Kenmore Imagineer
The Kenmore Imagineer is an interactive coloring book that was created by Art x Love for the @PLAY Akron project, a Knight Cities grant initiative designed to foster civic engagement and increase neighborhood vibrancy with a series of interactive art challenges and playful activities for Akron’s 24 neighborhoods.
Over several weeks, Art x Love’s team explored every street in Kenmore and interviewed hundreds of residents to better understand local needs and priorities for improving quality of life. This included attending and participating in numerous public events, and supporting a wide range of neighborhood initiatives. In the end, the big insight that led to the creation of the Kenmore Imagineer was not that most residents wanted more public art and murals in the neighborhood (which they did), but that there were highly polarized viewpoints about what that art should celebrate and look like. In many instances, residents had a better sense of what they did not want than what they did.
To address this need, Art x Love created the Kenmore Imagineer activity book to provide residents with a free and accessible platform to share their ideas for public art with the community. Art x Love met with local property owner’s to gauge their willingness to display public art on their walls, and selected a range of locations for the activity book that best represented the numerous opportunities for art across the neighborhood.
Launched in October, 2017, the Kenmore Imagineer generated more than 150 submissions from more than 45 local artists and Kenmore residents. A panel of nine Kenmore leaders were organized and instructed to judge the entries, not for artistic talent, but for the originality, merit, and potential impact of the concept. The winning submissions were digitally recreated as full-color mockups, then framed and hung on the walls of The Rialto Theatre for a community art exhibition. Each winning entry, judge’s favorite, and honorable mention received a $100 prize. The Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance (KNA) selected the overall favorite, Caleb Aronhalt’s “Kenmore/Halo,” and awarded the artist $5,000 in support to help turn their vision into a reality.
