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). [LINK]

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. [LINK]

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. [LINK]

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. [LINK]

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. [LINK]

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.'" [LINK]

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. [LINK]

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. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you "¡Qué No Se Vuelva a Repetir!", a story by Aryeh Shell from her 2006 residency in El Salvador. Shell was an ArtCorps volunteer in El Salvador, where she lived in the rural flatlands, forming popular-theater groups with youth to develop their skills as community leaders and actors for social change. The Revolutionary Youth Theater was an ensemble Shell brought together with survivors of the Tierra Arrasada or Scorched Earth massacre of October 20-24, 1981, which took the lives 600-800 innocent people, mostly women, children and elders. "The memory was buried under the scorched earth for 20 years," says Shell. The young people turned the survivor's memories into a play called "¡Qué No Se Vuelva a Repetir!" (We want it never to happen again.) This article first appeared in art’ishake, Issue No 5 Winter-Spring 2007, an e-publication Art4Development.net. [LINK]

Fifteen Newark, N.J., public high-school students and their professional-artist mentors will exhibit their collaborative artworks during ArtReach XVI, June 12-July 10, 2008. They are participants in an award-winning arts mentorship program by City Without Walls, New Jersey's oldest nonprofit alternative art space, founded 1975. The program features Newark artists mentoring gifted students in their studios for a semester, interns receiving real-world gallery experience, prominent artists lecturing at Newark high schools, and a culminating exhibition. Many of the students are from low-income families, and to make it possible for them to participate in ArtReach, each receives a stipend of $400. ArtReach has been called a "model" education program by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. This year’s exhibition opens with a performance by the Newark Boys Chorus School and features student videos, wall murals, photography, painting, sculpture, installations and time-lapse video. [LINK]

"Another River Flows: Stories, Songs and a Celebration of the Lehigh Valley Black Experience," the product of three years of oral-history gathering in Pennsylvania, opens in Easton, May 30, 2008. The Lehigh Valley Black African Heritage History Project and Touchstone Theatre partnered on the new theater work with New York theater artist Peggy Pettitt, playwright Linda Parris-Bailey of Carpetbag Theatre in Knoxville, and composer Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock in D.C. They gathered oral histories and songs of the African-American citizens of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton to create the show, which features Pettitt and 25 community actors, and travels to the three cities during its run (through June 14). The History Project partners Muhlenberg College, Lehigh County's Senior Center and Historical Society, Kutztown University, Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society and Touchstone. [LINK]

Chicago's National Museum of Mexican Art will be coordinating cultural events throughout the city during 2010, declared by Mayor Daley The Year of México in Chicago. The museum proposed the idea to the Mayor in recognition of two Mexican anniversaries and celebrations: the 200th anniversary of Mexican Independence and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. The National Museum of Mexican Art (formerly Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum is the largest and leading Méxican cultural institution in the U.S. In addition to visual-arts exhibitions and performance festivals, the museum has an education program serving more than 200,000 people annually ,including 60,000 K-12 students. 90.5 FM Radio Arte is the museum's youth-driven, bilingual public radio station committed to "advancing the voices of a multilayered society through socially conscious journalism, media literacy, training and programming." [LINK]

Photographer Christopher Irion unveils The Dogpatch Portrait Project in the oldest, largest and most intact industrial complex in San Francisco, May 15, 2008. It's part of his ongoing PhotoBooth Project to document communities across the U.S. and create public installations of the collected portraits in those communities. Dogpatch is a nine-square-block area on the Waterfront with a distinctive and colorful history that "... contains architecturally and historically significant workers' cottages, factories, warehouses and public buildings constructed between 1860 to 1945," says John Borg in "The Story of Dogpatch," online. "It is one of the few neighborhoods to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire." The unveiling, which Irion calls "a great party and a chance for the neighborhood to get together and meet each other" is on the sidewalk at 900 Minnesota St., 5-7 p.m. Refreshments will be served. [LINK]

Today CAN is proud to bring you a new story by Arlene Goldbard, "The Path of Stories: Artists and The Thousand Kites Project." It's a long, deep look (with video) into a multi-arts collaboration out of Appalshop that's starting a national conversation about the U.S. prison industrial complex. The Thousand Kites project comprises a call-in hip-hop radio show, “Holler to the Hood” (H2H), which has become a national communications nexus for prisoners and their loved ones, especially through an annual “Calls from Home” special that is distributed nationally; a documentary film, “Up The Ridge”; a play, “Thousand Kites,” based on stories collected from a wide range of people whose lives have been touched by the prison system; other initiatives that combine these, such as a radio program interweaving documentary and dramatic elements; and an interactive Web site providing a connection point and a toolbox for people who want to work on this issue. [LINK]

"Revolution I Love You: 1968 in Art, Politics and Philosophy" is an exhibition in Thessaloniki, Greece, investigating the year 1968 as "an interlude of liberty and global resistance." For the title exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, May 5-June 14, 2008, curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes (translocal.org) borrowed a banner slog from May 1968 in France, when "the whole heart of France was beating to the pulse of revolution." Focusing on "the interplay between the politics of the street, radical philosophy, and the explosion of creative responses in the period," it brings together artworks created in the immediate aftermath of 1968 and more recent responses to contemporary struggles for change. The show is one of a series of events organized under "Days of '68." Accompanied by a book, the show will travel to Budapest in September and Birmingham, England, in November. [LINK]

Berkeley Rep is offering educators lots of opportunities for interaction with "No Child..." an Obie-winning solo performance by Nilaja Sun about her eight years as a teaching artist. In "No Child...," May 11-June 1, 2008, Sun plays an entire classroom of children, their teachers, their parents, the principal, the janitor and even a security guard in what the Rep calls "a master class on overcoming the challenges in public education with humor and hope." They've augmented it online with video from the show, an MP3 interview with Sun and director Hal Brooks, and a great page of Educator's Resources. They're also offering low-cost student matinees including Q&A with Sun and free Teacher Study Guides linked to California Standards, as well as free Teaching Artists Organized workshops from the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, May 18 & 25, June 1 & 8. [LINK]

"Young People In a Changing Climate" is the theme of the third annual Shoot Nations online global photography competition for young people 11-24. Presented by the international children’s charity Plan and photography-event organizers Shoot Experience, the contest asks entrants to portray the current effects of climate change on their lives, how they can act now to reduce these effects, how their environment will change in the years to come and how they might adapt to that change. Entries are accepted May 1-July 31, 2008. The best entrants will have the chance to win a trip to New York and be exhibited at the United Nations HQ as part of International Youth Day, August 12. Last year the competition received 1,500 entries from 85 countries. More than 4,500 people attended exhibitions of Shoot Nations photographs on four continents. [LINK]

Community building as a collaborative aesthetic is the focus of the 4th Annual Community as Intellectual Space Symposium at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago, June 13-15, 2008. Co-presented with the Community Informatics Initiative at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the symposium is titled "Aesthetics as Resistance: The Act of Community Building." The schedule include speakers from surrounding universities and Turabo University, Puerto Rico, as well as DuSable Museum of African American History, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the PRCC and community and government representatives. Activities, all within the Paseo Boricua neighborhood, include a mural tour on the Paseo, Community Informatics Initiative workshops on working with teens and early-childhood learners, a play by Tato Laviera, performed by Pedro Albizu Campos High School students, and participation in the 30th Anniversary People's Parade. [LINK]

N.Y.C.'s Cultural Equity Group presents a Town Hall Meeting, "Sustaining Our Artists, Arts Organizations and Cultural Institutions of Color During the 'Recession'," May 9, 2008. The meeting, 6-8 p.m. at Hunter College's Hall 714 West Building, will address "Defining a new per-capita funding model based on the ethnic and racial demographics of New York City -- a more realistic support process, which would impact communities that are underserved." Moderator is Marta Moreno Vega, founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center. Panelists include Heather Hitchens, NYSCA; Arana J. Hankins, Governor's Cultural & Economic Development Office; Kathleen Hughes, N.Y.C. Dept. of Cultural Affairs; N.Y. State Assemblyman Darryl C. Towns, 54th District, chair, Black Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislative Caucus; and Laurie Cumbo, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). RSVP to elsa@latinoarts.org or call 212-876-1242. [LINK]

Sojourn Theatre is experimenting with the Web for its new project, "BUILT," exploring some online interactions and an organizing site. "BUILT" is a performance/participation/civic-dialogue project currently taking place in Evanston and Chicago, Ill., (in partnership with Northwestern Unversity), and soon to begin in Portland, Ore. Sojourn says it's an investigation of community, place, civic vision, housing and development in relation to the fact that the U.S. will grow by 100 million people in 30-40 years, asking: Where will we live? and Who are you responsible for? "BUILT" has its own Web site with a daily blog. The project participants will also pose a question every Friday on the photojouralism site Nocaptionneeded.com, and they have a page on Facebook. Go to the "BUILT" site to find links to all these pages. [LINK]