Story Boats
I collaborated with youth from Minneapolis and St. Paul participating in conservation work along the Mississippi River to create a series of stories and experiences about their lives and work within the Mississippi's watershed. Interested in all of the many layers of history accumulated along the urban banks of the River, I became interested in “Telling River Stories,” an on-going project headed-up by faculty member Patrick Nunnally through the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. I designed a community-based art project that would engage young members of the communities along the Mississippi to tell their river-related stories on the surfaces of porcelain boats.
I met with two groups of teenagers working on restoration along the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and St. Paul. In St. Paul, the Community Design Center of Minnesota operates the East Side Youth Conservation Corps and Garden Corps, which provide teens with leadership, entrepreneurship and career skills through environmental conservation and urban organic gardening. In Minneapolis, The Green Team partnership (or Minneapolis teen crew) was formed as a collaboration between the Community Design Center of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO), and the National Park Service. The Minneapolis teens were recruited from high schools in north and northeast Minneapolis and also help with conservation work, while gaining exposure to careers in the “green” sector.
Each week during their educational days, the teens participating in each of these organizations are given the opportunity to learn from professionals in different fields. This designated educational time provided a perfect opportunity for the youth to participate in an artistic collaboration. After talking about watershed and water resources in the Twin Cities, I asked all of them to draw their stories about the Mississippi River onto prepared two-dimensional boat forms. I then made a porcelain boat for each one of the stories, and transferred the teens' drawings onto the clay surface by creating a screen-printed replica of each one out of ceramic “ink” and pressing it onto the boats.
Once the boats had been made, we all met again at Father Hennepin Bluffs Park to ceremoniously “launch” the boats into the river. The teens each told their stories and then placed their boats in the water as a gesture of their personal role in building a community of concerned citizens focused on water issues. Teens from St. Paul also “launched” some boats at Lake Phalen. All of the boats were then put on display at Homewood Studios in Minneapolis.
Funds for the story boat project have been provided by a Graduate Research Project Partnership Grant through the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts. Thanks also to the many partners that support youth conservation work that positively impacts the Mississippi River including the Community Design Center of Minnesota, the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, Minneapolis Employment and Training Program, and the National Park Service's Mississippi National River and Recreation Area.