VIDEO: Interview with Resident Alumni Sammy Lee, Pt. 4: The Importance of Community
In the final installation of this four-part video interview series (watch Part 1 here, watch Part 2 here, and watch Part 3 here), Denver-based art critic and writer Kealey Boyd explores the importance of community with Resident Alumni Sammy Lee.
Lee shares more about how her experience as a RedLine Artist Resident inspired her to open her current studio to other artists by founding a new residency program at Collective SML | k in Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District.
She also discusses how her time as a Youth Art Mentor in RedLine’s EPIC Arts program helped her realize the impact that artists can make on the greater community.
Watch Interview with Resident Alumni Sammy Lee Part 4: The Importance of Community
Sammy Lee: I learned with art, it's not really about me doing something for myself, creating and channeling out. It's not just the “me” community. I really mean all this greater impact that I can create, it's bigger than me, and understanding that and also power of art.
I think it was natural for me to...initially this space, too, I wanted it to have it as my studio, but I think [my] experience at RedLine definitely helped me to make me want to share this with other people, and actually create community and create a bigger network and connecting people.
So I think that basic understanding came from my experience of being at residency and understanding what it means to create that community.
Kealey Boyd: Is there a [RedLine] program that you ran or attended that is particularly memorable?
Sammy Lee: So [the] EPIC Program was really nice, because shaping how I want to-
Kealey Boyd: What's the EPIC Program?
Sammy Lee: [The] EPIC Program was something that was actually one semester, you're committed to the inner city Denver school TPS program, and you're partner with the art teacher, and you go can help them assist the art teacher, and come up with the projects and help students to culminate that project.
But we're given this set of questionnaire, and I remember we're basically discussing in the class, defining what the problems that they see in their community in school, and using art, how do we address it and make it better? Basically that was the gist of it.
As an artist, sometime you have this doubt: I am not in a profession that tangibly makes difference. But I felt like, no, with art you can make such an impact.
So students identify a dress code of school banning like wearing hoodies as a problem because they want to wear a hoodie. We had a whole list of why, why not, and we ended up making huge hoodies facing each other, talking about all this historical dress code and issues and what it resolved versus what schools concerned.
So with this huge insulation, and it was really, teach me and the children that we can really communicate through art, and through art, maybe we can really have difficult conversation.
So I really saw, and it kind of took care of that self-doubt, whether am I able to do something meaningful with art? With my life, if I become artist, can I do that? So that helped me answer that.
About Sammy Lee
Sammy Lee is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
About Interviewer Kealey Boyd
Kealey Boyd is a writer and art critic based in Denver, Colorado. Her research interests include methodologies for interpreting painting and other visual forms as an integral element of political and cultural discourses.