The Wide House Project

In 2003 I wrote my first grant to San Francisco Arts Commission to conduct “The Wide House Project” with kids in San Francisco. By some miracle, I got it!!  I asked the children to help me design a building for the art center in Mozambique. The main goal of the project was to teach the children about African culture. The title of the project “Wide House” comes from a translation of a Nigerian creation myth. This place, “Ile-Ife,” the wide house, is one of the most sacred cities for the Yoroba peoples, in Nigeria. We also studied Adinkra symbols from Ghana and a miryad of different types of sculpture from across the nations.  Over 3 months I taught ceramics to children from the Potrero Hill Neigborhood House and Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy. We had our final exhibition in the gallery at Ruby’s Gallery in January 2004, we exhibited our masks, tiles, and individual and group sculptural houses. Proud parents attended the first art exhibition their children had ever been a part of. Tiles made by the children were brought as gifts to the children in Mozambique, and laid into the ground of the first class room, Casa de Paz e Luz.