MICA Study Abroad Application Statement of Purpose

Please write a thoughtful and consice consideration of your goals and reasons for seeking to study abroad at your prospective host institution, including how your proposed course study at the host institution relates to your educational and career goals:

SIT Study Abroad’s field-based experiential format is essential for a community artist like myself. In the past two and a half years, my collaboration with Baltimore residents has produced over ten murals around the city, and I look forward to using the stories of my international community in my senior thesis and future artwork.

One aspect of SIT’s study abroad program that I look forward to is collecting oral histories; an academic passion of mine that developed last semester during a class at Johns Hopkins University. Offered by their Center for Africana studies, the class was called “Race and Community in East Baltimore,” and aimed at using oral histories to preserve the neighborhood’s ill-archived past before it was erased by gentrification. For SIT's independent study project, I plan on using South African’s oral histories in studio and community artwork. I feel this project will be greatly enriched by my time spent staying with a Zulu family in a Kwa-Zulu Natal township, becoming immersed in their language and culture. I feel this cultural and linguistic understanding will carry over into my collaborative work with inner city Baltimore communities, especially Baltimore's large population of African refugees.

SIT’s format is also ideal because it will allow for a collaborative art and research project to grow organically, meeting the needs specified by those it will serve. Durban is ideal for exploring art as social change on a global level. The city has had an active community arts scene since the 1970’s, and is now home to organizations like “Art for Humanity” and “Create South Africa,” whose missions are to use art to “promote human rights awareness regionally and globally” and to “develop, preserve and publish, exhibit or market South African creativity, both in the visual and literary arts." These mission statements run parallel with my own interests. As a minority at my high school, and a resident of inner city Baltimore, I have become aware of the physical racial divides of my surroundings, as well as the psychological separateness of the “other”. Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance are finely knit into the fiber of Baltimore. In fact, just outside my window recently, a white man screamed derogatory ethnic slurs and death threats at my black neighbor during an argument.

How to best create public dialogue revealing the ugly underbellies of both the oppressed minority and privileged white experiences in an effort to reconcile them? Baltimore and Durban have begun to use community art as the catalyst for deep personal, social, and political change. I am interested in furthering this effort through my artwork and a future career that incorporates the arts, social justice, community development and international relations.