3D Printing Mobile Cart out on the street

Last Sunday my son and I had a blast engaging the public in 3D printing via our mobile cart. We stationed ourselves next to Roy's Station in San Jose's Japantown during the Nikkei Matsuri festival and printed out netsuke. Here is a link to our photos and an article in the Mercury News mentioned our 3D printing pop-up event.

Wrap It Up Youth Video & Mural Project

I am working on an invite for the Wrap It Up Video & Mural project. There will be a street screening of the youth videos on May 4th in San Jose's Japantown. It has been a real pleasure to work with Mr. D.J. Ashford and his students at Burnett Middle School. I am hoping that we have a lot of people come out and celebrate the students' and public artists' works. The videos are part of the Next Vista video library collection: http://www.nextvista.org/projects/wrapitup/ and all the videos can be seen here.

Lesson plans can be found on the project site: http://wrapitupmurals.weebly.com/

I have 19 mesh murals to sew. I am excited to get them up on the fence mural site. Soon the youth video interviews will be embedded in the Japantown Mural Project mobile app. The app will link to the videos posted on Next Vista.

Thanks to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation Donor Circle for the Arts for funding and thank you to Next Vista for Learning for fiscal sponsorship of the project.

Japantown Mural Project Dedication

I am finally posting a few images from the dedication of the Japantown Mural project. Here is my mural, Noodle Sipper. My daughter was my model and she poses here in front of the digitally printed fence mural during the Obon Festival. The Japantown Mural Project was coordinated by Tamiko Rast of Rasteriods Design. There are around 60 panels and 30 artists involved.

A Keepsy book was created to celebrate the dedication and you can see it here: http://www.keepsy.com/hnztEOZr

Here is an earlier posting on the development of this mural panel, Noodle Sipper.

Wrap It Up! Youth video interviews embedded into murals

A few weeks ago, I was awarded a Donor Circle for the Arts grant to engaging middle school students in a community mural project in San Jose's Japantown. The project, Wrap It Up!, now has a website to document the project process: http://wrapitupmurals.weebly.com/  The project will result in student created video interviews with mural artists which will be hosted on Next Vista for Learning. The project will also invite students to create visual art to add to the mural site and spoken word and poetry recordings. All video and audio recordings will be incorporated into the mural project via QR codes. An earlier posting on the project concept is here.

Studies for Mural Fence Wrap in Japantown San Jose

I am beginning to create studies for a digitally printed fence wrap mural in San Jose, California. I am one of several artists invited by Rasteriods Design to contribute art to this fence which surrounds what was once San Jose's last Chinatown, Heinlenville, and what is today a part of Japantown. We are also looking to incorporate large bold graphics inspired by Studio Cochae.

Incorporated into the pattern designs above are images of actual artifacts (Japanese porcelain bowl and cow bones) dug up in an archeological excavation behind the fence. The cow bone slices are examples of how Chinese re-cut Western meats smaller to incorporate into Chinese cooking. Many fragments of both porcelain and re-cut cow bone were found at the site and graciously lent to me by the Sonoma State Anthropological Studies Center.

Tonight I submitted an application for a Donor Circle for the Arts Grant with Next Vista for Learning to engage youth of the Japantown community in contributing poetry, spoken word and interviews to the project. I envision student works being QR code linked on posters and on the fence wrap itself to connect public with student reflections online.

In this mural concept I am attempting to metaphorically bridge the past with the present and bring the artifacts to life in a modern day context. The girl is dressed in clothing of today and is blowing on a bowl of soup. The bowl in her hand is the pieced together bowl from the bowl fragment in the pattern behind her. The soup she is cooling contains beef broth and it is echoed in the bone pattern visible in the steam and in the child as she drinks it. The steam itself is a connection to the past as it references the incense burned to honor and remember ancestors. On this steam I will be illustrating floating objects representing the life of this community past and present.

The several blocks of fencing that the fence wrap will encase. Most recently this area was a municipal bus yard. Before that it was Heinlenville, a walled Chinese enclave.

Thoughts on the 100 Cups of Anne Smith

Illustration by Anne Smith. All rights reserved ( http://www.annesmith.net/ )

A week or so ago, I happened to look at a link sent to me by Selvedge Magazine and it took me to the wonderful illustrations of Anne Smith. Her 100 cups illustrations especially resonated with me. She is working on a book to showcase her art and I look forward to being able to purchase it. Each cup illustration on her websites is a lovely bit of visual poetry and I am eager to see all the 100 cups illustrations in her book.

Around the same time I  discovered Anne Smith's work, I was contacted by Rasteriods Design in San Jose regarding a public art project of a fence wrap to go around a construction site of several block in Japantown, San Jose, California. These few blocks were once Heinlenville, the last of six Chinatowns in San Jose. I thought it would be really interesting to invite artists to each paint a cup reflecting some part of history of this area, as many fragments of tea cups and rice bowl were found in the site excavation conducted by Sonoma State Anthropological Studies Center.

It is the early stages of the conceptual ideas for the fence wrap and I think the theme of the designs will take a different turn, but I will tuck away in my mind the idea of cups for future projects. So often in these excavations, the echos of the past lives of Chinese and Japanese immigrants are in the form of pottery shards. Anchoring public art imagery in this site to tea cups or rice bowls both references historical relevant artifacts and creates a theme around objects poetically representing  spaces to be filled with ideas and memories.
Below: Digital textile design I created from a Heinlenville shard fragment of a Japanese rice bowl and below that an image of the fence wrap site in Japantown, San Jose.