Fellow Travelers: The Beauty of Community Engaged Art | Elika Tofigh

This year I have had the honor and blessing of being a Perkins Fellow and working with Virginia Book Arts, a community arts organization and letterpress printmaking studio. The community at VBA is wonderful and has welcomed me in such a sweet way, and I am happy to be working with them again next year, also through Perkins Fellows. Throughout my volunteering with them, I have spent time in the studio helping out with their reorganization, learning the basics of letterpress printmaking, and working with artist, educator, and VBA co-chair Lyall Harris to bring art to the community through a community-based project. 

The project, which has taken place over the last 6 months or so, is called Fellow Travelers, inspired by VBA’s new location in the old train station and centered around the idea of transportation, something that connects us all. For the project, which will ultimately manifest in an art book sometime within the next year, Lyall and I went to various transit-related sites—the bus, the airport, the Amtrak station, bike shops and running stores, the downtown mall, the VBA studio, and more—and asked individuals one question: where would you like to get to? The question is interpretive, and we encouraged this; there were a diverse array of answers, from practical and locational to spiritual and metaphysical. We also collected first names and ages to personalize the responses slightly, though participants could remain anonymous if they so chose. 

We recently compiled all of the responses we collected (which totaled to 230!), and reading them over has been monumental and remarkable. Next year, we will be figuring out the exact form of the book and how we want to print and distribute it. And while these tangible results of our work have been exciting, what was most moving about the project, and what Lyall and I both believe was the most important part of the project, were the conversations we had with the strangers who participated in Fellow Travelers. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge introvert and super quiet with strangers or those I’m not close to. When conceptualizing the project, the idea of going up to strangers and talking to them seemed like an impossible task. And while it didn’t really get easier over time, Lyall and I both were able to create some genuine moments of connection with strangers and have some meaningful conversations with people we might have never met otherwise. 

The project has been beautiful for me for a number of reasons. Pushing myself to talk to strangers has opened up my world and made me realize that the barriers we all put up when it comes to talking to strangers can be dismantled, though it can be so difficult. Also, getting off grounds and into Charlottesville as a city has been refreshing and eye-opening; the UVA bubble is real, and it can be easy to forget or ignore the beauty of and, conversely, the problems that face the larger Charlottesville community. While our work as artists may not be as tangible as other kinds of community service, I believe that it is similarly important. Art is an integral part of being human, and on the bus, or at the train station or the airport, when we are anxiously waiting for our stops or trains or flights, listening to music or on our phones, lost in the hurry and stress of everyday, sometimes we can forget we are human. In the interactions we had with strangers all over Charlottesville, I believe that Fellow Travelers has brought art to the community through our invitation to all individuals to participate in our project, giving them the opportunity to think creatively and create art through their words and ideas, and bringing humanity back to the places of transit we visited. 

As an artist, it is common and can be tempting to retreat into my studio and into myself, focusing on what matters to me and how to express my own thoughts and ideas. And while there is certainly a time and place for that, Fellow Travelers has taught me the value of taking art out into the community and creating a work collectively with many different voices, which is especially important in today’s isolating and divisive sociopolitical climate. I hope that in the future I can continue to find ways to engage my community through art, and I am grateful for this project and the opportunity to serve VBA and the Charlottesville community through Perkins Fellows this year.