Alphabet in Your Own Backyard

Showing accordion books at Henninger High School

“Alphabet in Your Own Backyard” is a collaborative community project between Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) and four schools from the Syracuse City School District: Henninger, Fowler, Corcoran and Nottingham.  These four schools represent the northeast, southwest, northwest and southeast quadrants of Syracuse, allowing for a wide range of students to be part of the culminating publication. The project is funded by Syracuse University's Enitiative with funds from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Henninger High School was the first venue where we worked with Lori Schneider, art teacher and next art chair at School.  Schneider teaches advanced design students (juniors and seniors) who are interested in the design profession and are potential college art students.  The project’s first stage is a digital camera/visual book assignment with Henninger students, resulting in a series of self-published accordion books of photographs and prose. Students find "hidden" letters in their neighborhoods (i.e. a step ladder might be an "A").  They begin to look to their own neighborhoods as sources of imagery, giving viewers a window into their lives. The finished hand-made accordion books can be sold directly in the neighborhood and also exhibited in the community gallery at the Warehouse.

Showing accordion books at Henninger High School

On September 17, Peter Verheyen, Head of Preservation and Conservation at Syracuse University Library and a book artist/bookbinder in his own right, and Gail Hoffman, Professor in VPA’s Foundation program showed examples of accordion and related book structures as well as working students through the process of constructing an accordion book.

M-LAB

Marion Wilson, director of community initiatives at VPA, will provide the Mobile Literacy Arts Bus (M-LAB) one day a week for two weeks. With local high schools lacking the space and, in some cases, the ability to afford up-to-date technology, the new Mobile Literacy Arts Bus (M-LAB) will provide both needed working space and technology for high school students participating in The Partnership for Better Education's ‘Art, Literacy and Technology (ALT)’ program” (from Syracuse University News). The new M-LAB has close to 40 digital cameras, two laptops, three ink jet printers and an art and poetry library.

Finding an alphabet at Henninger with cameras

In Fall 2008, Henninger students will also come to the SU Warehouse for a day to give them the opportunity to use the community classroom. Henninger art students do not have computers with Photoshop, so the community classroom is a valuable resource where the class will start to design, crop and refine their photos for printing. While the Henninger students are at the Warehouse, they will take a tour of the facilities and be introduced to the design areas in VPA.

Entrepreneurship in the Curriculum

The project will span two years and involve four freshman FND 115 2-D Creative Processes classes (one class per semester) in partnership each semester with a different Syracuse city high school art class.

Students will create and self-publish accordion books that will be exhibited in the Warehouse and in the Syracuse University Library's 6th floor exhibition space.  From these exhibitions, a jury of design faculty will select 26 letters to comprise a final alphabet accordion book that will be professionally printed each semester. Based on what the students learn from the professional contacts about marketing strategies, they will work in teams, research printing options, identify their audience/consumer, determine the production and middleman costs and what the profit will be, contact local vendors, develop a plan for delivering the product to the market, and determine the quantity of books that the market can handle.  Each subsequent class can build on the experiences of the classes before them.

This process will introduce to the students practical strategies that they can use to turn their personal artwork into something marketable and desirable to a wider audience.

Craig Watters, assistant professor of Entrepreneurial Practices from the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises program in the Whitman School of Management, will give a guest lecture to the 2-D class and the Henninger High School class about business and marketing practices and how to deliver a product to the market.  Professor Watters works with Whitman's highly visible South Side Entrepreneurial Connect Project, advising teams of undergraduates and MBAs as they help small business owners and minority entrepreneurs on Syracuse's South Side grow their ventures.

Watters was formerly dean for advancement in SU's School of Information Studies and director of its economic stimulus center, the I-Launch Pad. His research and community work led to his nomination for an economic development award from Senator Hillary Clinton in 2003 and travel to Ireland as part of Clinton's trade mission in 2002. His dissertation researched the impact of infrastructure on economic development in rural areas.

Bill Padgett, Communication Design professor in VPA, will also be a guest lecturer and will discuss with the students how one takes an idea and brainstorms, develops, designs and packages it.  Padgett brings a wealth of art sector entrepreneurship experience to the students.  Padgett has been the principal of WilliamPadgettDesign for over thirty years. He has had design projects for hundreds of international, national and regional clients comprising of the corporate, institutional and not-for-profit sectors, some of which were new and immerging entrepreneurial businesses seeking a innovative, strategic, and creative design approach to their business plan.

Peter Verheyen, Head of Preservation and Conservation, Syracuse University Library will be another valuable guest lecturer because of his practical knowledge of printing and marketing artist books. He has given frequent presentations to SU Foundation Program classes exploring the book, taught the "Book Arts" class in VPA's Printmaking department in 2007, and has worked with students from a variety of programs on an internship and informal basis. Since 2005, he has led the Brodsky Series for the Advancement of Library Conservation, bringing to Syracuse leading authorities in conservation and the book arts for lectures and workshops. He has also organized "semi-annual" exhibitions of student book works at the Special Collections Research Center. He is past Exhibitions and past Publicity Chair for the Guild of Book Workers, having organized 3 major national traveling exhibitions. In 1994 he founded Book_Arts-L, a listserv with over 2000 subscribers and shortly thereafter the Book Arts Web. In 2004 he co-founded the The Bonefolder, an e-journal for the bookbinder and book artist. His experiences in developing exhibits, marketing and selling exhibition catalogs, The Bonefolder, working in private practice, and collaborative projects have informed his marketing instincts in the field of artist's books. A full vita is online.

Sustainability

This project will be integrated into Prof. Hoffman’s 2-D Foundation classes each semester.

In addition to the accordion books to be sold in the high school area neighborhoods, a larger publication at the end of two years is envisioned that would be a compilation of the strongest alphabet images from each of the high schools and college freshman classes.  Area English Language Arts classes could also contribute short essays or poems. This larger publication would be printed professionally and marketed to a wider audience.

After two years, this project (or a variation of it with a different theme -- i.e. community playing cards, or visual art made in response to poetry, or concrete poetry where poems are constructed from the found letters made by cracks and marks in the city’s concrete) could be implemented as part of the curriculum or become a course in itself.  It would serve as a social and educational bridge between the Syracuse high school juniors and seniors who know the Syracuse area well but aren’t sure what their college path will be, and the incoming SU freshmen, who have already made their educational choices but are uncertain and unaware of what the city of Syracuse can offer and how they can make a living as artists after leaving college.  In the process, all of the students learn how to brainstorm ideas, place them into a larger context, problem-solve through collaboration, build a practical business plan and gain confidence through their experiences.