I left the country when was twenty-one years old. I went to Brazil to work with children in the favelas of Recifé, Brazil. I taught art workshops in a park. I was robbed once at gunpoint while walking from one park to the next after a sponge-painting workshop. When I was robbed, it was by two adolescents, who were around seventeen years old. After, I bought a skateboard to protect myself, and I cut my hair short and arrived at the park again for a workshop later that week. I was not mad at the kids who robbed me; I was more upset with the nature of the incident. My anger stemmed from the ability to recognize the problems of capitalist society, and how the corrupt disparity between rich and poor can result in children doing things out of desperation and hunger.
My art changed from there. I started to become more and more interested in education and social justice, while still seeing art as an important and viable way to reach out to kids with little or no educational background. I came to realize that art making was no longer about the art itself, but could be about shedding light on political injustices. The only question then, to me, was how I could pose needed questions to those who potentially were not interested in hearing them.
Upon my re-enrollment at Portland State University a good year later, I took art and social practice. We started a class project called Public Social University that term, a project that I took on the following term and soon turned into a functioning small non-profit. This project is a free education forum that we sometimes call art.
I started Public Social University independently from Portland State University with my friend Rozzell in the winter of 2009. He and I have been collaborating for over a year now, and have been interested in radical ideas of education- which can run without monetary necessity, taught person to person. We have also been interested in teaching more holistically; by utilizing more senses then those most commonly used learning devises such as linguistic, mathematical and auditory.
In my opinion, it is necessary for those who live amongst each other to build a sense of place and community. Carol Becker wrote, in “The Nature of the Investigation” that, “The response of many young artists at this juncture is to say: We want to be effective, to learn practical skills, to cross over into the city and work with groups of people to influence social policy about issues of the environment, homelessness, racist conflict, drug abuse, gang and domestic violence, the death penalty, and arts policy.” Another reason why I viewed Public Social University as important, is that we recognized that if the institution or the government is not giving us what we wanted, then we must either demand it, or build it ourselves.
We built Public Social University during the first scares of the economic recession. We thought that with so many people out of work, it would be a great time for people to come together, to teach classes on that which they are capable of facilitating. We then designed it to center around topics of value, such as water, food, healing and friendship.
We have since have won grants, been sponsored, spoke in different community events and given talks in classrooms. We became interested in becoming more radical. I wanted the Public Social University attendees to leave our events with something to take away, to change their communities. We had been investigating the importance of Oral Histories, with our grant money and sponsorship we designed a mobile museum called the Oral History Space. During the installation, I could sense my capability to collaborate with Rozzell shift. I was realizing that certain dynamics in our relationship could no longer be upheld. It was as if as we gained experience, we grew more and more into what we wanted out of the project, as well as what we could learn from each other. I think we can both agree that Public Social University has been an amazing collaborative effort, and that the project, as well as ourselves, have become better and stronger because of it. But like everything in life, it will grow and change, and new and better things will be created.
My interest in teaching that which I deem as important is still going to be explored as I am facilitating a free weekly on-going workshop under the Public Social umbrella on Survival at The Waypost. There is still need to examine what has been done in the past to evaluate what is a necessity for the future. In this very moment, as I finish the last day of my undergraduate studies, I feel ready to move on to the next chapter in my life, one that doesn't involve student loans, and is still meditating on everything that has happened in the past year.
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