The [*] Project: Creative Placemaking and Participation
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Event Title: The [*] Project
Opening Reception: 5-7 p.m. Tuesday, March 5
Run Dates: Through March 22
Location: PASA Studio, 400 N. St. Mary’s
(February 28, 2013) -- In the summer of 2012, the UTSA College of Architecture, in partnership with the City of San Antonio’s Department of Culture and Creative Development and VIA Metropolitan Transit, was selected to receive an “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to lead community engagement events focused on the integration of public art and public transit around the new Tobin Center for the Performing Arts. The NEA grant-funded project, titled Public Space, Public Transit, Public Art, began in January and the event series runs through May.
The next event in the series is an opening reception for The [*] Project, an exhibit of site-specific installations done by a group of UTSA architecture students in a Graduate Design Studio and an Undergraduate Seminar class. Both courses are taught by Dr. Antonio Petrov, an Assistant Professor in UTSA’s College of Architecture.
Below is a description of The [*] Project from the students participating:
City is everything. It is stories, moments, colors, and images engraved in our memories, imagined as a place between real and ideal. However, complexity distorts perspective of place, and we beg for clarification. The [*] Project exhibition is a research effort by students in UTSA’s College of Architecture. It is an active investigation of San Antonio’s cultural fabric, undertaken to reach a cohesive understanding of the city and its neighborhoods. We are attempting to map the seventeen cultural arteries and how they make the city. Our placemaking initiative will recover the city’s diverse cultural entities and connect them with every inhabitant through public engagement and participation.
The [*] Project is a creative placemaking experience, both emotional and evocative, in which we provide a place for citizens to contribute to our studio’s cultural recovery goal. We invite you to creatively partake in this placemaking process, and our collaborative efforts will strengthen relationships among the people and places across San Antonio.
To prepare for our exhibition, reflect on your perceived ideas of place. Identify yourself within the city to regenerate your perceptions of place. Experiment with emotionally mapping the places of your community. Bring these reflections to our exhibition and put your renewed perspective into action. Sketch your memories. Describe your stories. Map your neighborhoods. Make your place.
Together we will co-author the unifying ideas behind San Antonio’s true identity.
UTSA students involved in The [*] Project
Graduate Design Studio: Sergio Alanis, Peyvand Ali Amiri, James Beyer, Dennise Castillio, Xuhua Cheng, Jose Gallegos, Christopher Haskell, Braulio Hurtado, Sierra Jones, Britta Moe, Ksenia Nation, Laura Shipley, Jose Terrones
Undergraduate Seminar: Jacqueline Arevalo, Jose Besares, Cameron Contrestano, Matthew Guido, Matthew Hallstein, Zachary Hlavinka, Tommy Horine, Dustin Lovelace, Anna Rich, Miguel Rodriguez, Jacob Silva, Michelyn Smith, Steven Vara, Lucas Watkins, Samuel Wenner, Chase White
Download the entire program of events and participants at the link below:
Public Space, Public Transit, Public Art
All events in the series, including this one, are free and open to the public. Free parking available downtown for this event through Downtown Tuesdays. Among other options, the parking garage above PASA Studio is free for this event. For more information about any of the events in the series, contact Nicole Chavez, CoA Development Associate, at nicole.chavez@utsa.edu or (210) 458-3121.