“If you could do something really big for us, what would it be?”
What an honor to be asked this question by Pam Allyn, the founder of LitWorld, in the fall of 2017. It was an opportunity to enact an idea that had taken up residence in my brain: collect data from communities in the form of art, in order to humanize the information. Despite the artistic elements of charts and graphs, their colorful lines, bars, and circles don’t express the stories of the humans that inhabit the statistics. What if the data collected could reveal what we have in common inside our hearts, despite differences in culture, class, age, race, gender, and language?
The Heart Map Project was launched this past August at the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn, and at Sugar Hill in Harlem, a Broadway Housing Community. The participants created individual pieces in response to these three workshop themes:
People we love
Places in our heart
Who we are
Amassing the individual artwork from each workshop to form 3 chambers of the community’s heart, I created a walk-through installation at each of the two sites. The trust that I was given to do so was such a gift (not knowing for certain what a site-specific installation will look like while asking permission to transform a space can be challenging!). It was moving to witness the participants finding their own work in the installation, to listen to the dialogues that began, and to see the bonding that occurred from the shared experience. Visitors to the installations wrote the names of people they love on an anatomical drawing of a human heart, adding it to that chamber and becoming part of it themselves.
I am an artist and an educator with a “long game” credo.
Humanizing data
Poetic chart
What’s missing from the data?
Making the story visible
Breathing in and out, flow in and out, asks and offers
Maps help us get our bearings of where we are in the world, in life
Atlas of human emotions
The ongoing collection of 3-D Heart Maps provide visual information that yield another art form: a chart/graph/map that measures the components and commonalities of each community represented. A living visual document is created by the “data” compiled from the hearts of each community, expressed through art. The stories, faces, and spirits become an integral component of informational “data” and “data gaps.” The hope is that this living art form and the visceral response to it may spark an urgency and duty toward increased humanitarianism.
The heart map expands from an individual exercise into a group collaboration. Inclusive of all genders and generations that are parts of the whole, the 3-D Heart Map explores and reveals what binds a community together at its heart.
Visual storytelling activities build community while creating a unified art piece comprised of many individual parts, a reflection of the group itself.
The heart map expands from an individual exercise into a group collaboration. Inclusive of all genders and generations that are parts of the whole, the 3-D Heart Map explores and reveals what binds a community together at its heart.
Visual storytelling activities build community while creating a unified art piece comprised of many individual parts, a reflection of the group itself.
