The Story of City of Stories
Learning ways to tell our stories, so we can encourage others to share theirs, and they can teach others to share theirs…
In 2022 one of my clients, Turning the Page (TTP), wrote to me asking me to help them plan the restart for their communities to gather again. I had worked with TTP for over 10 years I think, as they invited authors and artists to present their work to children and families in DC schools they partner with.
See pictures of my work at Garfield Elementary and Raymond Elementary.
Students at Garfield Elementary School watch me create my Handmade Storybook Bhoot! Story of a Boy’s Fear, as I write a Hindi/Bengali word using Roman letters, with Chinese ink and brush, on French pastel paper. The story is all about a foreign grandfather visiting his American granddaughter and telling her a story from when he was 12.
I decided it was time for a new City of Stories project! As I looked on my website, now packed with 10 years of projects, I noticed I had not added the first City of Stories project to it. It had all happened in a rush, I remembered. Then I noticed there was another one I had forgotten to add. What was going on? Was I that rushed at Studio PAUSE? Of course I was, as the two opposite experiences of pausing and rushing are always together here!
So, I decided to take the time to tell the story of this project which Kori, a PAUSEr from the beginning, recently called “the Studio’s signature project.”
The Story Begins in D.C.
2017, National Building Museum:
In Dec 2017 I was invited by the National Building Museum to design and teach an art activity on January 16, 2018, when they were planning on hosting an event “1968: Shaping the District.” The event would recognize the impact of the 1968 riots in its 50th anniversary year. Many DC organizations would partner in this project. (Check out the complete schedule for that day on their Facebook page here.)
As I sat at the meeting of the partners listening to what they were going to share at the event I realized I had no idea about these stories of the history of Washington DC. They wanted the public to explore D.C. as it was in 1968: a predominantly African American city in a complex time of grassroots organizing, groundbreaking initiatives, and creative expression, in the midst of racism, protests, and activism. By the time it was my turn to say what we would be doing at the NBM, I had realized that even as all the partners had done great work with DC history, the people attending the event would be of all ages and from all over the country and world, as the metro DC area has residents and workers from everywhere. I was one of them. As an immigrant who came to the US as an adult, how do I learn about the country’s, or the city’s history?
The first set of pages I designed that would help us create a City of Stories. This is one-sided.
It’s a question I had asked myself when my son was in 4th grade and learning Virginia history in school. I had read his schoolbooks and learned more when I discussed the stories with friends. In 2012 I had created a Handmade Storybook Looking for Presidents, to celebrate President's Day at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. In it I shared how a mom who didn't go to school in the US could learn about US history if she looked for stories which lie in art, architecture, parks, bridges, and even license plates all around. The trick is in the Looking! In that book I tell the story of where I found 13 presidents and I also kept 2 pages blank for readers to find 2 of their own and add their photo and story in the pages of the book.
This time, at the meeting for the NBM event, I asked the partners to share with me the stories they had shared around that table that day, which I had made a note about. I would study them, learning from objects, posters, photos etc, and figure out a way to share them with others, inviting them to respond to the stories or visuals they resonated with. And as it was the Building museum, I wondered if the books could be like my house-shaped storybook Mangli, the very special Goat. The idea was to display the stories and responses in the house-shaped books in rows, like a city of stories, so we could learn about our city and our city can learn about us.
Here is what the program read:
City of Stories: Let images and words from 1968 inspire you to share your own thoughts, feelings, and ideas about Washington, D.C. – then or now. Learn how to make a house-shaped book with artist Sushmita Mazumdar and share your creation in an ongoing display, creating a “city” of collective stories.
A visitor responds to the poster with the red journal on it by adding her story to the page. This way everyone can read it when it is displayed.
You can see photos on our Facebook album from that event. City of Stories at 1968: Shaping the District. As a collaborative of educators, historians, artists and activists focus on events taking place in DC in 1968 they are planning many events to get the public learning, thinking, and responding. I created City of Stories to present at the kick-off event at the National Building Museum. I took images and words from the stories other collaborators had shared, and made them into single sheet posters thinking about what we will share when inspired by the stories of others as told in visuals or text. Visitors pick the one that inspires them and I show them how it becomes my house-shaped book. Then they write their story in it and hang it up to join other books creating a City of Stories.
For more check out www.dc1968project.com
The City of Stories display at the National Building Museum, 2018. This way people could see the posters and when they read any of the stories, they could tell which story it was in response to.
A child adds his story to the City of Stories installation, National Building Museum, 2018
Bringing it home to Arlington, VA
2018-2019: What Stories will we build Our City with?
Partner: Arlington Public School’s Extended Day staff, Arlington VA
Later that year, I decided to apply for an artist’s grant from Arlington County to do my City of Stories project in Arlington, where I live. This time I solidified what the objective of the project would be. I created a logo and decided to call what I previously called posters, StoryPages. Each StoryPage had the art on one side and the story on the other so when you read the story to children, they could see the art giving them auditory and visual ways to learn. These pages also had the zigzag dotted line which, when the page is folded and cut, turns into 3D houses.
This time, I invited PAUSErs, or people who are part of my Studio PAUSE community, to share stories from their childhoods which they would like to share with me and Arlington’s elementary school students. I made their stories into artworks. I then invited 22 staff members of Arlington Public School’s Extended Day program to listen to the stories of the PAUSErs and see the art. They were asked to share their own stories of childhood through words and images. I made these also into StoryPages so they could take all these stories to the children they work with and share. Then they asked the children to respond to their stories.
The final StoryPages with stories by the PAUSErs and art by me.
The 22 staff were all immigrants and none of them spoke English as their first language. They had many sessions at the Studio and loved it. I helped them write their stories and make their art using various materials and styles. They said it was different from the typical professional development sessions taught via PowerPoint presentations in lecture halls.
At the reception for the art show City of Stories, Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, 2019. Some of the PAUSErs who shared their stories pose with the artworks I created inspired by them. At the end of the project they took the art I made home as a small thank you for sharing their stories. From left, me, Eriko Matsuoka, Nancy Xiong, Hamed Farmand, Rana Jaafar Yaseen, Vanessa Vo, and Michael Swisher of Arlington Public Schools.
We displayed the exhibit at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, at the Rinker Community Center at the Gates of Ballston community, and at Kenmore Middle School. In the end we had more responses than we could display, done by children and adults.
Some of the APS extended day staff pose with Michael in front of a section of the City of Stories installation where their books were displayed. A structure created for another project, HOME @Arlington, I repurposed these 5 panel folding screen to display the City of Stories. When full, it can display 420 books!
City of Stories at Kenmore Middle School, Arlington, VA
Have we heard from children yet?
2019-20: City of Stories: Voices of Children
https://studiopause.com/projects/coschildren/
Partner: BU-GATA, Arlington, VA
In fall 2019 we created City of Stories: Voices of Children, a collaboration with a local organization, BU-GATA, which works for community stability and youth leadership development in the Buckingham neighborhood where the Studio is located. The children visited the exhibit of stories and art by APS staff and then wrote the stories they wished to share with 4th graders in a private school in Inchon, S. Korea, where a friend was a teacher. The Korean students would then respond with stories and art of their own and share it with the Arlington students.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic hit S. Korea and school closed there. Then it happened here. We managed to continue the project and got responses from the Korean students as they attended school virtually.
In 2021 when we worked on our pandemic-time community book project We PAUSED!, I decided to include the project in there as those children didn’t get their reception and show because of the lockdown. Later, in 2022 when we were invited to make the book into an exhibit, the project was part of the year-long exhibit We PAUSED! Unbound. Today, in 2023, the artworks by the children still hang at the galleries of Arlington Cultural Affairs, Arlington VA. The children who participated in the project and the Bu-GATA staff were part of our Community PAUSE in Oct 2022 where they read the stories aloud to the crowd of 40 + people who attended. They read in English and Spanish as we had translated the stories because many children’s parents read Spanish. You can see our photos from that event in a Reception Slideshow here.
Back to the Past and back to D.C.
2020: City of Stories: My Iran
Partner: National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC
In early 2020 City of Stories: My Iran was created in collaboration with an exhibit, My Iran: Six Women Photographers, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. I have been a docent at the museum since the year 2000 and I always wonder who decides to come visit and who might not have visited. So in this project I invited PAUSErs to a tour of the exhibit with me. Many of them had not been to the museum to see any exhibit. Sughra, however, had had her art on view here in the 2016 exhibit Turquoise Mountain: Artists Transforming Afghanistan.
I showed them the exhibit with photos by women photographers in Iran from the 1970s to present day. Then I asked them to pick photos or stories they connected with. They sat and wrote their stories right there. I created the StoryPages. The installation panels were then used over a weekend community engagement activity, where visitors responded to the StoryPages they connected to, and made the house-shaped books and added them to the display.
You can read all about it here where I posted a video and also some evaluations the museum staff shared with me later.
PAUSErs Sughra Hussainy (left) an artist from Afghanistan, and Rana Jaafar Yaseen, a poet from Iraq, tour the exhibit with me and see the photos of Iranians protesting during the 70s.
A two-sided StoryPage with a story by 13 year-old Elizabeth Isaac, and how she connected to a photo in the exhibit, Washington D.C.
Taking Arlington to Richmond?
2021: City of Stories: Columbia Pike
Partner: Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA
In 2018 I was invited by Lloyd Wolf, director of the Columbia Pike Documentary Project, to join their team as an interviewer, gathering stories of Columbia Pike residents to add to their work. I worked on their Transitions project and you can read the stories here. We framed the photos at my Studio and the show was up at the George Mason University, Arlington Campus. One day before the reception, lockdown happened.
In 2020 the Columbia Pike Documentary Project was archived at the Library of Virginia and a new exhibit, Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community, (August 31, 2021–January 8, 2022) opened sharing the stories of The Pike through photos. Inspired by the vibrant photos of the project, the exhibition team wished to encourage community engagement and designed large vinyls of the photos to be displayed in the library windows overlooking the street and welcoming visitors in, and on benches inside the library, filling the cold stone interiors with color. They also wanted to engage the community to share stories. This is what they had on their website:
“Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community, a unique exhibition of photographs at the Library of Virginia, celebrates the extraordinary cultural diversity found within a single community in Northern Virginia. Columbia Pike originated in the 19th century as a toll road connecting rural Virginia with the nation's capital. Today, the Columbia Pike corridor is one of the most culturally diverse communities in the nation, and possibly in the world. More than 130 languages are spoken in Arlington County, with the densest concentration along the Pike. Unlike in many parts of the world, or even in our own country, however, the stunningly diverse group of people—representing every continent—who live and work there do so in relative harmony.
Columbia Pike Documentary Project photographers, whose personal connections to the community allowed them to capture the strength, pride, resilience, elegance, and beauty of so many overlapping cultures, created the works on view. More than 70 of the thousands of photographs transferred to the Library of Virginia’s collections this spring will be highlighted in Columbia Pike: Through the Lens of Community. The exhibition will also include information about the neighborhood, the residents, and the photographers themselves. As the nation seems more divided than ever, this collection shows how one community is making diversity work.”
It was such an honor meeting the man behind printing the photos for the exhibit, Mark Fagerburg. Mark retired Aug 1 2021 as Digital imaging manager at the Library of Virginia, but he participated in the City of Stories project and shared his story.
When the library staff visited my Studio in Arlington to see what community engagement project they could create for the library in conjunction with the exhibit, I suggested a new City of Stories project. To introduce Columbia Pike to the residents of Richmond, VA, I invited the exhibition team of LVA who worked on the exhibit and other “behind the scenes” workers to visit the exhibit and share their own stories by responding to it. When they shared their stories, they in turn would engage the community that came to see the exhibit. As the staff were just back to work in-person for the first time since lockdown, visiting the exhibit would excite them about the return and help them reconnect with the library’s important work. They could also join in the celebration of community, something we had all been isolated from because of the pandemic.
Above, LVA staff writes in the exhibit.
Families make their City of Stories: Columbia Pike books, Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA
A mother and son drove to Richmond from Arlington, where they live near Columbia Pike, to participate in the project.
Above, example of a one-sided StoryPage from City of Stories: Columbia Pike and how the public will see who connected with this visual and how. In the blank space below, people can write their own response if they were moved by this visual or the stories.
Coming Back Together in D.C.!
2023,City of Stories: Coming Back Together with Turning the Page!
As I write this I have completed my 2023 City of Stories for Turning the Page. In this new version, which was taught via an online bookmaking video, a first for City of Stories, children and adults are invited to share a word that comes to mind when they think about “Coming Back Together with Turning the Page.” They write that word and make it into art. Then write why they picked that word. Turning the Page is having their 25th Anniversary gala at Planet Word and so focusing on a word connected with that as well.
But I work across words and images all the time so this was no surprise.
In 2018 I was commissioned to by Arlington Arts to create artworks to be installed in the ART busses. Words to Art: Art on the ART Bus, is a series of artworks I did using words Arlington’s ART Bus drivers shared with me to share with the bus riders. I made their words—which I asked them to share in any language and any script—into art. My second project with words was Words To Art Spring 2020. Again commissioned by Arlington Arts, I was asked to create a fun online art project to engage the public during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this we invited the public to share words they were thinking/feeling on 4 Mondays. The curator, Cynthia Connelly collected them and shared them with the 5 Arlington-based artists, including me. We then picked a word each and made them into art. Those were then shared via social media so the public could see which words we picked and how we had made them into art.
See you in D.C. in June!
I am glad I worked on this post and documented the six City of Stories projects I have created, all so we can learn from each other by sharing stories of objects, people, places, and ideas. I have two more City of Stories projects in mind for this year already. One for June at Turning the Page’s Children’s Book Festival, Saturday June 17th, 2023. Keep an eye out for more details and come join us. Then you can add your story to our City of Stories too!