The Story of My Life
“I hope that sharing these stories, told in both words and images can help to foster a more vibrant and welcoming global community,” says Kate Currie executive director of Maketank Inc.
The “Illustrated Memoir Project” currently on view at the Contemporary Art Center, is curated by Currie with collaboration from the CAC's Creative Learning Department. For the project, Currie engaged English language learner students to tell stories from their lives in words and images. Each participant writes some true story from their life and then creates original illustrations to support that story.
The result is an exhibition of poignant drawings that reflect the children’s experiences as well as short stories that explore their lives.
“I originally conceived the Illustrated Memoir Project in 2018 as my dissertation research project while I was getting my PhD in Educational Leadership,” says Currie. “It proved to be such a powerful project that after completing my PhD work I realized this is what I needed to do with the rest of my life!”
In 2019, Aaron Parker, ESL Specialist at Cincinnati Public Schools' Aiken New Tech High School invited Parker to meet with his English Language Learner students. Originally brought together by Refugee Connect, and the two have continue to partner, inviting students to participate in the “Illustrated Memoir Project” to students each year.
This year the “Illustrated Memoir Project” was integrated into the ELL classroom curriculum for the first time, as an optional project for students co-led with the classroom teachers. This new format allowed them to work with many more young people and allowed them to take the project to different locations.
“In May we will be taking the project abroad for the first time. A former participant from Aiken, Enock Sadiki, and I will be traveling to the Nakivale Refugee settlement in Uganda (where Enock was born and raised) to run the project together with 40 young people there. This has always been a goal of the project but the pandemic made such a move unrealistic until recently,” says Currie.
At the beginning of this year, Currie was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to develop a traveling exhibition of original artwork from “Illustrated Memoir Project.” Through a partnership with the CAC, the work is now on view to the with the Cincinnati community.
“We hope that viewers gain a deeper understanding of who our immigrant and refugee neighbors are, the diversity of their experience, and the richness they bring to our community,” says Currie. “I believe individual stories can impact our understanding of ourselves and each other in ways that statistics and generalizations fail to do.”
One of the benefits of the project, according to Currie, is the opportunity for the public to gain a more robust perspective of immigrant and refugee experience from the student authors and illustrators. Participants decide whether they want to make their memoirs available as open educational resource. If they do, Currie and the team at Maketank then find diverse ways to share those experience with the community. This can take the form of storytimes at schools, libraries, and community centers, as well as sharing digital copies of the books on Maketank’s website.
“I developed the idea for the ‘Illustrated Memoir Project’ in the hopes of using my strengths and interests in visual storytelling to help increase intellectual self-trust for immigrant and refugee youth,” says Currie. “I believe that centering the lived experience and unique knowledge of these young people by positioning them as the authors and illustrators of their own stories can increase their self-efficacy as well as language and visual literacies, critical thinking skills, and social emotional learning.”
Maketank Inc’s “Illustrated Memoir Project” is on view at the CAC through Sunday, Nov. 10. The project includes images and stories from more than 20 immigrant and refugee children. The exhibition is made possible by support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the generosity of community contributions to the ArtsWave Campaign. Maketank Inc. is also actively fundraising to pay for this iteration of the project as well as the regional implementations.
“The hope is that the intellectual self-trust engendered by this project provides a basis on which the participants can continue to build additional academic and creative achievements,” says Currie.