Sunblossom
was 6 years of making art projects with kids who were recently resettled refugees
2009-2015
Old Home / New Home, 2009, mural in Sunblossom Mountain Apartments #411
After college moved back to Katy, TX from art school, and worked for an arts nonprofit in my hometown. Houston was the #1 US city for refugee resettlement at the time. They took me along for an art making project with kids who were refugees, mostly from Burma, on the SW side. They began interviewing the kids about their old home/new home, but since only a few kids knew English, the drawings told even more.
I had the folder of their drawings when I learned the nonprofit was ducking out and leaving this process hanging.
I came back the next week anyways, and we developed the idea by compiling aspects from each of their drawings into a collaborative mural. Kids illustrated each other’s images of life then / now and home there / here in larger format onto the wall, making a collective landscape from common scenes and individual details.
In this process I met the art kids. Like really talented art kids, like Mi Paing who is responsible for many of the close up flourishes in the painting, and Htoo Roh who was older but was systematically repainting the cultural history of the Karen people. We had a bit of an art crew. Htoo Roh painted a mural in the front room, and taught a drawing session to a group of teenagers in the Refugee Community Empowerment Association.
We had video exchange sessions with contemporary artists from Burma like Chaw Ei Thein and Htein Lin, who’d been creating activist performance work under the military junta. They’d skype in and collaboratively make projects about the creative voice making a way out of no way. Then, we’d repeat the projects in the big group of 70-100 kids at Salvation Army. Students taught other students what we were doing, and I was learning how art communicates beyond language.
Htoo Roh
Chaw Ei Thein
Museum of Fine Arts field trip
I stayed for 6 years, until the youngest kiddos had moved on to junior high, facilitating art projects as a volunteer. We hosted contact mic workshops with Nameless Sound, and made bones for an installation on the Washington Mall protesting genocide. We moved around Catholic Charities, Salvation Army, and Amaanah as different nonprofits provided after school programs and allowed space for sometimes radical dissident artist training.
John Glenn, community leader, liaison, and political refugee himself for compiling a history of student revolutions, helped me navigate this nonprofit matrix to find where the kids had gone as programs transitioned.
He helped me talk to the parents for permissions on field trips, like to the Museum of Fine Arts, and big projects, like getting the kids scholarshipped to go to Art Camp at Art League Houston, and making art bikes with James Ciosek to ride in the Art Car Parade.
I remember the day the Elves & More donated bikes arrived. We hauled the boxes into whichever vacant apartment the complex was letting us use at the time, and I sat down to read the safety instructions for one tool. When I turned back around the girls had completely assembled their bikes in a matter of minutes.
This was no big deal, they were also the default parents of their families, handling translations for legal and medical paperwork, and citizen architects, retrofitting the swinging singles apartment complexes built in the 70s inside out with footpaths and patio gardens to serve them. They some of the most creative teachers I’ve ever had .
At the end of my time, I piloted a residency in which the now middle school kids chose multidisciplinary artists from around Houston to teach them making skills. Each artist taught a session and also supported two other artists sessions. I wanted the artists to meet each other, and get a bit of what I’d learned about communicating beyond an art audience. I hoped the city would use it as a model for a teaching arts program in a city touted for its diverse immigrant populations.
Every individual work since my time with them, including memorializing the house I grew up in, and every collaboration I’ve done with urban planners, architects, and designers, has been inspired by the Survival Creativity of this community, and especially how the kids made their new homes and new lives here. Shout out to Ma Nan Soe, Chit Khin, Mi Paing, Moo Paw, Ee Thee, Nanci, Oo Reh, John Glen, Mr. Raymond, Kai, and Bawi.
You can do a deeper dive into this work by visiting my previous website, or reach out.