The Healing Tree project is a community-wide endeavor to engage students and families in reflecting on and expressing aspects of their pandemic experiences while honoring loved ones they have lost or who have been a support to them in this difficult time.

The Healing Tree is a metal sculpture to be installed in downtown Hazard, KY. It is a collaboration between 3 Eastern Kentucky metalworkers and 1 social practice artist (Nicole); students and staff of rural Eastern Kentucky schools; and staff from Berea College Partners for Education. Metalworkers come to schools for workshops. The students have the opportunity to shape steel leaves on a forge or to cut and pound copper leaves. Prior to metalworking, students participate in Nicole Garneau’s ceremonial artmaking class that provides them with the opportunity to honor specific loved ones in their lives: those who have passed on, and those who love and help us in this life.

Contact me for more information about this project, including how to do a Healing Tree in your community!

COLORS + NUMBERS+ LOVE was a 3-day art experience for young people in grades 8-12, created by teaching artist Nicole Garneau. To protect the identities of the young people involved, identifiers of the participants and their school have been removed. In this program, Nicole lead students in exercises that help use numbers to express something about love. Students painted stair risers and columns and stenciled numbers to personalize the stairs. Using numbers as a storytelling tool is one of Nicole Garneau's ongoing explorations and practices. In this particular case, inviting students to stencil numbers that were personally meaningful to them on the stairs of their school allowed them to maintain their anonymity while also imbuing the space with care and intentionality. This project was made possible through the Appalachian Teaching Artist Fellowship program of Partners for Education at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Email me if you’d like to talk about how to do this project at your school!

Once a week for 3 weeks, Nicole visited high school juniors in their English classes. Nicole lead students in creative writing workshops that resulted in personal narrative storytelling incorporating numbers and a prompt inspired by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Students also learn how to make a simple 1-page “zine” or booklet and worked together on collaborative story-creation. Students explored multiple strategies for collaboration, including “exquisite corpse” drawings. Each class created a zine featuring writing and original artwork, distributed in the final session. Email me to learn more about how zines/small booklets and collaboration make creative writing fresh!

In the “Shrines and Memorias” after school program, we learned about and made different kinds of personal shrines and commemorative art. These were secular (non-religious) shrines. This class utilized parts of the curriculum published by New Urban Arts called “Secular Shrines and Commemorative Art.” Students studied artistic approaches to shrine-making and commemoration from around the world. Students used a combination of art materials, found materials, and personal objects to create a self-contained “shrine to who I no longer am.” The goals of the program are: 1) build student understanding of the global/universal practice of the creation of shrines and memorials, 2) encourage student confidence that their experiences and priorities can become the material for sacred works of art, and 3) develop critical thinking and writing skills through hands-on activities rich with text.  

This program was presented as part of Pulaski Playhouse at Pulaski Community School in Chicago; Liz Parrott Radzicki was the Community Schools Coordinator at Pulaski. This project was made possible by the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College Chicago. Contact me about how to set up workshops in personal shrine-making at your school!

What if children’s world views were the starting point for cultural development in the Sankt Kjelds neighborhood of Copenhagen, Denmark?

The work of Child Researchers began in February 2012 with an experiment in encountering children and families in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Sankt Kjelds. Blowing bubbles on a winter afternoon in Kildevaelds Park, we asked parents walking home from school with their children to tell us about fun places in the neighborhood, and gave them bottles of bubbles in exchange for this information. We were interested in projects like Notes for a People’s Atlas, Radical Cartography, and Participatory Maps for Inclusive Cities that utilize mapping as a political and artistic strategy. We were also curious about UNICEF’s Child-Friendly Cities initiative that has been utilized in places like Bam, Iran, after their 2003 earthquake. We envisioned our work as a process of research, workshops, and curated experiences designed to help children imagine changes for their neighborhood.

In February, we ran a prototype mapping workshop in Kildevaelds Park with 11-and 12-year-old girls. The results of their work helped us develop a proposal to Kildevaelds School administration for a series of mapping workshops we hoped to do with children in the school. One brave 5th grade teacher took us up on our offer, and we spent 5 weeks in April and May working with this group of children on creative mapping and an urban design project for their neighborhood. On Saturday May 5, we hosted a community building activity for children and parents based on designs for interventions we created in collaboration with the students.

It was our hope that the creative research activities of children would inform the plans for the development of both urban spaces and the Cultural Center planned for a site near the school. This work could be used not only to involve children in the design of outdoor and indoor spaces, but might inform the development of workshops for adults that explore approaches normally reserved for work with children. In this way, we hoped to encourage a sense of wonder and playfulness in both adults and children. Email me about the possibilities of creative mapping and engaging young people in urban planning!

Nicole Garneau was the lead artist in the Brood 13 project in summer 2007 as part of the Blue Sky Program artist residency in McHenry County, IL. Brood 13 was a series of daily, site-specific performances inspired by the visions of McHenry County youth and adults. Brood 13 took its name from the population of 17-year cicadas that appeared in Northern Illinois in the summer of 2007, and will emerge again in 2024. The youth artist team for Brood 13 was Alex Fayer, Erin Garceau, Selena Lester, Lori Moore, and Elizabeth Skalecki.

To generate material for Brood 13, Nicole asked parents, staff, artists and youth participants of Blue Sky Program to envision what they want the world to be like in the year 2024 when the Brood XIII cicadas re-emerge. Participants wrote their intentions on note cards. The issues and concerns of the youth participants shaped the form and content of the work. Youth participants also explored concepts and structures currently being used in contemporary performance art. Brood 13 emphasized spontaneity, quick thinking, improvisation, and interaction with the outside environment. Every day we choose intentions and made performative art work to embody that vision. Our work culminated in an exhibit of documentation at Starline Gallery in Harvard IL, accompanied by a live performance. Get in touch about doing a participatory art residency that is deeply rooted in your community.