CREATIVE CITY ARTIST INVOLVEMENT

COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS TOOLKIT

Local artists Diana Cervera and Josemar Gonzalez, Yolanda Franklin, Jacole Kitchen, and Cat Chiu Phillips conducted community conversations through targeted outreach activities – making Creative City a truly creative planning process.

Diana Cervera and Josemar Gonzalez are multidisciplinary transborder artists and organizers whose practices include community engagement through cultivating partnerships with cultural leaders and organizations to craft and inform their work. For Creative City, the artists facilitated engagement with culturally specific communities in City Heights.  Through a two-part workshop with participants, the artists garnered insights from the perspective of these individuals residing in City Heights, activating them through poetry and storytelling.  This work included building connections and creating a narrative, incorporating it into the second workshop and a final collective artistic creation. The stories emerging from the workshops highlight the current state of how creativity plays a part in the diverse communities of San Diego. Additionally, Cervera and Gonzalez conducted in-depth video interviews with cultural community stakeholders, sharing issues, goals, and values central to their work rooted in improving their communities and creativity within the community.

Yolanda Franklin is an actress and artistic director. For Creative City, she created a Legacy Renaissance project to engage Black/African American community in Southeastern and

Black artists in San Diego with their legacy stories – the stories that helped build the community. In multiple sessions, she worked with artists and cultural practitioners to gather and share legacy stories and uplift black voices.  The first workshop convened descendants of legacy makers, focusing on their stories and discussing why history is essential and how to incorporate this rich cultural history into the future. The project culminated in conversations about arts and culture as a tool for understanding and touring the Elks Lodge, a nearly 100-year-old Black-owned establishment, and learning more about its rich history and its connection to “Harlem of the West” the artist has uncovered as part of the project to help build the Southeastern community from the legend ancestors and local living legends to the future bridgers.

Jacole Kitchen is a theatre director, producer, casting director, and director of arts engagement whose artistic practice involves serving the military community of San Diego through creative enrichment and therapeutic opportunities. For Creative City, she engaged veterans to talk about the cross-section of the military and the arts, posing questions like what is happening now in the veterans’ community related to the arts. What is working well? What is needed? And how the arts have changed their lives and what they see in the future. Participants worked together to craft short scenes about an artwork, a community story, or other artistic infusion. After the discussion, veterans shared examples of their work, finding community and providing insights.

Cat Chiu Phillips is a local artist and educator who creates installations in public spaces, often using traditional handicraft methods such as crochet, weaving, and embroidery. Her fiber art workshops for Creative City were inspired by Kamayan or Filipino communal feast where food items are served on banana leaves and without utensils as a communal way to share a meal and build trust and intimacy among the diners. Participants contributed to making food for this faux food experience at the workshops. All levels of crochet experience were welcome! The artist introduced other textile methods to participants so all could contribute to the collaborative community feast and participate in conversations about arts and culture as a tool for understanding and successfully weaving cultures together in the diverse city of San Diego.

Katie Ruiz is a Chicana interdisciplinary artist, making work in painting and fiber sculpture. Ruiz collaborated with the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego and the City to facilitate art-making at Creative City public events throughout San Diego over the summer. Hundreds of Creative City participants helped with The PomPom Project, producing the nearly 2,000 handmade yarn pom poms that now adorn the City’s Civic Center Concourse while sharing their ideas for the city’s first-ever cultural plan. In the Civic Center Concourse context—a site shared by all San Diegans—creating a shared work of art for temporary public display becomes even more impactful. This colorful display becomes a visualization that celebrates our Creative City and its vibrant communities  sharing experiences, insight, and practices.