After Fountainhead, I headed to Manchester NH for Currier Museum of Art residency with Green Mask social practice project running from November 1 – December 13, 2022.
Green Mask Project is a multi-faceted eco-inspired humanities social practice project exploring individual and collective identities through a combination of sustainable mask masking methods using Currier museums own recycled and upcycled materials. Green Mask is designed to help promote sustainability, social equity, diversity and inclusion through art making, sharing stories, building community and collective empowerment.
The Green Mask Project is hosted at the museum through a series of community programming, public workshops, State of the Art exhibition tour, film screening and sharing culture through food.
The mask workshops seeks to challenge how we perceive ourself and thereby others in relation to place and environment. The final recycled mask creations become mirrors that invite the viewer to see themselves in the sameness we share, invoking connectivity in the sameness that we all share beyond social barriers. Green Mask project is a call for coexistence, for a more greener world in which individuals can unite in celebration of our distinctions and of our common humanity.
I did an earlier rendition of the project with Colorado State University for AAPI heritage month in April 2022. Based on my first experience with the project, for the Currier residency model – I decided it was best to implement a two-part workshop which would consist of creating individual identity masks with the museums weekly art+wellness programmed classes while also getting to build a series of four large Currier Totem Mask sculptures with the general public and museum staff throughout the six weeks. Both the individual masks and Currier Totem sculptures are all carefully being assembled and built, one at a time through individual workshops by various communities such as vets, youth, the disability and substance abuse residing in Manchester and the greater New Hampshire area. The completed masks are all directly exhibited at the museums gallery on the first floor for community to experience their artworks on display and to witness the totems being built in process. The totem sculpture rings started out empty but with each week they continue to grow rich and expansive.
I have enjoyed seeing the museums permanent collections, archives and temporary traveling exhibitions which include Gee’s Bend Quilts, Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl’s Window by Alexandria Smith, Frank Lloyd Wright’s two permanent homes (The Kalil House & Zimmerman House), and more recent headliner national traveling exhibition – State of the Art 2020: Locate hailing from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Here are pictures from my Frank Lloyd Wright’s two house architecture tour (The Kalil House & Zimmerman House). I liked the The Kalil house better which is a Usonian Automatic, with its cold hard cement blocks and angular build the house reminded me of German expressionism.
Designed in 1955, the Kalil House is one of only seven Usonian Automatics ever constructed. Wright termed the style “automatic” because they were intended to be easily and quickly built. Toufic and Mildred Kalil were inspired to commission the house by their close friends and neighbors Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman, who had commissioned a Wright house a few years earlier on the same street.
I am housed in a huge New England three story house right across the museum. I have made some great friends with some of the museum staff during my time here, it will be hard to say goodbye.
It has been a learning and cultural exchange experience getting to work with the various communities at the museum through the lens of identity, equity and sustainable art making. Since my arrival in November, I have had the pleasure to create individual identity masks with the museums weekly programmed classes including Art for Vets, Art of Hope and Creative Connections for Teens. I would start each class with a presentation followed by a writing prompt, mask masking and sharing stories.
Here are some images from the individual mask classes we have held so far. I am always blown away and highly inspired by everyones level of creativity and execution no matter the age. It has been such a gift getting to know and bond with everyone in the classes, their stories offer me profound wisdom.
The Currier Totem is an eco-inspired community building empowerment project about individual and collective identities consisting of 4 large ring mandalas each representing one of the four natural elements (Fire, Water, Air, Earth). Since prehistoric times, the number four was employed to signify what was solid and balanced; it is a symbol of wholeness and universality, a symbol which draws all to itself. In this spirit, we invite the Manchester community to help build the totem using recycled items collected from Currier’s own recycling. Through symbolic material meaning, the inside composition of the mandala reflects the collective identity of our inner worlds while the outside barrier represents the collective identity of our outer worlds.
The Currier Totem is designed to reflects the diversity and value of the people and communities that visit the museum and simultaneously help protect the windhorse spirit of the museum and its surrounding communities. Also know as “Wish Fulfilling Jewel of Enlightenment” windhorse is a symbol of the human soul in the shamanistic tradition of East Asia and Central Asia.
I got the opportunity to work with various community to build the totems from scratch starting the first week of November through various general public drop in workshops, Art After Work and the Creative Studio programs. For the totem workshops, participants got to shop for their favorite offering items from the provided recycled materials then went to the totem stations to build their offering creations onto the inside or outside of the rings. We treated the inside of the rings as our collective inner self and the outside as our collective exterior self or masked identity. Everyone got to share about their offering items with the class and how it reflects aspects of who they are.
As part of my residency programming, upcoming towards end of November I have a film screening event for The Eagle Huntress and a sharing culture through food day with the museums. Thank you Currier for the platform to share my culture with the museum and greater New Hampshire communities.
hilite head 
elaborate?