoke dialogue about injustice and implicit bias, and make space to engage these critical issues creatively. In addition to creating the photographic portraits, the artist interviewed project participants and asked about their personal experiences with racism, law enforcement, their sense of belonging or not belonging in their community and their interactions with people across difference.
Visual Tensions is supported by a grant from the Kindling Fund part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Network.
Collective Actions II: Future Mothers, Mobile Print Power, and MECA Public Engagement Program at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine
One month after Trump’s inauguration, my students, colleagues and I, in collaboration with NYC collective Mobile Print Power, launched Collective Actions II, a public exhibition and laboratory space. Many of us were feeling anxious and afraid for our families, friends, communities, and world. The collaboration provided a critical space at the right time, for individuals to come together and express their fears and also to find hope and power through creative expression with other people. Utilizing a range of media and tactics, we drew out the creativity in our community to ask the necessary, often uncomfortable questions within our educational community and with the public. We landed on one powerful, potent question: What does a community of compassion, trust and inclusion look like, and how do we build relationships to take that real?
Collective Actions II used a participatory public design process coupled with a series of public interventions and workshops to identify issues that were important to our community, gather ideas and design strategies to address these issues. Utilizing a range of artistic methods and expression, the project brought people together for hands-on experiences and dialogue to imagine solutions, exchange viewpoints and build relationships across difference. The collaboration provided a much needed civic space and catalyst for social healing, as well as providing a concrete social model for future community building.
Future Bridges, Elizabeth Jabar and Colleen Kinsella, Future Mothers Art Collective
Future Bridges is a socially engaged art project creating open spaces and platforms for community building, public action and social change. The Future Bridges project includes a mobile tent and a series of community events and actions within the City of Portland. The overarching goal of Future Mothers is to increase equity and inclusion, generate dialog, and engage communities in collaborative art-making as a tool for social change. The artists collaborate with educational communities, artists, activist, teachers and community leaders on public programming. This includes art-making activities and workshops such as screen printing, sewing, drawing and book-making. In these community settings the tent becomes a space and vehicle for learning and civic engagement. Participants have the opportunity to engage in creative projects, share stories about their communities, explore and discuss local and/or national social issues, meet new neighbors and connect with friends.
Future Bridges is supported by a grant from the Kindling Fund part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Network.
