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Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (Wilmington, DE)

Female artist demonstrating paper marbleizing for a group of young people  

Yukie Kobayashi teaches home-schooled students how to create marbleized effects on their handmade paper as part of her Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts residency. Photo by Holly Bennett Jackson

Nurturing new and emerging visual artists is something for which the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA) strives. In addition to presenting nearly 30 exhibitions a year, DCCA offers programs such as Visual and Performing Arts Camps for students K-6, Pre-College Art Studio for high schoolers, and an Art and Community Program to bring young artists to work with groups in the community.

In FY 2006, DCCA received an NEA Access to Artistic Excellence grant of $12,000 to provide residencies for two visual artists, Maria Anasazi and Yukie Kobayashi, in 2007 as part of the Art and Community Program. DCCA provided each artist with a studio, housing, stipend, material allowance, and travel expenses and paired the artist with a community group for an eight-week residency.

In June and July of 2007, Maria Anasazi worked with men and women at YWCA Delaware’s Home Life Management Center, which provides emergency and transitional housing for families. Anasazi’s goal was to explore issues of identity, loss, and change by having the group collaborate on a sewing project. Each participant used old sewing paper patterns to create clothes, symbolizing their old lives, and then used new materials and their own ideas on top of the old patterns, symbolizing a new life pattern. Anasazi documented the process through photos and video.

Yukie Kobayashi worked with 13 local home-schooled students and six students at Wilmington Hospital’s First State School, which serves critically ill children who are unable to attend regular school. Kobayashi taught the students a variety of traditional and contemporary hand-papermaking techniques from both Asian and Western cultures, using both natural pulps and Japanese mulberry fiber. At the conclusion of the program, students exhibited their work at DCCA.

(From the NEA 2006 Annual Report)

 

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