Artist Art Statement - Fragments, 2022

The art piece “Fragments” is about prioritizing the collective us, where a safe space is created for students to imagine, to create and manifest their ideas without any fear. A space where their voices matter and have the potential to transform communities through art-making and where they learn, through collaboration, how to coexist respectfully and peacefully.

As the resident artist at the Missoula Art Museum (MAM), I designed a summer program where high school students could learn about contemporary art by visiting shows at the MAM and engage in public art making to beautify the place we live.

This year’s project was driven by the students’ visual responses to the question: What connects all of us to a shared sense of place? When I refer to a shared sense of place I mean the places where meanings are made. Perhaps for some of us it could refer to memories of a place where meals were made, a space where you woke up without fear for the first time, a moment of painful silence, a family migration event, a new home, the loss of a beloved one, or the smell of lavender growing. We explored all the shared experiences that make us humans and give us the opportunity to empathize with one another.

This finished specific public art piece is composed of three elements: The VOICE of our youth, their MEMORIES of place, and the pedestrians showing us the passage of time.

VOICE is carried by a collaborative poem made by fourteen student participants from the Museum’s Teens Art Project (TAP) and University of Montana’s TRIO-Upward Bound. The piece, “Surrounded by Mountains,” can be heard using the QR code in the piece. The poem joins fragments from 14 individual poems to suggest their shared sense of place.

MEMORIES are the photos taken by the TAP teens addressing their sense of belonging.

TIME is made visible in the impermanence of the piece, where not only the weather, but pedestrians alter its appearance as they walk on it.

— Janaina Vieira-Marques