Hey guys. So I'm here today, I guess, to talk about Wonderroot, which is a community art
center that I started with two really, really good friends about six years ago.
We were talking a lot about how we could change the world and all those
conversations ended up coming right back to the arts and the ability that art has
to transcend cultural, language, about language boundaries. And so this is a
picture of Intermezzo where we had a lot of our conversations. We would have been
in Octane, but they weren't around back then. And so art kept coming up in
these conversations and also like a sense of a community and social
responsibility. And so we started to challenge ourselves, well how can we
kind of combine the two? These are two artists that were really influential to
me. Professor Delivaki actually was one of my film professors and got me, she's
sitting right there with the glass of wine. But yeah, so for me personally,
Stanley Kubrick and Milan Kander were big inspirationals. And so balancing
that sense of art with the sense of community service and social
responsibility and community was kind of what we last learned. We said that's it,
that's how we're gonna change the world. And so we started out, we started
doing community service projects out of our house. This is some photographs from
Feed the Homeless. We would crawl the streets at the middle of the night. And
then once we really were latched onto that idea, we started a company called
Wunderlust. And we quickly learned that there was a design firm in New York with
the name. So we re-brain stormed and came up with the name that I like a lot more.
It's Wunderroot. It's a balance between, you know, that idealism and that sense of
inspiration with a little bit of a root. And this is the first website that we ever
had. First website ever made. You can tell like the cheesy fonts and stuff. But
anyways, so this is, so we started going with that. And then I guess with a ton of
paperwork, in a second you'll see. But we just kept doing things out of our
houses and then we decided we want to be a nonprofit. So we did a ton of paperwork.
And after about two years of waiting for the IRS to get back to us, we got,
officially got status. And we did about a year of fundraising. And we finally made
enough money to sign a lease on a building in East Atlanta off Memorial Drive.
And so we're not architects and we don't hang out with architectural
professors. So we just use two by fours and hammers and things. And we just tore
down walls. We built walls. That's Chris and Whit, two guys that I started it with.
I think they're working on the dark room. Some benches in the dark room. That's me.
We had to rewire the whole place for computers. So I spent a lot of time in
the crawl space and it was really, really, really gross. Like I was like on my
back crawling, you know, with like probably six inches between my chest and
floor. So that's the suit that I built to protect myself from all the grossness
that's underneath the wonder root. So this is a very technical CAD rendering of
our space. We have on the left is upstairs and on the right is
downstairs. We have a recording studio, dark room, classroom, digital media lab,
ceramic studio, offices, a performance venue. And if you stay there really late,
sometimes people say they see ghosts. This is still from the recording studio.
And so what the space has become on an artistic level is a space you can come
to. You have unlimited access. Members have unlimited access and you can come.
You can record your album. You can develop photographs. You can use our
computers with Photoshop. You can make movies. You can have your band play in
our basement. It's really cool. It's awesome places to come and
it's like zero barriers to entry into making art. So the balance that art
side, we also have a community service side. So we have, in a second you'll see
some stills. These are programs where kids come in over the summer. It's like a
kids art camp and they learned everything from like how to paint, you know,
faces and all the lines and diagrams and geometry of a face to bookmaking, to
poetry. And so it's that sense of the members of Wonderroot, the members that
benefit from the space and the equipment that we have teaching these shops,
organizing these workshops and facilitating all of these
programming. So in addition to having kids come in and do things, we also go
out into the community and one of the things we're active in is mural
projects. So you can see Patrick Dougal, one of the Wonderroot members up on the
ladder on the left. This is the mural we painted for our refugee
family services. I guess last summer basically went out one night and buffed
the whole wall and then the next day Hands on Atlanta provided a bunch of
volunteers and Wonderroot brought a bunch of artists and we, you know,
cleaned up their building. These are some pictures from a poetry workshop where we
went into a school and did a six-week poetry workshop, everything for like
alliterations, the metaphors, and the kids got experience in writing poetry.
Pretty cool thing.
So, well, not done yet. So, yeah, so, well, I'm gonna let this slide go.
Well, maybe I'll just talk about something. So that's what Wonderroot is. It's a place
for artists to come and we'll help them do whatever they want to do,
whether it be, you know, taping fireworks to your bike and bike jousting at two in
the morning or having vegan brunches, you know. It's an organic space that we let
people kind of express themselves and follow their dreams. Here's some
slides from our pictures from a party that we had. I think it was our grand
opening party, so we can throw ragers. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. And so, yeah, so
that's Wonderroot. You guys should all come by and see us. $10 a month, $60 a
year. It's a limited access to all of our facilities and all the workshops are
included in the membership and come see shows, come see performances. It's a
great place.
