The Dot Art Factsheet

Mission

To make exemplary visual arts education available to everyone in Dorchester and surrounding neighborhoods.

Goals

• To empower individual children, teens, and adults by developing their abilities to think visually and to practice problem-solving techniques:
• To unite diverse groups within the Dorchester community around the processes and products of visual art making;
• To build meaningful connections between the Dorchester community and major cultural institutions.

History

Dorchester Community Center for the Visual Arts, also known as Dot Art, was incorporated in January of 1998 when sixteen Dorchester residents including artists, teachers, and community activists came together to address a pressing need for visual arts education in Dorchester neighborhoods.

Scope

Dot Art provides classes and other programs to between 1200 and 1300 participants per year; has an annual budget of $240,000; designs and implements collaborative programs with museums, schools, and health-care provider; and mounts exhibitions and events that are viewed by thousands and documented by Boston newspapers and media.

Board and Staff

Dot Art is a 501( c )(3) non-profit organization functioning under a traditional board structure. The 9-member volunteer Board of Directors meets every month. An Executive Board of senior officers meets monthly with Executive Director, and an Advisory Board serves to provide insight on specific issues.

Staff positions include:
Executive Director, Development Associate, Office Manager
Pool of 30 artists/art educators serve as faculty for various programs
Volunteers and students hired on occasion to help with filing, data entry, and other office business.

Key Strategies

Dot Art addresses its mission by:

• Providing individualized instruction that enables participants to develop their own ideas.
• Designing programs that enable participants to impact their community through the public exhibition of their large-scale works
• Delivering programs locally within the different “sub-neighborhoods” of Dorchester
• Collaborating with local businesses and organizations and with major cultural institutions (see connecting community chart)

Types of Programs

Dot Art delivers four kinds of programs to engage the community in different ways that effectively support each other and nurture an environment where artmaking is valued.

Sequential programs – series of classes – are usually of 8-10 weeks’ duration. Examples include a studio-art-making class focusing on Ancient Egypt and including events and trips to museums, programs combing science and art, school vacation programs in sculpture and printmaking, and a Stained Glass Class for Adults. Many classes include visits to major museums with carefully prepared interactive activities connecting class content with the work being viewed. Instructive programs are designed to provide individuals of different ages and skill levels with formal instruction and opportunities to explore their own ideas.

Workshops are usually of one session’s duration. Some engage individuals and families as volunteers preparing for a public exhibition or parade or helping out at a neighborhood park day. Other workshop classes are one-session informal instructional programs offered for a nominal fee like pumpkin carving or a bus trip to a museum in Boston or New York. (These are low-threshold doorways into participation for adults and teens, who initially feel they are too busy to get involved in visual art.)

Exhibitions bring Dot Art’s students and their families together with hundreds, and sometimes tens of thousands of art viewers. In nine years, student work has been formally exhibited multiple times in Dorchester libraries, Boston City Hall, the Epiphany School, the main Boston Public Library, the Hynes Convention Center, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Northeastern University. One hundred portraits are currently installed in the Dorchester District Courthouse.

Performances and installations enable our students to present their artwork in surprising ways and places. Students have worked their giant puppets in parades for Dorchester Day and Boston’s First Night, at the New England Aquarium, and suspended from a 4th floor balcony on Boylston Street. Life-size figurative sculptures are installed in the summer on sidewalks and rooftops along Dorchester Avenue.

Outcomes It is difficult to assess all the ways that Dot Art affects people and organizations in Dorchester and how it influences outsider’s attitudes about Dorchester, but the following programs are illustrative:

Dorchester Portraits Project (begun 1998) has enabled over 200 Dorchester residents to paint life-size portraits of themselves, their family, and their friends. Participant’s ages range from 6 to 70. A few are professional artists, but most have no previous artmaking experience.

Paul R. McLaughlin Mural Project (1999) enabled a diverse group of teens to design and paint a 7’ x 20’ mural memorializing murdered Assistant District Attorney, Paul R. McLaughlin. The mural was installed in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s downtown office.

Classes for Pre-School, Elementary, Middle School and High School students (begun 1998) designed and taught by experienced art educators and psychologists, these classes have provided hundreds of young people with developmentally appropriate environments, opportunities, and instruction to stimulate and develop their cognitive skills. Dot Art early childhood curriculum has been a model for programs implemented by the Ashmont Nursery School and the Dimock Community Health Center.
Look at Those People, the People Sculpture Project (begun 2000) has enabled young people to create life-size figurative sculptures that reflect and celebrate the diversity of their community. For three years, it has also provided an opportunity for students to meet and collaborate with the owners and managers of Dorchester’s businesses.

Living Links Mural at the New England Aquarium (2001-2002) enabled forty-nine young people aged 7 to 16 to study, draw, and paint animals who are links between life in oceans and lakes to life on dry land. Their final paintings became a 40-foot long mural that is a component of a three-year international traveling exhibition mounted by the New England Aquarium.

Heads on Heads Program/Wild Things Exhibitions and First Night (2004-2005) Students enrolled in the Lucy Stone and the St. Mark’s After-school programs, combined with the Teen Studio, created giant puppet heads that could be worn on their own heads. The original “realistic” Heads on Heads program was transformed into the fantastical “Wild Things” in the summer of 2004. This project culminated in the production and performance of the play, “Where Are the Wild Things?” written, produced, and performed by the Dot Art Students, First Night 2005 at Cloud Place, Boston, MA.

 
Using the creative art of painting to create common ground, Dot Art has brought together people of different ages, races, genders, and ethnic backgrounds, helped them create images of themselves and their community, and made it possible for them to share those images with the rest of us, thus helping us to recognize our common human experience. Dot Art has succeeded in uniting people across the very social and ethnic differences that have divided Bostonians for many years. Through the work of organizations like Dot Art, we wee how art works to help people feel connected, to help build community.
-- Anna Faith Jones, President Emeritus of the Boston Foundation