East St. Louis Action Research Project

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | College of Fine and Applied Arts

SPOTLIGHT

Larine Y. Cowan
Make a Difference Award

The Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Award was presented to ESLARP Director Laura Lawson and FAA Dean Robert Graves earlier this month during the 24th Annual Celebration of Diversity breakfast on November 11, held at the I Hotel. Presenting the award to ESLARP was Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Robert Easter, and Menah Pratt-Clarke, Interim Assistant Chancellor and Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access.

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Enriching young minds through community engagement

Outreach Weekend Report - September 21-22, 2007

Weekend Summary

Outreach Summary

This was the largest Outreach Weekend we had in several years, with over 100 participants! Students from Bob Selby's ARCH571 worked on building a new roof for the storage facility at the Village Theater , UP260 worked on several projects including Opal's House,and general volunteers at Eagle's nest removed weeds and vines from the fence surrounding the shelter. This was an excellent first weekend for the ESLARP fall semester!

Eagle's Nest

site supervisor: Abby Harmon This weekend we worked at Eagle’s Nest to clean off a large section of fence from the grips of some very intense vines. We had a lot of help from various groups, including Bob Selby’s architecture students (thanks everyone!). Before we began cleaning off the fence, it looked like a crazy jungle. Thanks to everyone’s effort, we successfully cleaned off most of the fence, and it should be no problem to finish up the rest of it in October.

LIS581 Dunham Archives

Site supervisor: Noah Lenstra A group of students in Library and Information Science, from Anke Voss's course on archival administration and practice, spent the work weekend of September 21 and 22 creating a preliminary inventory of the Katherine Dunham papers. Katherine Dunham was a world-famous anthropologist, dancer and activist who called East St. Louis home for the last 40 years of her life. Ms. Dunham created a museum, a cultural center and a school to teach her "Dunham technique" in East St. Louis. Dunham also went on a fast that lasted over 40 days in East St. Louis in the early 1990's to protest US policy towards Haitian immigrants.
The archiving students, who had previously studied the documentary record of Ms. Dunham at other institutions, inventoried Ms. Dunham's papers in order to be able to state with some degree of confidence what the center holds, in relation to her life. This knowledge of the archival holdings will enable the Dunham Center Board of Directors to act knowledgeably as they decide what course of action to take with the Dunham papers. A second group from the archiving class will visit East St. Louis in October to begin the work done during the September work weekend. The students will, in November, in groups, present a proposal on what they think should happen with the Dunham holdings in East St. Louis. These presentations will be open to the public.

Dunham Archives Shelving Units

Site Supervisor: Chris Sharkey At the Dunham House last weekend our group used salvaged 2x4's that were stored in the shed at the stone house and designed and built storage shelves which will hold the museums records and artifacts. We built 3 shelves which combined should hold anywhere between 96 and 120 archive boxes which the L.I.S. volunteers are sorting and cataloging. Once these shelves are filled there will be room in the basement of the museum for more shelves to be built if necessary.

ARCH571 and Village "Eddie Fisher" Theater Roof Repair

Participating: ARCH 571 Students: Tamary Alvarez-Gutierrez, Ryan Barandino, In-Jin Cha, Jesse Hass, Blake Knapp, Victor Le Bourgeois, Ik-Sung Lee, Mike Naponelli Nanechka Pagan-Torres, Malika Ramdas, Nathan Schramm, Jean-Baptiste Simon, Pei-Hua Wang, Jason Wheeler. Faculty: Dean Michael J. Andrejasich, AIA and Prof. Robert I. Selby, FAIA Additional volunteers: Jonathan Raiche and Bridgette Richardson
Following the tour of East St. Louis, we visited the project site at 3600 Waverly Avenue, the location of a proposed community center for the Concerned Citizens of Precinct 12 (CCP12). We photographed and “pace-measured” the site.
Barandino, Cha, Hass, Knapp, Le Bourgeois, Naponelli, Schramm, Wheeler, Raiche, Richardson, Andrejasich and Selby worked on the roofing project at Village Theater in Centerville. The garage is intended to be adaptively reused as a youth computer education center. Our community partner was Christina Fisher who runs the Village Theater. On Friday afternoon, we stripped the old shingles and roof sheathing down to expose the roof rafters on the gable roof. We installed new OSB sheathing on the gable roof and patched the existing sheathing on the hip roof portion.
On Saturday, we began to apply asphalt shingles to the gable portion of the roof. Eight of us returned on Sunday to nearly complete the project. A portion of the hip roof remains to be shingled. This will be completed on the October outreach weekend.
Wheeler, Raiche, Hass and Naponelli had professional construction experience;we were grateful for their leadership on this project.

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