Detroit Atlas Collaboration
Lyz received a Knight Arts Challenge Grant in 2015 for the Detroit Atlas Collaboration, which is a Detroit based research and community arts project. Throughout this project, Lyz facilitates free and donation based printmaking and bookbinding workshops around the city of Detroit (funded by a fundraising campaign and the matching Knight Arts Grant) using memory mapping as the prompt. Each workshop produces maps of the city of Detroit, based on memory and subjective experiences.
These printmaking and mapmaking workshops take place through partnerships with local community organizations and schools until funding runs out, with pop up printmaking classes at Riopelle and other partner organizations. Historical and data based maps of Detroit are also being researched and collected to be converted into printable blocks and screens to be used in those workshops. In the end, the personal maps created in the printmaking workshops and the data based maps printed from research will be bound together into books by hand, into Atlases of Detroit.
As a completed project, the Detroit Atlas will have been a collaboration between Detroiters in a wide range of neighborhoods in the city to map Detroit as they have experienced it, within the bounds of the same art project, all while learning and experiencing the technical, tactile, and interactive process of printmaking. These maps will provide context for one another, a juxtaposition of personal experiences of people who live in the same geographic space, but often very different social, political, and historically contextualized spaces. After the project concludes, I plan to seek out public homes for these handbound books, like libraries or community art centers, so that they’ll remain publicly accessible.
You can read more about this project at www.detroitatlas.com
