Waters Avenue: The Planters Tour!

“People come to Savannah and pay for the tours downtown to learn about this city. But people drive down Waters Avenue one time and think they know everything about this place.”

By Annemarie Spitz

Team ArtMe designed the planter project to be a beginning. We sought to pique interest and spark conversation while focusing attention on underused community assets. As the end of our academic quarter drew near, we needed a way to share our work and transition the project into its next phase, but we knew it couldn’t be an ordinary final presentation. This project wasn’t about powerpoint slides in a dark, quiet classroom. We wanted our guests to experience our project as we had: on the sidewalk, in planned and coincidental conversations, discovering unanticipated connections. We also wanted a forum to share the rich history and stories that we had collected about the planters. Keeping with Savannah custom, we designed a walking tour and corresponding guidebook.

For the inaugural Waters Avenue Planters Tour, we invited people from the community, local government, and SCAD. Our intention was to both present our work and facilitate the beginning of the project’s next phase with Jerome Meadows. Jerome, a renowned artist and Waters Avenue resident and business owner, is committed to continuing the planter project through sculptural exploration and community engagement. The tour was a way to engage existing contacts as well as introduce new potential partners to the project and Jerome. We began our tour at Jerome’s studio with a brief introduction before moving across the street to a planter at Best Cleaners. Here we consider the planters’ past.

Next, we walked south to the corner of Anderson and Waters. Along the way, we and our guests struck up conversations about our various connections to these neighborhoods. We arrived at two planters, standing before an empty lot where the tile floor of the recently-demolished building remains. Here we consider the planters’ present.

Across the street and north one block, we arrive at the planters in front of Best Appliances. Here we consider the planters’ future.
The informal conversations continued as we walked back to Jerome’s studio. There we enjoyed lunch (courtesy of Ms Penny’s restaurant on Waters near 37th St) and continued our discussion of the planters’ potential. Jerome explained his vision for sculptural expression, and others brought up ideas for gardening, engaging students, and creating a visually-distinct district. The planters are gaining attention, but this is just the beginning.

Forward “Motion” on Waters

By Krista Williams

Team Motion has completed a toolkit that will help facilitate community dialogue and inspire action.

The toolkit consists of a deck of playing cards with specific rules and regulations, incorporating a mapping tool that visualizes ideas and discussions that occur during the game.

The MOTIONcards serve to define problems, to create a shared understanding of issues, connect people, uncover the various ways that people align with one another and create successful communication and interaction. The purpose of the game is to create an environment where constructive conversation can take place.

The cards provide an opportunity for people to contribute and to think in new ways. As they engage in the game, a positive conversation naturally emerges.

This tool has been made available for download : Once you visit our blog – go to the ToolKit tab and click the MOTIONcards link and you will be redirected to Google Documents where you can download the files as a pdf by going to FILE, DOWNLOAD.

Celebrating Community with Motion

By Kelly Vormelker

It’s not simple to show the trajectory of a team that hasn’t followed a set of sequential steps; a team that has had to keep moving and adapting to the constant changing conditions of the Waters Avenue Revitalization Project. This is about a team in motion.

The members that create Team Motion, Krista, Tiffani, Kelly and César, were organized together in mid-January with the purpose of creating an event to engage the Waters Avenue community. The team immediately met with Ramsey Khalidi, owner of Southern Pine and host of the upcoming No-Control Festival. Motion heard about the festival, and got involved.

The No-Control Festival is an event in Savannah that provides music, food, and fun activities for everyone in the community. Motion re-directed the workshop in order to incorporate a collaboration with No-Control. The team took one of its original concepts, an interactive activity based on a chalkboard, and put it into practice during the festival.

The inspiration to create community engagement and constructive conversation hasn’t changed for Team Motion. The festival on February 18th served as a motivation to develop a toolkit that facilitates dialogue. Both the blackboard and the upcoming toolkit are inspired by the forces and voices that already exist in this wonderful neighborhood. Team Motion’s movement shows a dedication to staying in constant alignment with these voices.

Team Motion has been working on creating a toolkit in order to facilitate constructive community dialogue and to inspire action. An upcoming workshop will be held for a group of community members. A toolkit will be used during the workshop and left with the community, so that community members will use the toolkit to further create constructive conversations and positive action.

The upcoming Design Ethos conference represents an opportunity for the implementation and integration of Motion’s efforts and toolkit.
Hopefully, this toolkit will provide a unique way for the community to come together, learn about each other, and grow. Check out our blog to see our journey through this project and to see our progress on our toolkit. The toolkit will be made available to the public for download in a week.
Team Motion.

The Mystery of the Waters Avenue Planters

By Annemarie Spitz

ArtMe’s planter project has made me feel more like a detective than a graduate student. Seven weeks ago, we identified the large, mostly underused, concrete planters as a potential point of intervention on Waters Avenue. First through observation and then casual conversations, we began to gather clues…

“The city put them there.”

“The businesses have them.”

“They’ll fill with trash if you don’t cover them.”

“I’ve been meaning to plant something in ours.”

“They’re only in this area. None of the other planters in Savannah look like that.”

“I rented a forklift to move mine.”

Most people we spoke with were under the impression that the City of Savannah had placed the planters…but when and why? We followed this lead to Dr. Landis Faulcon, project consultant for the City of Savannah’s Waters Avenue Revitalization Project. She was able to confirm that the city was involved in the planters’ installation but indicated that this effort was coordinated by a business owners’ association. ArtMe was familiar with WABA (short for Waters Avenue Business Association), but the planters clearly pre-date this organization’s fairly recent formation. How could we find someone from this previous association?

An interview with Ellen Harris from the Metropolitan Planning Commission gave us great insight into management of public space in Savannah as well as a hot tip for historical research. In a city dating from 1733, we hadn’t thought of these planters as “historical,” but we followed the lead to the City of Savannah’s Research Library and Municipal Archives. Thanks to the thorough research of Acting Director and Archivist Luciana Spracher, ArtMe was in for a surprise. The planters had been installed in 1976! And this time, our clue came with a name: Rosemary Banks, then-president of the Waters Avenue Business Association. Read more

Planting Voices

By Laura Schoenthaler

A plan for a series of temporary installations along the Waters Avenue corridor commenced this past weekend, inspiring creativity, curiosity, and conversation surrounding community-based public art projects as part of the Waters Avenue Revitalization Project.

Members of ARTme and local artist Jerome Meadows constructed a series of large, brightly colored speech-bubble signs. The signs consist of a smaller neon speech-bubble with written a prompt and a larger white speech bubble with writing instrument attached. The signs were designed with prompt and responses components intended to serve as vehicle for soliciting interaction and insight as to what developments the community envisions for the future of Waters Avenue.

An initial installation of ten signs within the streetscape planters along The Corridor resulted in capturing interest of local community members from the public and private sectors, as well as a few written responses on the signs. The signs were monitored routinely so that the progress could be documented via photographs. This introductory series of paper-based signs were only planted for about 48 hours before inclement weather damaged the signs, forcing their removal by ARTme.

Despite the shortened posting duration of the initial series of signs, significant progress towards the project goal was achieved. Written responses from the temporary installation described the desire for a clean outdoor environment and the need for a local recreation center for children and young adults. Opinions of respondents in this demographic can be easily ignored during revitalization projects, however the prompts served as an accessible forum to have their desires for their community acknowledged.

The planting of second series of ten signs is scheduled for this weekend, weather permitting. This series of new signs and prompts will be used to solicit continued interaction and the contribution of ideas from the community.

The Planter Project: ARTme Digs In

By Sarah Tolzmann

On track with our plan to facilitate a community-based public art project on Waters Avenue, Team ARTme continues to look closely at the 28 “eye sore” concrete planters located up and down the corridor.

In the past week, discussions have progressed with local artist Jerome Meadows, his neighbors, adjacent businesses, and community organizations, including the Waters Avenue Business Association, and Eastside Concerned Citizens. We have confirmed that Jerome is committed to carrying the project forward beyond not only the completion of our SCAD quarter, but Design Ethos as well. This commitment has prompted the team to actively seek historic information and community feedback to bolster his artistic vision as the project evolves.

Our current agenda consists largely of information hunting on the mysterious origin of the planters. We are also working to introduce business owners and residents around the corridor so proactive community conversation might continue well beyond our project. Finally, we are working to secure donations of plants, landscaping materials, and the manpower to move one or two available planters to Jerome’s studio, which will act as the basis of a sculptural public art piece.

Read more

Discover. Engage. Celebrate. WATERS!

By Marina Petrova

When I started the class The Role of Graphic Design for Social Awareness, I knew the class would be involved with the Waters Avenue Revitalization project and would require real field work, but I had no idea it would get so real – evolving, adapting, throbbing with excitement or anxiety and full of surprises.

The goal of our 10 week class was to design a campaign to inform the Waters Avenue community about the assets of its people and initiate a sense of pride and celebration that would enhance community dialogue and collaboration. Strangely enough our class consisted of 5 students from 5 different countries – Bulgaria, India, China, Vietnam and the United States. Were we the ones to tell the people on Waters what they had? Or maybe coming from foreign places all over the world we were able to look on Waters with fresh eyes and unprejudiced minds.

We started our class discussions with reading the contextual research findings of a SCAD Fall’11 class. We made a few timid walks to Waters. Then we met as a class three community pillars – Jerome Meadows – a public artist residing and working on Waters, Gator Rivers – a basketball coach and ex-Harlem Globetrotter, and Sidney J. Johnson – a long time resident, community member and businessman… and a whole new world opened up . We learned stories about history and self-expression, victories and glory, magic and ritual, goodwill and faith in people.

We've used self-documentation projects to complement our understanding of the people we interviewed. Here Gator Rivers shows us what he is proud of.

The goal of the first part of our assignment was to get in-depth knowledge of the three pillars and present them to the Waters community and the Design Ethos blog. Each team conducted a series of interviews, and spent time with their interviewees to learn more about them and what they did. Read more

Signs for Type

By Chris Risdon

There are a lot of ways to get inspiration as a type designer. You can make a type design completely from scratch. You can take an historical typeface from the days of yore (i.e. pre-digital age) and bring it into the 21st century with some new touches. Or you can be inspired by your surroundings, pulling in from such things as graffiti and hand-painted signs. It was that last example which lead me to design SAV Display – a typeface inspired by the local signage of Savannah, GA.

When I started to study the hand painted signage around the city, I tried to learn more about the sign painters responsible. I had a friend, Rebecca Boehm Carr, who was doing research into the actual letterers as part of her thesis project while attending SCAD. She had learned that there were three painters around town who were responsible for the 2 or 3 styles that were found as signs for local merchants. Read more

Words of Wisdom: Mr. Sidney J. Johnson

By Foram Shah

“It’s not Sidney Johnson, but Sidney. J. Johnson! Don’t forget the J…” This was amongst the first things that our team Walkers, learnt about Mr. Johnson. The J stands for his father, role model and politician, Mr. Joseph S. Johnson. His deep connection with the J becomes even more apparent when we visit his home and his other properties – each of them adorned with the fancy J carefully made out of metal.

Ask him about the history and his experiences along Waters Avenue and watch him go on animatedly, most of which begins with “My daddy always told me…”

Mr. Johnson was born in Savannah. Though he and his sister received their education in New York, they always came back to Savannah during their vacations, hence creating a strong bond with their family and neighbors. After completing high school, he joined the American Navy and served there till 1944, when his father bought several properties in Savannah. It is during this time that he decided to return back to Savannah and do what he was really passionate about: Real Estate.
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Planters Reconsidered

By Kate Bordine

Over the last couple weeks, Team ArtMe has been walking up and down Waters Ave to talk to local residents and business owners. Our conversation pieces are the 28 concrete planters which dot the sidewalk between Victory and Wheaton. Of this set, 6 are well cared for, and our purpose was to gauge the communities interest in the 22 seemingly abandoned planters. After the team assessed the placement and locality we decided it was time to take action. We started walking at Jerome Meadows studio, Indigo Sky, and began by simply picking up trash and knocking on doors.

As we walked we drummed up conversations with community members along the way. Most were curious observers who started asking questions about our ongoings. We then spoke to the small business owners, bridging relationships to find out their desired plans for their unactivated planters. These forgotten objects were beginning to become points of discussion. Read more