Community Environmental Based Art

Community-Based

Enviornmental Art

in University Hospital

Yilin LiM039381382011-Spring

College of DAAPUniversity of Cincinnati

A project for the Maternity Unit

Part one Introduction to the course Expectations of mine Getting to know members of the group

Part two Getting ready for the project Ideas exploration of the Proposal Doing the Proposal Final Presentation

Part Three Decision of the Proposal Rearrangement Brainstorming Sketches

Part Four Progressing the project Finally Conclusion

Content of the BookContent of the Book

This course will immerse the students in the process of community-based art. Students will be engage with various participants and a com-munity agency to experinece the many dimensions of community-based art and its interdisciplinary process. We will be combining art, urban plan-ning, education, activism and philanthropy in our experience.

The University of Cincinnati Art Education Program is collaborating wiht UC Health University Hospital health professionals to curate a permanent exhibition for their newly renovated Maternity Gynecology Unit located on the 3rd floot of the main hospital. This unit provides a supportive health environment for women in the Cincinnati region-a place to give birth, to heal, to grieve losses, to learn and to grow. For the purposes of this class, we will be engaging with UC hospital professtionals, patients and high school students from all over the greater Cincinnati area in order to create a collaborative work of art to be permanently installed in the unit

Introductionto the

Course

Art Learning

&Social Change

Mar.29.2011

Expectations of

Mine

After the introduction to the course today, I feel like this course is designed to help students to build relationship with the local commu-nity, particularly the University Hospital. We are expected to improve the community through the art project we are going to be doing for this course.

As an international student from China, I believe I could bring into different ideas from a different cultural background while I am doing my project with my team. Also, as a planning student, I will provide professional ideas from the planning area to help improve the community. I expected to be difficult not only because this is a five hundred level class but also because it requires the comprehensive knowledge about art and community. We have to think big because the work is going to have multiple impacts on the community.

Last, in my opinion, a community is just more than a place people live tightly to each other. It is not just physical. Community has its own characteristic. It is a particular way of living developed by its residents and operation participants. Community socializes the people who get involve in the daily activities. Community is developed by people and develops people.

Service Learning&

Community Art

Mar.29.2011

Getting toKnow

Members of the Group

I think the unique skills and talent I can offer for the process of community art is my good understanding about sustainable community planning and streetscape design that I learned from my other planning classes. I also have the software and hand drawing skills to present to people our design and make them understand the advantages easily. First of all, I have done community study and improvement projects last quarter. I teamed up with one of my planning classmate to make a deep study about the Ludlow community and did a problem solution proposal in the end. That taught me how to think for the community as a community member. Second of all, I think I am really good at providing 2D designs and 3D models of the art I am going to be doing. I think these skills will help to me more flexible when I am doing my work in this course. In conclusion, since I have done new landscape design to prove the community, I considered that is a really helpful experience to what I will be doing for this course. However, I think I am lacking the relationship building experience with the community members. So that is also what I am planning to learn through this course.

I have learned how to draw a cute dinosaur character from my partner today. It is a re-ally happy and cute character. I have also learned that I am actually more patient that I thought. I can teach people things. Before today, I have always been thinking that I could not teach at all. Therefore, I expect more experiences like this so that I can practice how to express my ideas and let them learn that more. At the mean time, I am also feared to do so because of my shyness. I can’t do a lot of relationship building unless the person I am building a relationship with is pretty positive too. I am afraid that I might confuse people a lot.

After the Tharp reading, I will re-evaluate my skills from last class as hardware part of my skills. I put down mostly things I can do but I didn’t put down how I will deal with people. I feel like if I had anther chance to re-evaluate myself, I will consider the software part of my skills a lot because according Tharp, attitudes and personalities are a very important part of achievement too.

Communicating in

ART

Mar.31-Apr.5.2011

Getting ReadyFor

The Project

Today we have seen a lot of the past finished art project in Over-the-Rhine commu-nity. Honestly, I am very touched by the art projects that have been done in the com-munity. Although they are not the most beautiful artworks I have ever seen, but I have to say they fits the community really well. Today it’s more like an eye-side opening trip for us college students.

For the local community, have artworks like the project is very important. They make the community more beautiful, more inviting, more joyful and more attractive to both residents and visitors. Since Over-the-Rhine has such a nice market, Findlay Mar-ket, being attractive is very important for the local business to have more people to come and buy things. For the youth who participate in the project, this is a really good experiential learning process with the young professionals from the university. It is about learning more about their community, the home where they have been brought up. Although they are local, they might not know their community thoroughly. It is sort of like finding themselves. For the college students, it will be totally an eye-side opening trip by studying the community deeply during the project. It helps them to understand the diversity of beauty and life and appreciate the community. Last but nor least help-ing Over-the-Rhine to heal itself by community-based art projects like this will help both the Over-the-Rhine community and the city of Cincinnati by reducing the crime rate and increasing community involvement.

In conclusion, the processing and the result of this community-based art project are mutually beneficial to the people who involved in it and for the Over-the-Rhine com-munity.

Reasearching IApr.14.2011

Getting Ready For

Th Project

Today after we visited the actual site we are going to work on in the University Hospital, I feel exited and nervous. First of all, it is good to see what we can do to improve the women’s department to bring in joyful elements. However, after we asked tons of questions about what we can do and what we cannot do, I felt like a lot of my previ-ous ideas failed to fulfill the clients’ needs. Especially the mirror idea is not as capable as I thought it would be since this is really not the children’s department. The patients are mostly moms and future moms. So I am guessing I have to think of some more mature ideas. And the new thing just came up today is that the women’s department is also dealing with moms that just lost their baby. Therefore, in some spe-cific areas we are not encouraged to images have lots of babies. Also, because of the existing environment in the women’s department, we have to also consider the existing furniture. So I am also nervous since I have to think of some new ideas. But overall I am really happy to be able to have a real impact on the communities around UC. I am so willing to bring in happiness in the hospital. This is the very first time I can do something like a real project! Anyways, I am so ready for the next class and take the next step!!! Reasearching II

Apr.26.

Ideas Exploration for

the Proposal

Basically, what we have done in today’s class was sharing the sketches we have done and presenting different cool ideas that we have thought about during the weekend. It was like a little presentation within our group sharing first ideas. For the sketches, Lindsey and I have each drown a sketch of a woman. I had a sketch of a woman holding her child sitting under a tree. Lindsey has thought hard on the colors and picked out the color palette we would be able to use accord-ing the color tone in the hospital. Based on that, we have searched for styles on the Internet and I have found two really soft styles that can also help us to avoid the race problem because they were stylized. Also, based on what Cali had provided, we added the idea of a tree representing life and growth. Fortunately I have already had the image of a woman and her child reacting with the tree. Alex even suggested having a swing so that they could react more with the tree. And the leaves on the tree are also easy to be converted to some floating shape just like the women’s hair. Therefore we had our conclusion doing an image of a woman holding her child on the swing under the tree using soft color tones. Also, we have to discuss more on which color tone we are going to use so we definitely are going to develop more detailed image for Thursday.

Secondly, we also have discussed about the arrangement of the jobs. We looked through the list of things we have to include in our proposal and we have had a basic idea of who is going to do what. But we will definitely wait for Cali to have a final and clear job arrangement.

Images SharingMay.3.2011

Ideas Exploration for

the Proposal

Today we finally have the final discussion about the proposal and the job arrange-ment. We first discuss further about the big image that is going to be the main piece of the project. Because our favor in the three dimensional type of painting, we de-cided we were going to expend the image out of the frame and it will be a big image cut into pieces. Also, the connection between the big piece and other pieces will be the tree. Based on the idea about cutting the big image into pieces, I raised the idea about using little pieces to form the word life. Life would also be the theme of the image, which represented by the tree. Because of the gaps between the four letters, we decided we would also have leaves made by pieces of wood in the gaps. For the community engagement part, we were going to have participants the drawing patterns to make the tree and we, as artist, would draw the big image consist of different scenes so that it would be ready to divided into pieces. The participants would also make the leaves fitting between the four letters. So we basically have the main con-trol of the hanging pieces.

Moreover, we also figured out the size of the site and what size we would want the pieces to be. We have dig into the financial issues too. We researched a little bit for the budget of our proposal and ways we can support that base on the material we wanted to use for the pieces. In conclusion, we found it not that difficult to make our proposal to happen by getting donation and Plaza sales.

In the end, we finally have the jobs assigned to each one in our group. In my case, I will be the one who have the final sketch of the image and actually draw it for the presentation next week. We are so ready to go!

Final Drat May.5.2011

Doing the Proposal

Concept of the D

esign

Final Im

age

Floor Plan

Actual Size of the image

Budget of the project

Schedule of the project

Final PresentationPrezi link for the preseatation

https://prezi.com/secure/b98e8589002c57e586e064dc45c7eecbcbe39d63/?utm_source=share&utm_

campaign=shareprezi&utm_medium=email

May.10-May.12.2011

Final Presentation

Today we gave the presentation all together. I felt our group presen-tation went really well especially with the fancy slide show that Cali did. It was amazing. And I believed we have a well-organized pre-sentation with all the information the client needs in order to under-stand the concept of the design. As Emily said, the schedule was very good that we even divided our own class into different groups so that we could make the best use of time. That worked really well. I also thought our group worked together really well since everyone has their own job and contribute to the process all together. We all worked re-ally hard on our part as the slide show showed. I am really glad that we didn’t have the idea conflict problem. We fused everyone’s idea pretty well. If I have another chance thought, I would probably put more time understanding other parts of the proposal instead of just fo-cusing so much on my own. I got lucky because this was a group pre-sentation. If I had had to do this all by myself, I would found myself lacking of understand of my own proposal since I didn’t went through the slide show and the proposal thoroughly.

After the presentation

May.12.2011

1 The thoughtfulness of the con-cept instilled confidence that the project would be executed in an organized and professional man-

ner.2 By far the most professional and polished presentation of the

class.3 Exhibited thorough research

4 Beautiful preseatation.5 Ambitious, prehaps a little. unrealistic for our limited time

frame.6 Loved the reference to stu-

dents as “artists”.7 Silhouettes of women ratehr than literal depictions show a

cultural sensitivity.9 Use of the word “life” may be

too literal or elementry.10 Excellent group effort and use

of all member’s skills

Today we have been told about the final decision of the design pro-posal. The design proposal of Michael’s group got chosen. So now we are using the space of the waiting room. Specifically, the window space faces the balcony. We are going to paint the frames of the windows and the middle panel between the windows. But we are not going to draw the pregnant women on the middle panel. Instead, we will be drawing the tree of life absorbing the ideas from other groups. We were going to have the participants from the community to make the leaves to fullfill the inbetween spaces. Also, we are going to draw it in an abstract way instead of realistic. When jobs were being as-signed to everyone by Emily, I volunteered for the between spaces for the windows that are the strip frame of the skinny, lone windows. To make it more interesting then just flat colors, I decided to make pat-terns for those strips. According to the group we had about the pat-terns, we decided to draw leaves patterns to match the main image on the middle panel, which is the tree of life. Since we have five of us so each of us will need to give at least three designs of patterns for the strips for next class. And we planed to show the whole class the designs in order to decide which one we are going to paint on the strips. Furthermore, we are going to use the same color pallte of the main image on each strip.

Final decisionof

the Proposal

Whetstone Gray MSL258Wrought Iron MSL168

Dried Chamomile MSL073Fledgling MSL198

Picnic Basket MSL047Macademia MSL060Gloaming MSL170

Kalamata Olive MSL195Feather Duster MSL251

Timothy Hay MSL091Dune MSL078Pink Granite MSL171

Designing Patterns May.16.2011

Rearrangementof

the Project

Today we had really bad news. Ruby just got a chance to looked at the final proposal and it was not what she expected to see in the Maternity Unit. She was expecting the tree of life. Instead, she wanted more images of women, strong women or even preg-nancy. She also liked the idea of women and the globe. And we finally have a deep understanding of what she wants for the Ma-ternity Unit after Emily’s meeting with her. She was expecting: telling a story, eclectic, strong women, growth, gardens, flowers, joy, courage, strength, women inspiring women, friendship, live-laugh-love, women of the world, women living their lives, indepen-dence, freedom, motherhood, etc. And she wants a gallery for the waiting area. Although it would be a gallery style of painting col-lections, we had to think of how to get the community involved. It would be a lot harder than our original idea. I had an idea that we, as artists can draw the outlines on the canvas and par-ticipants could color it with the appropriate type to paints and we could offer brushes. It would be like what we were doing when we were a little kid, coloring pictures with color pencils. Also, we would only offer colors from the color pallet we chose. It would be easier to match the Maternity Unit.

May.18-May19.2011

Brain Storm Sketches

May.24.2011

Processing the

ProjectMay.25-May.31.2011

FinalConclusion

These are the two final drawings of

our group consists of Michael, Wei,

lisha and Me. Basi-cally Michael and I worked on the pregnant women

in red on the left and the other two work on the girl sitting under the tree on the right. But as a group of

four, we also have coorperate and do team work for the

two drawings in order to have con-

sistent style.

May.31.2011