Shifting to Virtual Learning During the Pandemic

In the second week of March 2020, we as an organization made the decision to follow the protocols, pack up our paperwork and our office plants and head home for an indefinite work from home lockdown. The decision, a collective action, was highlighted for our education staff because we were in the final week of preparations before two major artist residencies in the local school system. Our Teatro Esperanza Artistic Director Tanaquil Marquez was going to be the lead artist teaching an English and Spanish language theater series, and we had just kicked off the planning process for a new major community engaged mural. We had an uneasy choice to make: A) put all of our educational residencies on hiatus indefinitely or B) find a way to teach socially engaged art in virtual and digital spaces. 

In our first response to the moment, coLAB Arts created a virtual artist residency program with New Brunswick Public Schools which launched within three weeks of the initial lockdown declaration. The participating artists were tasked with creating an arts-based curriculum that developed social and emotional learning competencies and acknowledged the current crisis. We worked closely with each artist to test different versions of at home recorded lessons, video tutorials, synchronous zoom classes. We also began experimenting with podcasts, digital visual art, and interactive websites. The transition included creating a group of five artist residency tracks that allowed each artist to focus on their primary discipline. In the first phase, those disciplines included a movement director, an actor, a playwright, a puppetry artist, and a performance poet. Each artist styled their series a little differently, but the overall implementation began to coalesce around a three-part structure. 

1.    Artist and Classroom Teacher Partnerships

The artist was brought into a pre-existing classroom space with a district schoolteacher. In the initial virtual adjustment phase the arts teachers had a layered approach to how they organized their classrooms. The school system was itself experimenting with the best structure of the school day as well as the consideration of modified block scheduling and determining “release days” in which teachers of different disciplines (i.e., Math, Science, language arts) would have a day of the week they could release asynchronous assignments. Then teachers would hold synchronous group sessions to respond to assignments or provide additional support. In the arts specifically we found that teachers worked to create groupings of students that were reflective of different parameters based on student circumstances and work in other subject areas. The groupings might not perfectly reflect a traditional “class” but rather groups that could be organized around these evolving scheduling circumstances. The primary point is that coLAB Arts and our resident artists were reliant on strong relationships with these classroom teachers and their pre-pandemic student teacher relationships to organize virtual creative spaces. 

2.    Access and Technology

The ever present and ongoing challenge of technology equity is a topic that the pandemic highlighted in the American educational system. Fortunately, our local school system had been working for years on building their access to technology for all of their students including Chromebook for every student. The coLAB Arts team focused on how to make virtual educational content that was accessible to students in their district provided Chromebook. The content had to be streamlined, clear, and aesthetically appealing. This included experimenting with different delivery platforms such as YouTube, websites, and shared drives. This also included working with the school district IT department to make sure that students could access external resources through district firewalls. In addition, asynchronous delivery allowed for students to have the time to troubleshoot accessibility issues and allowed artists and classroom teachers to follow up with student progress. 

3.    Creative Content

Once access logistics were sorted out, we were able to give the necessary focus to the creative response. The artists coLAB Arts engages are trusted to have a clear and professional grasp of their specific disciplines. Our staff have either advanced level degrees or the equivalent in professional arts practice and teaching experience.  Our goal as an organization is to connect that expertise with community participants, cultural context, and resources for a meaningful creative collaboration. We knew however that this residency was not going to provide the same opportunity for larger group collaborative projects or performances. We focused rather on understanding that digital studio spaces require projects that honor individual voices and are concise. Our projects ranged from performance pieces reflective of the events surrounding the murder of George Floyd, poems honoring the anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement, and character creation exercises demystifying the idea of “heroism.” The projects from this very untraditional spring artists residency began to set the tone for what was going to be the next layer of work. We quickly understood that our students were bringing into their arts and creative spaces the issues and anxieties that the pandemic was bringing to so many communities.

Update from the Education Building at FRC

Update from the FRC Education building

By John Keller, Member of FRC and Director of Education at coLAB Arts

Since moving into the second floor of the education building at FRC, coLAB Arts has been holding a series of arts and community gatherings in fellowship hall. The space has been an incredible gift to coLAB Arts and an opportunity to engage with new and diverse communities in this historic structure.

FRC and coLAB Arts played host to two outreach events in February. The first, on Thursday February 20 from 7pm-9pm FRC was a regional art networking mixer. coLAB Arts was joined by reTHINK Theatrical and Thinkery & Verse to co-create a space where artists and arts interested volunteers could gather together to learn all about what these three arts organizations do. Susan Kramer-Mills who is both a member of the FRC congregation as well as a coLAB Arts Board Member gave a great opening and welcome. The event also feature an organized “speed networking” activity which allowed the 40+ participants to get to know one another and exchange contact information. The three arts organizations also provided a little background on their upcoming projects and ways to get involved.

The second event on Monday February 24 featured a full evening of arts related programming and conversation with coLAB Arts and our partners at New Brunswick Tomorrow and the Esperanza Neighborhood Project. The event featured a formal launch of Teatro Esperanza which is a bi-lingual (English and Spanish) theater company formed through a grant coLAB Arts received from the National Endowment for the Arts. Last year was a pilot year and the project has become so popular that New Brunswick Tomorrow and coLAB Arts have committed to making the theater company a permanent fixture in the city. In addition to a presentation from company members of Teatro Esperanza the event featured a community forum with mural artists Bob Aherns and Leon Rainbow who are tasked with taking community ideas and creating large freestanding sculpture/murals. The community got a chance to see the large figures set up in fellowship hall and had the opportunity to ideate with the artists around the themes of “Strength” and “Beauty.” These sculptures will be installed in Joyce Kilmer Park at the end of March just in time for the community Mercado season!

#LookForTheRiver, Jersey Water Works Opening Plenary Speech

On December 13, 2019 coLAB Arts co-producer and Director of Education John Keller delivered the following lecture as the opening plenary to the 2019 New Jersey Water Works annual statewide summit at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Brunswick, NJ.

Good Morning Everyone,

Uh, oh. I have to be that first person who annoyingly chastises you for being lack luster in your morning greeting. Think of it this way. It is Friday! You are coming to have a great time at this symposium, learn lots of stuff, have some good conversations, have la meal and still be out by 2:30! And as long as you don’t have a boss who is a party pooper it’s highly unlikely that any of us are going to go back to the office for just a few measly afternoon hours so that means found time! Maybe you’ll stop by your favorite independent coffee shop and have a nice afternoon latte in your favorite reusable cup. Then go over to the local day-spa maybe get a message or a nice facial (as long as it doesn’t have any microplastics in it), then meet up with some friends or family for a movie afterwards, but you will bring your own refillable BPA free water bottle because you are a little dehydrated from the latte, message, and facial and don’t want to pay $12 for a bottle of water at the theater. Then you will get out of the movie and think to yourself… wow that was a pretty good day.

So, let’s start this over.

Good morning everyone!

My name is John Keller and I have titled this presentation. 5 years of art in 9 minutes.

I am the director of education and outreach for a non-profit arts organization called coLAB Arts. You can find us on all the social media stuff as @colabarts.

I am here to tell you a story. The story is how an arts organization found itself motivated and inspired to facilitate conversations around our watersheds, and our relationship to water.

First, a little background. What is coLAB Arts and how does our mission drive us to collaborate with non-arts based social advocacy organizations, government institutions, and community groups?

Our mission is quite simply an equation. We engaged artists, advocates, and communities to created transformative new art-work. For us transformation must be three things. It must be sustainable, positive, and community focused. We work in areas as diverse as juvenile justice reform, transgender rights, domestic violence prevention, and dignity for our immigrant neighbors.

But this one is about water. So here we go.

LRWP Founder Heather Fenyk wrestles a tire out of a stream on a joint clean up with LRWP volunteers and coLAB Arts Artists. These joint activities became the basis of forming a long term creative relationship between civic scientists and civic artists.

In 2015, myself and two coLAB Arts’ board members attended a watershed education workshop with the then recently formed Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership (LRWP). After the workshop we adopted a local stream and found what so many find in our urban areas: a stream in need of some love. We asked ourselves what we ask ourselves whenever engaging with a new advocacy concern:

 How does the artist engage in this space?

What are the core issues that the advocacy partners are wrestling with? What are the historic contexts? What are the socio-political barriers to equity, diversity, inclusion, Justice and Access that the arts might help dismantle? Who are the communities not yet at the table? What are the questions not being asked? What are the ways artists can influence and augment research? - quantitative and qualitative data gathering. What are the complex ideas that artists can infuse into the conversation to make advocacy and even infrastructure better?

When LRWP heard these questions. And challenged us with some of their own for us to ponder. It was kismet. We began working together. Two organizations, arts and science. We formed a working group of artists, landscape architects, community organizers, and civic scientists, to wrestle with arts-based interventions to our natural and built environments. Early recognition from the American Architectural Foundation and their Sustainable Cities Design Academy gave us the opportunity generate bold ideas around on how the arts can drive sustainable changes to complex structural challenges.

We centered on a seemingly simple idea to drive the story of the work. It is the idea that the river is both a physical entity in our landscape, but it is also a powerful metaphor in our daily lives. It is all around us. It does not just exist in the physical limitations of the banks of a body of water, but it exists in our storm water systems, in the run-off from our homes, in our sprinklers, our faucets, in our dreams for quality of life, in our stories of migration, and our desperation in times of crisis. We began asking ourselves as well as the artists and communities brought into the work to #LookForTheRiver in all things.

We began work in earnest. Going alongside the LRWP on stream clean ups. Participating in macro invertebrate trainings, touring spaces and landscapes that maybe weren’t the most obvious places of water stewardship. We began engaging professional artists through programs like our National Endowment for the Arts funded residencies where we partner an artist with a non-arts based organization and task each with creating an engaged arts project that facilitates a conversation with community that generates new works of art inspired by some big problem or question that advocacy org is wrestling with. The model of that residency which now has multiple artists with a diverse group of organizations is successful in no small part to LRWP piloting that program our first year. Our Watershed Helping Hands Sculpture Project on display in the lobby is one such example of one of the community based art engagement programs that resulted from that artist residency.

Rock Dance Collective performs their original watershed inspired choreography on the Raritan River during Watershed Moment.

Once the communities have been engaged and you have built a critical mass of participation. You have to think next steps.

At the end of the day we are an arts organization and the greatest way to partner with artists is to provide opportunities for them to create bold artistic gestures.

Our work has been both conceptual and literal.

We have used the process of cleanups, data collection and public access as our points of inspiration to create works that both reuse found materials as well as engage with artists from diverse backgrounds and disciplines such as sculptural work, dance, theater, and mixed media.

Rock Dance Collective performs their original watershed inspired choreography on the Raritan River during Watershed Moment.

To integrate both professional arts creation with community arts creation. Recognizing that while not everything can be called great art, great art can come from anywhere. We balance the ethereal of the performative with the substance of created artifacts; both a natural growth from a new communal education on watershed health and quality and the provocation of a call to action.

When this happens a new kind of reality might be possible. Where if we truly look for the river in all of the aspects of our lives. We begin to question why is it absent? And we see our spaces built in essence to do whatever they can to keep the river out. To blot it out from our landscape…

Concept image of a #LookForTheRiver arts and green infrastructure intervention in New Brunswick, NJ.

But when you create the potential for new vision we can inspire ourselves, our planners, and political leaders to reintegrate the river into our lives; into our built cities, and our story telling. Accepting the river back becomes our way of solving infrastructure problems. Like a new art and history based greenway connecting public spaces through the heart of an urban area, or an art and green infrastructure concept project which includes a two-story sculpture work that becomes a wayfinding landmark, urban beautification, and a five thousand gallon cistern to keep water run-off from reaching the storm water system in times of flooding.

When empowering communities to create art that allows them to connect with both their environmental and social justice history we can make space to dream about ways in which we can work with our built communities to remember the landscape of our past. And find new ways to interact with it.

The arts are in incredible communicative tool. But the first act of social justice is to listen. Our creations cannot come before we first strive to listen with the intention of learning. Artists and water experts need to engage in this process together. When the artist is involved in the process - not just brought in at the end to slap some paint on a wall, not just asked to develop the PR or marketing strategy, rather allowing the artist to be in response to this listening process.

Example quote from the coLAB Arts #LookForTheRiver oral history story collection project.

In 2019 we began an oral history archive which is about capturing those stories. Balancing the narratives. We research and collect the stories perhaps lost, perhaps suppressed, perhaps forgotten, around one very simple idea: Water is everywhere, and water is important to everyone.  And then doing what we do… make are that is in response and helps us all frame a greener future.

The first major art project form the #LookForTheRiver oral history project was a two story mural on the facilities building in Boyd Park, New Brunswick. The mural was created through the oral histories as well as a community response process co-creating the story of the art with mural artist Leon Rainbow.

Tobiah Horton’s rednering of the first #LookForTheRiver Frame sculpture which will be installed in 2020 in Boyd Bark in New Brunswick. The goal is to created frames sculptures throughout the watershed.