Some new ideas for teaching art and social justice have been posted on the Web site of the Center for Art and Public Life at the California College of the Arts. Created by coaching artists from CCA, interns from Humboldt State and teachers from two Oakland public schools, the Art and Social Justice Project has produced some interesting curricula. Posted online are lesson-plan designs for courses in kindergarten through tenth grades, with such titles as "Interdependence: Going to Seed and Back Again with the Help of Some Friends"; "Energy Sources: Planning for the Future"; "Habitat: The Importance of the Environment That We Live In"; and "History: The Oakland Hall of Fame." The curricula are based on the Teaching for Understanding and the Studio Thinking frameworks developed by Harvard's Project Zero. [LINK]

Jan Cohen-Cruz, a major figure in the field of community-based arts and a CAN writer/adviser, has been appointed the new director of Imagining America. Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA) is a national consortium of some 80 colleges and universities whose mission is to strengthen the public role and democratic purposes of the humanities, arts and design. On July 1, 2007, when Syracuse University becomes the new host campus for IA (through 2012), Cohen-Cruz begins to direct the consortium there and serve as University Professor. Cohen-Cruz is a theater artist/scholar who comes to IA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she established an impressive array of programs, projects, curricula and national partnerships for the field. Her most recent book is “Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States." For more, see IA's Web site. [LINK]

Audience members will be able to stop the action of a play at the Boiler Room in Port Townsend, Wash., June 29, 2007, and improvise solutions to the problems it poses. “Waging Peace – Designing Justice” is a Forum Theater performance and community dialogue with a cast of 40 people from across the U.S. and abroad. It's the culmination of a week-long intensive training in Theater of the Oppressed techniques by the Mandala Center for Change. Under the guidance of facilitator Marc Weinblatt, the audience will choose from several prescripted short plays depicting social issues relevant to the community. The selected plays will be performed a second time, with the audience invited to intervene. Themes from past annual events have included racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, globalization, the education system, disability and the war in Iraq. [LINK]

Eco-artist Lynne Hull has received the 2007 AHN Award from the Arts and Healing Network "for being part of the solution to our current environmental crisis." The award also acknowledges Hull "for her firm belief that artists’ creativity can be effectively applied to the urgent situations we face today." Says the network: "Lynne Hull has pioneered 'trans-species' art, creating sculptural installations that provide wildlife habitat enhancement and eco-atonement for human impact." Her work has been installed in 14 states and eight including Kenya, Mexico and the U.K. Currently she's working on "Migration Mileposts," linking communities in the hemisphere that share migratory birds, and she recently completed "East Drake Pondworks" for the city of Fort Collins, Colo., where she lives. Visit the Web to read a Hull interview and learn more about her work. [LINK]

Burbank Senior Artists Colony is the first apartment community in the U.S. for creative older people, says Patricia Leigh Brown in the N.Y.Times (9/10/06). The southern California colony offers, free, a digital film editing laboratory, a theater, drama classes and art studios open 24 hours a day. And this is Hollywood! Residents are making movies: “Bandida,” a new comedy about an old woman who robs a convenience store, stars first-time actress Helen Miller, 81 (Apt. 125), and was written by first-timer Suzanne Knode, 63 (Apt. 406). And they're on the radio: Residents appear regularly on “Experience Talks,” a weekly KPFK program reaching 250,000 listeners and produced by More Than Shelter for Seniors, the nonprofit organization that conceptualized the colony. Seventy percent of the 141 apartments rent at market rate, with 30 percent reserved for low-income residents. [LINK]

The James Irvine Foundation is providing support to California community arts projects through the New Connections Fund (NCF), a program strategy that prioritizes diversity and location. One of NCF's "program strategies," Connection Through Cultural Participation, reaches out to small and mid-sized arts and cultural organizations that haven't received previous Irvine funding. Grants of up to $50,000 are intended to "support projects that present the diverse cultures represented in the state," enabling them to broaden, deepen and diversify participation in their programs. NCF prioritizes the Central Valley and Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties as geographic areas of strategic importance because they've been traditionally underserved by philanthropy; they're experiencing major demographic shifts and rapid population growth; and low-income people reside there in disproportionate numbers. Recent grantees are on the Web. Next deadline: August 13, 2007. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you an excerpt from a new book by New Village Press; "Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons Through Prison Horticulture" by James Jiler. It's the first comprehensive guide to creating in-prison and post-release horticultural training programs. Jiler directs the Greenhouse Project, a horticultural job-training program for male and female inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island jail system. He also directs the GreenTeam of ex-offenders who work with community groups and institutions on landscape-related projects throughout New York State. He has also worked as a inner-city urban ecologist in Baltimore and New Haven and an agriculturist in Nepal. He holds a Masters Degree in forestry and social ecology from Yale. The excerpt begins with a snapshot of the greenhouse program in action, and follows with details of Jiler’s teaching methods. Those working in art & corrections or arts & criminal justice may find Jiler's approach useful in their prison work. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you "The Funder's Tale," in which Dan Yashinsky, an award-winning Canadian storyteller, ponders his new job at the Toronto Arts Council. "After 25 years of being a freelance storyteller," writes Yashinsky, "I decided to apply for a straight job. I saw an ad for Community Arts grants officer at Toronto Arts Council, did an interview and, to my real surprise, was accepted. But when I heard the news, I lost my voice for a week." Adjusting to his first job "with benefits," Yashinky began seriously to think about community art and its relation to social change: "Will community arts produce concrete and measurable change in our social habitat? Perhaps. But what it will undeniably do, beyond all theories and definitions, is give us new ways, hard as they may be to measure, to express why those changes are necessary and new ways to make them." This essay is the online line debut of a story from The New Quarterly’s jam-packed issue for Winter, 2006/07, "The Artist as Activist," published in tandem with a similarly themed issue of Alternatives magazine; both were guest-edited by Susan L. Scott. [LINK]

Philanthropist Eli Broad and filmmaker Chike Nwoffiah are the featured speakers at the Conference for Community Arts Education in Los Angeles, Calif., November 7-10, 2007. Sponsored by the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, the conference includes tracks on programming, partnership, leadership & governance, development, marketing and research and participants will also visit L.A. area arts education organizations. An awards ceremony will honor educator Iona Benson and choreographer Liz Lerman for their contributions to community arts education. An Arts Education Expo will feature vendors and manufacturers of software, technology and materials for the field. Special preconference institutes are planned: "Marketing & Community Engagement: Increasing Participation and Diversity," led by consultant Donna Walker-Kuhne, and "Creative Aging: Increasing Older Adults' Engagement in the Arts," led by Susan Perlstein of the National Center for Creative Aging. [LINK]

The Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago is launching TARP, the Teaching Artist Research Project. TARP is a two-year project that will study teaching artists in six cities. It aims to collect demographic, economic, artistic and educational data; deepen understanding of the best supports, conditions, professional standards and development for the work; and offer practical policy suggestions designed to support the practice. The quarterly Teaching Artist Journal is an editorial project of the Center. In addition, it publishes online Democratic Vistas Profiles: Essays in the Arts and Democracy; the latest one is on Suzan-Lori Parks by Steven Leigh Morris. The Center's Web site just published "The Art of Social Imagination" from the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, a conversation about Arlene Goldbard's book "New Creative Community." [LINK]

The Writers Guild of America Theater in Beverly Hills will be the site of a June 30 reading and publication celebration for a new anthology, "Lines of Velocity: Words That Move from WriteGirl." WriteGirl is a community of women writers, in Los Angeles, Calif., that "promotes creativity and self-expression to empower girls." Through one-on-one mentoring and monthly creative writing workshops, professional women writers provide girls with techniques, insights and hot topics for writing. Workshops explore poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, songwriting, journalism, screenwriting, playwriting, persuasive writing, journal writing, editing and more. Events are held at Exposition Park Intergenerational Community Center near USC, with girls participating from 16 schools in central L.A. A feature-length documentary about WriteGirl is in production, with four mentees learning state-of-the-art techniques in production and editing. "Lines of Velocity" is their fifth anthology. [LINK]

Friday, June 29, 2007, is the deadline for submission of films for consideration for the 2008 TV broadcast season of "P.O.V.," the PBS documentary film showcase. "P.O.V." considers only nonfiction films that have not been broadcast nationally, made by independent film or video makers who had editorial control over the product. See the "P.O.V." Web site for guidelines. (Note: June 29 is the arrival deadline, not a postmark deadline.) A roster of films being shown during the 2007 season is online. Coming up are "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars" by Zach Niles and Banker White and "Massacre at Murambi" by Sam Kauffman (June 26), "Standing Silent Nation " by Suree Towfighnia and Courtney Hermann (July 3), "Revolution '67" by Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno (July 10) and "The Chances of the World Changing" by Katie Galloway and Po Kutchins. [LINK]

Chicago teens will learn to make waves on the airwaves this summer, thanks to Radio Arte WRTE 90.5 FM. The award-winning urban community station, offers free training for people ages 15-21 in socially conscious journalism, media literacy, broadcast training and programming. Radio Arte’s prime-time radio program "First Voice/Primera Voz" is looking for aspiring reporters, producers and on-air personalities interested in using the airwaves to talk about social-justice concerns. Trainees will learn how to think critically about issues affecting their everyday lives -- like immigration, LGBT issues, women’s rights, education, etc. -- and create features for broadcast. Applications, only available online, are due July 6, 2007; ten weeks of classes (twice a week) begin August 6. Radio Arte is a Latino-owned, bilingual, youth-driven radio initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art, located in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you a new story by Jan Cohen-Cruz chronicling the beginning of the multifaceted post-Katrina Transforma Project in New Orleans, La. (NOLA). Transforma represents the coming together of artists, organizers, arts scholars and students from all over the country to try to "insert creative people into the rebuilding process." The Transforma team includes Rick Lowe, founder of Houston's Project Row Houses; California cultural-affairs manager Jessica Cusick; and CalArts artist/teacher Sam Durant. The work in NOLA also involves New York conceptual artist Mel Chin and many others. Cohen-Cruz herself became part of the process when she relocated from New York for four months to work with local NOLA artists and scholars, neighborhood residents and students from NYU and Tulane on a Transforma project, "HOME, New Orleans?" She writes, "Our goal is not only to create art on site but also to create and expand relationships among the diverse individuals, organizations, institutions and neighborhoods participating." Cohen-Cruz describes and critiques the complex process of answering the question: "Can cultural activity produce meaningful and sustainable activity in such a devastated community?" [LINK]

The multiple identities of artists with disabilities –- including race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation -- are the topics of a forum in Miami, Florida, June 29, 2007. The half-day forum, "di(verse)ability: disability and diversity in the arts," will also examine the particular challenges of access, representation and alliance building across communities. John Killacky of the San Francisco Foundation will give the keynote, "From Denial to Acceptance," and panelists will include artists Sidiki Conde, Jennylin Duany, Terry Galloway, Karen Peterson and Marian Winters. The forum is part of danceAble, June 25-29, an annual program produced by Tigertail Productions and the Florida Dance Association for the Florida Dance Festival . Other danceAble events include a workshop, video screening and performance by Sidiki Conde and his Tokounou company, a mixed-ability West African drumming and dance ensemble. [LINK]

Posing as representative from big oil, the Yes Men delivered a keynote speech yesterday to 300 oilmen suggesting they could "keep fuel flowing" by transforming the billions of people who die into oil. Speaking as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives, they spoke at GO-EXPO, Canada's largest oil conference, held in Calgary, Alberta, June 14, 2007. "We need something like whales, but infinitely more abundant," said "NPC rep" "Shepard Wolff" (Andy Bichlbaum), describing the technology used to render human flesh into a new Exxon oil product called Vivoleum. 3-D animations of the process brought it to life. The oilmen listened to the lecture with attention, and then lit "commemorative candles" supposedly made of Vivoleum obtained from the flesh of an "Exxon janitor" who died as a result of cleaning up a toxic spill. [LINK]

The American Dance Festival's Emmy-winning documentary series "Free To Dance" will be aired nationally over PBS TV this month, and a comprehensive Web site premieres today (6/15/07). "Free To Dance" chronicles the role that African-American dancers and choreographers have played in the development of modern dance as an American art form. Landmark dance masterpieces by African-American choreographers were filmed for the series and woven throughout the historical narrative. The Web site offers an African-American dance timeline, beginning in 1619; historical and thematic essays; 43 biographies; hyperlinked resources; and lesson plans examining the relationship of modern dance to Afro-Caribbean slave roots and daily life activities; issues of black pride, self-expression and identity; and social justice and activism in response to a racist American society. Check local broadcast listings on the PBS site. [LINK]

The Charlotte (NC) Coliseum was demolished Sunday, leaving behind nothing but rubble and a $340,000 sculpture by artist Maya Lin, says Kytia Weir in the Charlotte Observer (6/6/07), and it raises the question: What happens to public art once it falls into private hands? Lin and landscape architect Henry Arnold were commissioned to create the work, "Topo," in 1989 for the city's coliseum. The piece involves dirt contoured along a slope, the giant holly bushes, trees and grass, not easily movable. Now the site-specific work sits on land planned for a 170-acre mixed-use development. Lin has not yet been reached, and Arnold said the developers never formally notified him. The initial contract and the federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 are muddying the waters. [LINK]

Gary Machlis, senior scientist at the National Park Service, is the next guest on "Virtual Concerts," a weekly live talkcast hosted by cross-sector artist Aviva Rahmani. "Virtual Concerts" is an international platform where artists and scientists talk about ecological art and global warming. Machlis will discuss "A Unified Field Theory for Ecological Change?" at 10 a.m. EDT, June 19, 2007. Upcoming June-July guests: Hans Dieleman, Ruth Wallen, Carey Lovelace, Eve Larramee and Steven Miller. Listen online or download past episodes about: ecological sustainability, student views on art and ecology, U.N. reports on global warming, city planning, art and climate change, land-trust strategies, social policy, ecofeminism and lots more. It's facilitated by TalkShoe, a service that enables anyone to create, join or listen to live interactive podcasts & audioblogs. [LINK]

The Rockefeller Foundation has announced the creation of a $2.5 million New York City Cultural Innovation Fund to promote engagement with the city's future civic and cultural agenda. Robin Pogrebin writes in the N.Y. Times (6/14/07): "Grants from $50,000 to $250,000 will be awarded for new creative work in the visual, performing and media arts ... The projects will involve partnerships that connect cultural institutions with universities and the private sector, or that present new solutions for longstanding limitations on cultural expansion. The foundation also named three advisers to the fund: Lowery Stokes Sims, former president of the Studio Museum in Harlem; David Thorpe, global director of innovation at Ogilvy Worldwide; and Andrew Zolli, curator of the annual Pop!Tech conference. Initial proposals are due on July 20. Grants will be announced in November." [LINK]

The U.K. organization The Arts Catalyst has an attractive roster of projects coming up, reaching across sectors and attacking urgent social problems. In addition to lots of participatory education opportunities, there's the 2nd International Artists Airshow, a day of "art, experimentation and flying" in Gunpowder Park, North London, presented with the Landscape+Arts Network on June 30, "from 3 p.m. till dawn." Also in progress: a study of deformed amphibians, with eco-art projects and field trips; research into marketing of drugs to control our negative emotions; a film exploring the U.K.'s nuclear industry; investigations of the government-controlled Health and Safety Laboratory, "where human life is priced on an industrial basis"; a report for the European Space Agency on cultural utilization of the International Space Station; and more. [LINK]

"7 Glimpses of Utopia," a June 21, 2007, performance event by the Skid Row-based theater group the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), examines the future of downtown L.A. It's part of "Utopia/Dystopia," a yearlong series of performances, public art, panels and community conversations about a current real-estate boom and social policy that may displace downtown's majority population of poor people. The event presents the visions of people living and working downtown, including musicians, architects, developers, small-business owners, poets, workers and activists. Among participants are Adelle Yellin, who developed Grand Central Market; Pete White of L.A. Community Action Network; Henry Procter of The Art of Cleaning; and Skid Row artist Manuel Compito (a.k.a. O.G. Man). The event was strategized by artist Harrell Fletcher and is presented at/with The National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. [LINK]

"War and Our World" is an international conference presented in England July 19-12, 2007, by several arts organizations and others. The University of Manchester's 2007 Hallsworth Conference will be devoted to the conceptualization, conduct and aftermaths of war in the modern world and the role and responsibilities of the public intellectual in understanding and communicating issues around armed conflict and intervention. Sponsors are a wide variety of campus organizations, including the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and In Place of War, a project led by James Thompson that explores the relationship between performance and war and researches performance from sites of armed conflict and by artists and communities fleeing those settings. Panels will feature politicians, activists and artists from around the world, including performance troupes from Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Gaza. [LINK]

Arlene Goldbard, returning from the N.Y. conference "Sustaining Voices from the Battlefront: Community Grounded Cultural Arts Organizations @ 30," is blogging. Posting "Further Travels in the Generation Gap" (6/11/07), she reflects on what she heard from younger artists about their preference for "alternative forms of organization--individual social entrepreneurship, collectives, cooperatives, for-profit and hybrid enterprises, as well as working independently, a kind of free agency," compared with her generation, many of whom "will never abandon the hope that government will at some future time act for the public interest in cultural development. ... It appears they have absorbed the current government's propaganda ... that government is intrinsically bad. But my friends and I believe that democracy can be rehabilitated, having adopted that view as ... young people, inspired by the civil rights and peace movements of our youth." [LINK]

The Cultural Arts Coalition, based in Phoenix, Ariz., has issued a list of "guiding arts practices" developed in a public participation process involving artists, educators and community activists. The CAC is a unique network of community arts groups in the Phoenix area that is working hard to identify practices that "stimulate social awareness" and honor the extremely diverse cultural values of its members. Their agreement mandates that arts programming be: participant centered and inclusive; issue or theme driven; experiential and expressive; holistic and authentic; reflective and evaluative; social, collaborative and democratic; developmentally appropriate; relationship oriented; and celebrative. "It is important to understand," they state, "that many, but not all of these practices, will be present in a single project." The CAC Web site elaborates on this guide. It also documents a recent CAC "Peace Dialog and Painting" event in a Phoenix garden. [LINK]

At 7 p.m., 6/7/07, a candlelight vigil and art installation will memorialize George Winne Jr., a student antiwar protestor who burned himself alive in 1970 at UC San Diego. The event, by students Christin Turner & Sasanna Yee, draws attention to the fact that Winne's action "changed the planning of public space on campus." It's part of a UCSD class, "Social Architectures: Interventionist Art, Participatory Design and Social Movement," in which 20 students constructed ten "architectural interventions" on campus, each designed to "observably affect social movement." Displayed on the Web, they include The Labyrinth, Alice in Candy Land, The Bus Stop Living Room, Mobile Gardens and more. The class, produced by the Social Movement Laboratory, was funded by an Open Classroom Challenge Grant from the UC Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). [LINK]

Today CAN brings you "Integrating Community Arts and Conflict Resolution: Lessons and Challenges from the Field," a Cross-Sector Resource essay. The story is by Craig Zelizer, co-founder and senior partner in the Alliance for Conflict Transformation, who's teaching "Arts and Peacebuilding" in the Master's degree program in conflict resolution within the Department of Government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Since more and more artists are working in conflicted communities, we asked Zelizer to bring to the table his experience in projects with youth from violent conflict regions, civil-society development and capacity building in transitional societies, program evaluation and design, conflict sensitivity and mainstreaming across development sectors, and arts and peacebuilding. Zelizer in interested in linking the fields of conflict resolution and community-based art, which he says are "natural allies, and together can be stronger." The essay is accompanied by an intriguing slide show, valuable bibliographic resources and links. [LINK]

On June 23, 2007, audience members will experience a unique urban wilderness in Queens, N.Y., guided by dancers, architects and field guides. The event by choreographer Jennifer Monson and iLAND, Inc., takes place from dawn to dusk on the perimeter of Ridgewood Reservoir, Highland Park, Queens, a 50-acre site comprising wetlands and native swamp forest unusual to the inner city. It's part of iLAND's year-long iMAP (Interdisciplinary Mobile Architecture and Performance) artist/scientist collaboration investigating the landscape. The dancing will move around the mile-long perimeter of the reservoir in five distinct groups. The audience will walk the edge watching the dancing, observing the environment and engaging in two architectural exhibits that display information from a breeding-bird census, vegetative mapping and the history and seasonal shifts at the site. Nature guides will direct and offer information. [LINK]

Three students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) have been awarded France-Merrick Community Arts Partnerships Fellowships for 2007-8. Juniors Hannah Baker, Margaret Lorraine Brett Hull and Anna Ishii, all involved in MICA's Community Arts Partnerships (CAP) program, each receive $3,500 in support of the design and oversight of a community-based educational experience serving the MICA and select Baltimore communities. In most cases, they develop comprehensive lesson plans that support predetermined educational goals and outcomes; articulate a strategy that encourages participating individuals to try out, practice and apply new skills, knowledge and attitudes to real, art-based problems; and manage the on-site activities and responsibilities that relate to the project. Read more about each student's previous community arts work on MICA's Web site. [LINK]

The Storyteller and the Listener Online is a fascinating Web site on the role of story in community peacemaking, healing, bridge building and reconciliation. It's a blog site facilitated by Holly Stevens in Oak Ridge, N.C., publishing two essays every month about story and narrative as a tool for positive social change. This week, for instance, it offers "From myth to meaning: Using stories in group work" by Joan Stockbridge, who tells weekly folktales and myths at New Leaf, a residential program for women in substance-abuse recovery. In April, Marina Cantacuzino wrote "The Forgiveness Project: A journalist's storytelling experiment," about "collecting stories from around the world of people who had experienced atrocity, conflict or crime and who -- rather than seek revenge -- had gone down the road of forgiveness, reconciliation and understanding. [LINK]

Americans for the Arts has presented its Public Art Award to FORECAST Public Artworks/Public Art Review magazine for outstanding service to the field. At its national conference on June 3, 2007, AftA honored FORECAST on its 30th anniversary for the success of the Public Art Review, a leading journal that reaches readers in 50 U.S. states and 20 foreign countries, and for its grant program with the Jerome Foundation to encourage Minnesota artists to explore the public realm. FORECAST will celebrate the award June 18 at the Minnesota Center for Photography (MCP) by honoring founding director Jack Becker (he wrote CAN's overview essay on public art) and releasing PAR #36 "Multifaceted Lens: Photography + Public Art," guest-edited by George Slade. Slade is artistic director of MCP, which will tour a national exhibition of photography related to public art through 2009. [LINK]

A Marygrove College summer arts-infused-education intensive in Detroit will have participants creating their own operas with the Michigan Opera Theatre. The program, "Community Arts Partnerships: Modeling Innovative Methods in English Language Arts Education," August 13-15, 2007, is the second annual intensive offered by Marygrove's new Institute for Arts-Infused Education. It will employ partnerships with local community arts organizations to train participants in using the arts to teach the core curriculum. The intensive will include sessions with Detroit Institute of the Arts on Visual Thinking Strategies, and with Matrix Theatre Company on using puppetry and theater. And Karen DiChiera, founder/director of Michigan Opera Theatre, will lead improvisation exercises in acting, movement and sound/music; participants' creations will be combined in short musicals or operas, poems, dances and music compositions. [LINK]

Families in the Minnesota Twin Cities are working with Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater to learn creative ways to communicate. The Family Matters Project, May 11-June 23, 2007, is an SPDT partnership with social-service organizations to explore the contemporary realities of “familial” communities. offers participants the opportunity to use creative expression, including story-telling and movement, to discover new means to enhance self-worth, stabilize relationships and improve communication within family units. Among groups in the project is The Hmong Youth Group at The Neighborhood House in St. Paul, many of whom are recent refugees from a camp in Laos. That effort will culminate June 23 in a movement project, "My Name is Tong Xiong," at the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Center performance space at The Neighborhood House, along with seniors from the Dunedin Apartment Complex. [LINK]