CVPA Concentrate:
A collaborative project on the Star Store façade
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the CVPA Star Store,
this project features the previous UMass Dartmouth CVPA New Directions Artists-in-Residence
Tracey Cockrell (2020/21) lead artist
Roz Crews (2017/18)
Lo Moran (2018/19)
Salty Xi Jie Ng (2019/20)
and CVPA alumni Kate Frazer Rego
CVPA Concentrate is a celebration of collaborations, from the seemingly small, but powerful daily exchanges between individuals, to the larger scale, multi-faceted connections between a range of communities in New Bedford and at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.
After my 2020/21 Artist-in-Residence with the College of Visual & Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, Dean Lawrence Jenkens and Gallery Director Viera Levitt invited me back to lead a public art project, bringing together all previous resident artists.
CVPA Concentrate is a mash-up of texts, field recordings, interviews, and images that catalog these artists’ immersions within the CVPA community. These artworks wrapped the Star Store facade in sounds and images AHA! Night, Sept. 9th, 2021.
In bringing together the works of this group of artists to celebrate the 20th anniversary of CVPA and the Star Store, I invited each to think about the exterior of the Star Store as book. I asked what they would most like to say to students and how they would like to see this project in dialogue with the city of New Bedford. With this as our jumping off point, I curated images, audio, and text excerpts from each of our works, and then wrapped the Star Store façade with a new story, interwoven from our collective collaborations.
Exterior text is printed in color-coded vinyl using the official colors and font of UMass Dartmouth. Each distinct color represents the voice of an artist in the group.
During the installation of this text, people passing on the street stopped to ask what we were doing, comment on the stories as they read the façade, and share stories of their own. In particular, this is where I found the heartbeat of this collaboration – within that space of conversation and sharing on the entry stairway, on the sidewalk, and spilling down the street as our stories enliven our connections.
Video and audio works played during AHA! Night, Sept. 9th. The video remains on view at the
Bubbler Gallery in the Star Store.