"MINES"

The first excersice for the class was to jump right into preperation for an upcoming outdoor Baltimore arts festival- Flowermart. Hosted in tents lined up around the base of the Washington Monument and Museum in the heart of the city's Mt. Vernon community, everything from clothes and jewelry to flower seeds and ripe tomatoes could be found amongst those gathered to sell their goods. Our product? Dynamic flowerpots for all those Baltimoreans using the weekend festival to purchase greenery for their yards, window sills, and front stoops. It didn't take long for DePaolo to break out the clay. Instructing everyone to first put a wad of clay in the bottom of their pots for a base, she then proceeded to explain the easiest way for a flowerpot to be completed. With little background in clay, save for a few experiments in grade school and summer camps, I payed close attention to how she constructed an entire pot in minutes by simply palm-rolling the clay into coils. She then carefully layed them along the inside of the pot. One on top of the other. Taking her thumb, she then smeared and smoothed all the coils together. This seemed to ruin the work, but once it dried it popped right out of the mold with a coil design on the outside, and a smooth inside. Then it was our turn. With a pot in front of each student, we all proceeded to take on the task: making our first ceramic flowerpot. I looked around the table as we all got started. Working earnestly, designs were being intricately placed on the work when all of a sudden DePaolo stopped the class. "Now pass to the work to the person next you," she said, to a table full of artists. Everyone but the students who had already completed the first half of the class looked around. Was she serious? We already had our designs in mind- had already started to execute our work and now we had to hand it over to a stranger? This was MINES! What if their coils didn't match my coils? What if they did a different design then what I wanted? WHAT IF THEY MADE IT PINK? All of these questions were soon put to rest with a simple explanation. The point of the excercise was to learn that everyone had to have a hand in the design- whether it was functional or just for aesthetic pleasure. Everyone had their own ideas- which should be welcomed- because their own life experiences and lessons bring something to the table. Just because I started something and regarded it as "mines" didn't mean that someone else couldn't finish it- and make it better. Just because I didn't finish it didn't mean I couldn't claim it- it was still very much my creation- just part of a larger work. This was community art.