Amarath Bakery/Muneer Bahauddeen

On April 28th I went to the Amaranth Bakery to do serve hours. I got there at around four an hour early for the class because I took the bus and didn’t know how long that would take. I talked to the owner of the bakery for a while before the meeting started. He has been living in the neighborhood for 12 years and told me a little about the history of the area. When he first moved there it was a predominantly African American community and still is. He told me it was 70% African American, 15% Asian American, 10% German speaking, and 5% white. He talked about how when he moved there it was common for the German population there to never have to speak a word of English. When the class started at 6:00 we first went out to the Amaranth Community garden, which is a small garden in the back of the Amaranth Bakery. At the garden people in the community can help plant vegetables and then harvest them later. We worked in the garden moving railroad tiers to portion off sections of the garden and create a small path. After helping there we went back into the bakery and got soup. Then we went across the street to Muneer Bahauddeen’s studio. Muneer is a professional ceramics artist. He has made installations for several parks in Milwaukee and a hospital. Muneer works with clay pressing it out into tiles, which he then designs. His real passion is to help out his community. He works in the schools system and has done artist in residencies at the Saint Charles center, working mainly with troubles teens. He has residencies their 3 times and has the kids make tile murals based on Traditional African symbols. Right now Muneer is in the process of creating a proposal to submit to Alice’s garden. He would like to create an arch and different posts with tiles marking off different family plots in the garden

Here are a few links to websites about Muneer Bahauddeen
http://aavad.com/artistbibliog.cfm?id=1091
http://www.artsatlargeinc.org/muneer.html
http://unifiedmilwaukee2.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/make-milwaukee-muneer-bahauddeen/