Cut, Paste, Copy: Trust-building, Community-making, and Storytelling through Collaborative Zines

at Belonging: Storytelling Across Campus and Community AAMG Annual Conference, Albuquerque, NM

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

May 20, 2023 and May 18, 2024

Tarble Arts Center

2023 Awardee: Dead President’s Urban Farm Seed Bank

2023 Giveaway: Sculpture by Marie Bannerot McInerney

2024 Awardee: Oscar Aguilar’s Picturing Charleston

2024 Giveaway: Zine by Karina Worful

Attendees pay $10 (cash only) at the door for a bowl of soup and a ballot to vote on 5-minute proposals given by those seeking funds for initiatives that support art, creativity, and community. Votes are tallied and one winner takes the proceeds of each event to fund their creative ideas.

Five projects compete for the SOUPRIZE at each event. Project presenters have 5 minutes to pitch to the soup-slurping crowd. All those who purchased a ticket at the door will vote on their favorite project, ballots will be counted, and the winner takes the pot.

SOUPRIZE is inspired by Sunday Soup and SLOUP—two soup-based, art-loving, micro-granting initiatives in Chicago and St. Louis, respectively. Sunday Soup was a community fundraising meal project initiated by InCUBATE (Abigail Satinsky, Bryce Dwyer, Roman Petruniak, and Matt Joynt) and others in the Chicago art community. It was in operation from 2007–2010 as a grassroots project to generate funds for artist initiatives and community projects through a grant raised by the meal. It inspired over 60 chapters across the world, all doing their own variations of the soup model. One such model was SLOUP in St. Louis, which was active from 2010–2015 and became active again since 2020.

Tarble Arts Center

As director of the museum, I designed and curated a space dedicated to the youngest museum-goers and initiated a partnership with the EIU Child Care Resource & Referral and the EIU Child & Family Life Education Center to offer free childcare during selected programs so parents and caretakers could attend evening lectures and workshops. The space featured folk art and contemporary art from the museum collection displayed on the walls, along with Enzo Mari designed puzzles, blocks, rainbow colored silks, soft tumbling blocks, Waldorf-style dolls, felt boards, board books, picture books, and other toys.

In 2021, the Tarble Arts Center initiated a free public wellness program open to all. Participants are invited to experience a Full Moon Sound Bath to support collective stillness, gratitude, and reflection. With the metaphor provided by the darkest possible sky, New Moon Yoga invites participants to consider the potentiality of blank space and new beginnings through heart-opening flows. All are welcome to join in community care, movement, and intention-setting.

September 23 and 30, 2023

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Tarble Arts Center

These workshops present sewing as a type of listening and mending as an empathetic gesture.

Through guiding many years of mending and sewing courses, artist Hadley Clark has come to believe that these circles are first a space to remember. We have been led into forced forgetting to allow us to keep mindlessly consuming. So, while you may have never held a sewing needle in your hand, Clark believes there is a piece of you that knows how to work with this tool to create acts of care and would like to sit next to you to remember. The workshops invited guests to come and sit on the floor, bring something soft in need of repair, and stitch in a circle together.  

While the workshop that will included technical hand sewing demonstrations it was also a time to intimately connect with our garments and each other through the act of stitching.  

September 20, 2024–January 25, 2025

February 14 - March 26, 2022

Typically, the last thing a museum wants you to do is touch the artwork. But for this biennial flat file exhibition, visitors are allowed and even encouraged to page through portfolios installed in the galleries.

Each flat file drawer contained artworks made by members of the community and organized into a portfolio collection of up to ten works. This intimate and tactile viewing experience allowed an unprecedented look at the variety of work being produced by artists working today while rewarding practices of slow looking and multiple visits to the exhibition space. 

The Tarble invited professional artists to submit two-dimensional or low-relief works that will fit within an 18 x 24-inch portfolio folder. Eligible artists either live and work geographically nearby, are faculty, staff, or alumni of EIU, or have worked on projects with the Tarble in the past.

When the exhibition opened, visitors to the gallery were invited to put on gloves and carefully page through these portfolios. Many of the works were for sale, and the museum managed a system to put potential collectors in touch with the exhibiting artists.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Tarble Arts Center

In collaboration with EIU's Department of Public Health and Nutrition, the Tarble presented a public discussion on art and mental health moderated by Dr. Aimee Janssen-Robinson, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Nutrition, and featuring a panel of licensed social workers who maintain robust studio practices as professional artists.

 Artists-in-residence Diane Christiansen and Jessie Mott and Charleston community member Dave Hunter explored the ways that art can be a tool in caring for our collective mental health.  

H&R Block Artspace

The Kansas City Artists’ Voices Summit was a public gathering of artists and arts administrators who voiced their concerns for themselves and their communities. Just within the past year, rising urban development and constantly-changing venues/spaces in the Kansas City metro area have many artists worried for the sustainability of artist practices and livelihood in Kansas City.

View a copy of the printable zine produced from this event here.

Third Thursdays, June 2018 - May 2019

H&R Block Artspace

PDF Club was a reading and conversation group hosted by H&R Block Artspace in collaboration with Informality, a slow media publication that focuses on empowering and growing the base of arts writers in Kansas City.

Each month, Melaney Mitchell and Jennifer Baker choose a pdf article that relates to the exhibition(s) on view at the Artspace. These open source pdfs were available for download so that participants could read and reflect on their own time before coming together to ask questions, share thoughts, and discuss ideas. The organizers maintained a PDF Digital Commons to archive the program and allow online commenting and discussion.

August 18 – November 6, 2018

H&R Block Artspace

Founded in 2016 by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, For Freedoms Federation is a nonpartisan project and artist-led platform for action and engagement that encourages new forms of critical discourse to build greater participation in American Democracy. In 2018 For Freedoms launched the 50 State Initiative during the lead-up to the midterm elections to engage in partnerships with organizations nationally. For its part, the Artspace hosted a campaign sign-making workshop August 18 with incoming freshman students during their orientation to create campaign-style lawn signs, which are currently displayed on the east side of the KCAI campus on Oak Street, and a voter registration event on campus, September 18, hosted by the League of Women Voters.

Friday, November 2, 2018

Building on traditional town hall meetings used by politicians to connect with their constituencies, answer questions, and promote their campaigns, For Freedoms Town Halls are non-partisan, artist-led forums that bring together experts from various fields in cities across the country to connect art, civic engagement, and direct action. 

For a For Freedoms Town Hall on Slowness, three artists, two scholars, one journalist, and one curator guided an exchange of ideas that sought to encourage more active, collaborative, inclusive, and empathetic communities. For the first half of the evening, guest panelists presented research from their respective fields in relationship to the aesthetics and methodologies of slowness. For the second half of the evening three artists joined the panelists to engage the audience in a conversation about intentional slowness, how we experience time, and the ways we remember our pasts, see the present, and plan for our futures.

Panelists:  C.J. Janovy, Jay Johnson, Lutz Koepnick

Artists: Marie Bannerot McInerney, Jarrett Mellenbruch, Jillian Youngbird

Moderator: Jennifer Baker

Nelson Atkins Museum of Art

Four artists considered the contexts of queerness, citizenship, ecology, climate, capitalism, leisure, replication, and salvation in order to examine water within the politics of belonging. Utilizing performance, action, and object-making, each artist offers strategies of engagement that encourage inclusion and dialogue, while offering multiple perspectives on water as substance and belonging as status.

 Panel Moderator: Jennifer Baker, Kansas City, MO

Panelists: Laurencia Strauss, Miami, FL; Denis Rodriguez + Leonardo Remor, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Amber Hawk Swanson, New York, NY

 The panelists discussed how artists can employ objects to engage action and how one performs the act of making. As a first generation US citizen, Laurencia Strauss proposes immigrant experiences as valuable resource to imagine solutions for a population facing relocation due to sea-level rise. Strauss employs sculptural action in public spaces by offering popsicles and napkins printed with stories from previous participants in exchange for stories about place, identity, migration, and belonging. Porto Alegre is a city with a pristine river landscape that is being privatized by developers to deny public access. As an act of protest, Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor’s project Water Fantasy invites participants to carry inflatable innertubes on the long walk to the closest remaining access point in order to simply spend time with water. Amber Hawk Swanson’s search for community has shaped her practice and led to projects engaging collaborators belonging to silicone sex doll forums. Her most recent project, DOLLY, will involve the casting of a life-sized penetrable silicone dolphin as an exploration of love, eroticism, seduction, objectification, violence, and captivity. This project of giving presence to the objectified has involved embodied research in saltwater sensory deprivation tanks.

Laurencia Strauss, Leonardo Remor, and Denis Rodriguez followed their presentation with a residency in the Printmaking Department at the Kansas City Art Institute, working with students on a project examining Kansas City’s fountains in relationship to the city’s racial divide.

October 14, 2016

Pulitzer Art Foundation

The third annual St. Louis Small Press Expo kicked off with an opening event at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation that celebrated independent publishing and the art of the book. Demonstrations, performances, and appearances by innovators in the small press community were featured throughout the Pulitzer galleries, inviting connections between architecture, the art on view, and the book as form.

Featured works include: a performative reading by comic artist Marnie Galloway; live hand papermaking with Taller Leñateros; bookbinding demos with Sean Shearer of BOAAT Press; a dramatic reading of selection from La Petite Maison (The Little House, 1763) by Jean-François de Bastide in a gallery of 18th century decorative arts on loan from the J. Paul Getty Museum; a lecture performance by artist Chloë Bass; a talk on Claes Oldenburg’s drawing by artist and critical writer Buzz Spector; a vendor fair featuring publications from Brainfreeze Comics, neither/nor zine distro, and St. Louis Zine Club; as well as an interactive zine-making station hosted by The Moon Zine.