Artist and educator Hillary Younglove was content working on her various projects alone in her home. She'd made a career out of it. But a conversation about puppetry would change the course, igniting a new passion she had not realized.
Her friend told her about the Processional Arts Workshop, a nonprofit ensemble of puppeteers, artists, and musicians committed to creating site-specific, community-organized parades, processions, and performances in the small Northern Italian town of Morinesio. Led by American workshop instructors Alex Kahn and Sophie Michahelles, locals would come together to make large puppets from recycled materials while learning techniques such as bamboo armature construction, paper-mâché casting, and scenic painting.
The California-based Rhode Island School of Design alum and former Fulbright Scholar found the project fascinating. She decided to travel to Morinesio with her employer's art department, theater teacher, and music teacher. They joined in the puppet-making, and on the day of the culminating event, the Midsummer Procession, she was surprised to see hundreds of people show up with puppets from past years to march throughout the town before gathering for a large dinner.
"I think it was at that moment I thought, 'Wow, the artwork that we made is reaching all these people,'" Hillary says. "And I just loved seeing the magic in the adults' and children's eyes, and I thought, I want to do this. It was the start of my thinking about community art and its impact."
Today, Hillary proudly promotes community projects as a specialty. In 2023, she'd return to Italy—this time to Lentini, Sicily—with her Sonoma Academy students, who collaborated with local non-profit Badia Lost & Found on a mural project.
Hillary and I chatted about that recent project, its inspiration, subject, challenges and highlights, impact on the students and community, and more.
What inspired this project, and why Sicily?
We do a lot of trips abroad with the students. A couple of years ago, I thought it would be great for our students to get to know Italian teenagers. So our arts department planned a trip to Sicily. One of my colleagues, a music teacher, has family from Puglia, and he's been to Sicily a lot, so he wanted to do an arts trip to promote his music program. And I said, "Well, if I'm going to come, I want to do a mural."
I started reaching out to different arts organizations in Sicily, writing to them without knowing anyone. I showed them the murals I'd done, but I wasn't getting very far. Then, I was put in touch with an organization called Badia Lost & Found, which is in Lentini. They were the perfect organization, a group of artists who wanted to revitalize a beautiful yet dilapidated neighborhood full of history. They started having local artists do murals throughout this designated arts district.
Lentini is not a tourist town at all. It's off the beaten track, but the people love their town. They started to put these murals in, and they got a big building where they have art classes, too, for the local kids. And so it was a perfect fit for us to partner with them.
I was put in touch with Erika Puntillo at Badia Lost and Found, who spoke English fluently. So we planned something on Zoom. It was right at the end of the pandemic. I'd had some experience making murals before with students, so I knew how long it would take to do something. I knew we only had one day to do it, which was really tight.
My goal was for our teenagers to interact with Lentini's teenagers. And so she got a local high school with an arts focus to come, and they were going to paint with our students.
Meanwhile, I did some research because they said they wanted something symbolic that represented the region. So I started going online and visiting museums and looking at different artifacts, and I found this image that I thought would work well as a mural. It was a Byzantine image, a stone carving. I thought the simple design would allow all skill levels to participate. So I took that image and drew it, and then I had one of my students create several color variations to scale. We sent those color palettes and designs off to the people at Badia Lost and Found, and then they chose the one they wanted.
Byzantine carving on display at the Regional Archaeological Museum of Agrigento
What were some of the challenges you faced?
We had exactly six hours to paint this mural. So I asked them if they could paint the background color before we arrived, leaving us just enough time to sketch out the whole thing and paint it.
We rented a big tour bus to take the students around Sicily. When we arrived in Lentini, it was really funny because it felt like we were rock stars arriving in this little town that Americans and other tourists seldom visited. The local citizens' heads turned as the bus pulled in. Our bus got stuck on one of the small side streets, but the locals helped us get the bus unstuck through lots of gesticulation and advice. And so we were late, and then it started raining.
The student artists in action
Tell us about the experience when you got there.
We immediately got to work. They had their group of kids there; our kids hit it off with them immediately. It was really great. I was so happy to see that my goal had already been achieved through their interaction. As word got out in town that the Americans were painting on a side street, an English teacher brought her class over. There were tons of kids talking excitedly, exchanging stories and ideas about teenage life in Lentini versus life in California with views on art and soccer. It was beyond what I had hoped for. So I was super happy.
They also had commissioned a local muralist. She worked with the Lentini art students while I worked with mine. Our murals were face-to-face on different apartment walls.
They asked the neighborhood, "Do you want a mural on your building?" And one family agreed to have our design painted on their apartment.
The family, with two little boys, watched the progress with excitement. We got it done just as the sun went down. So it was great because even after that day, the Sonoma Academy students kept in touch with the Lentini art students they had made friends with, and then those kids met us on the last day in Catania. It was really heartwarming to see that connection.
The artists beneath their finished masterpiece
What did you personally take away from this experience?
I'd love to do more community-based art projects so that people who don't frequent galleries or museums have art in their lives. Art is for everyone, and everyone should participate in the act of making something creative. So, I would love to collaborate more here and abroad. It's just a wonderful thing.
Art from Hillary's recent Traveling Postcards exhibit
I actually just finished a project that I did for a nonprofit called Traveling Postcards, which supports survivors of gender-based violence through the healing arts. I curated a show in Washington, D.C., for the organization and went there in October to help hang the show. As part of the exhibit, my students helped with writing quotes from survivors and made collages that I turned into small butterflies that accompanied my giant one.
I'm really interested in how art is a healing and community force. And so I want to keep doing projects like these.
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