My Pasadena
My Pasadena, commissioned by the City of Pasadena Arts & Cultural Affairs Division, was a continuous series of artist-led events and artworks produced between September 2015 and September 2016, transforming the Civic Center area into a creative, vibrant public forum and expanding community awareness of the contemporary role of government. My Pasadena was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town program and managed by Side Street Projects, an organization that connects professional artists with communities.
Below you can explore four artist-led events and artworks for the project series: Blotnbyte, Plastic Float Garden, Pop-up Museum Pasadena, and Roto Pasadena.
Blotnbyte
Artist:
Angela Willcocks
Partners:
Side Street Projects, Perry’s Joint, Mothers’ Club,
Villa Parke, Pasadena Transit
Blotnbye was a residency held in Perry’s Joint, a celebrated local coffee house.
Angela Willcocks met and documented local residents through Perry’s Joint Mothers’ Club Pasadena and Villa Parke. Willcocks created large scale drawings of residents which were then combined with audio interviews of the community member. Her ongoing project was promoted across local bus routes with QR codes, enabling riders to listen to audio mixes of the local community stories.
Plastic Float Garden
Artist:
Cat Chiu Phillips
Partners:
Side Street Projects, Rose Parade,
Pasadena Unified School District, PUSD Arts, Paseo Colorado
Plastic Garden Float was a collaborative project with over a thousand students from Pasadena Unified School District.
Community conversations propelled the creation of flower-shaped floats made from discarded plastic waste that participants wove into plastic yarn, or PLARN, from recycled bottles. Plastic Garden Float was displayed at the official Post-Rose Parade Showcase and Paseo Colorado.
Pop-up Museum Pasadena
Artists:
Betsy Medvedovsky and Steve Campos
Partners:
Side Street Projects
Pop-up museum pasadena was a set of temporary exhibits created through interactions with community members.
The exhibits explore four themes: origins, time, conflict and family. The museum invited people to draw and write on the pop-up. Thematic objects and artwork from locals were also submitted and displayed in the museum to catalog their significance.
Roto Pasadena
Artist:
Lisa Mann and Yo-Yo Lin
Partners:
Side Street Projects, La Pintoresca Teen Education Center, Pasadena YouthBuild, Pasadena Police Department, Pasadena Public Libraries, Pasadena City Council Districts 1 and 3, Garfield Heights Neighborhood Association
Roto Pasadena was a collaboration between youth, local government, and artists animating oral histories and interviews through rotoscoping film techniques.
Students at Youth-Build interviewed members of the Police Department and City Council. Teens at Pintoresca Teen Center wrote a poem to the city. These were projection mapped onto the facades of City Hall, the Police Department and the Library for a one-night screening.
