Forest Hill, Newark
Local Coordinator of Project : Eirini Linardaki
Participating Artists: Eirini Linardaki & Melanie Levick-Parkin
This project aimed at creating a temporary public art project that is based on cooperation between an artist+research team and community participants from Newark.
The team engaged with community participants to produce personal and family heritage narratives through informal interviews and ethnographic methods, supported by diachronic reflections on local heritage and history. The approach of the participating communities aims at collecting the personal but also the community stories that represent, identify, unite and render visual past and present sociological groups. The team synthesized visual and material data in the context of local heritage in order to co-produce visual narratives meaningful to the participants, community, and location.
Then the team designed and created flags that re-contextualize, represent, and make visible the community's multi-faceted belongings in an expressive and inclusive way. The flags will be exhibited as a public art display in the community for up to 2 months, starting Sept 23d. 2023 , setting to share this cooperation between artists, researchers, and communities with a wider public audience.
Impact :
This project is a transdisciplinary creative arts practice and research which utilizes ethnographic and visual anthropological methods to surface community heritage narratives that go beyond linear nationalistic identities by making visible shared human history, experiences, and values. It seems to us that it is especially important to be inclusive of aging participants that are leaving their homes.
About The Newark Artist Accelerator :
Beginning in 2021, in response to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on artists, their families, and their communities, the NAA Fund was initially established to provide emergency relief to artists in New Jersey.
The NAA Fund continues to provide immediate need, merit-based funding to artists’ projects and collaborations annually and is committed to sustaining this grant program through ongoing funding from local foundations and donors.
The Newark Artist Accelerator Fund is powered by Project for Empty Space.
This year’s fund is made possible by the generous support of :
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program aims to support vibrant, under-the-radar artistic activity by partnering with leading cultural institutions in communities across the country. The program allows the Foundation to reach the sizable population of informal, non-incorporated artist collectives and to support their alternative gathering spaces, publications, websites, events and other projects.