Archive for 2007

This coming Friday we are hosting an art exhibit at Dana Commons at Clark University with food provided by One Love Cafe. Live music, street photography, graffiti, food, dialogue.

Here is a Flash and HTML gallery of the photos that will be featured at the exhibit.

See full Flash or HTML gallery.

“Art –like the Self– is a dialogue between the Self and the Other.

How Did We Get Here?

We started back in September, 2007 as two groups, struggling to find a connection. One was a group of Clark first year students taking a seminar on Communication and Culture. The other was a group of students at the Worcester Boys and Girls Club, who signed up for something unclear like “Street Photography Project.” Mike Harris, one of the Clark seminar students, describes our progress this way.

I remember the look of curiosity on one young boy’s face when he saw me holding a camera. He approached me after our boys and girls club meeting, and told me he wanted to take a picture. I walked him and another boy outside and into an abandoned field, all of us strapped with toy (cheap-o, disposable) cameras. At first he snapped a few pictures in a row without thought, but as the remaining pictures ran out, he began to take it more seriously, carefully inspecting his picture through the viewfinder and showing his world in the way that he saw it. That’s kind of what this experience has been all about. In the beginning, we all were just going through the motions. But as the film ran out and our time with kids ran out, our efforts become much more focused. The kids of Main South started looking at their world and reproducing it to show us their view and we started paying more attention to the strengths of these kids as they took us and their work to heart.

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A neighborhood is not the buildings, or the parks, or the stuff in it; a neighborhood is the people. This week we’re posting photos of the many people we’ve encountered this semester on our quest to figure out what Main South is.

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Graffiti serves many purposes: gang tagging, vandalism, beautification of derelict buildings, expression of local character, and a method of re-claiming public space by folks of all walks of life.

See full Flash or HTML gallery.

Outside of Java Hut.

WHY GRAFFITI?

Graffiti is one of those forms of expression that intrigues us because of it’s history in urban areas. Stemming from New York City in step with hip hop culture, graffiti began as a grass roots, affordable form of artistic expression in the 70’s.

More graffiti outside of Java Hut.

Despite graffiti’s rise to a respected form of art, it is still used as a tool by gangs, cyber pirates, and vandals as a form of subversive communication and destruction of public property.
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