Art @ Work

Art @ Work was a group project created for ARTD 4055 Time Based Media in which we focused on creating a website that addressed a particular audience in order to build awareness and create a direct call to action for how the audience can address racism in our northwest Ohio community. As a group we chose to explore how the Works Progress Administration or otherwise known as the WPA had worked historically in Toledo, Ohio and how a national reinstatement and restructuring would directly impact local Black artists. We took the time to interview four artists—Natasha Overton, Paul Verdell, James Dickerson AKA Dirtykics, & Mariah Maddox—and asked them how the reinstatement and restructuring of the WPA would impact their art practice directly.

My specific contribution to this project was to take the artist interview transcripts and translate them into article formats that consisted of two separate pages—the stories of their lives and the stories of their work and inspirations. After establishing the content of each page, I designed the main page where visitors to the website would be able to find the introductions of these artists and then the pull out pages for the two sections of content for each interviewee.