Elsewhere's SEA program preserves and connects South Elm Street neighborhood

Over the course of this year, Elsewhere Artist Collaborative--a living museum set within a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro--has been creating connections within its growing downtown urban neighborhood. With the new Mellow Mushroom and advancing economic development in our downtown "arts and antiques" district, Elsewhere wanted to ensure that neighbors who live, work, and use the South Elm neighborhood had a forum for discussing the growth of their city and transformations of their urban surroundings. We have always been especially interested in our neighborhood's ability to link people across generations, ethnic backgrounds, race, and economic status--from the diverse businesses on our block, to its historic aesthetic character, to a playful culture of passer-bys and players. We set out to create a way to converse and explore these unique connections of the fabulous people who compose our city character.

This spring, with the help of the United Arts Council's PTICA initiative and The Building Stronger Neighborhoods of the Community Foundation of Greensboro, Elsewhere set out to strengthen our neighborhood community while preserving the unique diversity of our downtown district. We launched an ongoing project called SEA (the South Elm Alliance) which hosted and continues to host various events that provide create forums for community exchange (check out the blog here). We held two town hall meetings about the development of our neighborhood, investigated our neighborhood through a mapping photo project and posted on Googlemaps, joined Charlie and Ruth Jones of Greensboro Grub in producing a neighborhood dinner, enjoyed an evening of a free coffee cafe on our block for our neighbors and passerbys, and offered a street screen-printing event so that neighbors could wear the SEA logo around town. We have also held monthly episodes of our performance game CITY, which re-imagines our museum as a pretend city. Participants given visas and are invited to play a variety of characters, run CITY institutions like the library, bank, department store, skyscraper, motel, and more, and generally explore a collaborative game of pretend. We are interested in how this shared story, or fiction, can examine and expose real issues in our surrounding neighborhood. Anyone can play, even if you've never performed before. This year, we've been opening CITY up to many more participants, while continuing to film each event and transform them into movies on youtube.

We have two more events planned before Elsewhere goes on hiatus for the winter (we close the museum from november to march due to lack of heat in our very old building). The first is our living room lecture series on friday october 9th. Anyone is invited to give a 20 minute lecture on something they know anything about. Then the next friday, october 16th, we'll have the finale of our CITY games for the season. Come over and play. Be a farmer a baker a tourist, anyone really. Hope to see you here!