Kaitlyn Summer and Rebecca Rahn have a project for you. They don’t know what it is just yet, but they’re betting you do. While giving this interview, Summer looks over my shoulder at Weekly photographer Wade Vandervort and asks, “What do you want to try?” He responds with “oil painting,” and Summer beams: “It takes a while to dry, but we have all the materials! We could set you up. If you can dream it, we can do it.”
Raccoon Revival, Summer’s and Rahn’s nonprofit “creative reuse center,” upcycles dreams into motivations, residents into communities and trash into art. They collect donated arts and crafts supplies, usable cloth and paper scraps, and lots of household castoffs—coffee cans, soda bottles and the like—and combine them with a homespun educational component to make a warm, companionable afternoon of sitting down with new friends and making handcrafted art.
Located just north of Downtown’s Symphony Park in a quiet industrial plaza, Raccoon Revival is closing in on a proper opening date. (They’re currently offering programs outside the space; visit raccoonrevival.com for details, or check out their Instagram, @raccoonrevivallv.)
In the meantime, Summer, Raccoon Revival’s executive director, and Rahn, its program director, paint the Weekly a fun word picture.
Kaitlyn Summer: So much magic. We received donated materials from individuals, and also from companies and private entities, with the goal of serving them up to the community to make art with. We have a storefront with a pay-what-you-can model, because we want to make art accessible to everyone. And we also host workshops and meet-ups, and have creatives from throughout Southern Nevada who come together, teach a variety of different mediums and crafts, so that folks can see the magic in the discarded.
KS: A broad variety. We have connected with some of the local creative groups, folks like cosplayers and puppet makers. We also have had a week of volunteer hours this last week, where we were making big bugs with mushrooms with paper mache, all made from reclaimed materials: donated jars, toilet paper rolls. We use a variety of materials we’re diverting from the landfill, and folks can do pretty much anything with them. The sky’s the limit.
KS: I worked in tech for the last decade-ish, and I like to think this is the antidote to the algorithm. Instead of funneling your energy, your focus and your creative juices into a screen, you can funnel it into something real and tangible, and you get the gratification and reward of making something that’s not serving our tech and the corporate entities that control a lot of what we see and do.
We like to think about creative reuse centers as a place to make art for humans, by humans. … We wanted to create a third space. Community is vital, especially today. We’re trying to build somewhere where everyone is invited to come together to share in the making, to connect in the real world, and to try something new.
KS: We’ve been going to Burning Man for over a decade. When you’re at Burning Man, a lot of folks choose to go by a gifted nickname. My playa name, as we call them, is Trash Panda. … Raccoons just seemed like the perfect iconography for what we’re trying to do, because they’re the poster animal of seeing the magic in the discarded. They’re the ultimate creatures that love to paw through what other people would classify as garbage and identify things that might actually have a new life that could be revived. It felt like the perfect match for what we’re trying to do.
KS: Big time. We want to serve educators specifically.
Rebecca Rahn: My background is in special education. Making materials accessible to everyone, but especially teachers—that can add up easily. Encouraging art in classrooms is very important.
One of our big pillars is accessibility. From the volunteers and the community members that we’ve talked with, we’ve learned that not being blocked from doing things that you’re interested in because of money or financial struggles … that’s huge. We’re so excited to bring an opportunity where people aren’t turned away based on price.
KS: We’ve been so humbled by the amazing humans that have already offered to volunteer, contribute and connect as part of our community, and a lot of those folks are currently being underserved. We see this great momentum where this really diverse community is coming together—seeing magic in the discarded, creating together and making something that didn’t exist before.
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