Stock photo courtesy of Pexels
When COVID-19 came with a vengeance last year, everyone, and everything, was upended, including artists who felt the immediate sting from loss of revenue, lack of artistic spaces to occupy and even having their creativity threatened.
The pandemic was a lived experience for all as lockdowns closed businesses, schools and public spaces. Due to this rapid shift, the Detroit program ProjectArt, a national organization bringing free arts education to youth in partnership with resident artists and local libraries, was also impacted and lost access to spaces at the core of their program.
But not one to quit despite the challenges, ProjectArt and its resident artists moved to working virtually and held weekly art classes via Zoom for students ages four to 18.
The results of this working together resulted in a virtual exhibition, Resilience, running now through Tuesday, August 31, featuring the work of ProjectArt’s resident Detroit artists:
- Multi-media artist and educator Maya Davis
- Multi-media artist and educator Sicily Amaris McRaven
- Artist, writer and curator Nick Pizana
- Interdisciplinary artist and educator Alex Youkanna
“Every year, ProjectArt’s resident artists’ program culminates in a professionally curated group exhibition for our artists, and we weren’t going to let the pandemic change that. They deserve recognition not only for their art practice but for the vital work they do as teachers, mentors and community builders,” says Joanna Anderson, ProjectArt’s Detroit director. “It’s exciting to see how creativity and resilience have reshaped how art is created and presented, capturing the interest of our diverse audiences across the country while maintaining the safety of participants in our program.”
With the theme of Resilience, and the multifaceted problems faced last year, McRaven, of Detroit, told The Michigan Chronicle that she created a piece of art, Tree Dress, for the exhibition, that was 10 years in the making.
“I would like to think that inside all of us we can hold the same strength of every tree, and can weather through great storms and difficulty, growing resiliently wherever we are rooted.”
McRaven, Davis, Pizana, and Youkanna will also exhibit their work with some of their students’ work in a satellite exhibition through Detroit’s Art Mile, which runs June 14–July 11.
Anderson told The Michigan Chronicle that ProjectArt Detroit recently celebrated its fifth anniversary and there are new things on tap this year, especially after last year being hard on everyone.
“We followed a national study that said 60 percent of artists were out of work,” she said, adding that their organization took it upon themselves to bridge the gap and pay even more money for the artists and their services during the pandemic. “It was of the utmost importance to raise our pay for resident artists. We thought that was important most [for] resident African Americans.”
She said that the work of artists like McRaven tells stories about their own experiences with being resilient and creative during a pandemic, which she described as “powerful.”
McRaven said that when she was younger, she didn’t have art classes taught in her school, but her mother took her to art programming which changed her.
“I think my mom taking me to art programs was definitely a big way that I was able to be in touch with my artistic practice at a young age — I think it’s really cool to see being an artist is part of who they are even young,” McRaven, who teaches young children art, said.
She added that as a mixed artist who is also Black, what makes the residents of Detroit resilient is because they can take experiences and turn them into art.
“I think it’s definitely part of our resilience that we can make beautiful things even when we are not having a beautiful experience,” she said. “But also, I think there is an expectation of artists of color and Black artists especially, to take our trauma and turn it into art. I think that that is a beautiful thing that we can do, but also feel like that shouldn’t be an expectation.”
For more information visit www.projectart.org.
To view the online exhibit, visit https://artspaces.kunstmatrix.com/en/exhibition/5791222/resilience.
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