Cecilia McKinnon
Cecilia worked as VISTA with Design Planning Assistance Center (DPAC), a partner of STEAM New Mexico. DPAC was started in 1969 to provide community engaged design to low-income and rural communities. They believe that “design affects lives” a principle that has guided Cecilia’s work for the subsequent years.
While working with DPAC, Cecilia was allocated to two main projects: the Mayor’s Institute City Design (MICD) and the Central Corridor Neighborhood Study. Both of these projects built her understanding of the public work within Albuquerque where she has lived for the last six years. Her year of service was a means for her to learn about similar initiatives enacted by cities throughout New Mexico. In order to understand the DPAC archives within their broader context, she compared them to the personal journals of George Pearl held by UNM’s Center for Southwest Research. In this project she sorted through upwards of 5,000 papers to archive the first five years of DPAC’s catalogue. In the latter half of her service, her work even related to her undergraduate studies when offered opportunities to curate shows on the DPAC archives and SeedBroadcast, a local art initiative to save seeds.
During her work as a VISTA, Cecilia created community assessment reports. These reports are created by institutions to identify communities in need. When studying community needs, often the findings are never shared with the community. Her work with the School of Architecture and Planning Gallery addressed this issue by making the often private institutional bodies of knowledge now public. Often semester long project timelines and lack of communication between changing faculty, can lead to an inability to affect change. The work Cecilia did with STEAM NM hopes to alleviate some of these outlined issues by facilitating communication between private institutions and public resources. Cecilia is a part of the Graft Collective, a space for showing art work and performance in Albuquerque’s neighborhood of Barelas.
While working with DPAC, Cecilia was allocated to two main projects: the Mayor’s Institute City Design (MICD) and the Central Corridor Neighborhood Study. Both of these projects built her understanding of the public work within Albuquerque where she has lived for the last six years. Her year of service was a means for her to learn about similar initiatives enacted by cities throughout New Mexico. In order to understand the DPAC archives within their broader context, she compared them to the personal journals of George Pearl held by UNM’s Center for Southwest Research. In this project she sorted through upwards of 5,000 papers to archive the first five years of DPAC’s catalogue. In the latter half of her service, her work even related to her undergraduate studies when offered opportunities to curate shows on the DPAC archives and SeedBroadcast, a local art initiative to save seeds.
During her work as a VISTA, Cecilia created community assessment reports. These reports are created by institutions to identify communities in need. When studying community needs, often the findings are never shared with the community. Her work with the School of Architecture and Planning Gallery addressed this issue by making the often private institutional bodies of knowledge now public. Often semester long project timelines and lack of communication between changing faculty, can lead to an inability to affect change. The work Cecilia did with STEAM NM hopes to alleviate some of these outlined issues by facilitating communication between private institutions and public resources. Cecilia is a part of the Graft Collective, a space for showing art work and performance in Albuquerque’s neighborhood of Barelas.