Instrument-making at the Baltimore Museum of Art

I developed a pre-Columbian flute-making workshop for the Baltimore Museum of Art with the goal of activating their Ancient Americas collection in a new way. Through this program, which was free and open to the public, participants connected with cultural artifacts on display and in the museum's archives for inspiration, and then learned to build their own working clay flutes. 

  In this month-long residency, which was organized by the non-profit organization Story Tapestries, I guided 5 groups of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders through a bilingual “Mud to Music” workshop process. 150 students were introduced to ancient musical instruments from Central and South America and learned how to make their own ocarinas, which were unique to each of them in sound and form.  

At the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis I gave a longer format 4 session workshop where participants explored ancient pottery techniques in depth to build and decorate zoomorphic ocarinas inspired by historic instruments of the Americas.  After instruments were fired we reconvened for a communal flute jam session to explore and learn to play our own unique instruments.