GlassRootz Project

For most of my life, my artistic practice has been a means of escaping a lifetime of hardships. As a very young child I lost my mother to gun violence, leaving my father to raise me. This tragedy caused a great deal of instability and we moved nearly every year it seemed. By the time I graduated I had attended over 15 schools and moved just as many times if not more. Several years ago, I began conceptualizing an idea for a new series of mixed media works that would include street maps of Toledo as well as reference to the many places I lived. I made a list of the schools in attempts to track the addresses I would have lived in the corresponding year. I started this with the intention of going back to each location and photographing the spaces to be incorporated in the mixed media work and as a way of healing from the places and memories I used art to escape from. Though the original concept was born from a necessity to heal past my own traumas, with the rise in youth violence (many incidents taking place in the same neighborhoods I grew up in), I realized it could possibly be used as a tool to help others from those same communities begin their own healing through art. I envisioned going to the site specific locations and setting up an art pop up for the youth in the neighborhoods. There would be no registration required. Any youth in the community would be welcomed to come and explore the many creative ways to make art. The overall vision for the pop ups will ultimately lead to a youth gallery exhibit to uplift youth from these communities.

The concept was shelved and forgotten as motherhood and survival of ongoing housing insecurity took precedence. I continued to create art as a method of dealing with life's ups and downs, selling my art at popups to supplement my income. I created a coloring book called “Escapisms” to have art available at an accessible price point. It wasn’t until years later I began working towards the concept again, gathering materials for the multimedia art pieces. As the slow process of this project has continued, the vision has continued to grow and change. One such change is I no longer see myself as the one photographing the spaces. I will collaborate with a photographer/videographer for another aspect and instead I will capture the spaces with my pen and paper to be incorporated into the new multimedia art works. The sketches have also been composited into a coloring book entitled Glass Rootz; An Autobiographical Coloring Book on Housing Insecurity. This new part of the project came from my continued desire to keep art accessible. I also incorporated resource information for others experiencing housing insecurity in the Toledo area. Coloring is an activity that tends to not be intimidating to the non artist, there are many adaptive tools making it more inclusive and it has been shown to have a calming effect, lending to the healing concept of the popups.

This is an ongoing project that will likely take years and much collaboration to fully bring to fruition due to financial and time barriers. That is why my primary focus is the new multimedia art works and the coloring book highlighting housing insecurity. Sales of the coloring books will help with the financing and organizing of the larger creative concept.