Artmaking in Community: A Conduit for Testimony and Life Stories

How can art be a form of testimony and storytelling? This hands-on and methodological workshop explores the possibility of using artmaking as a participatory approach to oral history practices, and considers what participants might share when being asked to create artworks rather than participate in a traditional interview. The workshop will begin with a brief overview of oral history projects integrating participant making, before narrowing on the presenter’s own approach called community-based research-creation, which uses the community art classroom as a way to engage participants through sustained making and dialogue as an alternative and supplement to one-on-one interviews. In addition to discussing the benefits of integrating artmaking as an oral history practice, we will consider the ethics of interpreting participant works and how to facilitate participants with diverse experiences and artistic backgrounds. We will conclude with a short drawing and interpretation activity to explore this approach in practice.

No expertise or experience with artmaking is required.

David LeRue is an Assistant Professor in Art Education at Concordia University. He is an artist, teacher, and researcher working between research-creation, qualitative research, and community-engaged pedagogical practices. His work theorizes the contradictions of community through developing and using inductive methods of participatory arts-based research informed by oral history to understand how places are experienced and interpreted on the grassroots level. Through using dialectical philosophies and community-engaged methods, he has come to understand community and places as inherently contradictory, subject to ongoing social and physical re-imaginings.