My Innov8 project was going to be about art supporting action against climate change. As climate change is a big problem that is clearly going to affect my generation, I wanted to do something about it. Since I’m good at art, I figured, why not combine two interests into a project? It wasn’t much of an original or innovative idea, many others had done it before, but I figured how young I am would be unique enough to make me stand out from other activist artists. It started off as something unsure, I wasn’t sure whether I should do something like stickers and merchandising, writing, a game or website, posters, or something else entirely. As time ran out, I eventually simply settled on making murals. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have many places to put murals. I heard Ms. Stuart and someone else wanted to put up an “art wall” somewhere, but I never got the chance to follow up on it. The graffiti wall seemed like a good idea until I remembered how quickly things could get covered up or vandalized, especially in a public space that specifically allowed it to be so. I’d heard about an Austin program from the government about putting art on train cars, but the most recent thing I could find about it was an event announcement from 2016, so that became yet another dead end. Another program turned out to not be what I thought it was, as it was more of assisting popular Austin artists than actually making the art yourself, plus no credit went to you. A friend of my Mom’s put up public art fairly often, but it was usually sculptures and moving things, neither of which I knew how to make in terms of art, and I couldn’t figure out how to fit my message clearly into that type of art anyways. The same went for another sculptor, who made even more abstract art that would be impossible to fit a message into. I still didn’t even have an idea for my art, much less a location, materials, or funding. I figured I could write a letter to the government or something (it was a very half-baked idea at the time) or to a business that could be willing to cooperate. It was going to be rather tricky, though. Texas, as you might know, is not very supportive of action against climate change. Although Austin is generally an outlier in this, there are still people who refuse to believe it and large corporations that either want to save money or stay neutral to their customers. While I was trying to figure out what might be a willing place or property, I started looking into other, smaller ideas, seeing how this could fairly easily not end up working out. Maybe a painting to sell in Austin Java, or a paper online, or a website, or something like guerilla marketing, where it’s not technically illegal. As time went on, the original idea seemed less and less possible, and my alternate ideas strayed further and further from what I had originally wanted. Not to mention that I also had actual school to balance with this, too. Eventually I just ended up dropping the project entirely as my hands were full with overdue schoolwork and such. By the time quarantine rolled around, I had entirely forgotten it. Had this project been in better hands of someone who could put the time and effort into this to make it, it could have been what I had wanted it to be, but due to the unfortunate circumstances at the time, I couldn’t get it to work while still keeping everything else going.

To be honest, I don’t know whether it’s that I dreamed too big or simply bad timing that caused the project to go as badly as it did. Plenty of others who had dreamed bigger had gotten their ideas pretty far in the time we had, but there were also some who hadn’t gotten where I did. Regardless, my idea was fairly hard to accomplish for me, especially because I needed ideas for art and to ask a lot of people for locations for my mural.