Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Ackerman

Tiffany, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?

In 2012, I had the opportunity to start teaching art classes at the YMCA Safe Place Shelter for homeless and at-risk youth. Safe Place is a 24 hour emergency shelter in Louisville, Kentucky. Every Tuesday at 6pm, we make or draw or sculpt until we are either bored or out of supplies. The more time we spent around our art table, the more fun we have, and the more relaxed the kids become. The kids in my art room are all in crisis in some form or another. Many of our kids arrived scared, hungry, angry, sad, and empty. The ones who don’t know me walk in to my art class with a visible chip on their shoulder. It’s incredibe to watch these kids relax, decompress, and start laughing as soon as their hands get busy. The goal of my time there is not to create great artists necessarily, the goal is to give each of them a moment of escape and control. They can make whatever they want, throw it away if they want, give it away, or keep it. I just encourage them to get their hands busy, and experiment.

Over the course of the last 12 years, the other things I’ve noticed in my time around the art table, is that most of the kids have done the rounds, seen a variety of placements, foster homes, and hospitals, but all of them would chat and say that Safe Place was different. The staff were better, the environment was better, they felt like this was a place where people actually cared.

In 2021, inspired by a recent installation my boss, Brook F. White, Jr. had installed in honor of his mentor, Stephen Rolfe Powell at Centre College, I started thinking about the power of art and color and legacy. I decided that my goal was to completely change the look of the YMCA Safe Place campus. I wanted you to be able to see the caring the staff provides in the space. I think that all humans are sensitive to color and light and pattern, and I have personally never felt better while surrounded by institutional spaces, and blank taupe walls. With the blessings of the Safe Place Executive Director, I began to gather supplies and recruit help.

The Safe Place National Network began here in Louisville, and with the help of the Louisville art community, I wanted to make this campus the jewel of the program, and hopefully an inspiration to other similar facilities to start rethinking the power of art and community.

Our campus is two buildings, one two story building with administration offices, family meeting rooms, classrooms, and our shelter house upstairs. The other building houses our Youth Drop In Center, which provides help and a path to housing for 18-24 year homeless youth, is a gymnasium with a computer lab, showers, storage, laundry facilities, and living room/napping area.

At this moment, my #artistsagainsttaupe and #safeplacewalls team have eradicated almost all of the taupe in shelter house, and a local art non-profit group I participate in, Louisville UnFair, have adopted the actual dorm rooms, so that each of our 8 rooms will have a different theme and be handpainted by a different local artist or team of artists.

This year marks 50 years of Shelter House, and I was lucky enough to get funding from a grant to not only help with materials and labor to complete my 2 year art takeover, but also help facilitate a mural dedicated to our founder, by local art legend and muralist, Damon Thompson.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

Before I began this wild adventure, I had never muraled anything before. My background is in painting, I have a BFA from the University of Louisville, and I have been working in glass and as the gallery director at Flame Run Glass Studio for 20 years. Flame Run has done a number of large scale site specific installations in our region, and being part of the team prepared me to take on a project of this magnitude, having watched my boss plan, organize, and accomplish things many artists only dream of. I thought I had a handle on budgeting and making a solid timeline. My goal was as much to curate the space as inject some much needed color, I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about what the space is used for, who would using it the most, and how I was hoping each space would flow into the next, and who I could ask to recruit to help.

What I did not consider was the physical demand of the job. Ceilings are tall, and hand painting that much wall space, lugging around ladders and paint and drop cloths, that was the part I hadn’t fully appreciated. I’ve painted rooms, gallery walls, pedestals, but never this sort of painting, and certainly not on this scale. I’ve had to recruit younger and more flexible friends, especially those who aren’t scared of heights, and am personally proud of some of the acrobatics I’ve accomplished to reach that top corner to finish the barely out of reach edge.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?

Through my work at Safe Place and my experiences there, I’ve learned that imagination is a privileges. I have been very fortunate in my life. My needs have always been met, I’ve never had to worry about food or shelter or physical safety, and thus been free to spend time in my head, in a safe place I created for myself when I was a kid. I grew up in Gainesville, Fl, and I thought there was magic everywhere. I remember studying interesting flowers or leaves or patterns, and trying to immerse myself in the world they might hold. I have always loved a bit of magic and a bit of illusion, so all of my work, paintings, Mumples, stained glass weirdos, each of them is an experiment in mediums, and a response to the magic the material can hold. Joy is far more fleeting than pain or sadness, I’ve made a choice to create joyful things as a means of resistance. Life steals it from us as we age, and holding on to magic gets harder, most of my work is about that escape into joy.

How do you think about happiness?

I love to teach and share and experiment. I love to come up with ridiculous stories and scenarios and give human attributes and stories to animate and inanimate things. All of my artwork carries an element of that, and in my time with Safe Place, I’ve found friends and art and laughter in spades.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tartackerart.com
• Instagram: tart_ackerart
• Facebook: tart glass
• Other: flamerun.com #artistsagainsttaupe #safeplacewalls #mumpleverse