These days, we are working hard to sustain our Makerspace and its impact, expand our community offerings, and continue to develop creative spaces in Lawrence and beyond. Read more about our journey below.
2023
a growth spurt
Channel 5 News did a feature on our Makerspace this year! In it, you can hear a little more about the origins of our Makerspace and hear about the impact that it has in our community.
In 2023, la house continues to deepen its support of our community partners in Lawrence and beyond, housing Rainbow Alianza and directly supporting their mission to create events and safe spaces that nurture and strengthen the QT/TLGBQ+ community in Lawrence. Rainbow Alianza achieves its’ most impactful year yet.
At our Makerspace, we offer a new Ceramics Focus Group for our students, led by Y-Bình Nguyễn. We close out the Spring semester with a photovoice collaboration with Elevated Thought — a reflection on “healing, transformation, and growth”, with students artistically intervening and transforming portraits of themselves.
Over the summer, construction begins on an expansion of the Makerspace — giving us more square footage to tuft, paint, and sew, more storage space, and a new Sound Studio. This comes as an answer to much student advocacy, and is, of course, immediately appreciated by our young people.
Fabrication Friday begins as a monthly pilot program to test out something that had always been part of the original vision of the Makerspace — opening the Space up to the Lawrence community at-large. We are blown away by the community’s response, affirming our belief in accessible spaces for creativity.
2022
a practice of freedom
We start the fall of 2022 with a couple large-scale collaborative art projects. Our students are thrilled to work alongside Colombian street artist Luisa Cárdenas of Piranhas Crew through every step of the process. Together, we ideate, conceptualize, sketch and lay down paint, culminating in one mural celebrating love as a revolutionary practice of freedom.
When Phoenix Academy sponsors a number of students and staff to attend the March for our Lives in DC 2022 to protest gun violence in schools, we support our students through using our laser-cutter and spray paint to make protest signage.
We spend this year hard at work alongside our students, continuing to tweak and tinker with our model and methodologies. We continue to diversify the offerings at our Makerspace, launching two Focus Groups for our students — Branding and Tufting. The focus groups are a huge hit with students, Tufting becomes a favorite of many in the space, and the Branding course spurs entire DIY fashion lines.
This year we also have the opportunity to have a pair of students become student interns at the Makerspace through MassHire to assist operationally and help shape our programming.
2021
a creative catalyst
la house finds its' new home at Phoenix Academy Lawrence. We officially say goodbye to the studio on Island St and wholly center our efforts into a new Makerspace for the school community at Phoenix Lawrence. Our collaboration with the school has been one of symbiotic growth, and we are so grateful to be in continued partnership with them; the youth at Phoenix inspire and challenge us to continually polish and refine our work at the Makerspace and across the city.
Our 2021 is spent continuing to build-out the Makerspace, co-creating a curriculum and culture for the Makerspace with the youth at the school, and dreaming about opening the space up to the city at large.
2020
a transitional time
We don’t like to talk about this year. Just kidding! It was a difficult transitional time for everyone, to say the least. Partway through the year, while we are in full gear with our programming across different schools in Lawrence, the Covid-19 pandemic forces us to pivot to virtual offerings — we begin doing art challenges on Instagram to engage our community creatively online while the country was on lockdown.
We also begin a virtual program at Phoenix Academy Lawrence, “Journal Away 2020”. We sent students boxes full of art supplies and met once a week to converse, create, and commiserate with each other about our experiences with the Covid-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the time we had at home helped us reconfigure ourselves individually and as an organization — leading to a renewed vision and a new sense of hope for our mission.
2019
nurturing growth
This is a year in which we strengthen and nurture our community partnerships and our presence in the arts and culture community in Lawrence — we continue to support Rainbow Alianza in their efforts to highlight and make space for the QT/TLGBQ+ community in Lawrence, as well as furthering our partnerships with youth literacy organization Andover Bread Loaf, and arts and social justice organization Elevated Thought.
2019 is also our last full year offering art therapy programming for Lawrence Public Schools, as in the spring of next year, the Covid-19 pandemic forces us to pivot towards virtual offerings for our community.
2018
tending to the phoenix
In 2018 we find ourselves in deep collaboration with the NAN project, an organization that uses a peer-to-peer model to raise mental health awareness and work towards suicide prevention. la house has partnered with the NAN project to provide creative experiences for their participants, as well as art therapy supports.
After the tragic events of the 2018 September gas explosions, in which the school community at Phoenix Academy Lawrence suddenly lost a member to the disaster, and many were left in temporary housing for weeks/months while officials secured the situation, the NAN project made it possible for la house to set up an art therapy studio for Phoenix Academy Lawrence in order for students and the school community to come together and process their trauma and use their creativity as a means to heal, transform, and grow. This work lays the foundation for our later project — the Makerspace at Phoenix.
2017
art as resistance
la house continues to develop its methodology and pedagogical framework, finding inspiration in emergent strategy and popular education. We further nurture our partnership with Lawrence Public Schools and find ourselves supporting grassroots movements in the city and the state — holding pop-up sign-making workshops prior to demonstrations and protests near and dear to our hearts — Women’s March (2016-2018), UN DÍA SIN INMIGRANTES (2017), LHS Walk-out Against Gun Violence (2018)...
2016
building community
la house expands programming to serve the Arlington and Bruce middle schools as well as after-school programs like Manos Felices. This is also the year that we open our new studio at 50 Island St, forming part of the artist community there. This studio became our home-base in between projects and our public hours supported community events like Canal Open Studios.
In the summer of 2016, we host our first Artist Residency, bringing the Colombian street-art collective Piranhas Crew to the city of Lawrence to beautify, activate, and feminize the local Misserville Skatepark as part of their international arts-activism platform, GIRLS TO THE FRONT.
2015
finding our footing
Our collaboration with the Guillemette school strongly affirms our belief that a therapeutic approach to arts education would aptly serve the social-emotional needs of Lawrence’s youth. We are able to support the Guillemette school with their enrichment programming from 2015 until March of 2020 when the Covid pandemic forces us to pivot to virtual offerings.
Access being one of our core values at la house, 2015 is also the year in which we develop our pop-up art studio model that allows us to meet the community where they are at, setting up art studios at the common parks, cafes, libraries and other schools. For more information on our past and present community partnerships, visit our partners page.
2014
an emergent strategy
In the summer of 2014, la house is initially envisioned as Lawrence Arts House: a space to engage young people through art. We open our first studio thanks to the support of the Lawrence Youth Team and the generosity of the owners of the building at 530 Broadway St. This is where we draft our first expressive arts curriculum for youth served by the Family Resources Center and the Arlington Community Trabajando (both organizations now defunct).
Our summer programs leads to art therapy workshops at the Guilmette middle school in the fall. Then in 2015, we’re invited to become an enrichment partner with Lawrence Public Schools. Eventually we give up our studio at Broadway St. and find ourselves running expressive arts programming for Lawrence youth out of the trunks of our cars etc until we land at our next studio at Island St.
