Art education students leading community projects on storytelling, weaving

University of Maine students in an advanced art education course will present their community art service project, “Weaving a Story,” during the 22nd annual HOPE Festival.

From 11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. Saturday, April 23 at the New Balance Student Recreation Center, the students will provide the opportunity for participants to contribute to a collaborative public interactive weaving. The students also will present their projects at 6 p.m. April 28 in Room 100, Lord Hall.

The 10 women in UMaine art professor Constant Albertson’s Topics in Art Education class have hosted several community events this semester relating to their project that uses art as a form of storytelling among communities of elders.

“In our personal lives, we feel a tangible generation gap between young people and older adults, largely due to this massive shift in how we communicate, with technology playing a huge role,” says Hattie Stiles, a member of the class from Eliot, Maine. “We thought it would be nice to create an environment where we could facilitate spoken storytelling, as well as incorporate it into the art making piece itself.”

In March, several of the students offered a workshop at Eastern Area Agency on Aging (EAAA) in Bangor to lead older adults in a community art project. During the class, participants made circle weavings that will be strung together and hung on the walls of the EAAA Annex studio located in the Airport Mall.

Workshop participants were encouraged to bring scraps of fabric or other materials that carry personal meaning to spark conversations and the sharing of personal experiences, according to Stiles.

In April, the students collaborated with the Indian Island Housing Authority to host a potluck breakfast, followed by another workshop on weaving and the art of storytelling with members of the Penobscot Nation.

The group created a video of their Indian Island project that they will show during their Lord Hall presentation.

Every year, the goal of the future art teachers in the course is to work collaboratively in the community to spread knowledge while inspiring creative, positive action. The students choose which community partner to work with and what art project to pursue, and take the lead on making it happen.

During the organization of the project, students created a logo for the class as well as their specific group, University of Maine Art Education Community Outreach (UMAECO). They also created a website and developed several social media pages.

More information about the project is on the group’s website as well as social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.