Building a City: The Experiment

I set out for Art Milwaukee's Art Jamboree at City Hall (we need to come up with an acronym for this...AMAJ:City Hall?) with canvas and paint in hand, along with a number of stranger materials...

The goal was to make a collaborative piece with the participants of the Jamboree. They would draw on tracing paper, the paper would be pasted to the canvas, and over time the piece would gain depth, texture, detail and a sense of the physical build. I wanted to build our city.

While I was very happy with how the piece turned out, the collaborative part didn't quite work out as well as I'd hoped. People were very hesitant to join in, people didn't realize it was an option, the supplies didn't work as well as I'd hoped...there just wasn't enough participation (this definitely falls on me and my lack of prep) and the piece failed to really take hold of the collaborative aspect. It's a good piece...but it's definitely more "Daniel Fleming" than "and Company". If I let the collaborative parts stand out like i wanted, it would have looked disjointed and confusing. If you're going to use a certain, very specific medium, it has to work with the rest of the piece...and there just wasn't enough of the collaborative materials for them to look normal.

 The important thing is that the people who did take part seemed to enjoy the opportunity. Some people came back to find their piece as it was worked into the canvas, some pointed it out to their friends while others just liked that it was somewhere...and, after the slight disappointment of realizing it wasn't quite working out, I think i figured out what I need to do to make it work next time.

We need a sign. We need oil pastels instead of crayon. We need fast drying glue. We need the collaborative piece to be separate from my live piece. We need it to be a thing in itself, not a secondary aspect to a piece I'm working on.

Now, after all that I did think the piece came out well. It's not the collaborative piece I had in mind, but it was a learning experience which, hopefully, will lead to a better opportunity for people to participate next time. I think it'll work and I still think the idea will can take hold and create an awesome visual, I just think, for next time, I need to concentrate a bit more on getting people to notice it's a collaboration, and make the piece itself about the collaboration more than a live painting. I need people to walk up and say "Let's join in" rather than "That guy's making a cool painting" and while that's not the only issue, I think that it's the first step to getting the collaboration that I think Milwaukee and Art Milwaukee participants will be proud of.