Ceramics preview Friendraiser

-from the Curator

Tonight we had our last FriendRaiser of our 2014-2015 fiscal year.  With the amount raised tonight we have raised the projected $10,000 from ten FriendRaisers that was our goal for the NEH Challenge grant this year.  Congratulations to our Board Members for all their hard work!

This FriendRaiser focused on ceramics and premiered a short video we have been editing for our permanent exhibit.  A grant from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts allowed us to go through raw footage from the award winning, Emmy nominated documentary First People-Kumeyaay and focus on the footage on ceramics.  Frank Salazar, our Cultural Collections Project Manager edited together from this footage a video of renowned Kumeyaay ceramics artist Teresa Castro going through the steps of making a pot.  A grant from the National Environmental Education Foundation allowed Frank to work with several different Kumeyaay culture bearers and language experts to add Kumeyaay words to the video.  Videos and technology are some of the best ways to reach the younger generations and gain their interest, and have proven successful in other situations.  The hope is that seeing the language embedded in a situation will support "situational fluency" for language learning.

Attendees ate food prepared in ceramic pots, saw both newly made and older ollas that will be in our permanent exhibit, and commented on the video.  Frank is now planning on going back for some more editing to incorporate this great feedback.  We're looking forward to having the final version in our ceramics visible storage exhibit by this fall. Thanks to Conveyor Group for their help in turning these clips into a lovely, smoothly transitioning video.


 Thank you to everyone who attended this and any of the other FriendRaisers this year - you are helping us to drive this museum forward to success!