Community Care through Bookmaking

Here at GMAACC, we are consistently investigating and playing with how to use art as a tool to understand and empower our communities. This past spring, we invited our communities to create art with us under a shared question: what does community care mean to you?

Local artist Yuko Okabe led the workshop series Imagining Medford Books and Imagine Malden Books—now the Community Care Books—as a way to invite the Greater Malden AANHPI Community to re-imagine their communities through drawing and bookmaking. Yuko designed individual book pages to include prompts that inspired conversations about what resources and spaces people need to live happily and fully in their neighborhoods. By the end of the workshop, each participant created a 5-page book that detailed a collective vision of what community care means to them through writing and drawing.

We had the pleasure of collaborating with four wonderful businesses and community spaces to host our four main workshops during April and May of this year. At our first workshop at Colleen’s Ice Cream and Sandwich Shop, we talked with neighbors about civic engagement and GMAACC programs while munching on sandwiches and devouring ice cream. One of our participants Matt Hassan had also been selling work at Colleen’s and gave us a mini artist talk about his process. Moving into Malden for our second workshop, the Gallery@57 provided an inspiring, creative space for us to quietly make books with long-term and recent residents of the city. Our piles of colorful embroidery strings and markers blended well against the hip atmosphere of our third host, Idle Hands Craft Ales, where GMAACC Co-Founder and Former Board President Diana Jeong joined our bookmaking festivities in the taproom. Finally, we had a great turnout from Medford and Malden Youth at the Medford Public Library’s workshop where we once again enjoyed sandwiches and ice cream from Colleen’s while having good laughs and hearty conversations. 

Our participants created about 30 books with additional books made during our Pride in the Park drop-in book making event in June. Through the book prompts, many participants shared the need for third-spaces where neighbors can share a meal, volunteer, garden, engage in arts and culture, find peace, focus on self-care, or to simply “check-in” with others. For the last prompt in the book (“Now what could community care look like in your city?”), a participant drew an outdoor gym and picnic space where people can exercise while enjoying food. Another person wrote, “[a] safe space for everyone to learn from one another.”

Not only were these workshops an opportunity to provide free artmaking to our neighbors, but we now have a colorful data set of books that will inform current and future programs for GMAACC. Especially as we await the completion of our Asian American Community & Cultural Center, these insights will help shape what community gathering will look like. 

This program is supported in part by a grant from two local agencies: the Medford Arts Council and Malden Cultural Council. Both councils are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

Below, you will find a zine that Yuko created which summarizes the Community Care Books workshops and takeaways.