Reflecting on Educational Resources and Community Engagement Initiatives- June Ahleman, BFA Painting ’27

Working with EASPA this summer has taught me so much about community centered work, collaboration across non profit organizations, and cultural programming generally! For this last blog post I thought I would go over different projects I supported and some of the main things I learned from each!

TEAACH ACT Resources

The TEAACH Act (Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History) is an Illinois act passed in 2021 that mandates that all public elementary and high schools in the state teach a unit of curriculum on the history and contributions of Asian Americans.

In my last few weeks with EASPA I continued to create an arts resource to support the TEAACH Act, as well as an AAPI Calendar for future educational toolkits. This seventeen page resource has been super exciting to put together and very interesting from a curatorial perspective. My Theory and History of Art and Design concentration has definitely prepared me for the task of making connections among artists, historical events, and TEAACH requirements. Including professors and peers I admire was another really exciting part of creating this resource! RISD affiliated artists mentioned in the resource include professors Susanna Koetter, Tsai Ling Tseng, and Timothy Lai as well as students and alumni such as Paree Rohera, Katherine Tae Hee Lee, Talha Shams and many others!!

Other TEAACH work I contributed to this summer included creating a template for a future EASPA educational toolkit, cataloging existing resources, synthesizing those resources with materials in EASPA’s historical archive, and creating an AAPI booklist for future projects. 

These projects taught me a lot about how I can use my perspective as an artist to contribute to initiatives that do not directly involve art but would benefit from examples of lived experiences and different points of view. I want to thank Melissa Molitor the Founding Director of EASPA for encouraging me to initiate my own project within the organization and offering insight with things like citations and how dense the included information should be!! 

Through organizing resources and familiarizing myself with EASPA’s historical archive I also learned a lot about the history of different AAPI communities in Evanston and Chicago!

Community Events and Cultural Programming

In addition to work supporting the TEAACH act, I was able to contribute to multiple great community events! These included facilitating arts workshops, supporting the annual Umbrella Festival, installing and staffing an exhibition called In The Absence of Space, and supporting community events in the exhibition space! I have always loved meeting people, hearing their stories and asking questions so programs like these were very fulfilling to participate in! 

I would say the main thing that was re- affirmed through these projects would be that curiosity is really important and people are usually interested in telling you about their experiences if you ask the right questions and listen! Especially as an rising senior, I enjoyed taking these community events as an opportunity to ask about different paths people have taken in their lives and careers; it’s been awesome to hear so many assorted and multigenerational perspectives!

Finally, I learned that people are often more comfortable talking when making something with their hands. Facilitating arts workshops created many opportunities for interesting conversation!

Regardless of where my career takes me after graduation this year, I know that three things I did this summer will be part of my life and creative practice for the foreseeable future: asking questions, connecting people, and of course, creating. I encourage you all to be more curious, invest time in communities you care about, and definitely make something!!

Thank you to Melissa Molitor, Abby Mendoza, Amy Kung, and everyone at EASPA for being so welcoming! Thanks to Kevin Jankowski at RISD for being a great advisor throughout this experience! Thanks to Scott Malloy at the RISD career center for telling me about this fellowship! And of course, thanks to Maharam for this opportunity to invest so much time in an initiative I care about!!