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This year’s annual Beloved Community project through Salt Lake Community College features meaningful and impactful ways to engage with the project through two mediums – film and photography.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. popularized the phrase “beloved community” to represent his vision for societies that embrace cooperation, unity and connection. To honor and apply this bold idea, SLCC’s School of Arts, Communication and Media created the Beloved Community Project to facilitate explorations of Dr. King’s concepts and how they can be applied to our own communities. Elementary school students are the stars of the photography project, and the Utah-based film, created in partnership with Brolly Arts, uses local voices to connect with Dr. King’s support of social equity and justice.
This year, SLCC’s School of Arts, Communication and Media and Brolly Arts are presenting a virtual screening of the new 25-minute Beloved Community Film Project followed by a panel discussion. This event is free and open to the public Feb. 25, 7 p.m., and a Zoom link will be posted here. “I’m very happy with it – it was a lot of work,” says Marian Howe-Taylor, SLCC Communication and Media Outreach Manager, who worked on the film with Brolly Arts founder Amy MacDonald, SLCCTV and TWIG Media Lab since 2015. “You don’t really know when you have six years working on something how much information you have collected until you try to narrow it all down.”
The beautifully produced, powerful film, dubbed Black Social Change Utah in its first incarnation, features leaders from the community, staff and faculty from SLCC, local educators and activists, artists, students and more, talking about Black history, hope, examples of triumph over racism and their own stories and histories from within their communities.
For Howe-Taylor, who in fall of 1967 marched with Dr. King in Boston, whose uncle Virgil Wood worked directly with Dr. King, whose father in 1965 walked with John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, who remembers Coretta Scott King coming to her church to offer words of inspiration, the film is deeply personal. “She would wait until you could hear a pin drop,” Howe-Taylor says about Scott King. “And then she spoke the words, ‘If we can teach hate, surely, we can teach love.’ That’s what the Beloved Community film project tries to express.”
Historically, for the Beloved Community photography project, students are provided cameras and instruction by SLCC, which includes activities that explore Dr. King’s legacy, and then they head out into their communities to portray in photos their interpretations of beloved community. This year, students at Whittier Elementary School used their cell phones or whatever cameras they had available to them, while students at Adelaide Elementary School were able to access cameras from SLCC. Normally, their work is displayed for in-person visits and the College holds a reception to honor their work. This year, however, because of the pandemic, the exhibit will be a virtual one, starting Feb. 19. Check back here for more details on how you will be able to enjoy their extraordinary efforts and learn a little bit about each student photographer.
“We’re really glad, even with the unusual circumstances this year, that we can continue with this project and have students participate,” says Josh Elstein, Program Manager for SLCC’s Center for Arts and Media. “We hope students really find a way to connect with their community and share their voice through artwork.”
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