Ali Dipp is a Brown-RISD Dual Degree student. In 2022, she will graduate with degrees in Painting at RISD (B.F.A.) and English at Brown (B.A.). This summer, through the generous opportunity allotted by the Royce Fellowship, Dipp will create an original digital platform titled The Work Project (www.ourworkproject.org). The Work Project celebrates Southwestern history of labor and art. To encompass this vision, The Work Project includes five parts: Mementos/Momentos (verbal tales of labor histories), Mural Wall (a collaborative digital mural wall), Mobile Mercado (meeting place for local businesses), Currents (vlog/blog for nonprofits pursuing labor equality), and Linked Bridges (gateways for inventive learning and further research into museum archives). Through contributing to the RISD Museum Guild, teaching in arts education, and founding a community arts organization in her hometown of El Paso, Texas,  Ali Dipp recognizes the parallels between the arts and agency.

Spearheading Sunhouse Arts since 2012, Dipp and her younger sister have raised over 10,000 dollars for El Paso-Juárez charities and non-profits through five original plays, educational outreach programs, and film festivals (sunhousearts.org). As an extension to her long-standing investment in creativity’s visionary capacities, The Work Project presents a platform for El Paso-Juárez to self-represent. In The Work Project, organizations, museums, researchers, and artists from across the Southwest will examine representations of the borderland pictured in museums, murals, and literature. In emphasizing a region’s legacy of labor, The Work Project investigates former and formal presentations of ‘progress.’ Emphasizing how a region sees change, a community (re)envisions a future.