Community Engagement

Class Minutes

1-18-2012

Grant Summary on North Limestone: Issues with water quality

Needs Identified:

Immediate reduction in stormwater runoff and thereby pollution

A plan for improving the stormwater runoff and sewer system developed by environmental experts that we as neighbors can pursue with further grant funding

Expert advice about stormwater system improvement

Support and experience in engaging and educating the community

Solutions:

Installation of 30 rain barrels with soaker hoses to reduce runoff and use water effectively

Establishment of 40 native species plants in neighborhood rain gardens and/or other residential/business landscaping.

Professional stormwater planning, design, and management consulting services from EcoGro

Professional evaluation, design, and consulting to create a detailed project-oriented sustainability plan for the area of North Limestone and Loudon area.

Project manager with local marketing business as partner to maintain effective communication with residents

Community tours of progress (including rain gardens)

Goals of a neighborhood association: Deal with environmental, economic, housing, and landscaping issues

Rich Schein:

Schein was inspired to explore Lexington’s landscape after moving here from reading the book The Urban Frontier by Richard Wade The book explains how agriculture and urbanization grew up hand-in-hand, and describes slavery in Lexington, KY.

Cultural Landscapes….

Record of our urban past

Hold individual and collective identities

Make urban processes seem normal and natural

Allow us to change urban processes

Ways to look at landscape:

Landscape history: Who made it and why? When did they make it?

What the landscape means: to identity- to the individual and the society

The landscape as facilitator/mediator: particular political, social, economic, and cultural intention and debate

Landscape as discourse materialized

Landscape as identity and belonging: Cadentown, Lyric Theater, stone fences, etc.

Thoroughbred Park: Isaac Murphy Memorial Garden

Class, race, and gender are ALWAYS a part of the landscape.

Legacies:

Hampton Court on 3^rd Street: gate locked shut with Hampton Court on one side and Smith Town (black community) on the other side.

Legacies in landscape can physically affect the way we view things.

Lexington Developing Urban Form:

Original plat and “unsegregation”: Lexington was a grid with lots of lots. Homes from this period had slave quarters- blacks and whites lived side by side in close proximity

Alley life as segue to: Began the separation of whites and blacks. Black people often lived in alleys off of main streets. Big/small houses. Brick/wood houses.

The “towns” and agglomeration: Lexington by 20^th century was about 87% white and 13% black. Neighborhoods where free slaves gathered became known as “towns” and were mostly located on the outskirts of the city.

Formal Apartheid: Jim Crow (1907) Whites are no longer OK with living in close proximity to blacks. Do not want alleys with black populations behind their homes

Clearance, renewal, gentrification

The macro segregated city

Check out Ed Franklin’s dolls for inspiration on his Facebook page!

Class Minutes - 02/02/11

Class minutes for February 2nd:
• Shared a communal meal at the Sustainability House
• Kurt and Kremena will be in NYC next week
• Workshop with Bianca: Writing What You Know
◦ List 5 things you can remember seeing today
◦ Circle the most memorable and free write about it; Why did it stand out in your mind?
◦ Voluntarily shared what we wrote
◦ Draw a tree with your eyes closed and the hand you don't normally write with—this is the tree you carry in your heart
◦ Write a descrpition of the tree you just attempted to draw
◦ Adopt a community tree and write about it; email to Bianca and she'll send you thoughts back
◦ Empty out your purse, wallet, etc. and close your eyes. Pick out 3 things and write about them
◦ Pick one last item—write and ode to it, incorporating at least one of the other three
◦ Point of exercise was to celebrate the little things in life
◦ Things like these exercises can spark ideas, feelings, etc. that you forgot were there that can lead to a complex This I Believe Essay
◦ Community prompt: List 10 wrods at top of sheet that you associate with fear. Cross the first one out and free-write about it. Passed 5 times
◦ Point was to show collaboration: Working with a community you're going to be wading through lots of people's fears—Bianca hopes that we realize we have universial experiences even if we are leading very individual lives
• Clay read his This I Believe essay

Class Minutes - 01/19/11

Class minutes for January 19th:
• Sarah Milligan as guest speaker
• Paul Brown gives brief comments on his experience as an alum of CETA, stressing “working with,” not “for”.
• Sarah Milligan, folklorist, involved with the KY Folklife Program and the KY Oral History Commission (the only state funded commission of its kind).
• Folklore-identifying, documenting, and preserving tradition (while they change over time) through oral tradition, giving a sense of community and identity.
• Recorded through oral history, photography, observations and other methods.
• Briefly discussed assimilation of other cultures into communities: 2nd and 3rd generations of immigrant families forming their identities as not Italian or American, but as Italian American.
• Mention of PlaceMatters site and the general study of “sense of place” (a study of the physical and cultural influences that determine how we see our environment; “what you notice without noticing”).
• Brings up the question of how one is to determine “people’s [cultural and community] attachments”.
• Brings up the question of how to document a community in transformation.
• Patrick brings up distinction between cultural idiosyncrasy and community.
• Sarah clarifies that community can translate into any group of people with an element of cohesion.
• Kurt and Kremena assign Folklore Project.
• Kathleen shares her experiences as a CETA alum (Spalding’s Bakery and Mr. Needham).
• Collective setting of neighborhood boundaries: Race to Broadway, Loudon to 3rd.
• Sarah makes suggestion to ask questions around neighborhood in order to find important voices.
• Paul makes suggestion to speak with old real estate agents.
• Patrick suggests a contact list legacy, and to call people repeatedly if necessary.
• Griffin mentions Guy Huguelett.

Class Minutes 1-12-11

Community Engagement through the Arts

January 12, 2011

Hop-Hop

Steve

• Degree at UK with a strong emphasis on community development
• Bring together development, arts, anthropology,
• Glad everyone involved in CETA is not an “artist” and urges us to deconstruct that word
• We should ask What is community? What is arts?
• Personal background:

◦ Kaleidescope

▪ using hip-hop in youth development

▪ took community needs (i.e. fair housing) and advocated for social change

◦ working with refugees currently

▪ telling the stories of students

▪ arts work to subvert media in regards to SB 6

▪ mural and stenciling

• 3 themes for good, sustainable community development and arts

1. Do work with or by community, not for

2. Importance of local knowledge, the story

◦ Importance of building trust and listening

3. Arts activism- bring it back to first point: who are you doing this with?

Empower people to tell their story

• Ad Busters—culture jamming

Danny, editor of North of Center

• moved to Lexington in 2000 for graduate work at UK
• works at BCTC—soured on some of the larger missions of formalized education
• Ph. D. work was on new journalism
• writing for paper helps him to relate and humanize relationship with students
• teaches a community that isn't as discussed in Lexington
• this paper tries to give people voices who normally don't get a chance

Marty, President of the North Limestone Neighborhood Association

• around 250 neighborhood associations in Lexington, about 15 are active
• Neighborhood associations typically form around negative thing—challenge is to continue and be proactive after the problem is resolved
• founded North Limestone NA about 9 years ago
• North Limestone NA Vision and Values

1. Diversity

2. Green Space

3. Community Art

4. Safety

5. Pedestrian/Bike Friendly

• Make sure you work based on values & vision of the community you work in
• N. Limestone has really benefited from Transy trying to create community awareness & positive image
• community leaders: Millers, Archie, Griffin

Nick, Local Artist

• Drive By Press: print-making press in back of truck and travel to schools/programs to educate about print-making

◦ traveled all around country

◦ print-making demonstration: democratic art, able to give away

• How can art make a commentary to the community?
• Difference: reflect on whether or not this is our community
• History of Street Art

◦ Begins with cave art

◦ Greek/Rome

◦ Wheat paste advertisements—influence continues on street art

◦ Hobos-symbols for information

◦ Hip-Hop & street art connection

▪ 80's was a street art boom (Keith Herrington)

▪ beginning of imagery instead of just names

▪ Banksy—using the language of street art & stencils

◦ Gallery culture and street art

◦ Is what our class is doing street art?

◦ Brad Stanely—visit by the Secret Service

◦ Swoon-big woodcuts

◦ Small-hummingbirds- run in w/ police

◦ Shepard Fairey—move from street art to sanctioned art

▪ Is sanctioned street art still street art?

◦ Philadelphia wheat paste project at bar

Other guests present: Archie, Becky, Griffin, Stephen

Class Minutes 2-19-10

*Kurt and Layson read their This I Believe essays. Everyone has now read.

*William Wells Brown neighborhood association meeting on Thursday: A couple is having a “Block Party”/ Wedding Party/ Reception that Saturday of Labor Day weekend @ Duncan Park. Transy students are invited to help, the entire community is invited.

*Tonight, Friday Feb. 19 is the 3^rd mandatory community event: It is the opening of Zoe Strecker’s exhibit in the Morlan Gallery—Kurt and Kremena will be arriving around 5 pm.

*Next Wednesday, we will be traveling to Louisville:

-Layson and Austyn will be the drivers: Amanda, Montgomery, and Kathleen will be riding with Layson. KateLynn, Casey, and Paul will be riding with Austyn.

-Meet at Back Lobby at 5:30pm!!!

-Leave for Louisville at 5:45pm!!!

-Meet at UofL art building, near the Speed Art Museum. We may have to park at Speed

-On the drive, we need to decide who will read their This I Believe essay, and other topics to be discussed with the UofL class.

-The class we will be meeting with is similar to ours: They do artwork throughout the community.

-We will be explaining to each other what our respective classes do: Talk about our class and quilt projects. Talk about This I Believe essay project—share an essay and invite them to write their own. Share a story with the class (a way to prep for our Storytelling Projects).

-We will be meeting with this class for an hour, and we will also be seeing Kurts exhibit in Louisville.

*Homework for Next Wednesday and Friday:

-For Weds: Put all T.I.B essays in a word document. Rank them in your preferred order and list 3 criteria for choosing as you did. Send these to K & K.

-For Weds: Please bring a handwritten T.I.B essay (choose any of your own) to be part of the flyers to let the community know about the essay project. Casey will be taking these.

-For Fri: T.I.B. essays, and come to class prepared to discuss our individual tasks, and let everyone know how we’re doing with this.

**Final Discussion of The Known World:

“Slavery pollutes everyone who participates in it

and warps their concepts of justice and humanity”

-An emotionally charged ending: the class expressed a great deal of frustration, a lot of anger particularly about what happened to Augustus.

-Inherent Evil: where does it come from and where does “evil” (however we define it) exist in comparison to established norms? Is evil deviation from those norms or something else?

*We may use the term evil because we are discussing fictional characters (evil as a fictional concept?). We are presented biased and incomplete information about these characters, so it becomes difficult to develop a complete understanding of who they are, their motives, etc. The author sets up this bias and miss context, and in this missing context, bad seems to outweigh good.

*Is evil determined by what others see, how we’re socialized, or the choices we makes? How are these things connected?

*Does this discussion of evil and morality distance us from the actual story being told?—It makes it difficult to imaging living in the world inhabited by these characters.

-Laws suggest you can maim a slave, but if s/he is still able to work, no crime was committed

*Skiffington and his killing of Mildred vs. his position to always side with the law: Is there a contradiction here?

*Law vs. justice: Both favor people in positions of power and both are stacked against slaves and freed blacks. White people in positions of power (and even poor white people in the instance of Harvey and Augustus) can extract law and justice by almost any means they wish, whereas the law discriminates against black people ultimately prohibiting them from pursuing justice for their selves. Example: Skiffington vs. Mildred- Though Mildred pulls a gun on Skiffington, he knows he has the upper hand because she is a slave and a woman and will be greatly punished if she even hurts him. Still, he chooses to kill her—acting potentially out of frustration (not likely an act of fear) and certainly demonstrating his power.

*Doe Jaime, Priscilla, and Alice represent justice? They escape slavery, and ultimately create something beautiful out of their experiences.

-What is the role of God in slavery? How do so many people remain so faithful in the face of everything happening around them (especially in regard to slaves). The role of religion/Christianity: The overall message may appeal to their real lives (hard work/labor will be rewarded later), especially when couples with the loss of original religions/traditions

*But why embrace the white people’s religion, the oppressor’s religions? The message is nice/comforting, but the reality is quite different.

*Christianity is a religion for the oppressed, especially when one considers the context of Biblical stories

*Old Testament vs. New Testament: both written in a context of oppression, stories about slavery and overcoming it. So white would white oppressors celebrate this religion and use it as justification for their actions… The analogy of the story of Job.

-Does anyone in the novel have control—over their own lives, over others? Alice may be the best example of someone in control. She has constructed a façade/act that allows her some semblance of control and “freedom.”

*Is anyone able to truly be physically and psychologically free: Celeste is psychologically free—she embraces kindness and love and strives to live these things—but she is still physically a slave. Alice is able to wonder and eventually achieves her own physical freedom, but this comes at the cost of years of being trapped within her own mind, her own constructed reality—any deviation from that reality may have stifled her physical freedom.

Class minutes 2-24-10

*Amanda talked about the quilt project (will added info from Austyn and Kurt) and showed her completed quilt top—talked about working in conjunction with Americorps and the Build-a-Bed Foundation, the process of quilt making, the quilting bees, and how the quilts will be on display for a day in Marty’s N. Limestone store.

*Austyn explained the This I Believe essay projects, and Amanda read her 1^st essay.

*Paul talked about the oral history projects and how they related to building community and preserving unique histories of our communitites.

-Kathleen shared some stories about Spalding’s Bakery that her group may be using:

* One lady said that it was annoying to live so close to the bakery because all the cars lined up to get doughnuts in the morning would block her driveway. Another person said that no matter how many shootings occurred in the area, people from the “nice part of town” would still come to the bakery because the doughnuts were so good.

*The Louisville Class

-collaborativeprojects2010.blogspot.com

-UofL students can take studio courses up to 3 times, some students have taken this class twice already.

-Students Jimmy and Lucy started by talking about past projects of the class (some of which were inspired by an earlier photography class some of the students had taken)

*Volunteered at St. Joseph’s Children’s Home/Hospital: The children were taught photography. One project involved children taking pictures with toy cameras—the pictures were then combined to make a bigger picture. Another project where the children were able to dress up as superheros. The pictures were put on display in a gallery and the children were invited to see the exhibit showcasing their photos.

*Some photos of children included a Basketball Playing Banana, as well as the variety of unique superheros.

-At one time, the class had a grant and the money was spent on bus shelters and printing. A lot of the students donate supplies, go to goodwill, contribute personally, etc.

-We looked at images on their blog

-Impactproject.org: Will be sponsoring a project similar to the film “Born into Brothels.” Children will be giving cameras and taught how to take meaningful pictures, a 4 week project.

-The Walnut St. Then and Now Project: Photos from archives juxtaposed with “now” photos

*A poor inner city area (similar to our N. Limestone neighborhood). The students are working to revitalize the area and bring positive attention back to it. Get students to go to an “intimidating” part of town. A project to “create dialogue” via interaction with people in the neighborhood.

-Lexi’s Music Project: “The Sight of Sound.”

*Art and sound installations: included a mock Tesla coil, 4000+ paper airplanes in a corridor where movement through the corridor triggered certain sounds

*Dial-a-Screamer Project: will work with human, mountain top removal, and other organizations (may eventually work with soundscapes) to broadcast messages throughout the city.

*Q&A:

-Q: What is the value of collaborating? A: Learn to relinquish control and listen to others; helps you learn about yourself and others—Learn empathy, new perspectives

-Q: Why retake the class? A: It’s enjoyable; good practice for future goals of the students (Lucy) The class changes with each new group of students; not necessarily the same class twice.

-Q: How are we received in the N. Limestone community? A: It seems like the community has been responsive, maybe because it has been seen as Transy reaching out to the neighborhoods, trying to be a better neighbor. An attempt to integrate neighborhoods, trying to build connections between Transy and the north side.

*The Louisville class gives us an assignment: Create “art” for an unexpected spot in the N. Limestone neighborhood/community. We have a week from Friday, and we must document it to be posted on the blogs.

*We give the Louisville class an assignment: Write a This I Believe essay to be read in their class, and submitted on our blog. Due a week from Friday.

Class minutes 2-10

We began by discussing the question I (Amanda) posed in regard to Fern Elston and her disapproval in regard to her family moving north and passing as white people. We examined the complexity of her character by discussing contradictions in her personality—how she seemed offended that her family would abandon their black identities/heritage in exchange for (possibly) a better life, while she herself was a slave owner and preferred to teach lighter skinned black children. Eventually, it was brought up that Fern may have resented her families being able to pass because she would never be able to because of the man she loved—a man whose skin was too dark to pass.

This consideration of being limited by love, or not being able to fully express love for those we care for was reflected again in Robbins’ relationship with Philomena, and Winnifred and the Sheriff’s relationship with Minerva. Both these instances depict a white person (or white people) who are restricted by overarching social structures from truly loving/embracing those who mean the most to them. Robbins ultimately treats Philomena as a slave and exercises his dominance over her by physically abusing her. Winnifred and the Sheriff claim Minerva is not their slave, but still delegate chores and “servant” work to her. Ultimately when Minerva runs away, they go about finding her in such a way that a master would go about seeking a runaway slave.

Austyn brought up the idea of social structure vs. human nature. In so many instances throughout the novel, we see a variety of people acting in a variety of manners, so we are left to ponder what is fueling these actions. Obviously these people are a product of their era and environments, but through Archie’s and Kurt’s explanations, it seems these attitudes and behaviors were (and to some degree are still) present throughout the country. At some point, this condition that limits our ability to sympathize with certain characters was described as a psychological malady where people can only achieve what they are taught (and ultimately forced) to be. This functions as an explanation of “The Known World.” This world of hypocrisy and fear is the only thing many of the characters no. Symbolically, this hypocrisy—being torn between a white father and a black father—is one reason Henry does not quite make it to manhood. He dies before he is able to become a complete human because he is torn between two known worlds, that of master and that of slave, and he may only be able to occupy one.

Archie brought up an interesting discussion of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, in which he told us the story of how Benjamin Franklin—whether in France, where Jefferson and Hemmings behaved more comfortably as husband and wife, or in the United States—always treated Sally Hemmings the same, as if she were a woman deserving of equal treatment and consideration, no matter her skin color. Jefferson, on the other hand, talked to Hemmings and treated her as a slave when in the United States in spite of any difference in their relationship while in France. It would seem that Franklin’s attitude, and what may be called compassion given the period of time, was uncommon. It is not something we see in The Known World.