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Fides
House Communications Workshop [1969 – 1975]
Fides Settlement House, a neighborhood
hospitality house organized by a group of Catholic University of America
sociology professors and students in the 1940’s, supported by the
Catholic Interracial Council of the District of Columbia and run by an
order of Catholic priests. Fides House provided services, ssistance, and
educational help to people in the Shaw neighborhood in the District of
Columbia.
The Fides House Communications Workshop
trained Shaw community youth in the visual arts. The first year we
trained a group of older teenage youth in photography, filmmaking and
the “new” portable video technology and methods of arts program
management and grantsmanship. By 1971, the teenagers we training younger
children, managing the programs and securing funding for their programs.
During our residency at Fides House, CA-FAM III was born.
Shaw Community
Documentation Project (1975 - 1976)
Our first intergenerational project –
blending the elder’s stories with recording skills – creative
writing, photography and videography – taught to youth. Our students,
also, learned how to research histories of home ownership in the Shaw
community which was in its initial stages of gentrification. Elders
shared their life stories connecting the youth with a historical
perspective unheard of previously. The youth produced a journal, Looking at our History, that summer. The Shaw Community Documentation Project was an
official American Bicentennial project.
Miya Gallery [1976
– 2001]
1976
- 1986 | 1987
- 2001
Since its 1976 beginning, the Miya Gallery
exhibited the work of more than 200 artists/craftspersons, hosted the
first “Men Who Cook” fundraising activity in the District of
Columbia (1982), and is generally credited with significantly
popularizing the decorative natural hair (braiding) design industry in
this country during the early 1980’s. The Gallery closed in August
2001 after twenty-five years of service.
Black Arts Review/Palavra [1978
– 1982]
BAR/Palavra was our initial attempt at
print publishing. Based on our experiences at the Miya Gallery and our
activism in cultural related activities in Washington, DC – especially
the initial stages of development of the downtown governmental &
business center and shopping district – we researched and published
about issues of development of the individual artist and the small,
non-profit organizations created by them with an activist community
service agenda.
Black
Family Net Project [1998
– 2002]
An annual technology literacy
demonstration, organized in 1998, conducted during the annual September
Black Family Reunion celebration hosted by the National Council of Negro
Women on the National Monument Grounds in Washington DC. Between 5,000
& 10,000 attendees visit our pavilion.
ConnectDC2000 [2000
– 2004]
An inter-generational technology project,
created in 2000, linking youth between the ages of 14 and 19 with senior
citizens, 60 years of age and older, from diverse geographic and
socioeconomic neighborhoods and communities in the District of Columbia.
Through its unique design and focus,
ConnectDC2000 incorporated multi-disciplinary technology training to
bridge the digital divide among these community participants. In
addition, the project focused on empowering participants, through
internet training, to record oral histories of the senior residents and
share these stories, with the broader community in our Nation’s
Capital, through the design and development of multimedia programming
for the Internet. The project explored preservation issues pertaining to
family collections of significant historical materials, as well.
We have recorded more than 50 oral history
interviews in the Washington-Baltimore region. We have plans to digitize
the collection enabling internet access to some of the material. Most of
the interviewees were artists and civil rights activists.
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