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APPLICATIONS WERE OPEN FOR STUDENTS IN 11TH AND 12TH GRADE LIVING IN JACKSON AND GOING TO A JACKSON PUBLIC SCHOOL.
Requirements to be on the team:
- must be a Junior or Senior in high school
- wants to be a positive force in their
community
- lives in the city of Jackson, MS
The unveiling of The Art of Governance
for the Jackson City Council.
November 6, 2015
First Team Meeting
Mississippi Museum of Art, Bancorp South Classroom
The Art of Governance Team: (In order beginning top left) Zekari Nickelson, Danielly Bailey, Tiffany Thomas, David Clanton, Rahzizi Ishakarah, and (not pictured) Nytaya Babbitt
The team held their first meeting at the Mississippi Museum of Art in the Bancorp South classroom. For almost three hours everyone focused together and helped to jumpstart this project. First, we defined our goals for the meeting. The team then participated in a sticky note wall process to share and group the skills they each bring to the team as well as the community networks they can access or activate.
Facilitating artist daniel johnson then shared about his artistic process and shared examples from his past works. This brought him to the inception and background of the current work they were all present for, The Art of Governance. They all worked together to define the current moment we all found ourselves in - deciding how they would govern themselves, deciding on needed roles and intentionally delaying the creation of some, making key decisions on their own pay and the overall budget.
We then began a visioning process to look toward the issue they might focus on. In another round of sticky note organization, the team wrote out Past Dreams for Jackson, Current Challenges of Jackson, Intriguing Actions to Engage In During the Project, and Tools and Techniques They Would Be Interested to Use. They each promised to decide on 1-3 issues or topics to present to the group at the next meeting and to do some preliminary research on each.
Click here to download the Follow Up Summary
from this first meeting.
October 6, 2015
Public Comments at City Council Meeting
Jackson City Hall
December 6, 2015
Third Team Meeting: Challenges Check In
Mississippi Museum of Art, Bancorp South Classroom
For this meeting, team members were to brief their teammates on their progress to meet with their City Councilperson and revisit the identified challenges for further discussion.
It turns out to be difficult to coordinate with a City Councilperson when you are a student during normal office hours. daniel suggested strategies to each of them.
For the Art Moment, the team looked at Tania Bruguerra and her Immigrant Movement International project. The students also watched and discussed videos of projection mapping projects during their break.
Click here to download the Follow Up Summary
from this third meeting.
If you would like to contribute to The Art of Governance, you can still contribute online through our Indiegogo campaign page or contact us directly at info@theartofgovernance.us.
For this meeting, team members had prepared to speak on specific issues of concern.
daniel johnson volunteered to be the teams' Secretary and took notes as the group discussed the issues brought forward by each team member. Topics covered were the Generation Gap, Healthcare Access, Road Infrastructure, the State Flag, Lack of Businesses, and Graduation Rates. Each topic was posted on the wall and the team fleshed out considerations and questions for each.
Team members then discussed contacting their ward councilperson to present these issues and receive feedback on current local considerations for each. daniel modeled an example of what this call to request a meeting might sound like.
Click here to download the Follow Up Summary
from this second meeting.
November 15, 2015
Second Team Meeting
Mississippi Museum of Art, Entergy Classroom
January 10, 2016
Fourth Team Meeting: Challenges Brainstorm
Mississippi Museum of Art, Bancorp South Classroom
The goals of the meeting were to brainstorm potential art actions relative to our six identified challenges.
Ward 4 Councilman De'Keither Stamps met with Art of Governance team member David Clanton since our last meeting. Their conversation was most animated on the topic of the generation gap and the need for reactivating a sense of community among Jacksonians. Councilman Stamps expressed interest in attending a future team meeting.
For the Art Moment, the team looked at Theaster Gates and his Stony Island Art Bank project.
The bulk of the meeting was spent brainstorming potential art actions for each challenge. For this process, we would read over the notes from our previous conversations, spend 5 minutes free writing, and then each present our thoughts. It seemed with almost every challenge, the various thoughts of the group coallesced well into larger, intergrated series of actions. Read all of those ideas in the notes.
Click here to download the Follow Up Summary
from this fourth meeting.
February 11, 2016
Debrief and Feedback: The Mayor and his Youth Council
Mississippi Museum of Art, Yates Room
The goals of the meeting were for the team to facilitate conversations on the 6 challenges they had identified as facing Jackson. From these conversations they hoped to receive feedback and potential allies for any future art actions.
As the twenty Mayor's Youth Council members arrived, they selected from slips of paper on the counter, each with a different Jackson challenge which had been facing the group. daniel welcomed the Mayor, his youth council, and the Director of Youth Programs for the Mayor to the Museum and we began with introductions; each student sharing their name, school, and activities they participate in and the adults sharing the same information from when they were in high school.
After this short exchange we entered into the bulk of the meeting, facilitated conversations. The Art of Governance team used the Fish Bowl method for facilitating the conversation. With the Fish Bowl method, a small inner circle of participants engage in conversation on a chosen topic while an outer circle listen, having a chance to respond at the end.
For our meeting, each conversation began with an Art of Governance member summarizing a single challenge for a group of 5 Youth Council members who had chosen that challenge on their initial slip of paper. After this roughly 30-second intro, the group would then converse on the topic. The Art of Governance team facilitated by reminding people that our goal was to discuss aspects which could be affected at the city level. This conversation lasted 6 minutes.
Following the inner conversation, the outer circle had 2 minutes to reflect and respond. The Mayor then had 2 minutes to respond to the whole.
In this meetings notes, each youth conversation is summarized by challenge with follow up responses from the Mayor and his Youth Programs Director.
This thoughtful and dynamic exchange held significance as an art work in the particular constellation of participants; youth from across Jackson in all wards and high schools alongside the Mayor and his Youth Programs Director. The art work held significance in whom had chosen the topics for the evening, the order of presentation and response, and most significantly in the depth of thought brought forth by all parties with equally gracious listening and receiving of each other.
Click here to download the Follow Up Summary
from this Mayoral debriefing and feedback.
March 10, 2016
Fifth Team Meeting: Revisiting Challenges
Mississippi Museum of Art, Bancorp South Classroom
With three team members present, we simply reviewed the experience and feedback received from the meeting with the Mayor and his Youth Council. In considering what challenges we might remove from our focus, the team determined that the decision should be weighted based on how much control they could reasonably expect to exert toward a solution of the challenge. Based on past discussions and feedback they had received, they determined that they would likely not focus on the Roads, Lack of Local Business, or the State Flag.
They decided to hold off making a final decision until the whole team could be together.
April 4, 2016
Sixth Team Meeting: Deciding on a Challenge of Focus
Mississippi Museum of Art, Bancorp South Classroom
Many of the team members have gotten jobs over the course of the past month and once again, we only had three team members. Everyone is settled that Monday is a good new day to have meetings though and it seems like work schedules will be adapted by our next meeting.
Of the three team members present, two were different than last time and so we were able to continue the discussion on deciding a single challenge to move forward on for the project. Through texting the other members, it was decided to focus on The Generation Gap.
The team felt that they had the potential to speak most forcefully on The Generation Gap and the capacity to bring about the greatest change in this area. In thinking about the core of the divide, they most often came back to the role of technology and the different relationships that the generations have with it. At the same time, they also felt that technology held the greatest promise for bridging this gap.
The team decided that they would utilize film as the creative medium for engaging society in a discussion on The Generation Gap. Before the next meeting, a YouTube channel would be made for the group and everyone would download a video editing app for their smartphone or their home computer. The cost would come from their supplies budget.
daniel recorded a video of a conversation on The Generation Gap with the team to act as a first video for their channel.
April 25, 2016
Seventh Team Meeting: Gauging Progress and a Joint Project
Mississippi Museum of Art, Bancorp South Classroom
The team discussed issues they were having with filming and uploading and we did some trouble shooting. Team member Rahzizi Ishakarah had uploaded his first video - a short movie trailer-esque piece on a day where a young person discovered his phone could be practically useful!
The team discussed their budget. Having settled on a digital medium for their work, there was still a substantial supplies budget they would not need for materials. They discussed a desire to host an event bringing different generations together which they could film. This would make a good addition to their channel, something long form to go along with their shorter videos and a format which would allow for looking more indepth at the challenge while also engaging some individual community members directly to consider the complexities of the issue.
Among the assetts the team had available to them, it was determined that a local restaurant where Zahari worked would be the ideal venue since we could buy dinner for everyone and easily service them through a single contact. Danielle's mom works at a hotel and as a second option, she would look into permissions and restrictions of using that space. There is a bar-b-q vendor just outside which could be an easy source for feeding everyone and the lobby of the hotel has some various seating areas and a kitchen.
The goal of this event would be to hire a filmmaker to document a variety of conversations had throughout the restaurant. Team members would circulate through the space prompting conversation on The Generation Gap and when an interesting angle came up, they could pause the convversation and direct the filmmakers to come and record.
The filmmakers would also get some individual interview material while they were there to edit in. The team would consider interview questions and be the ones to conduct those interviews.
Rahzizi's Video - The Art of Governance Team
daniel's video - The Generation Gap
no longer accepting