Robyn Hill Hendrix

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Friendly Streets 2014

April 22, 2014 By Administrator

I’m overjoyed to announce I’ve been hired as an Artist Organizer with the Friendly Streets Initiative, in partnership with the Hamline Midway Coalition and Springboard for the Arts. My 9 month appointment will include coordinating artistic projects within the FSI’s 2014 project sites to complement their local, grassroots community engagement work. It feels like a perfect continuation of the placemaking I did with Friendly Streets and Springboard three years ago, the social media consulting work I do for the Irrigate project, and all the knowledge and best practices I soaked up in the Intermedia Arts Creative Community Leadership Institute last year. And I’m sure my Land of Parcheesopoly dice and plethora of leftover sidewalk chalk from last summer’s open streets events will come in handy, too!

Background on Friendly Streets (or skip to the photos at the bottom if you want!)

Responding to neighbor concerns about the designation of Charles Avenue (which runs 2 blocks North of University Ave) as a potential bike boulevard in city plans, the Friendly Streets Initiative arose to search for ways residents could have active, effective and inclusive input into the future of the street. Working with the Hamline Midway Coalition and Frogtown Neighborhood Association, five block parties were held in the summer of 2011 that brought the civic engagement process out onto the pavement. Large images of various infrastructure and placemaking ideas were turned into a mobile gallery, and block party attendees could vote on ideas they liked best with stickers and post its. The “gallery of images” also added an interactive component to the more in depth paper surveys people were asked to fill out.

In addition, Friendly Streets partnered with Springboard for the Arts to hire ten artists (including me) to bring creative placemaking activities to the block parties. Community singing, painting, improv games, building sculptural ring toss benches, creating flags that were an ode to foreclosed homes on the block, bike flags, recycled magazine bowls, and a Q&A photo project brought fun, exciting energy to the parties while giving residents creative ways to express some of the concerns and issues they are facing. This work also informed Springboard’s continuing effort to connect artist and community through creative placemaking with the much larger Irrigate project which launched that fall.

After a successful run of summer block parties, the Friendly Streets team wrote a report summarizing the data and findings. This data combined with a tremendously strong outpouring of support from the community at additional Friendly Streets events and formal policy meetings the following year led to residents’ input being directly integrated into city plans for Charles Avenue, and construction of various improvements voted on by residents (such as bump outs and roundabouts) is set to begin in 2014.

The Friendly Streets team (headed by Lars Christiansen) was invited to bring their gallery of images and model of street-based community engagement to other neighborhoods in St. Paul facing similar challenges with regards to bicycle and pedestrian mobility, access to the new Green Line LRT and other neighborhood changes that come with heavy development projects such as the Central Corridor. Partnerships with the Frogtown Neighborhood Association, St. Anthony Park Community Council, Summit-University Planning Council, Desnoyer Park Improvement Association, and Union Park District Council are alive and flourishing. I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of it.

More info… 

From Envision MN: 10 Ways to Achieve Authentic Participation

On the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative blog: The Friendly Streets Initiative: Bringing Community Voices into the Planning Process by Lars Christiansen

On the Artist Organizer model: Artists as Organizers, A Fresh Approach to Community Development by Jay Walljasper for Twin Cities LISC

[portfolio_slideshow]

 

Filed Under: art Tagged With: artist organizer, central corridor, creative placemaking, Friendly Streets Initative, Green Line, Hamline Midway Coalition, saint paul, springboard for the arts

Twenty-twelve.

January 1, 2013 By Administrator

Happy New Year everyone! I’ve been visiting family in Portland, Oregon and eastern Washington for the past week, soaking up good family time, mountain views, and catching up with old friends while reflecting on the past year. Summing up 2012 is proving a little tricky. There’s been some tough stuff this year. Lots of transition, which is not exactly my favorite thing, thus the lack of fall art emails. I’ve been saying I’m in a bit of an “incubation period.” I’m not sure how much longer I can get away with that, but hey! I did some stuff, quite a lot actually, so here we go.

In January I took down my first solo show at the Baroque Room, selling two pieces to a retired physician who loved the microscopic, biological influence in my work and planned to have them hung at a library at Mayo Clinic.

In May I spoke to junior art majors at my alma mater Carleton College with fellow alums Dustin Yager and Mira Rojanasakul. Looking back at how my life and artwork has evolved over the past 7 or 8 years was surprisingly revelatory. That thing about not being able to connect all the dots until you look back later became very real for me and I saw continuous threads between my day jobs, studies abroad, and my artwork that helped me reexamine and rephrase the way I think and talk about what I do.

I dipped my feet in the arts festival world for the first time at Art-a-Whirl and Red Hot Art Festival. I made temporary tattoos of my artwork, which are funny, and a little bit weird (I still have some and would be happy to send you one if you missed out). At Red Hot Art, I had a TENT! I painted outdoors surrounded by green grass, live music, and lots of smiling people and dogs, which was absolutely lovely. My booth was right next to the hamburger stand, which was also lovely for the first hour or so.

Women and Water Rights was re-mounted in June at the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson. It was a beautiful showcase of artwork by women concerned with global water issues. There are some photos of the exhibit here.

In July I worked with Alis Olsen and Bethany Whitehead to coordinate WARM Pop! – a one week pop up art installation for the Women’s Art Resources of Minnesota in the St. Anthony Park Pop Up Shop, which was later included as one of the projects featured inStarling Project’s Your Idea Here: A Toolkit for Unlocking the Community Potential of Vacant Storefronts. Twenty-five WARM artists participated in the spontaneous gallery show on University Avenue, which also included a mini library/resources corner with feminist art criticism and WARM history. Photos can be found here. It was a blast.

Making a move to refocus my work life towards arts and early childhood education, I had a tearful goodbye with my coworkers and clients at Wayside Family Treatment after five years of pouring so much of my heart and energy into serving women recovering from chemical dependency and their children. I still carry the grief, humour, and resilience of those women with me every day.

I was stationed at Intermedia Arts for my annual house managing duties with the Minnesota Fringe Festival. This year included live tweeting a show that didn’t exist (the company pulled out last minute, leaving an open “TBD” show page on the fringe site that attracted wild assortments of made up reviews, which I pretended were all coming true before my eyes as I live-tweeted from the technically completely empty venue during the show’s abandoned time slot). Various other good shenanigans also ensued and the Twin Cities Daily Planet posted my recap.

During election hoo-ha I felt blessed and humbled to play a very tiny part in helping promote and donating artwork to a fundraiser put on by Artists in Storefronts and Cult Status Gallery to commission world famous feminist political art group the Guerrilla Girlsto create a billboard and poster campaign to help defeat the marriage and voter id amendments. Click here to listen to the KFAI Fresh Fruit radio interview that organizers Joan Vorderbruggen and Erin Sayer let me join on behalf of WARM. And the best part of all: both hateful amendments that would have disenfranchised voters and injected discrimination into our state constitution were voted down! Minnesota did us proud.

I turned 30, celebrating with good friends, food and drinks at Moto-i and a Boundary Waters canoe trip with my parents. Part of the bday festivities even got podcasted (ep. 13, NSFW) when my friend Noah ended up in the hot seat at Joseph Scrimshaw’s Obsessed show.

In October I celebrated the successful first year of Irrigate with my Springboard for the Arts colleagues at the fall Art Happens Here event (which included capturing a video of Mayor Coleman and a bunch of other happy souls doing a cake walk), plus we got to go to the swanky Minnesota Monthly Best of 2012 event when Irrigate was named best public art project in the Twin Cities. Irrigate artists are using performance, music, spoken word, writing, theatre, visual arts, and other creative endeavors in unique ways to improve economic vitality on University Avenue, create new community narratives and enhance neighborhood identity amidst light rail construction. See the video from the first year of the project to see what I mean.

We helped make some stuff happen! Jazz Hands!
(With Springboard for the Arts makers’n’shakers Noah Keesecker, Laura Zabel, Jun-Li Wang, Peter Haakon Thompson and Rachel Summers)

Saving the best for last, I was just recently selected as a a 2013 fellow in the Creative Community Leadership Institute at Intermedia Arts. It is a program that “provides comprehensive, professional-level training and support for local community-engaged artists and community developers…The Creative Community Leadership Institute matches people who work at the intersection of the arts and community development with the tools and experiences to address the social justice issues affecting our communities. Based on the fundamental belief that the future health of communities demands innovative, cross-sector leadership at every level, this program builds a dynamic core of capable leaders and partnerships over an intensive five-month program of hands-on workshops and on-site experiences.” I hope it will be a good match for me as I continue to explore the ways I’d like to connect my artistic practice with my passion and experience in early childhood education and social services.

I finished out the year learning about ninja legos (“Ninjago”) from my 5 year old cousin, cooking balsamic beef brisket with my cousin and aunt, eating the traditional Orange Julius pepperoni cheese dog while shopping with my mom, listening to disco star wars music while playing Settlers of Catan with the best of old friends from high school, and just generally trying to rest up and replenish so that I can jump into another year of hard work.  Thanks to each and every one of you who supported me, cheered me on, and made me laugh in 2012. Special thanks to creative friends and fam in all pursuits doing work that inspires me every day. Here’s to celebrating all the things that change and all the things that stay the same.

Cheers,

Robyn

Work in Progress

Filed Under: art Tagged With: 2012, CCLI, intermedia arts, irrigate, public art, saint paul, springboard for the arts, starling project, women's art resources of minnesota, year in review

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