While you're making your summer travel plans, note that there are two wonderful community performances scheduled in the Southeast -- both musicals in Georgia. "Land of Spirit," Franklin's County's new folk-life play, is written by Jules Corriere and directed by Richard Geer of Community Performance Inc. The artists have been blogging eloquently on CAN about this production, set for June 5-28, 2008, in a brand-new theater in Lavonia. Based on community stories, the play features 60-100 local folks on stage. See Guest Blog on CAN's front page. And "Headwaters :: Stories From A Goodly Portion Of Beautiful Northeast Georgia" runs July 10-27 in Sautee Nagoochee. Written by Jo Carson and Jerry Grillo from stories collected in seven northeast Georgia counties, it's choreographed by Celeste Miller and directed by Lisa Mount (see video on Mount's blog).

Artist Richard Kamler's project "Seeing Peace: Artists Collaborate with the United Nations" surfaces with Peace Billboards, May 26, 2008, in San Francisco. Ten artists form ten member states of the United Nations were asked to imagine what peace looks like from their unique cultural perspectives. Starting May 26, their visions will be displayed on full-sized outdoor billboards all over San Francisco. The artists are from South Africa, Cuba, Tibet, Puerto Rico, U.S., Iran, Ukraine, El Salvador, Japan and Israel. "The aim of this project," says Kamler, "is to incite members of our community to imagine for themselves their own vision of peace. Because if we cannot first imagine peace, we may never make it so." Some of the participating artists will join a May 26 bus tour to all the billboards sites, discussing the work and returning to the University of San Francisco for a reception.

Artists in Hoboken, N.J., are working hard to preserve the building where they live and work, Neumann Leathers, "one of the city’s last artistic and historic arts complexes." They've formed the Neumann Leathers Tenants Association to save the building at Observer Highway and Willow Ave., now scheduled for demolition to make way for luxury housing. Neumann has been full of artists, artisans and creative technology-based small businesses for two decades. their alternate "Piazza Plan" will preserve some structures and create new ones, including public space "that will benefit all Hoboken citizens." An open house and studio tour is set for May 18, 2008, and everyone who has ever worked at Neumann -- as artist, artisan, entrepreneur or employee -- is urged to come and their memories, opinions and feelings about the building, documented by resident filmmaker Mark Gaspar.

Documentary films by Boston Public School students about the civil-rights history of their city are posted on the Web site of the Digital Legacies Project. In 2007, staff from Facing History and Ourselves facilitated a four-week digital filmmaking program in Boston, during which ten high-school students learned research, writing, interviewing, video production and dialogue while creating films featuring interviews with local civil-rights leaders. Now online, the films and their subjects are: "For Roxbury," with Sarah-Ann Shaw, the first African-American female reporter for WBZ-TV in Boston; "Our Destiny," with political activist, author and professor Mel King; "The Struggle for a Good Education," with Jean McGuire, executive director of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc.; and "The Makings of a Leader," with civil-rights activist and professor James Breeden. The student films have been incorporated into the Boston Public Schools' tenth-grade civil-rights curriculum.

Community Partners in Action's annual Prison Art Show is underway, through May 28, at Capitol Community College in Hartford, Conn. The show features the work of 152 artists from 17 Connecticut correctional facilities. See the CPA Web site's home page for the remarkable poster (downloadable). Community Partners in Action, Inc., (formerly the Connecticut Prison Association) is one of the nation's oldest nonprofit agencies. It began in January 1875 as the Friends of Prisoners Society to work in the brand-new field of criminal rehabilitation. The Prison Arts Program, started in 1978, provides classes and projects, as well as publication and exhibition opportunities, to people incarcerated in several of Connecticut’s correctional facilities. The program has an annual Journal and a permanent collection that travels to public schools, universities, libraries and community centers. The program is supported by donations and the sale of artworks by prisoners, which are available on the CPA Web site.

Today CAN brings you a story by Nina Billone about a collaboration that part of the "body of urban community-based performance that has emerged over the past three decades." In February 2007, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, the city’s oldest alternative arts space, launched The Prison Project, a yearlong exploration of the California prison system. The Prison Project’s first public performance was an Open Process Event in which representatives from the Prison Activist Resource Center, California Prison Focus and The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women entered into a public conversation with Intersection artists and staff. This essay emerges from Billone's Ph.D. dissertation research on U.S. penal-welfare performance in the 20th and 21st centuries. "In examining performance practices that spill over the boundaries between culture work and social work," she says, "I have been working to develop language with which to speak about performance practices that, like those of The Medea Project and Intersection for the Arts, are 'neither that, nor that.'"

Join the All City Waitress Marching Band in a Protest March for a Living Wage up the Grand Concourse to the Bronx Museum, Saturday, May 17, 2008. "When The Waitresses first marched in the 1979 Pasadena DooDah Parade, women made 43 cents to every dollar a man made. Now, women now make 77 cents, and people of color make 71 cents for every dollar a man makes - for the same job," says original Waitress, artist Jerri Allyn. Join Allyn and bandleader Chutney Berry, decked out in white uniforms, accented by red polka dot aprons and bowties. Rehearsal is 10:30 to 12, parade at noon, Unhappy Hour 5 p.m. The event is in conjunction with the exhibition, “Making it Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community" (March 2 - August 4), curated by Carey Lovelace.

Art in the Public Interest is proud to announce the names of four new members of the CAN Advisory Board: Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Grady Hillman, Meena Natarajan and Shannon Turner. Mañjon is director of the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, where she developed one of the first “Community Arts” majors in the U.S. In July, she becomes vice president for diversity and strategic partnerships at Weslyan University. Hillman is a poet, folklorist, anthropologist and arts-and-education consultant, based in Austin, Texas. Natarajan is a playwright and founding executive and literary director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minn., a theater committed to bringing people together from different backgrounds and ethnicities. Turner is a 2007 graduate of the MFA in Arts Administration program at Virginia Tech, now working at Synchronicity Performance Group in Atlanta, Ga.