Allida Warn is an artist, teacher, and researcher with a practice in Socially Engaged Art (SEA). She creates participatory projects in order to share and learn with others. She loves the ephemeral and the interconnected. She creates contemplative personal work primarily in the disciplines of printmaking, fiber, and non-traditional materials. Allida’s SEA practices range through most artistic media and bridge academic disciplines through collaborations that she cultivates with disciplinary experts from anthropology and geology to engineering and math.
Collaborative and Social Projects
There is a tension in creating socially engaged work between breaking through boundaries and creating connections between people so that they gain critical awareness of differences that create dissonant systems.
In my work, I tend to create opportunities for learning through imaginative narrative or metaphorical abstraction. The piece above leverages the metaphor of weaving with different choices, textures, and motions to create a literal social fabric. You can read more about it in these two posts.
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Emerging Wonder: A Shadow Ballet
Lewis Carroll played with time and scale throughout Alice in Wonderland in order to reframe the quirks of British culture. It’s publication in 1865 coincided with the end of the American Civil War, and despite optimistic framing at the time, vestiges of both British and American culture still contribute to inequitable systems of power.
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Breathe: Art Lives in Community
“This morning I have been pondering a nearly forgotten lesson I learned in high school music. Sometimes in band or choir, music requires players or singers to hold a note longer than they actually can hold a note. In those cases, we were taught to mindfully stagger when we took a breath so the sound …
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March Spring Winds
March Spring Winds is a contemplation on tensions that coincide as seasonal change crashes into human emergence from the pandemic. Created through a meditative practice on internal ecology, the video consists of a sequential drawn animation combined with an improvisational flute melody to evoke the interplay between complements. As plants sprout and animals emerge from hibernation, …
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Looking Back, Looking Forward
Four years ago this weekend, in the midst of concern over the potential for our country to unravel after the 2016 election, I had an opportunity at the last minute to create something at an arts festival in Ypsilanti, Michigan. My head was a mix of fear, worry, protectiveness, hope, connection, and disconnection. Although my …
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Songs of Urban Ecology: Cathedral of M-14 Fugue
What spaces around you do you ignore? Stop, Observe, Listen. The Second Song to Urban Ecology, this one was actually begun first. It was originally a photo series that I took in one of my favorite parks, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. M-14 is an expressway that runs between Ann Arbor and Plymouth, which is …
Continue reading “Songs of Urban Ecology: Cathedral of M-14 Fugue”
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Make it Out of the Ordinary: Pixel Magic
Join the #pixelmagicmoon challenge and contribute to our collaborative reIMAGINEd FOOLmoon CommUNITY!
Art
Fascinated by grandmother’s drawings and rag rugs, the abstract expressionism of Sonia Delaunay, and traditional arts from Finland, I made a series of rag-rugs to evoke natural imagery: the sun and the rain.
While living in Spain, I was overwhelmed by the dryness of the land. Having lived in Chicago near Lake Michigan, the arid desert was so different, and I started to draw the Seine while sitting on the banks of a canal near Gare du Nord. These became abstract images that I have printed on cloth and have worked into a few designs.
In the fall of 2016, I curated a show that featured teaching artists from FLY. During the honey-bee festival. My own contribution was a giant walk-in honeycomb installation constructed out of fabric so that visitors could walk into it and be engulfed in texture.
In the fall of 2019, I did an experimental limited engagement to get feedback on a new project that will combine theatre, digital projection, fiber art and participation called In-Between Thoughts.