Artist-in-Residency May 14 - May 25
ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
The shipwrecks off the Jersey shore are particularly nice. In May we jumped in the car and drove from our home in Providence, Rhode Island to the town known mostly through the reflective yodelings of Billy Joel as... Allentown. A really together arts council there had brought us in for an Artist-in-Residency. We had a little over a week to expose as many people as we could to Tape Art. And expose we did. We flung tape around the school systems for several days, did collaborative works with students, made some high profile Tape Art murals in downtown Allentown and topped it all off with a whole lotta taping at the Mayfair Arts Festival. 
At the festival we worked for two days on our own murals... quietly leading the bull into the china shop. Then we opened the wall up to the public for spontaneous, theme-based, tape-hurling, muralistic, free-for-alls. Working with over 200 people a day, we helped to facilitate the drawing styles of a wild range of age groups and backgrounds.  Those 5 days of mural-making were seen by the 300,000 people who visited Mayfair during the festival. 
Good thing they only gave us a dozen days.

A DOZEN DAYS IN ALLENTOWN
Artist-in-Residency: The Breakdown


Take me to the teaching page. Click here to get to our first mural in Allentown. Click for the old-folks hawaii mural and collaborative mural. Exercise your index finger's right to chose. Lots of pages dedicated to temporary work on a temporary wall.

Crazy, lazy, mazy, May Dayz.
This is our actual calender we use. You can see the last two days of The Big One and also Art All State. Phew.


Red like a blushing robin.
TEACHING
We spent our first two days of teaching looking eye-to-eye with the first-timer Tape Art students and another two days trying not to trip on them. When it was all done, though, Deiruff High School and Mosser Elementary had spun their tale with tape and covered their walls with That Special Blue Stuff.
A Deiruff student working hard.

A man depicting the 1990s passes a mural depicting the 1880s.
Orange like an ... orange.
HESS MURAL
On our first weekend there we spent two days creating a long Tape Art mural on the side of the famous Hess building in downtown Allentown. At one point the largest department store (apparently, in the whole galaxy), it is now closed. But we brought its display window back to life. This page takes a minute or so to load, but shows a display window tribute to what We buy, from 1880 to the year 2050.

All nine sections pieced together for your convenience.

Green like envious grass.
HAWAII/COLLABORATIVE
The Lehigh Senior Citizen Center is the highest plateau for fun, relaxation and good times. This level of recreation is specifically rewarded to those individuals who have an accumulated fun-factor of 60 years or more on their life's odometer. We spent a day there creating a mural predicting the future of fun... their upcoming trip to Hawaii. All the mural's dancing and swinging portraits were done from life. To top it all off, some rather talented Tape Art folks from Deiruff High School came by and we all worked on another mural.
A senior citizen whippin' out a hula. Hawaii, here we come.


MAYFAIR - the five day Festival
TAPEY / BRIDGE / COMMUNITY MURALS
Mayfair is a fantastically well organized and openly embraced arts festival that is now in its 8th year. We had a wall built for us in the middle of the festival grounds. We worked every day on it and the following morning would remove the work and start again. The first two days we created our own murals and the last three days the wall hosted massive collaborative projects by anyone who could lift a roll of tape and say "I believe, let me tape."

Yellow like a summer sigh.
 Can you find the tapir?
Yellow like uneatable snow.
 This is the last peaceful mural before the storm.
Blue like sad blue grass.
 The storm. You are looking at over 200 people's drawings per wall!
Blue like blasphemy.
Blue, like I'll never love again.

 Feel free to click on this sentence if you want to see a larger version of the above 5 walls.
   

Take me to Hygia's Last Day Take me to the Bonfire Take me to the Community murals Take me to the Community murals Take me across the Bridge Take me to Tapey Take me to Hawaii Take me to the Hess mural Take me to the Hess mural Take me to Teaching Take me to Teaching