Living Our Dreams Creating Our Future

"Living Our Dreams Creating Our Future" ©2011 Nile Livingston

 By Nile Livingston

This summer volunteers and members of the North Philadelphia neighborhoods came together to paint a mural at the Cecil B Moore Recreation Center Playground at 22^nd and Lehigh Avenue. This grass roots project began with my childhood friend, Teyona Jackson, who met a group of girls called the P.I.N.K Ladies at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she gave educational tours. The P.I.N.K Ladies invited her to their Recreation Center where she felt inspired by the positive energy involved in the youth mentorship program. Interested in pursuing Arts Management, Jackson used this opportunity to engage her skill set. She sent proposals and pull together sponsors of supplies and invited me on the team as Lead Artist.

 “This is a prime community mural project: ideas for the design generated from the youth at the Rec Center, community paint days involving the youth, staff, family and others, and a beautiful mural for the neighborhood to see. This is really one to be proud of!”  - Mary Newson

Seeking to build trust and respect with the residents of the area we focused on the use of educational workshops, meetings at the community center, and social networking along with cooperative learning to ensure participation toward this mural’s success. The community’s ideas stimulated discussion and interaction among the neighborhood and a consensus was reached about the mural’s theme. Working with the guidelines to incorporate singer and song writer Jill Scott in the mural who grew up around this area and taped her music video ‘A Long Walk’ in this playground, along with some of the children’s recreational activities at the playground the mural design was brought to life. The images depict active children having fun and feeling safe. I wish to provide the possibility for more people to have pride toward their public art and I appreciate everyone that came out to help build this mural. The wide range of stories, emotions and walks of life I observed converging at the recreation center playground will now have more to admire about their environment. This work of art draws attention to universal human commonalities and helps make sense of our motives and how we relate to each other. 

 

“Man o man o man, very impressive; An ambitious project” - Parris Stancell 

I became a part of the mural project because I wanted to use this opportunity to learn more by becoming involved in teaching. The key to my philosophy is that we can all use critical thinking to connect and help each other create something larger than ourselves. Reflecting upon my academic career it is clear that many of my mentors have helped develop my ability to create, utilize resources, and articulate ideas. Aspiring toward self improvement, I believe that a good teacher is a good student. My goal for this mural project is to inspire others as my mentors did for me.

“Murals can change neighborhoods and lives -- press on ladies!” - Mary Angela Bock 

Over the course of 14 weeks our education team brought on friends Don Christian Jones, Eve Hall, Kanids Hutcherson, and Lanita Sims as assistant artist and dedicated supporters. This system of students teaching the younger ones was encouraging for us to be able to innovate a way for us to utilize our skills in an uplifting way. With high standards for visual clarity the team mixed a variety of vibrant paint colors and researched efficient use of materials to proceed with mural making. 

“Love seeing all the photos and progression of the mural - amazing!!!! Looks like fun too!” - Moira Groves Schwartz

Installing parachute cloth with community power.

Projecting digital figures onto scaled parachute cloth we developed a paint-by-numbers aesthetics in hopes of combing all proficiency levels and increase observations from collaborative learning as various volunteers were be able to tackle more complex problems. We overcame the obstacle of acquiring insurance and funding for scaffolding. Realizing the lack of time and financial resources our prevail was to carefully use tall ladders to help prime and paste the mural onto the 21ft tall by 73ft wide wall. Now that the mural is at its completion I’m excited that they style of the mural is unique compared to murals around Philadelphia. I am inspired at what a small group of dedicated individuals can accomplish.

“I would like to thank all of the Artists and Volunteers who helped create our Master Piece. Thank You so much for dedicating so much of your time, energy and efforts in to this project.” - Nakia Campbell 

After the summer of 2011 many of our team members have branched out across the world to continue their education or return to employment; however we all continue to build new connections in our communities. I am engaged in a film about preparations transgendered folks take as they growing older and I am dedicate more time toward personal art projects which documents a series of character encounters, such as the ‘Church Ladies’ or my current project; ‘People Selling Things On The Side Of The Road’.

Teyona Jackson, Project Coordinator.

Artists Biography
 

Nile Livingston is an emerging African American contemporary artist working in drawing, web-art, and installations. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1988 Livingston received her B.F.A. in Studio Art, at Kutztown University where she focused on sculpture and large metal fabrications. Her mother; an educator, and father; a draftsman, encouraged both of their children to explore various forms of expression such as music, writing and dance.

Always doodling and experimenting with computers, it was not until attending the Creative and Performing Arts High School that Livingston found satisfaction through the visual arts. She began creating art as a way of recording her life, similar to a public diary entry. Livingston became involved in community organizations such as the Mural Arts Program. Art courses at surrounding universities in Philadelphia introduced her to computer graphics and videography. Fascinated by the limitless mediums, she found that each combination provided evidence for narrative art works that address social, environmental, and technological changes.

Livingston continues to juxtapose found materials with intentions of articulating her current experiences as it relates to the world at large. She displays her works to be understood in new contexts and to spark conversations about our overall human condition. Her work is accessible to all people, found on walls of public buildings as well as showcases of interactive new-media-art distributed through the internet. The subjects of her work are as broad as the materials in which she uses to expresses them. Livingston is actively toiling at new creations. “There is so much in our community, society, and civilization to see and learn about, and for that my passions are extremely charged and my art is the by-product of human consciousness.” - http://nilelivingston.com/
 

 

Mapping Courage a poetic evaluation of Murals

By Davy Preston Knittle

Mapping Courage is designed to be the commencement of a poetic evaluation of the work of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program, a compositional homage to the place and to the role of the murals, and a motion towards the consideration of the question: how are the murals linked to the way in which Philadelphians live the history of their neighborhoods? This project is centered on a series of eleven interviews conducted during May and June 2009 with muralists, arts educators, arts administrators and community partners of the Mural Arts Program.

The four poems in the collection that have an intersection or a street address listed below the title are written from the perspective of a particular mural and from the space that it occupies. In the case of these poems, I paid a series of visits to each site to observe the role of the mural in its space and to reconcile both the history of the mural and the significance of its content with the way in which it takes part in the daily interactions and processes of its surrounding neighborhood.

Mapping Courage engages in an experiment in public voice that draws from both the peripatetic exercise in public character and the virulent respect for public space exhibited by Brenda Coultas in her collection, A Handmade Museum. Another principal source of inspiration was a number of collections of poems and oral history narratives put together by the Mural Arts Program’s former Special Projects Manager, Lindsey Rosenberg. Her project that resulted in the book My North Philly proved to be of particular assistance. The language of a “poetic evaluation” of the work of Mural Arts is hers as well. She was unprecedentedly helpful in imbuing this project with its particular focus, and in validating its methodology.

As Coultas experiments with creating the figure of the public poet, so too was the work of this project both, as muralist David Guinn reminded me, to “live with the murals in a casual way” and to simultaneously observe the casual usage of the space of and around each mural. To this end, I owe the fundamental background of this project to Jane Jacobs and to her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities in which the figure of the sidewalk calls into question the patterns of visibility and attentiveness of the public character. I kept Jacobs’ awareness of the space of the sidewalk and of the identity of the public character in mind when considering the area around the murals, (of the four murals that are explored in this collection, one borders a sidewalk, one a public park, and two border or sandwich parking lots) and the way in which the murals themselves can adopt the supervisory role of a public figure in their respective neighborhoods.


MAPPING COURAGE 6TH AND SOUTH STREETS
Muralist: Amy Hillier, PhD


What do you wear for fighting fires?
For collecting records for restitution?

Block by block: the viral spread
a composite house for history,
a map by oral letters: door to door.

Whose documents harbor the record
of Mother Bethel’s inception?

Whose 1899 story of the Seventh Ward was
whose safety in the color line, problem
seconds before the 20th century?

Who affixed a method delta, exit signs, safety
in number lines, to the personless,
acerbic edge of the present Seventh Ward,
to the song of the singular district?

Ask Queen Village’s no man’s not here in
the national soundstage of human by human
diagrams of sidewalk use

Whose documents of ownership sought
centennial release to the public domain?

Street deeds, where before,
they named the people homeward.

SUMMER (THE MEETING): 235 QUEEN ST - MARIO LANZA PARK
(Mural by David Guinn)

I

For Duke, the
hose turns on
to fill the
green bowl

There’s a boxer
in the dog run where
Eliot shreds hedges,
on aphid patrol,
and offers detritus grass

Duke and his brother,
are red collared,
eating grass blend animals
and morning glories.

II

David painted
a sparrow,
a sparrow.

His golden retriever
sized to the bird,
without threat
goes without touching

Shadows suggest
the weight of
the willow pulls behind,
their steps retrieve
their shadows.

III

David painted around a
window in the house

below which
Duke and Eliot
masticate their tails.

Midday sitters
turn off the faucet, and

David says that
a sparrow can stand
under this tree too,

to feel out his need for water,
his stamina for visitation.


THE WONDERS OF RADIO 43RD AND LOCUST STREETS
(Mural by David McShane)



A hero is no masker of declaratives, he
Oxygen Man, lassoes the wonders of wave radio
emits frequent figures for disbursal, finds

field fossilists discovering a dinomine,
a forest of swimfrogs who
eye clowns, or clownfish, watch
for a listener public framed by radioglow.

Oxygen Man cedes a dance party on
the experimental network’s
Peanut Butter and the Cat’s Pajam a
jam when the juice box republic gets down.

Through the frequency floor he
floats codes between discoverables, an
invitation in his signature math an adage
of remember your two-step to the city.

Tangerine trees sparkle, parse our artist
whose speakers flow upstream, downgear your sneakers
to hold court, a six-count shag to the broadcast basic.

Look out between sevens and eights where
underwater conductors use traction tread
sounds to funk lines to walk it out,
Oxygen Man, bop for break beats, light the way

Hamster havoc traffics in brass noise, but his
iron hands command the palm of calm and
he radios the sea to send another cowboy

Sleep will check the cats who get done
when the done gets the attention of the
heroes are the raiders of the lost art of broadcast
when the wizards of wave radio wish you well.


...

Lion of Jerusalem Project

The "Lion of Jerusalem" will be dedicated June 1 at Congregation Anshi Israel in Tucson, AZ. The life-size sculpture will welcome all who enter Congregation Anshei Israel.


This design is inspired by the tradition of Jewish Paper cut outs. These works often had a religious, ritual, or mystic purpose. This particular design has Sephardic and Northern African roots. If you look closely you will find similar patterns on buildings throughout the southwest. I selected two colors that flash or flicker like a candle, colors that speak to the Jewish American spiritual history and experience. You may notice slight color changes in various types of light. This vibrancy is achieved through the careful layering of paints. I knew that most people would be seeing the lion from a distance, so I enlarged the designs. The lion looks different from all angles, and the colors change throughout the day.

The earliest known reference to Jewish cut paper dates to 1345, when Rabbi Shem-Tov ben Yitzhak ben Ardutiel composed The War of the Pen Against the Scissors. He tells a story that when the his ink froze one winter night he started cutting the letters out of the paper.

This project was part of The Jewish Arts Alliance (JAA) , dedicated to supporting and inspiring Jewish artists and artistic Jews in Southern Arizona.


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