Continuum of Creativity - Arts Advocacy and Creative Career Awareness
Going into the 2024 Fall elections, discussions about voter awareness and advocacy were at a high in my day-to-day. I was seeing a lack of awareness about the economic impact of the arts in our region and among our college degree students. At the same time, my center was working with admissions on a vision of how we could become better partners when crafting the on-campus tour experience for school groups and teachers/guidance counselors. Some groups were mixed in their levels of awareness of the college and of the range of career pathways within the arts. These two issues did not seem too dissimilar and I wanted to see what it might look like to test the delivery of advocacy and creative career information with our internal and external communities.
Libby Modern, owner of Modern Art studio, has always been an amazing partner and creative experience creator. She reached out to ask if I might personally be interested in participating in a project she calls Art Peep Show. The 2024 installment of Art Peep Show would be the third time Modern had curated this experience.
Over 24 local artists were assigned a day to contribute to an 8 x 8-foot diorama, and given freedom to use the space however they’d like: to display artwork, put on a performance, or work on their craft for the day. Unlike a traditional gallery/studio, the only way to view the artwork/performance was be through small peep holes in the Pine Street window of the studio.
I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to reserve a day as the Center for Creative Exploration and create experiences and a takeaway about the impact of the arts nationally and regionally on our economies. We called our day the Continuum of Creativity. During the experience, we had worksheets outside of the building with markers and pencils and signage encouraging passersby to draw out what their creativity looked like. They were encouraged to feed it through a large conversation mouth (that I constructed) and in return, their artwork was displayed in the peep show window and they were given the advocacy brochure and a monster finger puppet. Below you will find photos and video of our installation and the publication we created to be taken away.
The Art Peep Show experience was successful and we decided to use some of the extra brochures in teacher and student packets for a campus tour. We had wonderful feedback from art educators and decided to keep this piece in rotation but look at a companion piece that focused in greater detail on creative careers and resources to continue investigation as well as how to stay connected to the college while still in high school or middle school. I began to compile the Creative Career brochure with assistance from the events coordinator in admissions and the Center for Creative Exploration staff. I designed it so it would be visually complementary to the existing advocacy brochure. We also created a resource page as a companion to the brochure to hold additional information and useful links.
Our goal is to use these for the remainder of the 24-25 academic year and then assess their overall impact. At that time we can make edits and changes and consider a redesign and more extensive printing to use moving forward.
