Q&A | Northside Art Activist Stasya Panova

Even before she became the Northside Collaboratory's beautification coordinator, 24-year-old Stasya Panova was hard at work on community art projects in Syracuse. While other students drank or partied away their senior years, the Syracuse University painting major taught photography to high-school students and illustrated a book about a resident she met at the Rosewood Heights nursing home.

"I'm trying to combine my personal art practice with community projects," Panova says. "I'm a drawer, a video artist, a painter, an installation artist, and hopefully, a community artist."

Two years after graduation, Panova is also a key figure in the Northside beautification movement. Her public art

projects mask vacant storefronts on North Salina Street and brighten the construction fences around St. Joseph's Hospital. More importantly, Panova acts as a bridge between the city and university, inspiring other young people to engage with the community through public art.

Salt met Panova at the Northside Collaboratory to talk about her work and the future of the neighborhood.

Salt: How did you first get involved with community beautification in the Northside?

Stasya Panova: I started working for the Northside Urban Partnership the summer after I graduated from SU. For 10 weeks, I worked with four young people from this community on vacant

storefront projects, teaching them art and looking for ways to enliven spaces. After that, the Northside Collaboratory said they'd like to keep me on in an Americorps VISTA position. That means I don't get paid, really. I just have a stipend, but I get incredible opportunities to work with this community at the grassroots level.

S: What are your thoughts on the Northside, now that you've been here two years?

SP: It's an incredible community with a ton of potential. This was traditionally a German and Italian, working-class neighborhood. But as people moved out to suburbia, new groups moved in. Now we have some old Italian and German immigrants, an

African American population that moved in maybe 20 years ago, and refugees from more than 40 different countries. It's dynamic and beautiful in a way I wouldn't expect to see anywhere, except maybe New York.

S: What's the art community like in this neighborhood?

SP: I think the art community is on the rise, largely because of Craft Chemistry, the art shop and gallery that Briana Kohlbrenner started.> I love Briana. Briana basically decided to take a chance on starting a new business around local art.

S: What other art groups operate in the Northside?

SP: There are pockets of art events

going on everywhere, because this area is a clean slate — people can really put their energy and love into it. ArtRage Gallery and Syracuse Cultural Workers are both right down the street. They do an opening every month or so. There are also two artists working out of Briana's space. One of them, Brendan Rose, has done tons of public art in the city, like the large hand sculpture downtown near L'Adour.

S: You started a project here, too. How did you come up with the storefront program?

SP: Well, I was working with those four high-school students over the summer, teaching them about artists and art technique and that kind of thing. After a few lessons, we went out

and looked at empty storefronts and said, 'okay, this is a space that we have. How can we use art to enliven it?'

We ended up working on three different storefronts on North Salina Street. We installed some exquisite, enlarged corpse drawings at a building on the corner of Catawba and Salina. The second building we worked on was at 748/750 Salina Street, and we decorated the windows to look like a large blue and green fish face. And then down the street at 437, there was a storefront next to a restaurant, so we created a paper mural of three chefs tossing vegetables in the air.

S: Did the Heroes Project evolve out of that?

SP: Yeah, the Northside Heroes

Project was something I envisioned, looking at vacant storefronts. I thought that I would really love to work with people in this community that had something positive to share. So from there, I started looking for community heroes. We put out a call through a Post-Standard article and through other advertising, asking people to please nominate the heroes in their lives.

S: What did you do once you found your heroes?

SP: Well, I worked with Danielle Carrick, who is a photography student at SU. We went to interviews together, and I took down the individuals' stories while she took photos. Then we went through all those photographs and interviews, choosing quotes that

embodied the people and the photographs that guided their narrative. The whole thing was printed on chloroplast and installed on the construction fences that are up around St. Joseph's Hospital.

S: How did the community respond to the project?

SP: Really well. I got a lot of comments from people saying, "But what are you going to do when the panels come down off the fence? When someone steals them, when they get graffiti on them?" But so far they're still hanging and they look beautiful. It's hard to tell exactly what impact the panels have had. But if people walk through this neighborhood and think, "I never knew this was going on here

and wow, I never knew about this organization or this person," then well done. If that was all we accomplished, I'm happy with how it came out.

S: Who are your personal heroes?

SP: When I was at SU I was lucky enough to have Stephen Mahan and Donna Lee Payton as professors, and they are probably the reason that I'm here. Stephen is the director of the Photography and Literacy Project at SU, and he works with students in local schools to create and exhibit photo diaries. I think his work manages to gel art and community service the same way I'm trying to do. Donna teaches figure drawing and life drawing, and she is one of the most incredible artists I've ever met. She gave me constant

feedback about my thesis, my work, and my life — I would stay an hour everyday after class to talk to her.

S: Now you teach an SU class yourself. What's that like?

SP: I do teach a class in the Honor's Program called Dialogue and Action on Public Art. I have a much different perspective on SU and on Syracuse than I did when I was a student. For a while after I graduated and started working in the Northside, it was like these two worlds I was balancing. I was almost scared to go back to campus. I didn't know how I'd feel to see Marshall Street, or to see how ignorant students can be. At the same time, the campus provides amazing knowledge and comfort. It's a wonderful and terrible

bubble for the students there.

S: How have these experiences changed your perception of SU?

Going back to SU now, I feel proud of the things that are happening there and hopeful that there will be more ties between SU and the city. They both need each other. It's wonderful to have a piece of the community to show my students. I kind of say, "Hey, I never knew about this when I was in school because no one shared it with me. But this is your opportunity to share it with other people."