Art and Quilting of Mama Miti [ Wangari Mathai ] with Dr Amina Humphrey from CSUDH
With the world evolving over time, humankind has resorted to shift gears and resources to embrace basic soft skills in order to tap into all and any opportunity that would present itself when need arises. Rise in technology has shaped the online platform with the creatives developing contents for educational purposes, awareness creation and entertainment for their socials. With this resource available at a personal level, it has be an ease for people to get up-to-date information on new trends in the world today.
Nevertheless, this has
influenced the use of creative arts to advocate for different thematic concerns
within their areas of interaction. Arts has not been limited to only creation
of content but also the development of talents such as drawing, poetry,
artist(singers, actors and stage performers), comedy and inventors/innovators
of new concepts. A lot of people are now leveraging on art creation to earn
sources of income in their daily life as previously perceived by the society.
With the education system
embracing the new Curriculum-Based system of knowledge dispersing, it gives the
students the privilege of exploring and tapping into their personal skills in
their tender ages as they grow and develop with it in time. This will in turn
create a strategic society with a workforce equipped with relevant skills
required at different career placement.
Art being emotional-driven
tends to speak out on what the creators hold within. Art in its literature form
tends to express on instances of things and history that could have occurred at
one point of our existence. Therefore, creative arts can be a great channel
used for advocacy on matters that revolve around an individual, community or
even a national concern as it captures the mass with the intended information
in place.
Knowledge has no end, and an
individual ought to always find channels of empowering and capacity-building
themselves for effective personal development. Learning of new trends in the
market place makes it easy for a person to deliver to their best when presented
with an opportunity within their areas of specialization.
The Creative Arts department
under the Sports and Talent Development section held a four-day beneficiary
engagement on using literature and art to grow an individual’s awareness in the
sector. With this we were privileged to be visited with prof. Amina Humphrey
from the California State University, Dominguez Hills who focused mostly on
creation of African art representation our history and culture from the times
of colonization to the time of access to freedom.
African heritage has played a
big vital role in the growth of the developed continents with no appreciation
but exposure to extreme servitude. Cases of social injustice to the people of
Black descent living abroad has been on the rise and calls for the need of
expression through any relevant source that would have the attention of the
masses for intervention.
The four-day engagement
involved the use of locally available fabrics in order to make African
presentations through the quilting technique themed: Mama Wangari Project: Art
and Literacy.This
would be a new adventure and every participant alongside the team was eager to
embrace and adopt in their normal creation of portraits. Alongside this
technique, we were able to access, equip and boost our community library with
African-based novel and real life history to inspire our beneficiaries and
community as a whole on appreciating our culture and maintaining it towards
realizing a well-built ethic generation appreciating its motherland.
The workshop registered a
total of forty participants to be engaged through the four days of interaction.
These were the same beneficiaries used and adopted to the creative art
department at the organization. The mood as usual was colourful as expected of
our art workshops. Participants and representatives were anxious and eager to
grasp this technique and implement it for their growth and sustainability in
the department and for their individual-based projects.
The workshop involved
different sessions of reading, coloring, painting and the textile art for
illustration and presentation of different African literature books led by the
professor assisted by the other team leads in relating to our current state within
our setups. This encouraged and instilled the culture of continuous reading
amongst the beneficiaries during their set aside free times. The fabrics were
locally sourced from the community tailors for the activity in hand as it also
helped reduce the indecent disposal of the raw waste materials within our
community. The first day engaged the participants with coloring the portrait of the Mama Wangari
Maathai(Mama Miti); the global renown Noble Peace Prize for environmental
conservation.
The second day involved painting of the portrait still under the quilting process. The activity was much colourful as the participants were able to us the available resources at the library space to maximize fully on the exercise. With the help of the team leads they were able to put into practice the knowledge and techniques of painting the had gathered from the previously conducted workshops at the space.
They were able to express
themselves on the choices of different coloring paints and what they signified
in their lives proving the sessions engaging.
The third day was for the textile art
which involved use of the fabrics for quilting the portrait. As fun as it
sounded in theory so was it in its practical sense and as much as it were a new
trend and technique introduced to the participants, it was a great adventure
and they dived into it with the enthusiasm to explore more of it. Using the
locally disposed fabrics shed light into them on how to leverage on them in the
conservation of our environment and making our communities clean.
The final day was set aside of the literacy session of reading and interpreting the African literature books and video presentations of African-based comics. This session was very important to the participants in realizing their self worth and appreciating their origin. The participants were able to read and interpret the novels enriched wit African culture and history such as Mama Miti, Sulwe by Lupita Nyongo, I Have A Dream by Martin Luther King and so much more of the same kind. During the session it was evident that we had more to appreciate of ourselves than to look down upon us as much as the challenges we face in our day-to-day engagements. The participants were grateful for the session as they got to be informed of how great of a continent they were and the values they held
CONCLUSION AND
RECOMMENDATION
Our cultures, lifestyle and
the set mentality are key in how the coming generations view our heritage and
ways of living. Empowering the growing generation to appreciate their local
heritage is important in the growth and development of a state or continent as
a whole. People are equipped differently with skills and capabilities that would
in turn create a great asset to their
countries of residence. Africa as a continent has been evident to hold and
produce people of great potential when it comes to the developmental
structures.
Creative arts ought to be
implemented and leveraged on to create a wide vast of relay information and
sensitive occurrence within a human setup. Much of knowledge can be derived and
used from a portrait of a common figure in the public history. With this in
place, it would be much easier to integrate it with other educational materials
to pass the message to a mass population in times of need and awareness
creation. Art never fades or dies, so we have to preserve it for our future
memories and history storage. Kids should be able to integrate their studies
with activities that are conducive and creates a space space for their growth
and development towards achieving their set goals.
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