Sunday, April 13, 2-6 p.m.
WEST END BLOCK PARTY
Lyon Park Field, Cornell and Halley Streets, Durham, North Carolina

In conjunction with Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life, a project of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

Food / Music / Art / Fun / FREE

Weather Forecast: Lovely. Mix of sun and clouds, highs in the low 60s.

JOIN US.
At the party we will be coloring murals depicting past and present champions of Southwest Central Durham. We will also have a labyrinth made of shoes, monument building with the Scrap Exchange, community quilting, soccer activities, sketchbooks, great food from the Chicken Hut and Azteca Grill, and fabulous music including DJ Rich Medina. [SEE MORE DETAILS BELOW.]

Face Up is a documentary arts project devoted to building and strengthening community in Southwest Central Durham through the collaborative creation of a series of large-scale, locally inspired public murals. Artist Brett Cook, whose unique approach combines drawing, painting, and photography with ethnographic fieldwork and community organizing, is collaborating on the Durham project in January–May 2008.

WEST END BLOCK PARTY
A Collaborative Community Celebration

Listing of Stations
Courtesy of the Face Up Team

Invocation
What better way to celebrate the start of this event than with our friend and neighbor Hazelene Umstead. Since returning to her childhood home in Durham in 1993, Hazelene has become a glowing presence in the community. As she states, she hoped to restore the vitality of her neighborhood because she was afraid that the “laughter had faded away.” Hazelene has succeeded in bringing laughter and fellowship to this neighborhood through her commitment to the vision of a loving community.

Create a Community Labyrinth
A labyrinth is a single path with no forks or dead ends, winding through all four quadrants of a circle to bring the traveler to the circle’s center and out again. It is one of the oldest contemplative tools known to humankind and has been used in many cultures throughout time. Select a pair of shoes and inscribe them with a thought about community, add them to the labyrinth, then consider the thoughts of others as you walk the path.
Facilitator: Bryant Holsenbeck

DJ Rich Medina
DJ Rich Medina lives, breathes, and revels in sharing the type of music that makes a listener remember her/his soul. It is this awareness of soul that brings listeners back time and again to hear Rich spin: heads nod, bodies sway, emotions expand and coalesce. He lures you in and makes you forget who you were before the music began – he spins you into the now, into the moment, into the vital essence of who you are. Rich Medina has always seen music as a form of celebration and rejoicing.

Face Up Project Collaborative Coloring
Drawings based on photographs of local residents have been transferred to larger-than-life canvases which will be installed as murals in Durham. The murals are about residents from the six neighborhoods that make up Southwest Central Durham and their ideas about community. West End Block Party participants are invited to color the murals in any way they like. Please express yourself freely and choose to be a part of creating these new neighborhood monuments.
Facilitators: Face Up Team

Quilting
Quilting is an artform embraced by many cultures across the globe, and each quilt artist draws from his or her own culture when selecting fabrics, batting materials, and quilt patterns. Some create quilts with exacting geometric symmetry, while others prefer a more free-form improvisational approach. At the West End Block Party, we can use our own ideas to make quilt blocks for our own unique creation.
Facilitators: Candace Thomas and Barbara Lau

Revolution Encyclopedia
A wide assortment of visual art supplies accompanies sketchbooks that are the material focus of this station. Collaborators are free to express themselves in the sketchbooks regarding community, connection, and whatever they may want to say.
Facilitators: Face Up Team

Scrap Exchange Building Community Monuments
The Scrap Exchange is a nonprofit creative reuse center located in downtown Durham. Its mission is to promote creativity, environmental awareness, and community through reuse of collecting industrial discards through a retail store, community events, parties and workshops. We’ll be using loads of this wonderful material to create personal monuments to our community.
Facilitators: Scrap Exchange Staff

SEEDS
SEEDS Community Garden encourages respect for life, for earth, and for each other. SEEDS helps individuals, neighborhoods, and communities grow together through gardening, gathering, and education. This Sunday we’ll have a variety of free seeds and garden information available. Plan a garden for your yard or your whole block!
Facilitators: Seeds Staff

Azteca Grill
Owner Magaly Espriella has succeeded in creating a local restaurant that has become a vibrant presence in Durham, a presence that deliciously reminds us of the rich cultural contributions of our Latino neighbors. Azteca Grill is known locally for their high quality food, and more importantly, as a social gathering place for their entire community.

Chicken Hut
Serving traditional soul food cooked with lots of love, the Chicken Hut has been favorite gathering place for generations of Durham residents.

Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project
Six neighborhoods make up Southwest Central Durham: Burch Avenue, Lyon Park, West End, Lakewood Park, Morehead Hill, and Tuscaloosa-Lakewood. Historically segregated into African American and white neighborhoods, this area is becoming more integrated and is striving to reach out to the many newly emerging Latino enclaves within its borders. The residents and organizations that make up the Quality of Life Project are working to break down economic, social, and cultural boundaries by building intentional bridges of common experience and shared concern.

The Face Up project embraces and advances this approach through an artist residency/public art process that engages and amplifies the voices and stories of community members through the creation of monumental works of art, allowing them to access the power of creativity and discover new avenues to community membership and involvement.

This event was made possible in part by the people, Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, Duke University Office of Community Affairs (OCA), Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project (QOL), The North Carolina Arts Council, Council for the Arts, Office of the Provost – Duke University, the City of Durham Parks and Recreation Department, Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professorship in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Greenfire Development, Visual Studies Initiative – Duke University, Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies – Duke University, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Mary D.B.T. Semans Foundation, Calvary Ministries of the West End, Inc., Office of the Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations – Duke University, TROSA, Tuscaloosa-Lakewood Neighborhood Association, Azteca Grill, Chicken Hut, and the residents of Southwest Central Durham.

HEALING THE PAST AND CREATING THE FUTURE BY LIVING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT

Click the image below to view a slide show of the fall 2007 residency.

Click the image below to view a slide show of Brett Cook’s previous public and collaborative work.

http://cds.aas.duke.edu/faceup/slide_show/index.html