PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Tender at a Distance: The Queen Amie Project

As their contribution to the Wonderland Project, the team of Doug Hall and John Roloff (working under the theme of Tender at a Distance or TAAD) will be working with the artist, Queen Amie Krubally. Queen, originally from Gambia, is a Batik artist, whose designs are based on her own personal stories and the folk myths from her native land. She has, for the past several years, been living in the Tenderloin, a resident of one of the TLNDC properties, but has been unable to ply her craft due to her current living situation. Our proposal is to use the Wonderland Project as a context in which she could work, exposing her to a larger audience through the publicity that the event will attract during its exhibition at multiple venues from mid-October through mid-November, 2009.

Our proposal is to establish a studio space, with a pre-determined amount of equipment and materials, where Queen could work and display her wares for the duration of the Wonderland exhibition. For most of the time, Queen will concentrate on her own work, producing what interests her and working at her own pace. In exchange, she will be asked to conduct one or more workshops for people in the community working with organizations in the Tenderloin (The Boys and Girls Club, for example). TAAD and Wonderland will help organize and facilitate these. Although the details have not been worked out, we have been discussing different approaches that the workshops could use to engage the diverse communities of the Tenderloin. For example, participants could be encouraged to make drawings based on their own personal stories, which would be turned into batik art or fashion during the workshop. Throughout the month these would be displayed at Queen’s temporary studio. Toward the end of Wonderland, there would be an event where batiks created in the workshops are exchanged between participants. Each participant would receive a batik created by another person in the group. In this way, the stories represented on the batik hangings would be distributed through the community. The personal work that Queen produces during this period will remain her own property to do with as she pleases.

One of the central focuses of the Wonderland Project is to encourage the invited artists to respond to the Tenderloin and to do so with no official budget. During our research over the past several weeks we came up with numerous ideas, many of which involved procedures for interacting with and celebrating members of the community and their stories. While a couple of these excited us, they seemed, at the same time, overly abstract and perhaps self-serving in the sense that they imposed our vision onto the community rather than allowing elements within the community to come forward and to do so on their own terms and with their voices intact, which has been our intention all along. Our proposed collaboration with Queen, in which we act less as “artists” and more as promoters and facilitators seems to provide a way for us to proceed.