| MARK MAKING a new non-profit |
| Our mission: -To offer visual art education emphasizing creativity-building skills to children and adults. -To nourish a sense of citizenship and empowerment for these participating artists by encouraging them help define our visual landscape. -To improve target area's visual landscape with collaborative public art projects. -To offer clients high quality, inexpensive art. -To provide facilitating support artists teaching opportunities and experience in public art projects. |
| Creativity has become our nation's rarest and most valuable resource. Creativity is teachable. The most simple way to provoke our innate abilities in problem solving is to make are. Simple visual tools such as line, shape, texture and color can be used to create visual poetry, evoke feelings and describe order or chaos. Mindful "playing" with these tools is parallel to manipulating variable is finding solutions to a wide variety of problems. The same focused but playful mindset is critical to making art, inventing new widgets, choosing successful stocks, and engineering creative government policy. Mark Making's goal is to offer a setting where creativity can happen. We know that students taking art classes perform better in other subjects. We know that problem solving skills carry over to professional as well as academic situations. In our experience, non-working adults: those with physical or mental problems, homeless people and those in the correction system, also benefit greatly from exercising these abilities. Using these skills, Mark Making's goal is to create public art by non-professional artists. It is important that these site specific projects engage the aesthetic sensibilities of our citizens. High quality public art beautifies our world and can camouflage blight in our cities. Murals can bring positive attention to otherwise drab surfaces, offer information and serve as public service announcements about our community. Three dimensional arts can shape space,mark a place or function as furniture. Art can soothe or excite, instill peace or provoke commentary or debate. Business and government can also use visual solutions to make neighborhoods a more aesthetic and cohesive, more attractive to visitors and less inviting to criminal activity. It is their way of expressing that citizen input is valued and honored. It allows inhabitants to "mark" their neighborhoods and make public commentary about their history or values. For participating artists, public art-making evokes a sense of ownership and citizenship by invoking pride and self esteem. It gives a voice to disenfranchised members of our population. Public art by non-professionals is inexpensive but creates significant economic impact. Children and adult artists absorb concepts and skills that make them more valuable to their communities. Art projects offer employment opportunities to teaching artists and those in support industries. Also, art is good for tourism. Beauty, grace, whimsy and visual public commentary are always a draw; equally attractive is the cooperation, partnering and unity necessary to sustain a solid public art program. |
| Board Information |