"Community-Based Research is on a Roll" (for Angie!)

In the past two weeks our group has prepped for and facilitated two workshops, one at BICAS and one on the UA Mall:

The BICAS workshop was on mobile making, co-facilitated by Shantaye and Emma. I was hoping to upload my "fancy" video of this workshop, but it seems to be too big...


We also had a special guest speaker, Roy Pearson, who showed us some examples of his own personal work with bike parts. Roy spoke about craftsmanship, bike part knowledge, and marketing. That, knowledge of the bike parts lends to identification with the biking community and to greater imagination of what the parts can be made into. If you know what the bike parts do or how they fit together, you can use that in your work. Thinking within the materials will allow you to create works for a larger audience.

While I attended the workshop for support of fellow group members, I have not found the environment at BICAS conducive to art-making – there are too many things to listen to and look at and I get distracted by what else is happening in the shop. So, I busied myself with promotions.

Casey expressed a desire for greater promotions of the Friday workshops and the need for more flyering and word-of-mouth promotions for the auction. I took a stack of flyers for our group to distribute and Troy gave me an updated version of his distribution list. I also offered to help contact some local news organizations and Casey gave me the names of three printed sources, “Artes sin Fronteras,” “Tucson Green Times,” and “’N Touch.”

About a week ago, I contacted friends La Monica Everett-Haynes and Will Holst at UA News to run a story on our class’s collaboration with BICAS. So far so good: a photographer from UA News came to the mall workshop and La Monica is setting up times to conduct phone interviews with students early next week.

The second mall workshop went very well. Our group decided that we would invite classmates to either be a part of the art-making activity, creating headbands and bracelets, or pass out flyers for BICAS on the mall, helping with promotions. I joined the latter activity, hanging flyers in near-by buildings and spreading the word about BICAS verbally.

I was hoping to help Casey with a draft of her donations/solicitation letter this week, but so far, we have not connected. Ultimately, the plan was to use the list of shops Emma had collected to solicit for future workshop/art supplies.

Next Up - Art Auction run-down: Understanding our role.