Community Collaborations
Over the years, Kristin has partnered with community organizations and fellow artists to bring creative projects to life. Her work includes collaborations with Washington, DC areas mainstays like 826DC, Imagination Stage, and the Sitar Arts Center. Beyond local initiatives, she joined a team of artists in 2014 to design and paint a school mural in Quito, Ecuador. She also co-founded and directed the Makers Assembly Project alongside arts leader Zachary Clark from 2012 to 2017, building a space for community conversations around the ways that creativity shapes our everyday work.
Community Collaborations, Artful Outcomes.
From 2013-2017 the Makers Assembly Project (MAP) cultivated dynamic, collaborative, and nuanced conversations around artful practices. We believed (and still do) that artmaking is a wildly inclusive pursuit. Painter, doctor, writer, advocate, teacher, chemist, gardener, and storyteller: each is a meaning-maker, engaged in a practice defined by its distinct commitment to purpose.
The resolve required of these practitioners and those like them – the craft that underlies the work – belies a similar kind of artfulness threaded through these apparently unrelated disciplines. MAP was committed to highlighting the ways in which makers of all kinds overlap in their practice by fostering public discourse around various artful pursuits.
The Makers Assembly Project (2013-2017)
In 2013, Kristin co-founded the Makers Assembly Project alongside her former grad school classmate and close friend, Zachary Clark. Together, they designed spaces for open conversations around artful practice—inviting the broader community to reflect, make art, and build connections across diverse creative fields. Kristin’s favorite MAP initiative was the Visual Thesaurus, a participatory project that invited the public to submit their own visual interpretations of a single thematic word.
Expositions
In traditional show-and-tell-style, practitioners of various backgrounds will each present a brief talk about their practice, grounding their presentation in an artifact that represents their work. Conversations
After sharing their talk with the assembly, practitioners will have the opportunity to ask questions of one another in order to uncover the connections underlying their disciplines. Inquiries
Practitioners will engage in a conversation with the audience, further investigating the connections between their work by responding to questions sourced from those in attendance. All are encouraged to contribute their voices to the conversation that emerges.Projects
The audience will be invited to actively participate in the Makers Assembly Project by responding to a prompt developed collaboratively by the assembly’s speakers. Participants will be provided with instructions regarding the project’s nature, scope, and date of submission and are encouraged to contribute their work to the MAP Collection for exhibition. MAP projects offer the broader community an opportunity to contribute their perspective to the conversation in a tangible and lasting way.MAP Structure
