S3A’s Community Art Collaborations initiative is currently funding projects by 3 influential artists:
Alyssa Ridder
Awearness is a short documentary that highlights the process of producing a sustainable garment from sourcing materials through developing a fashionable prototype ready for consumer use. The mission is to illustrate the environmental impacts of garment production while educating community members on how to expand the physical and emotional lifespan of their clothing. The fast-fashion industry is shockingly pollutive. It is responsible for 92 million tonnes of waste produced per year and 79 trillion litres of water consumed1. The industry also promotes exploitative labor practices in countries all over the world with abuses such as criminally low wages, child labor, and gender and race-based discrimination2. A future in sustainable garment production will require our community to both take responsibility for our own consumer behavior and hold fashion companies accountable to sustainable business practices. Awearness both educates the community on the processes of sustainable garment production and promotes sustainable consumership.
Niinimäki, K., Peters, G., Dahlbo, H. et al. The environmental price of fast fashion. NatRev Earth Environ 1, 189–200 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0039-92.
Ditty, S. (2020, April 27). Why do we need a Fashion Revolution? Retrieved November19, 2020, from
https://www.fashionrevolution.org/why-do-we-need-a-fashion-revolution/
Kris Grey
GENDER / POWER
Final Performance on Zoom
Wed, April 28th at 7:30pm EST
https://tinyurl.com/GenderPowerPSU
Memoria is a repeatable participatory workshop wherein community members engage in repetitive crafting tasks to experience catharsis around death as well as to collaboratively produce a series of commemorative plates. Rather than approaching the commemorative plate as an object of celebration, Memoria deploys the repeated plate form like a tombstone to visually represent the accumulation of trans lives lost to violence. Participants can expect to be instructed in techniques of slip casting with molds that have been prepared for them. Each workshop is hosted by a special guest who will facilitate a group discussion on topics that will inform and promote community catharsis and healing while the group works to manually produce the commemorative plates. While the plaster molds set and new plates are being cast, other already glazed plates will be provided to participants and they will be instructed on how to apply ceramic decals to the surfaces that list the names, dates, ages, and locations of transgender people killed in the United States. Workshops will eventually yield thousands of commemorative plates that mark the loss of every transgender individual killed in the U.S. from 1970 to the present, that we have information for, working from the Transgender Day of Remembrance website (TDOR.info). To date, three collaborators have agreed to work on the design phase of Memoria, all of whom are trans women. Chelsea Thompto will design Steinfeld Plate Mock-Up for Memoria the 3D digital plate specifications, Rio Sofia will design the memorial text, and Ianna Book is at the ready to translate the design to deploy in Montreal after we pilot the workshop in Pennsylvania.
Nichole Van Beek
Art can play an important role in connecting these disciplines and generations and in generating meaningful public discourse on the climate crisis. For this reason, we seek to convene and motivate artistic projects. We seek to facilitate creative exchanges between students, teachers, and community members on ways to use visual, performing, or literary arts to explore and communicate climate issues. The range of these issues is as broad as human civilization, including agriculture, engineering, energy, human rights, racial justice, international policy, politics, philosophy, culture, religion, meteorology, mineral sciences, and mass mobilization. The first step is to advertise the project and recruit participants representing student, faculty, and community cohorts. We will draw the group primarily from Awaken State and our allies, several of whom have already indicated their support. We will work with faculty and staff organizations throughout the greater Penn State community through Penn State’s Sustainability Institute and its affiliated faculty, the Rock Ethics Institute, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, the Environmental Humanities Council, and the Interdisciplinary Climate Workshop’s Art Working Group. Allied student organizations include EcoAction, the Sunrise Movement and the Student Sustainability Advisory Council. We will also seek to involve community groups such as Inter-Faith Power and Light, and Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
Early in the Spring semester 2020, participants will meet together to learn about existing climate-related art, design, or performance projects, as well as cutting edge data-driven research and policy proposals. We will set up video conferencing for students and faculty from Commonwealth Campuses if necessary. Participants will be asked to share their own expertise, interests, and reasons for wanting to move towards climate solutions. We will organize conversations to generate ideas for collaborative projects that could be launched during Climate Crossover Week. Through these initial discussions we will facilitate the formation of teams (pairs or groups) who will work together to define concrete projects. The teams will write a description of what they would like to make and do, including delineating specific goals, individual roles within the group, a list of materials, a budget, and a timeline. We will provide support when needed by guiding research, finding spaces for the work to take place, keeping projects on track within the given timeframe, and designating the time and place during Climate Week when the project will be displayed or performed. Best practices for the use of sustainable materials will be employed to the fullest extent possible. We aim to encourage students to take on leadership roles and steer the direction of the projects with the help of teachers or community members. We will also work to connect participants to mentors within the larger network of Awaken State to support and guide the formation, creation, and display or performance of their projects.
Emily Steinberg
Comics journalism or graphic journalism is a form of journalism that covers news or nonfiction events using the framework of comics, a combination of words and drawn images. Although visual narrative storytelling has existed for thousands of years, the use of the comics medium to cover real-life events is currently at an all-time peak. “More and more, comics and journalism are cross-pollinating. Artists around the world are finding that combining images and text allows them to convey urgent stories with extraordinary emotion. Despite the immediacy of its impact, comics journalism is a slow form. Immensely labor-intensive, it demands of its practitioners extended attention and a careful eye. In this way, it offers an antidote to the churn of the news cycle, inviting us to take a closer look at the pressing matters of our time.” Reporting, Illustrated, Laura Thorne, Columbia Journalism Review, Laura Thorne 2019I propose to conduct a series of interviews and site visits which will culminate in the publication and exhibition of a full color Graphic Narrative focusing on the following: Animal Rights & Ethical Treatment of Animals, Plant based diets, Sustainable farming, Farm to Table, Education on Health and nutrition for lower income populations and the Environmental threats of Agribusiness and The Industrial Food Business.
I will engage the Penn State community, across the commonwealth, as well as our community beyond the University in the following ways:
- Through interviews connecting insights throughout the commonwealth from students whose studies or interests focus on Responsible Consumption and Production.
- By connecting voices from Penn State Abington’s majority minority campus, to a large international student body and the commonwealth at large, making the narrative diverse in many ways, and reflecting the land grant mission of the University.
- By making the Visual Narrative readily available in print and digitally.
- By Installing an exhibition of images from the project in art spaces on different campuses throughout the Penn State community.
- By Blogging real time progress of the project.
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S3A contributes to Advancing the Arts and Humanities through innovative arts-based approaches to sustainability and social action, education initiatives, community collaborations, and a biennial exhibition and symposium.
University level contributions include coordinated curriculum and research opportunities through the arts and social action. The project also relates to additional priorities of Enhancing Health, Stewarding our Planet’s Resources, and Transforming Education. The first step is to establish unified programming among the three campuses with other campuses joining in later on.
S3A will become a national model for arts-based sustainability and social action. These priorities require maintenance of interdisciplinary partnerships between arts practitioners, environmental researchers, socially engaged engineers, to position centrally the arts in relation to rural and public health, water and food resource management, and related social and educational issues.
Faculty at UP, Abington, and Altoona will continue partnerships with engineers, climate scientists, and others to emphasize sustainability, curriculum development, and collaborative community projects. Art courses on climate change and activism will cluster with courses in biology and psychology; embedded study abroad to Iceland deepens student awareness to cultural responses to climate change; first-year engagement seminar in Philadelphia and summer study away and study abroad examine cultural, environmental, and grassroots movements for social action and activist art; Sustainable Studio and the eARTh Lab project draws on sustainable principles and ecological justice perspectives through art for undergraduate and early childhood learners, respectively. As engaged scholarship, these initiatives position academic educational experiences in collaboration with local and global communities to foster democratic forms of knowing.