Around Town: Baltimore AMP
As many of you know, I have worked with a local non-profit group, the Baltimore Art and Music Project, for several years. Better known as the Baltimore AMP, the organization is based out of Dundalk, MD and aims to provide a safe, drug-free environment for kids and teens to express themselves through art. For more information on the Baltimore AMP click here.
We not only hold some great events for kids and teens, but we put on some neat community events and have some pretty fun fund-raisers for the organization. (I’ll have to post some of these events in the future). In addition to the events that the Baltimore AMP puts on, we participate in other kid and art oriented events in neighboring communities.
I had the pleasure of spending Oct 4th, which happened to be my birthday, with the Baltimore AMP at the O’Donnell Heights Community Family Fun Day. As many of you know, many of the homes in O’Donnell Heights were torn down and the community is trying to rebuild itself. What better way to build a community than holding a free, family-oriented arts festival?
There was a moon-bounce, face painting, and the Baltimore AMP came and set up an art table for the kids. What a blast!
The ‘boys’ brought in some drums for the live music, instrument jam session we had with the kids…
Eric showed the kids how to create beats on the conga drums…
Since we are an ‘arts’ organization, at every event we set up an outlined canvas for participants at the event to design, draw and color on in whatever way they are inspired to do so. To teach the kids how the drawing/sketching process works, we first had them sketch their design idea out on an index card.
They then used their sketch to transfer their idea onto the final canvas print.
All of the kids who participated in either the music making or design and draw won a prize…
We usually keep the canvas art pieces from each event in hopes that one day, when we have a building, we will be able to display the years of art our organization has nourished. Since this was a community event for O’Donnell Heights, Carla, our director, decided to donate the canvas to the local community center….
