Arts Explorer #10: Community Arts Project

We needed to brainstorm, find a topic and how what we wanted to do with this cause. As my group came together and began to discuss hot topics, we thought of things that we felt strongly about or have affected us personally. After going back and forth and discussing popular issues, our final BIG IDEA was pre-teen female bullying and we called our campaign Words Hurts GTA.

Even though this project was a great deal of work in the last two weeks of the semester, we put all of our minds together, gathered all of the necessary information and created an excellent mock campaign for a start to raise awareness for pre-teen female bullying. We created a Facebook and Twitter page, our own blog, a video, a mini flyer, t-shirts for ourselves containing information about our personal experiences with bullying, a PowerPoint presentation and an excellent workshop for the female students that we would be visiting at schools, if we implemented this campaign further.

Front of Words Hurt flyer



Back of Words Hurt flyer



The presentation that we prepared for the class consisted of us going through our PowerPoint slides, discussing the issues that we had and what our plan was to implement and enforce change in societies around the GTA and, if our campaign was picked up and funded, how we would manage to keep our campaign going and remain effective.

Through planning and brainstorming, we came up with a lot of great and successful ideas that would help spread the word for our campaign to other societies which was through social networking and the artistic spin we put on our activities for the female students in which we plan to visit that would help them to feel more comfortable around us and feel more open around us and others and with a bit of luck eventually come to feel comfortable speaking to anyone when having a bullying problem.

I feel like our presentation was well planned out and organized. We knew who was going to say what, we had our information straight, we all felt passionately about the subject so when we talked about it we it really sounded like we were truly pitching an idea to a panel of potential buyers. Our presentation went really well, we presented it with confidence and sincerity in our voices. We had a lot of information to give to the class and I felt that they were engaged and really listening to what we had to say.

We felt really good about our presentation and the concept that we came up with. We think we did an excellent job so far with getting information out there in the world through Facebook, Twitter and word of mouth and we would actually consider taking this a step further and contacting people who would be interested in helping our cause!

Arts Explorer #9: Guerilla Art

To be a guerrilla artist you can create something – anything – that you would like to and post it around a city or community. The purpose is to try and have random people who you do not know to see your art and for it to have an effect on them in some way, shape or form.

For my own guerrilla art I decided to create something that I find extremely important to do every day, which is smile and laugh! Seeing random things around the city, such as street performers or signs or graffiti around the city can be inspiring, make you happy and perhaps, make you think. Here is my version if guerrilla art:



Guerilla Art

In my picture I have a few happy, uplifting phrases to hopefully boost the person’s day. And along with those phrases is a small happy face to go along with the cheerful mood!

I printed a few of these pictures and placed them in common places where I know people would go quite often around the city. I wanted them to be placed on spots and objects where people go or walk by often. Therefore, I placed one at the library, one on a car in a parking lot at the mall, one at the library and one on the mailbox by my house.



Car in parking lot.



Mailbox on street.



Mississauga Central Library



To catch someone’s reaction, I was at the grocery store and decided to place my guerrilla art within one of the aisles of the store. I stood around for a while and waited for someone to notice my art. Someone did notice it and actually smiled! While the lady was standing there looking at my art, she pointed at it and I snapped the photo. After she looked at it, she was really nice about it and asked me what it was for and why I had to do this. I proceeded to tell her it was for school and why I had to do this. She then told me it was actually a really nice thing to see while she was doing her grocery shopping.

I hope the lady whose picture I took went and told people she knew about what she had seen and hopefully it brightened up her day like I would have hoped it would.



In Loblaws



In Loblaws with reaction.



When doing this assignment I tried to think of something that would make people happy when they saw something posted that normally wouldn’t be seen on objects around the city. I know I’ve talked to people who have seen random stickers with a funny saying or even seeing balloons flying aimlessly in the air around the city, put a smile on people’s faces. Therefore, I just thought of something simple and easy to make that would be uplifting to someone, quick to read but also have an effect and make them smile! I know if I saw this posted on a wall or in a library I’d smile, and I hope it has the same effect on others too!