Multimedia Visual Storytelling at Shawangunk Correctional Facility
Facilitated by Maggie Hazen, Eliza Lu Doyle
The Multimedia Visual Storytelling workshop brings together practices across painting, drawing, collage, writing, zine-making and sculpture. Under the facilitation of Maggie Hazen and Eliza Lu Doyle, the artists of Shawangunk Correctional move fluidly between these media, exploring their creative voices. Each participant comes to the workshop with unique interests and challenges: some have maintained art practices for several years, while others joined the workshop without having drawn since elementary school.
After being introduced to the fundamentals of constructing 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional works of art, participants pursue ambitious self-directed projects across all of these media, oftentimes improvising and inventing their own material processes. In Multimedia Visual Storytelling, we frequently write about the self as a point of departure for independent projects: participants respond to collective writing prompts exploring self-storytelling, identity, and memory, and from there develop their ideas into visual artworks. We also bring the work of contemporary artists into the workshop, introducing participants to contemporary practices that resonate with their own across space and time – an asynchronous form of artist mentorship.