- I'm sitting here at the Woodland Hill Montessori School in Rensselaer, New York to get a look at the Flock Art Mobile Art Gallery.

Let's go.

(upbeat music) Flock Art is an artist residency program that is out of a shipping container and we bring it into communities.

This is our flagship container.

It's our flagship gallery.

We've brought it here to host multiple artists to have parallel curriculum and have this kind of teaching opportunity about creativity, art and process.

- About two and a half years ago I was approached by Susan Thomas, who was also the founder of Flock Art, and she had an idea that she wanted to share with me and this was during the pandemic so I have clear memories of sitting outside of the school with Susan.

- I had this idea of getting a shipping container, having this external gallery where I can rotate artists through all different kinds of artists.

I have been obsessed with shipping containers.

I wanted to build my house out of shipping containers and my husband said no.

When I came up with this idea he's like, I don't know, I don't know, that doesn't seem like it's gonna work.

And then I called him up and I said, so I bought a shipping container cuz I just had always wanted to.

Fix it up.

I put drywall, put some electrical, got the pin lights in to be able to highlight pieces of art.

I knew that the school was gonna let me do it and I knew it was gonna be awesome.

- Even though I didn't have all the details and even though I didn't know exactly how this would all play out, I knew that the vision was solid.

I knew it was inspirational and I knew it would bring great things to the Woodland Hill community, so I was on board.

- Today we're hosting Victoria Vanderlynn and it is her opening of her show.

We like to have these big parties where the community can gather, celebrate the art, celebrate the artists and celebrate themselves like as this like really vibrating community.

- Volumes is a whole new body of work.

Somewhat different from any of the work I've made before, still in the quilt form, but all of the pieces are shaped in an interesting way.

So I'm sort of breaking out of the rectangle square shape of quilt.

- I try for each year to pick artists that are very different from each other cuz I like to kind of like ping pong around the art world.

And so we haven't had a fabrics artist yet.

It's a completely different kind of world of education that you can have behind the history of quilting and quilt making in America.

When you agree to be a flock artist you have to do a community activity and we also give people the opportunity to teach.

Victoria actually taught the beginning of the year she taught like stitching and sewing just to introduce her technical skill and what it takes to make this kind of art.

- The idea of professional artist, that's somewhat abstract to children at this age, they know that an art teacher makes their living doing art and they know that musicians do, but there's a lot of mystery behind how other artists work.

- It's just so interesting to see sort of that glimmer of an artist in kids, actually kids are such a natural artist, so to give them access to textile art, which is not often something that is present in elementary and middle schools was really great.

- Well what's exciting about Flock Art is I met Elizabeth Dubin from Collar Works.

She came to one of the shows and she said I love this and I want it to be a part of ColorWorks.

Now that I'm part of ColorWorks, I feel like I'm part of a bigger family that really is helping the vision come true.

The goal is to have a flock and to give artists more opportunities to teach, more opportunities to have solo shows all around the capital region.

- This space outside, little did we know that this would turn into the heart of our community during those years of isolation.

Here outside on our grounds we had a safe place for us to gather.

We had something positive to experience together as a community and to really come together and celebrate.

And at the time when Susan envisioned this project, she couldn't have known how important it would be, but it's really turned into something quite magical.