the Painting Activist

This weekend I traveled to the far western end of Kentucky to facilitate the third week of one of five summer camps titled the “Kentucky Remembers! Project.”  A close friend, who spearheaded the project, via the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, asked me to participate in the Murray/Paducah camp as the artist leading a week long mural project.

The middle and high school students involved in each camp are charged with quite a hefty task of creating material for a textbook about the history of human rights, specifically in our state.  Apparently, there are no requirements in Kentucky public schools to cover monumental topics such as the civil rights movement, and unfortunately the freedom to omit these events has created a generation that knows little of historical events, which tremendously impacts their lives.

The “Kentucky Remembers! Project” requires students to spend a portion of their summer collecting material for the textbook, which will be used in the classrooms in 2009, and will include material from:

• audio-recorded interviews, as guided by oral historians, with community members who lived through much of the civil rights movement
• video and still photo documentation of field trips to historical places of interest
• a collaborative mural illustrating their “ideal community” (which will ultimately hang in a public venue such a library)

This week long commitment has landed me in a dorm room at Murray State University, with little to no time to paint for you.  Instead, you’ll be following 17 students, 3 staff members, and myself through the process of creating a large scale painting that is the culmination of 2 weeks worth of face-to-face, hands-on historical research.  This is the storytelling method of passing down history of the old days meets new media of the 21st century.  These “kids” will be posting podcasts, editing freedom songs they wrote themselves, uploading videos on YouTube, and showcasing it all on their blog (which is uber new and very much in the works, so bear with us).

This is truly a unique opportunity for students to have a tremendous impact on their peers.  How many high school students can say to a middle schooler, “Hey, I wrote that book you’re using in history class?”