Greetings and salutations!

Welcome to the Project Ellipsis blog, not to be confused with the Project Ellipsis Blog, which is someone else's personal blogger thing.

Project Ellipsis began as a project called "..." (pronounced "ellipsis"), which was part of a bigger public art project called the ArtForce! Cambridge Public Art Lab [http://www.artforcecambridge.org - I'm also the webmaster for this site!]. ArtForce! Cambridge was born out of the Site-Specific Installation class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, taught by Mags Harries but mostly run by us. The Public Art Lab was our way of exploring and defining public art for ourselves, and included projects such as hula hoop dances to the fresh waters of Cambridge, MA, conversations with visitors to our space at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, guided hikes from Boston to Medford, MA, and more.

... was originally proposed as a series of workshops to be conducted with youth groups in Cambridge - these workshops would result in the creation of cajón drums that would be painted by the youth groups and installed on sidewalk corners at major intersections, where the public would be invited to sit down and drum across the street to each other. This idea lost steam and became an attempt to get citizens to signal across the Charles River to each other using flag semaphore and Morse codes. Eventually, the workshop idea came back.

In 2005, as a junior at Boston College High School, I got involved with a public art project at U/MASS Boston called "What's the Point?" facilitated by Wendy Baring-Gould with artists Gary Duehr and Cathy McLaurin [read more]. In the project, residents, professionals, and students living and working in the Columbia Point neighborhood engaged in a series of workshops to create a "point" about the area. These "points" were digitally printed onto aluminum sheets and installed in twelve "totem poles" around Columbia Point and remain standing today. Wendy had originally intended for the project to cycle every three years, but she moved on to other things.

In 2008, as a junior at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I was reunited with Wendy at the Boston Center for the Arts on a visit to the Medicine Wheel installation (and, incidentally, I was part of a photo exhibition at Gary Duehr's Bromfield Gallery in Boston the previous summer) and was reinspired by What's the Point?

... became a series of workshops exploring forms of communication, such as the flag semaphore and Morse code I mentioned before, but also various sign languages, ideograms, body language, and more. The project would culminate in the creation of a complete language or languages unique to the city of Cambridge.

In December of 2009, fellow ArtForce! artist Lisa Silveria and I paid a visit to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School in Cambridge. Muna Bruce, then-electives department coordinator, had been wanting to work with SMFA students for a long time. She offered me the opportunity to run an elective class at the King School, which was a perfect venue to run my project (and incidentally, I am an art education major at the SMFA - I love teaching!). ... began on 23 February 2009, with a classroom of fifteen middle schoolers. The class I teach, called Tools for Communicating (ironically, due to miscommunication, it was officially written down as "Tools of Communication"), is still running until 19 June 2009, a month from now.

Project Ellipsis was retitled last May, mostly due to people not being able to pronounce "..." (and it looks funny on paper), but also due to the project's expansion. I have been offered the chance to run a similar project with the Friends of Alewife Reservation, who I came into contact via another ArtForce! Cambridge project, as well as a summer program in my hometown of Milton, MA. If I'm lucky, I'll be running it in the fall of 2009 as part of my Senior Projects thesis at SMFA, and the King School has offered to run Tools for Communicating again in the spring. If I'm really lucky, I'll get to display ephemera from the project at First Night Boston 2010.

This blog is my little place for reflection on the project, as well as your way of keeping track of what's going on. I'll tell you a little about myself in another post. (Hey, it's in the sidebar now!)

Thanks for reading!