CHAPEL HILL
Residents of the Abbey Court apartment complex in Carrboro are looking to recast their neighborhood’s negative reputation by telling their own stories on camera.

Husband and wife Neill Prewitt and Eleanor “Ellie” Blake joined up with Prewitt’s best friend, Lincoln Hancock, to produce an installation of videos created by residents as part of “Dream Acts: The Abbey Court Community Arts Project.” The exhibit opened Friday at the former Chapel Hill Museum, 523 E. Franklin St. The project is sponsored by the Chapel Hill Public Arts Office and the Public Arts Commission.

Chapel Hill Public and Cultural Arts Administrator Jeffrey York said the Into the Streets project selects communities that don’t traditionally have a commanding voice within the larger population.

“We like to focus on communities that maybe the general populace is not aware of,” York said. “Part of the whole idea is to present a particular community differently than other people might see them.”

Abbey Court is thought by some to be a difficult place to live because of the negative press coverage it receives, said Lesley McBride, an intern with the Public and Cultural Arts Office who is involved with the project. Many of the neighborhood’s residents are Hispanic and Burmese immigrants.

“Abbey Court has a stereotype of being not the best place to live in,” she said. “The artist team is working within that frame, and then looking to celebrate the people as individuals rather than just the stereotypes that have been associated with that community.”

The artists spent a year collaborating with residents to bring the exhibition to life.

Prewitt, who is working on a master’s of fine arts at UNC-Chapel Hill, taught English as a second language in a Mexico high school from 2006 through 2008 along with Blake, who recently finished a master’s in public policy at Carolina.

Hancock is a recent graduate of North Carolina State University, where he earned a master’s degree in graphic design. Prewitt said the three realized the potential of community-focused work after collaborating on a video installation about the environment last year in Raleigh.

“The video was really sparse,” Prewitt said. “But there was a lot of conversation — people lingered and talked to each other. It was a departure from typical gallery installation — coming in, looking at discrete works. It was more of an experience.”

“We realized the community-building potential of the work,” he continued. “We had a project or medium. We were searching for a community to apply it to.”

The call came in the form of the Chapel Hill Arts Commission’s request for a six-month-long arts project.

“Blake, Hancock and Prewitt seemed very enthusiastic and organized,” York said. “They had done their homework and already had community contacts. They were really kind of ready to go.”

Blake had previously worked with Judith Blau, a UNC professor and the director of the Human Rights Center of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, located at Abbey Court. Through that connection, the team developed an interest in working with the Abbey Court community, Hancock said.

Prewitt explained that living in Mexico and witnessing the Hispanic community grow in the Triangle gave him “a certain level of comfort, a familiarity that dispelled a sense of ‘otherness.”

“I wanted to understand not just ‘other people’ but our home — making our home better for people,” he said. Hence the reference to the controversial DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, from which the project takes its name.

“It’s a poetic reference to a really important piece of legislation that’s been a topic of conversation around Abbey Court,” Prewitt said. “It’s Dream Acts because there’s that political reality.”

That reality includes the cultural pressures that have developed in the last 10 years as the Hispanic population in North Carolina has doubled, as well as political pressures of legislation designed to address the changing demographics of American society.

The DREAM Act would provide a path for foreign-born children of immigrants to pursue permanent residency after completing either two years’ military service or two years of college. The bill was first proposed in 2001 and has repeatedly died in Congress. It was most recently re-introduced in May.

“One of the things we’re trying to do with the exhibition is create an encounter with the people who live at Abbey Court,” Prewitt said.

“These people are your neighbors, they could be your friends,” he said. “I learned a lot about my own prejudices, limitations and fears.”

Prewitt added that having a discussion with the people behind those politics — the people from Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Abbey Court, is important.

Hancock echoed Prewitt’s concerns.

“It’s a place that gets a bad rap,” Hancock said. ”But there’s so much energy and so much positivity there, and we really want to tap into that and bring it to life.”

Meredith Clark, a second-year PhD student, is a multimedia journalist for the Reese Felts Digital News Project.