Dec 19-24

In the last 6 days we saw some amazing outcomes of artists creating with mixed media, documentation, and even multiple others artists to bring a vision to fruition. Of course the more collaborators, the more possibility for unknown outcomes. Just like the creating process itself, when you pick up new materials and experiment with them, you don’t know what the end result will be. Because you are allowing the unknown to enter. You are not controlling the creative process or staying within a fixed lane of pre-determined materials or known frames. The “canvas” of your art or creativity doesn’t have to be a traditional canvas. It can be a wall, a fence post, the sidewalk.

Many crafters and creators, whether they deem themselves “artists” or not, don’t make things to go into museums, but instead make them for their homes, their beloveds, or install them within the community, to be experienced freely, or even to be taken, or added to.

There is an impulse to create. To transform materials. To look at the world in new ways and try to capture that vision: to visualize what you have experienced, what you are seeing before you, or what you dream can BECOME.

BE.

CRAFT.

CREATE.

BECOME.

We hope you will keep playing. Being. Crafting. Creating. Becoming. Long after these 24 days are over. Because this world — and the beings that live here — need all the creativity and re-imagining that is possible.

Playing with materials — as children, and as adults — is how we get to know our surroundings and our very selves. Play is critical to survival, too. It’s no wonder a place like BMC emerged in the shadow of war, economic collapse, and oppressive systems like in the Jim Crow south. We are facing many similar crises in 2023. Creative play and the dreaming of artists are needed more than ever.

And YOU are a creative being with something unique within you that seeks to be Made. And in the Making, not only are materials changed, but so, too, are we. May it be so.