Beam Camp: Fellows Making Things Happen

Spring 2022 Fellows with Project Production Staff and Beam Project NH designer, Macon Reed.

Beam Camp is about halfway over, and the big project is coming along, so there’s no better time to introduce you to the team that prototyped this summer’s Beam Camp big project.

As one of Beam’s annual Big Projects, the Beam Camp project is prototyped by youth in our  Fellows program in NYC. The Fellows program is an in-depth training program within our Project Production enterprise for youth who have previously participated in our Apprenticeship, Project Leaders, or at Beam Camp City. 

Fellows learn a different set of skills each year, depending on the Big Project in question. This year, Fellows learned prototyping and building skills and techniques, including welding, metal cutting, resin casting, electronic circuitry, textiles, and more. Fellows also had the opportunity to develop their skills in problem solving, critical thinking, expressing themselves, and developing individual thinking.

Originally, the Fellows program started at Beam Camp where older campers engage more deeply with the project, developing more advanced skills in a specific area of the project and then sharing these skills with younger campers in a team based setting. Beam Center brought this type of opportunity back to NYC and expanded how youth were involved. In comparison to the Fellows at Beam Camp, NYC-based Fellows get more in-depth training with a variety of hard skills and are involved in both the process of choosing the year’s Big Projects and prototyping all aspects of the chosen project.

This summer at Beam Camp, campers will be building As Above, So Below designed by artist Macon Reed. Macon is a multidisciplinary artist who creates immersive sculptural environments that are activated through performance and public participation. This year, for the first time, Fellows were given the opportunity to experiment with different materials and tools as they designed a prototype that would be ideal for the environment and conditions at Camp. In the past, Fellows joined after the specific materials were figured out and helped solely with building the prototype.

The materials used so far in As Above, So Below are metal, wood, paper clay, and LED lights. While prototyping, Fellows faced many challenges, but they say that the biggest challenge was figuring out the specific process for mixing the paper clay for the stalagmites they were trying to create. According to Beam’s Project Director Mitchell, who has been directing the Beam Camp summer project for years now, "The paper clay process was really interesting in that we bumped up against so many subtleties that really have a dramatic effect in…how it turns out. It was interesting to have so many conversations about how something sculptural feels. Macon's art and the renderings have a very aesthetic feel, and so we had to get closer to materials that felt like Macon's art."

Marking another first, one of this year’s Fellows was invited to work with us all summer at Beam Camp. In addition to a Production Assistant who is going to Camp as well, this Fellow is part of an effort to more deeply connect the Beam Center and Beam Camp experiences.