Laughing and chatting, a line of senior citizens filed past scanners and laptops and handed their mementos to artists Leah Sobsey and Lynn Bregman-Blass.

Katherine Wade brought a small portrait of her only grandson, Chasley.

Cora Coleman brought her father Henderson Barrett's honorable discharge document from the U.S. Army and her high school diploma from the Clemons Colored High School in Texas.

Images of the women's mementos would become part of "Our Stories, In Focus," an art and history project sponsored by the UNC Program in the Humanities and Human Values and the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission. The goal is to gather community stories that might otherwise become lost and, over four workshops, weave them into a tapestry of personal histories.

"It's signaling a new direction in the humanities program," said Town Council member Sally Greene, who works in the program part time as public humanities coordinator. Under new director Eve Duffy, the program "is reaching out into the community and bringing the campus's resources out where they are accessible to the general public."

Using old photographs as prompts for storytelling and as raw material for the finished art project, "Our Stories" will encourage participants to focus on how they became a part of the Chapel Hill area.

In the first workshop, at the Hargraves Center Black History Month breakfast, communications professor Della Pollock had students sit at each table and ask participants questions like, "What is the first kitchen you remember?"

Photos quickly scanned by Sobsey and Bregman-Blass will become a permanent piece of art. Sobsey is a photographer who works in mixed mediums using personal artifacts and photographs, while Bregman-Blass does encaustic painting (using warm beeswax and molten wax to paint). Their first collaborative work of art is on display at the Durham Art Guild, 120 Morris St.

As part of the project, oral histories are being gathered under the guidance of The Southern Oral History Program.

Upcoming workshops also will feature opportunities for journal writing and story circle activities led by Poet Laureate of the Piedmont Jaki Shelton Green and poet and playwright Debra Kaufman.

The project will culminate with the installation of the finished work of public art this spring.

As the Hargraves breakfast wrapped up, Coleman said it's good for her fellow senior citizens to tell their stories so future generations understand all that has been accomplished in the past 40 years.

"We've seen a lot of change and we're finally going in the right directions," she said, "but it's taking a long time for us to get to where we are.

"Kids today need to know it wasn't always like this."