The Blog

A Little Creative Class has partnered with Escape Tiny Houses, to offer short-term leases on two of their units for artists for self-directed residency. Forty percent of the rental fee goes directly to support A Little Creative Class’s work with marginalized youth and their families throughout New York State.

We fixed up our old scrapbook studio and now are ready to to offer project-based leases to artists who can support A Little Creative Class while realizing their vision.

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Contact us for more information on these magical spaces, the work we do, and other ways you can share your passion with us.

In January A Little Creative Class purchased a house at auction in Troy, New York. The four-bedroom two-bathroom property sat vacant for three years until we got in there with hammers, trash bags, and a vision to turn this creekside parcel into our Troy home and gathering place for creative class families.

A Little Creative Class will continue the scrapbook workshops that we have been facilitating for the past decade, and add yoga, our Creek and Rail Trash Fashion, and weekly mini-fests showcasing our DIY wares and food. We plan a series of music, dance, and theater events, and of course a night of multi-media scrapbook projections as the summer wanes. The weekly activities will culminate in our third annual trip to New York City for a broad survey of arts and culture.

The calming sound of the creek will set the tone for all who enter this drama-free safe space.

All are welcome at 150 Ida Street, Troy, New York.

The fall of 2018 saw the completion of a year-long process of cleaning out the 5000-square-foot vacant lot next to the Little Creative Class house. For the past decade, the lot had been used as a toxic dumping ground, left to collect several 40-foot trash containers and abandoned construction machinery, including leaky bulldozers, old trucks, and even a boat. With the help of the Long Island Rail Road and the NYC Department of Sanitation, we now have a clean lot and a lease to create a green space, garden activities, and art projects with our kids and industrial neighbors. We celebrated the rebirth of this natural space with a performance on October 20.

Click here to see a video of the performance

We started an art project with our young creatives called Creek & Rail. After harvesting trash and other found objects along the railroad tracks and from the lot next to our Little Creative Class house, our mentor Don Shearer helped us design high-fashion art to wear. The young people from Troy came to Maspeth to model their creations in our industrial setting:

In the summer, we gathered on 5th Ave in Troy for an all-girls mini scrapbook workshop. Heather, one of the original Scrappin’ Upstate girls, helped her daughter Jaeda, now age 10, to make her own scrapbook. We met every day – we had a lemonade stand, made cookies, and hiked along the Hudson. We made a window display of some of our Creek & Rail fashions.

The workshop culminated in a weekend trip to New York City, where we went on a whale watch and participated in the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. There, we presented our new book Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City.

Our scrapbookers:

Tony celebrated his 14th birthday with five mentors and artists from A Little Creative Class. We joined the Newtown Creek Alliance for the annual Creek-A-Thon, an epic 13-mile walk led by historian Mitch Waxman. The Creek-A-Thon is a narrated exploration around the industrial periphery of Newtown Creek, which is literally situated in the backyard of the Little Creative Class arts compound in Maspeth.

Newtown Creek has been a main inspiration for our current multidisciplinary conceptual art project, titled Creek & Rail. The project involves collecting trash and other found objects from the creek and railroad tracks that border it.

A Little Creative Class was recently mentioned on Kingston Creative’s blog: http://kingstoncreative.net/the-new-york-capital-regions-66-most-instagrammed-places/. Read the excerpt below:

“Kingston will always be the first capital of New York, but we decided to turn our gaze to the north and see what’s going on in New York’s fourth capital, Albany. We discovered that Instagram is very much an Albany thing (in addition to the steamed hams).

As a digital marketing agency based in the Hudson Valley (check out our work with some recent political campaigns), we’re always striving to understand how real life activities and places are driving the most activity online, and vice versa. One of the ways of doing that is with social media data; we looked at over 80,000 Instagram photos taken throughout the Capital Region in the last year, and organized them by how many times people geo-tagged themselves at different locations (we didn’t count posts by the places or business owners themselves).

We ended up counting the photos taken in places like Albany, Troy, Cohoes, Rensselaer, Schenectady, Colonie, Delmar and all of the places in between (sorry Saratoga Springs!) and came up with the 66 places below…”

“While most of the photography and commentary featured in this post is positive, we also have to acknowledge that the social media bubble distorts the struggles that many people are going through. For example, almost half of the households in our own Ulster County are one paycheck away from financial ruin.

If you’re reading this and thinking about spending money to visit the region, you should also consider pre-ordering Brenda Ann Kenneally’s upcoming book Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City, where she documents the rise and fall of the American working class while photographing a group of women in Troy, and their struggles and victories of making ends meet in our society. 100% of the proceeds go towards her non-profit, A Little Creative Class, which helps provide disadvantaged young people with access to the creative economy that has a high cost of entry.”

Thank you, Kingston Creative, for the mention!

Over Spring Break 2018, several Price Family Fellows from Rutgers University——along with their mentor Jonna McKone, who is a Duke University Hine Fellow——joined A Little Creative Class for a two-day Scrappin’ Upstate mini “scrapzine workshop.”

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About The Price Family Fellowship

Funded since June 2013 by the Price Family Foundation, the Price Family Fellows is a Rutgers University-based supportive program for students already accepted into the University on the New Brunswick campus who are current or former foster care youth with experience in the child welfare system as an adolescent. Youth take part in life skills workshops, research, and goal setting for financial and personal needs.

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The Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program

Established in 2002, the program provides teaching, training, and fellowship opportunities to socially motivated young adults with documentary interests and experience. In addition to sponsoring and disseminating the documentary work produced by Hine Fellows, the Hine Program has also worked with selected former Hart Fellows to publish and disseminate their documentary work. In 2002-2003, the Hine Program sent out its first Fellows to organizations in Egypt and South Africa. The program is open to recent graduates of The Duke University Documentary Studies Program.

It was wonderful to have time to take in the best of both worlds — urban with a heavy dose of industrial nature, and s’mores over a bonfire. Our two father-and-daughter teams were so beautiful together. It was a real bonding experience for us all, and inspired us to understand more deeply the value of our special spot here at the edge of Newton Creek.

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We set out for an urban hike along the Maspeth railroad tracks. Just blocks from the traffic and hustle of the Bushwick Mural District by the Jefferson L train, we were able to connect our bodies with some earth in a drama-free zone. Nothing clears away old energy like a good walk. The trains don’t run on Sundays, so we had the whole place to ourselves!!!

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In addition to our urban hike, we also made gravestone rubbings in Calvary Cemetery…

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We visited a deserted Coney Island…

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We went window shopping in a taxidermy store…

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And we ended each night with a bonfire and s’mores!

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Some of us even found the time for a quiet reflection with our scrapbooks.

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Finally, we boarded the bus in Chinatown and said goodbye. Until next time!