A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty of fodder. I took up the task and wanted to document the process and result to share.

Step One
Create the form. Since the sarcophagus was going to be used to store candy, I knew it needed two halves. I drew and cut one out of a large cardboard box, and essentially copied it for the second half. In the center, cut out a square somewhat larger than a shoebox size, leaving enough room on the edges to retain structural integrity.

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During a brief family holiday along the Erie Canal last week, I had the pleasure of stopping in at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. What a thrill! Why? Several reasons:

•  Its a bright open physical space in the heart of a city ready for a rebound. Artists know what that feeling is like: a kinetik sense of opportunity that can be won or lost at any moment.
• A great show on the walls. Richard Rockford is a mixed media and assemblage artist with a knack for subtle colors, balanced proportion, and ingenious mystery.
• A working, rentable printshop crammed with manual and automated machinery dedicated to keeping the craft and art of book- and print-making alive.
• A schedule of workshops and open studio sessions through which artists, crafters, and the curious can learn basic and advanced printing techniques and more.
• A tidy shop topped off with papers, cards, notebooks and  more titillating to the fingertips, staffed by knowledgeable staff in love with the printed letter.

Overall, I was enlivened by the sense of possibility and exploration at the relatively small corner space. Buffalo you must know is a city that peaked maybe in the ’20s and ’30s, immortalized by the contributions of canonical American creatives Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles Burchfield and many others. One can’t help wondering on arrival, “What the hell happened - where’d the vision go?” I have a belief that, like with the Roycrofters and the Arts and Crafts movement, these traditions emerge slowly, of a synchrony of many visions that seek to reconcile an impulse to shape the future with an instinct to draw forward gleanings from the past. Anyway, that’s more philosophy than I’m used to. But my point is that efforts like the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative are inspiring because I believe they are similarly inspired - a recognition that through preservation, inspiration and reinvention we can build great movements. I wish them much success and will look forward to any opportunity to revisit. I hope you will too!

Two founder-centered arts organizations, which each address the impact of violence on youth in different ways, are profiled in this month’s issue of ODE Magazine. One, founded in Los Angeles on principles of forgiveness and victim reconciliation, works with youth already deeply involved in the cycle of gang violence. The other, founded and operating in Cape Town, centering its activities on the needs of women and children who are victims of  abuse, violence and exploitation. The Tariq Khamisa Foundation (TKF), born out of the grief and generosity of a father who lost a son to a senseless act of violence. That was 12 years ago. Today, the foundation reaches millions of students in California with a message of hope, forgiveness and personal responsibility through programs that teach peace. Through community service projects, the TKF Foundation encourages children and youth to strengthen their ties to community.In South Africa, Angela Rackstraw founded Community Art Therapy after seeing children directly affected by gun violence playing among the dead victims. Her work, carried out in a shipping container structure at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Nyanga, a township skirting Cape Town, aims to bring healing to as many women as she can on the monthly income she scrapes together from individuals and foundations.I can imagine Peace Tiles being a resource for groups like these, offered as a tool to reach shared awareness-raising, therapy,  self-advocacy and research goals.

The Global Peace Tiles Project has a new guide for educators aimed at generating reflection and dialogue around the topics of identity and place. The “topic pack,” which is 12 pages, includes six activities and several discussion starters. In addition to a look at the book, “The Big World and the Little House,” users of the guide are encouraged to think about place through the lenses of people, institutions and geography and to collect artifacts for use in collage that capture these and other personal reflections on place. The guide is free and intended for use as a precursor to a Peace Tiles project that explores place.

Click here to download the guide.

I’ve been putting alot of thought into ways to communicate the possibilities for creating Peace Tiles - outside of the workshop environment. I’ve noticed that one of the challenges - both in communicating the essence of “collage” as well as the possibilities for creativity within that 8-inch square “sandbox” I like to call a Peace Tile - is moving participants away from what we learned as collage back in third grade: cutting out pictures we like and gluing them to a surface.So I’ve selected a few Peace Tiles I like, and tried to - very superficially - “dissect” them and distill some ways for participants to think about using the surface of the wood panel. The guide include:

• A brief but “in-depth” discussion of the basic composition an outstanding Peace Tile from India
• A brief discussion of the relationship between foreground-background elements and materials selection in an outstanding Peace Tile from South Africa
• A page of “patterns” and accompanying discussion of each
• Two brief exercises to get participants thinking and sketching

Anyway, here’s the design guide - I’d really be very interested in your feedback. For example, do you think it needs a glossary, or can I leave some of the “conceptual work” to teachers…?