seed project’s mission is to foster a process of building relationships, connections and mutual support in Southeast Lancaster City, in hopes that neighborhood-centered artworks, projects, and collaborations emerge from our time spent together. This effort centers BIPOC artists and residents in or from Southeast Lancaster.
Context of other ongoing projects:
In 2016, The Pennsylvania Downtown Center award SACA an Elm Street Program grant. SACA and many of the other community organizations created a steering committee and proposed a $10.6m revitalization plan for Southeast Lancaster. In 2018, The Wells Fargo Regional Foundation awarded the Elm Street Project Steering Committee $100,000 to facilitate neighborhood engagement and surveys to help finalize the revitalization plan. Last year, the Foundation agreed to invest $890,000 over the next 4 years.
about seed project
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Southeast profile (LNP)
About 12,000 people live in the southeast. It has the highest poverty rate of Lancaster’s four quadrants, the legacy of economic and racial segregation, compounded by the destruction of a major section of the neighborhood for public housing in the 1960s and 1970s.
The neighborhood plan will cover the same area as the Elm Street designation: a square mile bounded by East King Street to the north, South Broad Street and the Conestoga River to the east, Chesapeake Street to the south and South Queen Street to the west.
In the winter of 2019 the Spanish American Civic Association (SACA) was awarded the Creative Communities Project grant for creative and artistic projects in South East Lancaster. This grants has allowed the Seed Project to launch.
meet our team
salina almanzar | consultant and visual artist
Salina Almanzar (sah-lee-nah ahll-mun-czar)(she/her) is a Puerto Rican and Dominican artist, educator, writer, social justice advocate. Her art and scholarship examine the intersections of Latinidad, feminism, decolonial practice, and Taino spirituality. She is specifically interested in what it means to be ni de aqui y ni de alla, meaning being part of a diaspora that is between spaces and between cultures. She is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 2013 with a double major in Studio Art and English Literature. She spent about two years working in galleries and museums in Philadelphia and Lancaster City before deciding to pursue a Master's in Arts Administration in 2015. She completed the Arts Administration and Museum Leadership Graduate Program at Drexel University in June of 2017. There, she completed a thesis examining Creative Placemaking in the Lancaster Latinx community. She has since continued her research through continued data gathering via story sharing as well as serving as co-facilitator of the Latino Empowerment Project. Salina was elected to School District of Lancaster School Board and is the youngest and first Puerto Rican elected to the board. Salina also serves as a teaching artist in Lancaster City parks through Lancaster Public Art.
josh graupera | consultant and visual artist
josh graupera (he/him, they/them) is a Lancaster born, Philadelphia-based artist, activist and educator. Their practice explores the relationship between visual art and community organizing, using painting, screen printing and socially-engaged processes.
Josh is an Arts and Media organizer with Stadium Stompers, a worker-owner of Bonfire Media Collective, and an Art and Multimedia Coordinator with the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project (YASP). josh has worked as a teaching artist with various organizations including Mural Arts Program, Art Well, PhillyCAM, The U School, Fleisher Art Memorial, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Tyler School of Art, Big Picture Alliance and The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Education:
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 2016
BFA Millersville University of Pennsylvania, 2014
Claudia Rojas | consultant and visual artist
Claudia Rojas is a Cuban American mixed media artist and illustrator.
Born in Cuba, she completed a BA in Social Communication from the University of Havana; afterwards, she earned a fellowship for her Afro-Cuban art research in the University of Morelos in Mexico, and eventually migrated to the United States in 2015. She recently finished her MA in Illustration and Animation from the Barcelona School of Design, Spain.
Locally, she has participated in Lancaster’s Art Walk and First Friday events and collaborated in the public art project “Keys for the City”. She was also featured in the “Welcoming City” Exhibition at Franklin & Marshall College and the Emerging Artists Juried Exhibition at The Delaplaine Arts Center in Frederick, Maryland. Additionally, she developed and taught an art program for unaccompanied migrant children ages 3-17. More recently, she presented a solo exhibition at the Ware Center, and was commissioned by CWS and the City of Lancaster for the Welcoming Mural, installed in October 2022. Her work is featured in the exhibition Art of the State 2022 at the Pennsylvania State Museum, in Harrisburg. She is also working on “The colors of my community”, a community-based project that will serve as a space for inclusion and representation that will produce a collection of illustrated children’s books available in different languages. Her art is found in several private collections in the United States.
Her interests and experiences include photography, design, illustration and fine arts, with several pieces in diverse mediums. Her subject matters gravitate towards migration, transculturation, community, and identity, approaching them from a myriad of different angles, with her portfolio being as restless as her travel history.
