About Me – Teressa Poe-Culton

Display of ESL & Mainstream students Artwork

Dance Group from Opening Day Ceremonies

Elementary Mainstream members of World Class '96

Elementary ESL members of World Class '96

Olympic Gift Quilt in progress on display at School is Out party

Olympic Gift Quilt on display in Atrium of Marriott. Quilt is on display in Lima Peru and was a collaboration between four elementary & middle school ESL & mainstream classes and myself. The Pen pal - Art exchange program was successfully completed with 65% of participapnts continuing and corresponding with a Japanese pen pal during the '96 Summer Olympics

My name is Teressa Poe-Culton. I’m a designer and artist. My current creative medium is video. I use my Camera to capture artist and their work. Sometimes during the creative process while they’re in the studio, they’ll share a few minutes with me and let me into their world so it can be shared with others. Sharing is a way of allowing someone to gain a little insight about who you are and what you’re all about.

I’m going to share a little with you. Many brilliant artists can look back to a moment in time when they knew what they wanted to do when they grew up, or make grand statements about being artists all their lives. I didn’t know what I wanted to do or be ’til I got older. I knew more definitely what I didn’t want to do or be. Teaching and nursing were totally out of the picture! I’ve always been attracted to beautiful things. That appreciation and need to be surrounded by beauty applies to animate as well as inanimate objects. My pets, dogs and cats, have always been pretty animals.

So what does all that mean? Simply that it was natural that after a half hearted attempt to become a psychiatrist and dropping out of college, that I would decide to embark on a career as an apparel designer. I could never find anything that met my expectations when I went shopping in the retail stores.

After two years of professional training at Tracey-Warner School of Design and drawing classes at Moore College of Art in Phila., followed by two years of frustration with fashion shows done to gain exposure, a seemingly unending abusive relationship and a move to Atl (I was looking for a way to ‘expand my horizons’ in the fashion industry), I went back to school to get more training.

At GSU I studied surface design and jewelry construction. Why is it that instructors and professors like to tell you what you can’t do when you’re creating??

I met a few artists, did a few shows and tried to find out what it was that I was really good at. I was invited to take part In the Mayor’s Artists in the Schools Program. (The City of Atlanta’s first program to put artists into the public schools.) Later I was an artist in the Fulton County Arts Council program that put artists in the public schools throughout the county.

These in school programs allowed the artists freedom and forced us to be creative with the programs we presented to the students. I’ve always been fascinated with ancient cultures, so I put a mask making program together that incorporated stories and mythology with the mask making. The students related to the shaman of the ancient tribes and created masks that would empower them and protect their hopes and dreams. I had the students put their hopes and dreams into the mask so it would have some relevance to them and they would understand the power the shaman had in the village. This also gave importance to their individual hopes and dreams and made them something important enough to be protected and held onto. They were told to protect their dreams so no one could ever steal their dreams from them.

Four years before the ’96 Summer Olympics happened in Atlanta I founded a non-profit, Arts-in-Intercultural Education org. (Creativity International, inc.). During this same time I was working with a coalition of independent artists who had come together to make certain GA Artists were not slighted in the selection process for participants in the ’96 Olympic Arts Festival. I also joined the GA Quilters Olympic Project and registered to create an Olympic Gift Quilt that would be presented during the Opening Day Ceremonies.

My design for the Olympic Gift Quilt included drawings from the students in “World Class ‘96”, an intra-system, international pen pal and art exchange program. The collaboration resulted in an Olympic Gift Quilt that depicted a ‘postcard’ from the City of Atlanta. One side read “Greeting From Atlanta” in appliqué while the other side contained drawings, done by ESL and mainstream students, of places or ideals that were Important to the students. The Quilt was signed by the teachers and principals of the students who were Members of “World Class ‘96”. Our Quilt, “Greetings from Atlanta!”, is on display in Lima, Peru.