STOREFRONT STORIES
Cedric Douglas, Nilou Moochhala, Julia Roth
My first project in Arlington evolved from my community engagement process with Arlington Public Art in East Arlington. Over several months, we organized open public meetings and smaller scale conversations with stakeholders and neighborhood leaders. I heard from many residents that the independent small businesses along the Mass. Ave corridor were a valued element of the landscape and the community. I visited every store in the neighborhood known as Capitol Square to meet owners and workers and ask them about their neighborhood.
It quickly became clear that these storefront business offered vital places – a hybrid of public and private space where all kinds of people would informally meet and get to know each other. Diverse shops, bakeries, salons, and restaurants provided a kind of connective tissue and built a feeling of local community. A few examples:
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one of the last typewriter repair shops left in New England
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a pizza place that had given three different Greek families a foothold in the American economy,
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a drumming store and school that brought visiting artist/teachers from West Africa,
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an independent pharmacy run by three successive generations of the same family,
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a welcoming clothing shop that served older women with artful clothes that emphasized personal style over fashion.
These establishments, often run by one person or a family, could be understood to express the hopes and values of their proprietors as well as their practical skills and business interests. I proposed to the Town that we create a temporary public art project that would explore, document and celebrate the diverse stories of these store owners, with an emphasis on understanding their personal history and cultural grounding.
ARTIST TEAM
I enlisted Cedric Douglas as a collaborator and thought partner as well as lead artist. Cedric has a gift for listening to people, genuinely appreciating and honoring their unique and positive qualities. He saw almost everyone that he interviewed in Arlington as a fellow artist, and praised the way they created their spaces, their food, and their interactions with customers in the same thoughtful and expressive way that an artist creates images or music.
I also invited talented graphic designer and public artist Nilou Moochhala, who had already created her own Arlington stories project, to develop oral histories and design a newsprint publication. Cedric brought his partner/collaborator Julia Roth on board, and we had a team.
We held a nomination process, asking people to share their stories about their favorite local businesses. Cedric produced oversized boards to interview people on the street and we printed postcards for people to pick up at the local branch library. Our team selected 13 people for portraits. Cedric interviewed all of them; Nilou and I worked on crafting written portraits while Cedric focused on large scale designs that would be wheatpasted on exterior walls throughout the neighborhood. Cedric designed each graphic portrait with details to capture the character of the primary subject. I developed pull quotes for each site – extracts from the transcribed interviews. Nilou designed and produced a Storefront Stories Zine, a free newspaper with the content from our project, including Cedric's final designs and process photos.
Whew, that project was a lot of work. It took more than a year to accomplish, and should have been funded with 4 times the budget! But live and learn. It was the first major project I did as an independent consultant.