This Place Has A Voice

Identity, Location, Artists

THIS PLACE HAS A VOICE

This Place Has A Voice is a foundation for individual histories, concerns, and aspirations to stand on and be heard, paramount to a vibrant and sustainable locality. Artists contribute A/V projections, sculptures, performances and installations. Historians contribute research, photographs, articles, and context. Site-partners contribute audience, facilities, and logistics. Local residents, workers, and visitors contribute personal stories, experiences, and perspectives. The pilot The pilot phase (2012-14) was celebrated on September 20 2014 with a free public Event Day in the park and neighborhood. The day included presentations, tours, performances and projections. Moving forward, This Place Has A Voice continues to deepen the community ties around Canal Park building an Event Day 2015, and explores other locals, in DC, the USA, and abroad, to investigate with this inclusive, innovative, and educational model for making art happen and getting people to experience it. This website will continue to upload additional works from Event Day 2014, as well as other artists’ developments and future projects. For now, please explore the various pages for a sampling of how this project started and what this project has explored to-date.

This Place Has A Voice is the juxtaposed visions of artists and locals exploring life and history around Canal Park, Washington DC. The dialogue between artistic vision and community voice, both past and present, produces visual and virtual photographs, videos, and drawings, augmented by local historians. In 1799 the Navy Yard moved to this neighborhood. In the early 1800s a canal linked the neighborhood to Georgetown via what is today the National Mall. At  the turn of this century, the place was a parking lot for school buses next to a strip of gay sex clubs. In 2008, the new baseball stadium was built here.  A riverfront walk now graces the bank of the adjacent Anacostia River. New businesses bring thousands of employees to the neighborhood. Some families have lived here for generations, others for less than one week. Where long-term resident Mr. James Stoddard’s grandmother lived in the 1940s is today the entrance  to a Marriott Hotel.                The neighborhood’s recent, drastic makeover is celebrated by most, yet in many ways the changes mirror those of earlier periods of urban renewal, compromising a desire to provide sound housing for low-income residents with a conscious effort on the part of authorities to remove poor, often African American residents from areas that had become desirable.

The Lieutenant Governors Association supports incentives to encourage cities and developers to create cultural districts, creative corridors, innovation hubs and other places that will attract a critical mass of creative talent. Click below to view.

Lieutenant Governors Association
Annual Meeting 2014

CUBE Artists:
Bruce McKaig Chaya Shapiro Dawn Whitmore Ira Tattelman
Janelle Fernandez Kent Gay
Ward Tietz
Magus Magnus
Jon Lee
Gowri Koneswaran
Tony Mancus
Mark McMorris
Jenn Ferguson
Casey Smith
Adrienne Penebre
Ryan Biller
Billy Friebele

Cube @ Canal Park Exploring in all four directions the immediate surrounding streets to the Canal Park in Southeast DC, this project deploys a team of artists to connect with and listen to locals and their role(s) historically, currently, and in the near future. Participating artists are using photography, videography, drawing, and installations. The team of artists also meet regularly for professional development workshops and brainstorming sessions, thereby informing and shaping the overall reach of the project. 
Artworks will be projected nightly just past sunset until 11:30 from now until September 20th 2014.

Capitol Hill Alphabet Animal Art Project This project uses animals as the binding theme, each sculpture an animal starting with the same letter as the street where the sculpture is installed on selected street poles. A panel of four local experts in public art selected ten artists from an open RFQ. This project also instills each sculpture with a digital reference, which connects walkers via cellphone to information about the art, the artist, and the spot where they are standing.

Talking pictures During the months of contact between artists, historian, and residents, the team will conduct workshops and demonstrations where participants engage hands-on with the art processes the project uses, letting their personal histories shape the collective images and words of local lives, past, present, and future. The cumulative result of all works and activities will be Event Day, September 20th 2014, including projections, presentations, and performances in several localities, all geographical ly linked by dozens/hundreds of mural-sized portraits of participants displayed on the streets in windows, facades, etc.

Then and Now 
Replicating historical photographs with contemporary images of the same locale, then “reconstructing” a virtual, interactive historical block for viewers to better imagine what the area has looked like in the past. Mara Cherkasky is part of all three projects, providing research, images, artifacts, and contacts to participating artists. She will also make a public presentation on the history of the neighborhood.

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Canal Park neighborhood 2012.
Photo by Janelle Fernandez,

Carrollsburg site 409 Eye St SE adjoining junkyard 1939 DCHA

Cube@Canal Park

Curator and Lead Artist: Bruce McKaig

Team Artists:

Chaya Shapiro
Kent Gay

Janelle Fernandez

Jon Lee

Gowri Koneswaran

Adrienne Penebre

Initial funding provided by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

Capitol Hill Alphabet Animal Art Project

Project Manager: Hannah Jacobson

Art Director: Bruce McKaig

Team Artists:

(E) Emu Elizabeth Baldwin
(D) Dog John Yanson

(F) Falcarius Charles Bergen

(S) Spider Breon Gilleran

(I) Ibis Evan Reed

(L) Lady Bug Susan Champeny

(K) Koala Davide Prete

(V) Viceroy Butterfly Novie Anne Trump

(N) Narwhal Undine Brod

(G) Grasshopper Carolina Mayorga

Funded by the DC Department of Transportation (DDOT)

Administered by the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop (CHAW)

Talking Pictures

Project Manager: Bruce McKaig

Project Historian: Mara Cherkasky

Funded by the Humanities Council of DC (DCHC)

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THIS PLACE HAS A VOICE

© 2014 This Place Has A Voice / thisplacehasavoice.info

Bruce McKaig, 504 Constitution Avenue NE

Washington DC 20002
All rights reserved.

Website by PIXI DESIGN

DC Department of Transportation

Capitol Hill Arts Workshop

DC Humanities Council

DC Commision on the Arts and Humanties