Our work at Color Outside the Lines extends beyond our focus on youth populations and also has a broader impact on the community at large. Through collaborative art installations, we aim to facilitate community healing and hold space for critical conversation.

Community Prayer Weaving Loom

In the summer of 2018, Director Anna Barlow collaborated with Mariah Makalapua of Medicine Collective to hand-build a Community Prayer Weaving Loom. Since its creation, the loom has facilitated group prayer and intention setting in communities throughout Oregon, California, and Puerto Rico. At a Community Prayer Weaving event, each person present has the opportunity to write a prayer on a colorful strip of fabric and weave it into the tapestry. Through the creation of each new weaving, the loom stitches together a multitude of voices, languages, and intentions into a beautiful work of art and provides space for communal healing. 

Climate Action Summit in San Francisco

In 2018, Color Outside the Lines was honored to facilitate our first community healing project at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco from September 11-14th.

We joined hands with our friends at Hip Hop Caucus and If Not Us Then Who? to co-host ‘Our Village’ — the largest community convening at the Summit. This special event brought together over 50 indigenous leaders from around the world for the first time, alongside representatives from other communities of color and climate activists. Through presentations, performances, film, art, virtual reality installations, and storytelling, the event aimed to stimulate critical, productive conversations about deforestation and climate change, and spread hope for a more just and sustainable future.

At Our Village, COTL hosted a Community Prayer Weaving with Medicine Collective. Individuals from all walks of life and cultural backgrounds participated in creating a new tapestry, writing their hopes, prayers, and dreams for the future onto prepared pieces of fabric and weaving their contributions into the Community Prayer Weaving Loom. Reflecting the vast diversity of event attendees, we received prayers written in many different languages, creating a weaving that physically enacted community healing in its material production. In the months following the event, the loom traveled to Native American reservations along the West coast, where local residents contributed their own prayers to help create a much larger weaving. After the tapestry was completed, we auctioned the piece and reinvested the proceeds into Native youth communities through artistic programming and outreach.