Dreaming America: Enacting Community Joy Collaboratory Report

In the spring of 2025, our small team, Michael Stevenson Jr., Gregory MacNaughton, and Kate Duffly, conducted our Imagining America Collaboratory, Dreaming America: Enacting Community Joy at Reed College. We brought together students, staff, and faculty for seven weeks of collective reflection and creative visioning around themes of America, belonging, and representation, with an eye toward a final collaborative art project.

The project began with a series of conversations centered on the meanings of America and the American Dream. Drawing inspiration from Langston Hughes’s Let America Be America Again, participants reflected on their own relationships to American identity before engaging in creative exercises that invited them to envision the values they hoped our communities might embody.

(Photo credit Michael Stevenson Jr.)

As the weeks progressed, those conversations evolved into the collaborative creation of large-scale paper-mache puppets. One theme emerged repeatedly across our discussions:

Interdependence

Participants returned again and again to the idea that our well-being depends upon one another and that stronger communities are built through mutual care, collective responsibility, and hope. This shared vision inspired, among several other puppets, three large sculptural hands—the Helping Hand, Healing Hand, and Hoping Hand.

(Photo credit Samuel Hobbs)

Our Collaboratory culminated in a campus puppet parade that opened a student-organized rally against fascism. The parade demonstrated how collaborative art-making can move ideas beyond the classroom, transforming dialogue into a visible act of public engagement.

The project did not end on campus. Following our on-campus parade, members of the Collaboratory joined the Everything Under the Sun Parade, a grassroots community parade in southeast Portland organized by faculty convener Kate Duffly. Participating alongside neighborhood residents, artists, musicians, community organizations, and activists allowed students to experience firsthand how participatory public art can foster belonging, build relationships, and create joyful opportunities for civic engagement.

Attached to this post is a zine that introduces the concept of grassroots community parades—people-powered processions that strengthen communities and imagine more just futures by moving and celebrating together in public space to create a feeling of solidarity and connection.