By Daisy Lin | Project Leader
Greetings!
We are so excited to update you on some of the amazing empowerment programs we've hosted with our older friends in Northern Taiwan, a few unique Bright Side Projects curriculum and workshops we hope that we can eventually roll out to other older folks community centers throughout Taiwan. While we were not able to secure much funding for our dream projects, we still went ahead with what we could this year as we felt that it was important for the elderly to experience and engage in the art empowerment process after taking them to Art Taipei last fall. This includes African mask creation and drumming, graffiti session with the artist COLASA, and a mini me workshop - where our older friends learned more about themselves through observation and creating portraits to beautify their center. Many of these workshops were seen as something that was unachievable due to age and mobility but with patience and planning and our confidence in their ability, they far exceeded anyone's expectations (even the older persons themselves)!
In the beginning of the year we began to renovate their community center, organizing and cleaning, including clearing out inventory, scrubbing through their kitchen and rooms, taking apart fans to wash off the dust. We then hosted a "building" workshop to start our BUILD A HOME (beautifying their center) project after the Lunar New Years so that they could have a hand in redesigning this space and then began the process of doing a massive paint job over the weekend in mid April. While several workshops took place, we have provided photos of four of our main amazing workshops taking place between June and September - from African mask creations followed by a two hour African drumming workshop with local musician Fablan Samory Toure, a graffiti workshop first starting with creating and spray painting stencils and then beautifying their indoor space with artist COLASA, and a self portrait session with artist Long Long. We really wanted each person to be able to have a piece of themselves hanging in the center and their adorable depictions of "the self" are the perfect mini masterpieces. Tomorrow we will actually be heading to the community center again to hang them up on the newly painted walls!
We hope that we can gain more support for these unique programs so that the art world is able to learn more about our older friends and they can also be a part of the new and upcoming art trends - next year we have something exciting planned in learning about the environment through a variety of workshops from painting, upcycling plastic into roses, to an AI workshop. We apologize for not being able to provide an accompanied full PDF report as we usually do; there is still so much work to be done! Thank you for your support and help us spread the word about the work that we are doing and we will provide you with updates when we can!
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