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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
July 2022

This past week was one of the coolest weeks ever at AMP. Three programs going on simultaneously—Create @AMP, Outdoor Design & Build, and Digital Story Work—with kids inside, outside, and all over. Abigail and Ben were greeting visitors at the front desk. Ted and Vance were leading the Digital Story Work interns, Morgan and Sam, who were moving around filming on the ramps as visitors came in. Michelle, our education programs director, was alternating between inside and outside programs. Justin, John, and I were making noise that no one seemed to hear as we installed plywood on the back ramp, readying for more collaborative projects to be added to the mural in the coming weeks. And Sam Posey’s voice echoed through the building on a video voice-over for one of our collaborative project videos that visitors were watching in the video viewing room. Our teaching artists, Shana, Christine, and Chip, were just knocking it out all week. I talked to each of the kids in our Create @AMP program, and thanks to Shana’s incredible energy and talent as a teaching artist, these kids were fired up. Teens are not usually given to high energy enthusiasm but, in this group, not one person was tentative at all about telling me what they were trying to create, why they chose the materials they chose, and what they wanted in the final outcome.

If I had one dream about how cool it could be on a given day at AMP, last week was it in spades. “Build it and they will come.”

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AMPed UP

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AMPed UP
June 8, 2022

Welcome, Abigail, our new visitor services/education coordinator! She's a New Hartford native and earned a Bachelor of Arts in fine arts from Central Connecticut State University. She has worked with children in both a professional and volunteer capacity, from teaching Tang Soo Do to serving as a youth and family counselor. Abigail is an avid writer and creator, with a wide focus encompassing painting, fiber arts, and installation work, and is always looking to expand and share her toolkit.

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Ellen’s Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
June 2022

AMP is now less than three weeks away from our June 18 opening. The projects to complete, big and small, have pushed everyone to the limit but no one is complaining. Jamie from Scope has been heading the construction team, along with Tony and Mike from Vision Electric and all the Action Air guys. Their goal is to finish the upstairs education program room in time for our summer kids’ programs. Herbert’s crew from Premier, having just finished the floors in that space, will be spending the first days of June sanding and putting the finish on all the platform flooring.

As for our AMP staff, they have been working overtime to ready the mill for the opening. Abigail, the newest member of our crew, has been preparing for every possible scenario that relates to welcoming people into the space. Along with Ben, we have an all-star duo out in front. Amy, Shari, Sarah, Mimi, Ruthie, and Justin have been everywhere doing everything while Michelle finishes plans for a full summer of kids’ programs at AMP.

For all of us, this is the moment to celebrate and thank everyone who has worked with us on the building and the mural installation, all the volunteers who have given their time to help us, and people all over the country who have donated to our appeals. Without you, there would be no opening.

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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
May 2022

April has come and gone with appropriate showers, daffodils, and not so appropriate sleet, wind, and cold. Now here comes May, my favorite month, everything in bloom and a very strong chance for wearing shorts on a daily basis.

I have been working this past month on yet another incredible collaborative project we did in 2005, in Japantown San Jose and Manzanar, California. (For historical reference, Manzanar is the site of one of ten American internment camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, from March 1942 to November 1945.)

This project took more than a year to organize and would never have happened without help from a few key people in both locations.

In San Jose, Kathy Sakamoto took my phone call, listened to my pitch and, miraculously, stayed on the line. She agreed to work with us and began inviting family, friends, and neighbors in Japantown to come to a fellow artist’s studio for the project. Over two long days, people all over town showed up with memorabilia and created personal messages and artwork on our long rolls of rice paper.

In Manzanar, we planned our arrival to coincide with a weekend pilgrimage to the concentration camp site. People came to the desert from all over northern California—many had lived in one of endless rows of barracks, all using communal bathrooms, no stalls, no doors for two or three years.

My sister, Judy, an award-winning photojournalist, took photos of everyone who participated, and a few are up on our website. She brought her daughter Taylor who skipped school to be on the trip. In exchange, Taylor agreed to write a paper on the internment camps. She interviewed everyone—and I know the experience of listening to people describe their lives in the camps is embedded for life.

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Art at Work: Education

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Art at Work: Education
April 26, 2022

AMP partnered with SOAR, Salisbury Central School (SCS), and twenty2 wallpaper + textile factory of Bantam, Connecticut, to create an all-school mural commemorating the 20th anniversary and legacy of SOAR’s after-school enrichment programs and the program’s founder Zenas Block.

Students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade at SCS worked off of a prompt to create art focused on the work they would like to do when they grow up. Students visually explored their dreams and aspirations for their future work—from teachers, hair dressers, and bus drivers to astronauts, botanists, athletes, and more.

SOAR Executive Director Linda Sloane, AMP teaching artist Jessica Russell, and SCS art teacher Gayle Christinat oversaw the more than three hundred art creations, which were scanned and digitized by twenty2 and turned into high-end wallpaper that covers the length and width of the hallway—80 feet long by 8 feet high—outside the art room at SCS.

Absolutely stunning!

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Ellen's Work Blog

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Ellen’s Work Blog
April 2022

April—come on spring! As I anticipate work ahead, I want to accomplish way more than is remotely possible between now and when we open the doors to visitors in June. I dream about getting all of our collaborative projects assembled and installed, and I’m confident they will all come together in the year ahead. Now, the flip side.

As I close in on a finish of the Illinois collaborative project, I slide right back to 2005. The project took place at Hope Meadows, a revolutionary foster-care community created by Brenda Eheart as a solution to the overwhelmed foster-care system in which she’d been working. After petitioning the Pentagon for five years, Brenda gained their permission to use the eighty homes on an abandoned Air Force base for the community that is now home to families who agreed to adopt kids who failed to make it in the regular foster-care system. Seniors also live in subsidized housing there, in exchange for six hours of weekly service in the community. The seniors have become like grandparents to the kids.

Our project honoring this work involved doing wax rubbings of anything and everything meaningful to each participant. As I move each piece around to find a suitable fit in the composition, I remember every kid, each teenager, their foster parents and all the “grandparents” in this idyllic community. I remember Ryan’s topsiders, how he struggled to create an acceptable facsimile, and Miss Irene’s birdbath, her broom, her handicapped license plate on the Buick, and her porch swing, all her students running around making rubbings of everything inside and outside her house. And, ta da, Crystal’s flip flop with multicolored ribbons on the toe thong.

Completing a work of art for any artist is the culmination of hours of thought about how to best present their gift to the viewer. In Hope Meadows, every brick, every fern and flower, every spatula, cross-stitch needle, and pair of scissors is art. I included every piece given and, together, they will be a great gift to behold for future visitors.

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In the Studio

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In the Studio
March 13, 2022

Ellen's working on the Illinois collaborative project that was done in 2005 at Hope Meadows, a revolutionary foster-care community created by Brenda Eheart as a solution to the overwhelmed foster-care system in which she’d been working. After petitioning the Pentagon for five years, Brenda gained their permission to use the eighty homes on an abandoned Air Force base for the community that is now home to families who agreed to adopt kids who failed to make it in the regular foster-care system. Seniors also live in subsidized housing there, in exchange for six hours of weekly service in the community. The seniors have become like grandparents to the kids.

In the collaborative project with AMP, the Hope Meadows residents—children and adults together—made rubbings from objects in the community, including tree bark, house siding, garden plants, manhole covers, basketball jerseys and running shoes for Ellen to collage together into the mural.

 
 

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