Luminous Communities

"Luminous Communities: Shaping our Neighborhoods with Jell-O," through January 2009, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, Del., 302-656-6466, thedcca.org.

by Jakob Dorof

Visual Art/Jell-o

"What is beauty?" This has been the prompt for artists-in-residence at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts this year, inspiring exhibits featuring everything from African-American hair weaving to neighborhood candids taken around Wilmington. But now that the program has coaxed Cali-based artist Liz Hickok back to her hometown, she's bringing a different flavor of beauty to the table: Jell-O.

"Most people just think of Jell-O as a dessert, but it turns out that when you light it from below and make little cities out of it, it becomes this beautiful, jewel-like material that's just gorgeous," Hickok explains. "It just glows."

While her gelatinous models of San Francisco recently earned her nods from NPR and The New York Times, this time Hickok teamed up with local children (and a few curious adults) to mix and mold wobbly miniatures of the Edgemoor and Second District burgs. The exhibition — which took more than 40 boxes of Jell-O to produce — is also the product of a collaboration with Blueprint Communities, an organization dedicated to community revitalization and sustainability. And in a way, Hickok thinks her rainbow-colored sculptures can help show people the way.

"It lets them see their neighborhoods as something really beautiful, something to be proud of," she says. "It allows them to see the city how it could be."

"Luminous Communities: Shaping our Neighborhoods with Jell-O," through January 2009, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, Del., 302-656-6466, thedcca.org.