Quimby: Jessica Hamilton-Jones
Jessica Hamilton-Jones, our 2025 Quimby Fellowship awardee, attended a two-week workshop at Haystack with artist, educator, and cultural organizer Valeska Populoh.
It is with immense joy and a deep sense of honor that I can share with you my experience as the 2025 recipient of the Quimby Family Foundation Fellowship. This opportunity granted me two unforgettable weeks at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft on Deer Isle, Maine, an experience that I will forever cherish.
As a member of the MAEA, I have had the privilege of attending numerous fall conferences at Haystack. These opportunities have been instrumental in my personal and professional growth, pushing me beyond my comfort zone in an environment that nourishes the spirit. Exposure to new media, such as stained glass, screen printing, bookmaking, weaving, and even laser printing, significantly enriched my teaching toolbox and deepened my practice as an artist.
The workshop I chose for my two-week residency was another example of picking something out of the ordinary. I chose Processes, Parades, and Lantern-Building for Community Engagement.
Our instructor, Valeska Populoh, infused this workshop with relationship-building in a way I never expected. We would gather every morning in a collective circle, modeling brief activities that allowed individuals to feel safe, seen, and valued within the greater collective, while balancing play with deeper exploration. Valeska referred to this as building a container for our group. This group was diverse, ranging from the youngest participants, who were in their first years of college, to the oldest participant, in her 80s. Just as varied were the lived experiences, cultures, perspectives, and places that we all came from.
The range and scope of the lanterns were incredible. There was a dragon, a luna moth, and abstract forms. Everyone went in their own artistic direction, but what was amazing was seeing how we came together to parade our art under a cohesive theme. I learned more about performance art and its historical and even ancient roots as a means of communication and, even, of bringing about social change and awareness. We learned tips to host our own community art builds and the importance of shared experiences and traditions.
At the end of our two weeks, our workshop culminated in a campus parade and performance to showcase our hard work. The learning continued as we checked our route for safety issues, advertised our event, enlisted helpers from other workshops to provide musical support, and planned the final climax dance party that engaged the staff, admin, and participants across the whole Haystack community.
Building on this momentum, I plan to organize local community art projects inspired by my fellowship experience, aiming to foster stronger connections and creative expression within the Central Maine community. This two-week experience has profoundly impacted my teaching approach by encouraging the integration of community engagement strategies and artistic practices into my curriculum, resulting in more impactful and relevant learning experiences for my students.
I am deeply grateful to the Quimby Family Foundation for their support, which made this transformation possible. Because of this experience, I have developed a renewed sense of my role as a teacher and my place as an individual in a larger community. I have gained new skills in community engagement, facilitation, and artistic collaboration, which I am eager to apply to future projects. I am committed to using the knowledge and skills I gained from the fellowship to continue contributing to the arts education community and to make a meaningful difference in students' lives by building stronger communities through the power of creative expression.
