Mission
The project’s name comes from a French expression meaning “as a whole”, or “all together”.
EN MASSE is a multi-artist collaborative drawing project that creates boldly black-and-white works of public art; underlining the power of shared creativity, and the building of strong communities through effective communication.
We create embodied learning spaces where participants from all walks of life come together to support cooperation, not compromise...where different points of view are celebrated as strengths, not weaknesses.
EN MASSE emphasizes process as being far more valuable than the final product, and invites participants to find the courage to actively listen and work together through a process designed to remind us of our dreams, to affirm, and to reinforce our deeply human need to belong.
“''Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.''
”
Leopold Henryk Staff | November 14, 1878 – May 31, 1957
Cultural Learning
EN MASSE generates community vitality, by encouraging people to define and redefine themselves in relation to their past, inherited culture, and our present shared circumstance.
We use a hands-on process of Cultural Learning. Together, we explore the way groups of people within society transmit information and knowledge from cross cultural-generational perspectives
we affirm that
All humans have creative potential
EN MASSE affirms that all humans have creative potential as the projects engages and cultivates within participants and audience alike, a developing:
Sense of creativity and initiative through the development of a fertile imagination
Emotional intelligence, as we learn to share space with others in a cooperative environment
Capacity for critical reflection
Sense of autonomy within community
Freedom of thought and action.
Today, we are facing global challenges of environmental and political upheaval, we must develop capacities to enrich creativity.
It is through the eyes of artists we see the
transcendent possibilities of imagination,
and it is through imagination that we
envision a new reality for tomorrow.
Art has always been a powerful tool in helping us wake up to and confront the issues facing us, in deeply positive ways.
This has never been more important than right now.
Through shared creativity, art powerfully motivates and animates conversations that are usually drowned under roaring tides of cultural opinions. It is through the eyes of artists we see the transcendent possibilities of imagination, and it is through imagination that we envision a new reality for tomorrow.
