The Artists
The Artists |
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Chicago-area artists Nina Smoot-Cain and John Pitman Weber work as a creative team. They are muralists, mosaic artists, printmakers, writers, curators and educators whose work is featured in the collections of the Valparaiso University, NY City College, Harvard University, and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago; and been commissioned by the Bethel New Life Center for Performing Arts, Chicago Neighborhood Institute, and Chicago Percent for Art Program. Nina and John are active with Chicago Public Art Group. In Spencer they will guide the public in the creation and completion of a ceramic tile mosaic depicting the changing nature of their region, illustrating the theme, Fostering a Love of Community: Today and Tomorrow, Using Yesterday's Experience.
I paint to have an opportunity to play with liquid color, patters, textures, and shapes. "I paint to know myself. I know to paint myself." I make art to play and to learn. I also make large-scale public/community mosaic murals, often collaborating with other artists, students, or adult volunteers. I make no distinction between my studio painting or working in collaboration with others.
My personal artwork and my large-scale mural projects reflect a lifelong quest to communicate the unspoken ideas and truths of my family/community/culture. While these are my visions, they are sometimes developed and acted upon collaboratively through living and interacting with others. For me, art making is a deeply spiritual act that honors the creator in all of us.
Each piece I create frames a reflection of a moment in time of my own existence. As pieces are added together, in reflection, they tell me metaphorically where I have been and where I am going; they become my past, present, and future, they become my history. This constant dialogue in and through the creative process allows me to tell my story and make a visual record of my existence.
As others view the work a new dialogue begins. This extension to my family, friends, and strangers allows me to have an unspoken voice in the mutual understanding of our existence together. It is my hope that my visual statements merge and reflect the journey and unspoken truths of others in our society.
Community
The underlying goal of "community" public art must always be the creation of a sense of community. Community is not a given, it is a process and a goal. It always involves a re-imagining and a re-imaging of history, values, identity and the uncovering/redefinition of "new common ground." The goal is always to expand from the "smaller" agenda of individual concerns to family and group heritage, to shared vision and responsibility in/for the community. Community public art is a process of designing and symbolically building our life together, claiming citizenship, in the city, the country and the world.
As a product of Southern Baptist-Russian Jewish parents, the question of "translation" across cultural/racial differences is never far from my mind. My entire career I have worked with Puerto Rican, Black or most often, racially, ethnically and economically mixed communities, in which ethnic/racial change was an issue.
Almost all of my work in community public art has been collaborative, with a partner as well as with community. Collaboration has often been a positive inspiration for me and never more so than in my work with Nina Smoot-Cain, a Black colleague with whom I have dialoged for 15 years. We share deeply held human values, aesthetic references and a commitment to achieving a unified solution. Our understanding of and celebration of our differences as well as our commonalities enabled us to model and mirror the process of working together and of connecting to American citizenship. We believe our unusual partnership can provide effective facilitation of the public art process in many complex community situations.
ParkArt is an ongoing project in which the whole community can express themselves in many ways. We will show you the progress on these pages and give you an opportunity to participate in any way you can. If you have questions about this project, you can contact the ParkArt Coordinator, Judy Hemphill, phone 712-260-1373 or at hemphill@nwiowa.com.
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