Today CAN brings you a new story by Dana Edell, "World Savvy: Mapping a Creative Path to Global Education." Edell spent several weeks in New York City with World Savvy's Global Youth Media and Arts Program, in which 500 teens from all over the globe explored themes of immigration and identity. She writes about how the global arts-education organization worked with immigrant students from 200 New York public schools while they researched immigration and sculpted their new knowledge into visual arts and performance projects. World Savvy's methods helped the teens, all of whom were born outside the U.S., mine their own stories and create group identities as well. They created t-shirts with social-justice messages, poetry banners, altar installations, a migration map, collages, animation videos, performance works and more -- and showed them in a gallery exhibition at NYU and a festival at LaGuardia Community College. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you some intriguing additions to the two most recent book reviews on the site: excerpts from the books themselves. Craig Zelizer's July review of Bill Cleveland's "Art and Upheaval: Artists on the World Frontlines" is accompanied by a section of the book describing how a small NGO called Reyum has helped to rebuild Cambodia’s decimated cultural and civic infrastructure in the post-Khmer Rouge era. Richard Owen Geer's August review of Petra Kupper's "Community Performance: An Introduction" is accompanied by three excerpts from the book, illustrating the complexity and multivocality of the book's design. The Kuppers excerpts are from chapters on "Setting Up and Running a Group," "Findings Motivations" and "Building Sustainability." These excerpts may be accessed by clicking on the links below the book covers that illustrate the reviews. [LINK]

One thousand kids will march in the Mississippi Delta's first-ever “Blues Harmonica Parade,” to kick off the opening of the B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center. The students in the September 11, 2008, parade in Indianola, Miss., will perform a B.B. King song from the "Indianola, MS Seeds" CD, and will be provided a music instruction sheet, instructional DVD, a harmonica and a button reading "I Got Harmonica Love for B.B. King." The organizers encourage students to make their own original artwork about the legendary blues musician and to bring along to the parade their cheerleaders and school banners. The new Center honors B.B. King and "his life's story of hardship, perseverance, talent and humility as a way to further the arts, youth development and racial reconciliation in the Mississippi Delta and Beyond." [LINK]

September 26, 2008, is the deadline for applications to the pilot program of the MetLife Foundation Creative Aging Program. It will provide in-depth technical assistance and seed grants of $7,500 to eight community arts education organizations to enable them to design, implement and evaluate sustainable creative-aging programs (participatory, skill-based arts education programs for adults age 60 and above) using best practices detailed in the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts' latest publication, "Creativity Matters: The Arts and Aging Toolkit." Technical assistance will focus on capacity-building with particular attention to outcome-based evaluation measuring changes in the health of participants. Only organizations that are full members in good standing of the National Guild may apply (it's not too late to join!). There's a conference call for questions at 1 p.m. EDT, September 4; to join, e-mail Program Manager Johanna Misey Boyer: johanna@jmb-arts.com. [LINK]

In Massachusetts, the Creative Transitions Initiative is "a state experiment that is using theater, art and music to help juvenile offenders. Run in seven settings statewide, the program is a way for officials to see what it could take to build a system of high caliber arts programs rooted in the Department of Youth Services," says a Boston Globe editorial (8/18/08), which praises the program, and recommends, "A good DYS arts program could also save public money if it steers more youth away from reoffending. Officials should find ways to track the long-term outcomes of young participants, to prove the program's worth to taxpayers. ... The next step is for Massachusetts to gather evidence by taking a long-term look at what happens when court-involved youth become involved in the arts." (Thanks, Cultural Policy Listserv.) [LINK]

BrushFire is Provisions Library's guide to activist arts and culture during the run-up to the U.S. elections in November 2008. Artists, arts organizations and their community partners are submitting notices of their arts actions for social change to the Brushfire blog. At the same time, Provisions is presenting a series of public art interventions around the country designed to focus attention on key issues such as the Iraq war, immigration, global warming, civil liberties, housing and healthcare; artists include The Beehive Collective, The Floating Lab Collective, Futurefarmers, Ligorano/Reese and Jon Winet. Brushfire culminates in an exhibition, "Close Encounters: Reflections on the Future," at the American University Art Museum in September and October, along with a D.C.-wide festival of exhibitions and arts events on key social issues. Send your announcements to the blog. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you a Richard Owen Geer review of "Community Performance: An Introduction" by Petra Kuppers. Geer says it's "a valuable tool for the new practitioner of the community-based arts. It begins with historical material, but the result is not history as much as an indication of the breadth and diversity of the field, as conveyed by reference to specific practices and practitioners." Kuppers, says Geer, provides the entry-level student with how-to chapters, presented in a "welter of sidebars. Constant multivocality is one of the book’s most notable characteristics." He admires her sensitivity to diversity, but questions her definition of community performance and her lack of inclusion of the voices of many of the authorities from the field as presented on CAN. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you a story from China by artist Lily Yeh and the Barefoot Artists, who helped students at the Dandelion School change their environment. The Dandelion School, say Yeh and Kelly Tannen in today's story, is located in a heavily polluted industrial section on the outskirts of Beijing. It's the only nonprofit organization in the city that serves the needs of 620 children of poor migrant workers coming from 24 provinces. Its programs and activities manifest its motto, "Ai Man Tian Xia, Let the heaven and earth be filled with love." The school environment felt inhospitable, barren and harsh, and Dandelion's teachers invited Yeh to "cultivate us to have the ability to find angels in hell." New designs were crafted from recycled student art work and the work of Ku SuLan, an influential self-taught 20th-century female Chinese peasant artist, then the students installed the designs in mosaic throughout the school. Yeh and Tannen describe the "powerful effective process." [LINK]

Pangea World Theater will host and immigrants' program, "Breaking the Silence," August 26, 2008, at the Minneapolis Public Library. The program, presented in collaboration with the Immigrant Women’s Task Force, Advocates for Human Rights and the Library, is intended to "empower immigrant and refugee women and their communities," and "to help shed light on the facts surrounding immigration to the U.S. and Minnesota." The event will provide information about immigrants' basic human rights, including housing and medical services. It also includes a performance of "Journey to Safety" by Pangea World Theater, which combines an artistic stage presentation with interactive discussions and training about the battered immigrant woman’s experience. "In order to access services and protection," sayd Pangea's Meena Natarajan, "battered refugee and immigrant women must overcome obstacles such as language barriers, fear of deportation and community pressures." [LINK]

Local historians will speak on the agricultural/ environmental history of the Philadelphia region September 25, 2008, to accompany an exhibition of environmental art installations. "Ghosts and Shadows" shows at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia, September 6, 2008 - January 2, 2009, presented with The Center for Emerging Visual Artists. Artists Jennifer Chapman, Keiko Miyamori, Kara Rennert and Marisha Simons were chosen by curator Warren Angle for their "poetic sense of place" and unique views of human impact on the natural environment. The installations, located at the Schuylkill Center's Second Site, a historic, abandoned farmhouse and barn, examine the farmhouse as a human habitat, juxtapose it with 50 birdhouses, reanimate the barn and awaken a "ghost forest" of endangered and extinct plants and trees. There will be several opportunities to tour the installations with the artists. [LINK]

"The Future of the Arts and Arts Education" is the title of two panel discussions at the Democratic and Republication national conventions in August and September. Sponsored by the Americans for the Arts Action Fund and NAMM, the National Association of Music Merchants, the panels are designed to engage members of Congress, governors, lt. governors, mayors, local elected officials and education and cultural leaders attending the conventions. Both events are part of ArtsVote2008, the national initiative the Action Fund has been running throughout the presidential election. In Denver, August 29, the panel is moderated by former U.S. Secretary of Education and former Governor of South Carolina Richard Riley; in Minneapolis, September 2, the panel is moderated by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Space is limited; for reservations: jstrieter@artsusa.org. [LINK]

"Art as a Public Health Tool" is a panel discussion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga., September 4, 2008. The event is in conjunction with the current exhibition at the CDC's Global Health Odyssey Museum, "The Complexity of Emergencies: Responding through Art" (through September 12), which examines the visual art projects of three organizations working with children affected by emergencies, in the U.S. and abroad: America’s Camp (focus: 9/11); the Community Initiatives Foundation (Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana); and The ArtReach Foundation (Bosnia). Representatives from all three will be on the panel, moderated by Richard Besser, M.D., director of the CDC's Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response. It's in the Distance Learning Auditorium, Tom Harkin Global Communications Center, Building 19, Roybal Campus, 10-11:30 a.m. (jgantt@cdc.gov) (Thanks, Craig Zelizer.) [LINK]

For the first time, the arts and humanities have been officially invited into the professional space explorers global meeting place: The International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow. At the congress, The Arts Catalyst, Leonardo/OLATS and I-DAT at the University of Plymouth will host "Less Remote: The Futures of Space Exploration," September 30-October 1, 2008, an arts-and-humanities symposium "in the context of our current understanding of social, economic and technological imperatives." Artists, thinkers and writers will contribute to debates about going back to the moon and on to Mars, living in space, art in zero gravity, the future of the International Space Station and the search for life and human origins in scientific missions. "Less Remote" features presentations by artists who have worked either with space agencies or in the space context recently. [LINK]

Stockholm artists, architects, political scientists and filmmakers have organized a "storytelling" project called "Informal Cities: The Stockholm Urban Think Tank," September 6-8, 2008. The exhibition and symposium focuses on the fastest expanding city structures in the world: areas with no city planning or communal infrastructure. "The formal city might have something to learn from the slum, where people have started to organize themselves both in local networks and internationally," say the 16 organizers, postgraduate students at Stockholm's Royal University College of Fine Arts. They have spent three years studying urbanization, informal living and socioeconomic structures with inhabitants of Rio, Sao Paulo, Durban, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Manila, Nairobi, Lilongwe and Blantyre. The exhibition includes films, sound, drawings, models and other documentation from the sites. Twenty guests from communities whose voices are rarely heard will talk about their work and lives. [LINK]

Americans for the Arts has announced a series of Webinars with leaders in the field of community arts, September-December 2008. Topics for the 90-minute online seminars include arts-education program evaluation, local emerging leaders networks, creative aging, leadership evolution, new technologies in professional networking, rural arts communities, and leadership in tough times. This new media platform enables you to get a high level of interaction with the presenter, other attendees and the content without leaving your desk. The registration fee allows participants to invite an unlimited number of colleagues to participate in a presentation at one location by watching the Web and using speaker phone to hear the audio and to display handouts and power-point presentations with enhanced content-delivery options. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you "Community Conversations through the Arts: Artistic Response After the Virginia Tech Tragedy" by Shannon Turner. Turner was a graduate student in the arts and public dialogue when the shooting rampage broke out at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. She joined a disparate group of Blacksburg residents who formed HERE: Honoring Experiences, Reflections, and Expressions. They wanted to create a healing artistic response to the shattering events. Turner takes the reader through a year in Blacksburg, as HERE presents many community arts events that memorialize and examine the tragedy, culminating in "Community Conversations through the Arts," a creative showcase intended to give local, amateur performers an opportunity to perform on Blacksburg's Lyric Theatre stage on the first anniversary of the shootings. She also interrogates HERE's process and its criteria for the success of the project. Shannon Turner is a member of CAN's advisory board. [LINK]

New films by teens from the Florida Film Institute's filmmaking programs are on YouTube; don't miss "Bop It Out," about a boys v. girls dance contest. "Bop it Out," by students of the City of Miami Summer Film Camp, is on view, along with award-winners like Turner Tech High School's "Brother's Keeper," Coral Reef Sr. High School's "Safe," and Miami Northwestern High School's "A New Love." This year, the Florida Film Institute (FFI) kicks off its 16th season, having mentored nearly 5,000 Miami-Dade and Broward County middle- and high-school students through its CINEMA (Cinematographers in Education and Media Arts) programs in local schools and community centers. The workshops provide an in-depth look at script writing, location shooting, cinematography, acting on screen, lighting, directing, editing, sound, wardrobe and makeup. [LINK]

There's a floating city on the Hudson River right now, part of an art project called “Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea." Julie Bloom in the N.Y.Times (8/17/08) says the fleet of seven handmade ships "with junkyard roots" is on its way down the Hudson, from Troy through New York Harbor to Long Island City, where the fleet will dock at Deitch Studios as part of an exhibition beginning Sept. 7. Created by a collaborative led by the artist Swoon, the project is "part floating artwork, part performance, part mobile utopia and seemingly part summer camp for grown-up artsy kids." Made entirely of recycled materials, the flotilla totes a band and a play, performed by crew members at stops along the way. "Swimming Cities" is reminiscent of Swoon's 2006 “Miss Rockaway Armada" on the Mississippi. [LINK]

Artist Suzane Lacy will be the keynote speaker at "Public Art and Democracy," a conference at the University of MInnesota, September 26-27, 2008. The conference sponsor, the Institute for Advanced Studies, describes it as "occasioned by the confluence of four important events affecting the Twin Cities: Speaking of Home, artist Nancy Ann Coyne's photographic public artwork exploring the meaning of home, acculturation, and alienation for new Americans in the Twin Cities; the thirtieth anniversary of Forecast Public Art, a Twin Cities-based non-profit organization; the need for conversations about public engagement with the political process which will doubtless arise in the wake of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions; and the Minnesota Sesquicentennial." Lacy is one of the foremost scholar/practitioners in public art and community art. Conference participants include Forecast's Jack Becker, who wrote the overview essay on public art for CAN. [LINK]

Portlanders will investigate the concept of "clothing as home" during a workshop with Sojourn Theatre, August 16, 2008, as part of Sojourn's new project, "BUILT." The workshop, "What to Where" by Sojourn costume designer/ensemble member Courtney Davis, will have explore "the person as building block for city" as participants build their own functional costumes "for a very specific person using the unique materials provided. Be inspired by a pre-fab house, an inner tube, a porcupine, a raincoat, a seatbelt, a hamster ball. Get ready to tape, staple, hot glue, and sew, if you can." On August 23, Sojourn will lead a workshop/conversation called "The Future of Housing in Portland" with developers, representatives for the homeless, urban planners and civic leaders. The events are part of Sojourn's BUILT Public Engagement Series at the South Waterfront Artist in Residence Program. [LINK]

Three artists will stage a public event in New York's Dead Horse Bay, August 16, 2008, during the convergence of sunset, moonrise and high tide. The event is part of an iLAND collaborative residency by choreographer Sarah White, architect Angel Ayón and visual artist Gerald Marks. The project explores the dynamic of man’s interactions with the natural environment over time and as it applies to this area of coastline, once home to horse-processing and fish-oil plants. Nature has reclaimed much of the bay, now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area. "Through these public events [August 16, September 14, October 12]," say the artists,"we would like to call attention to a multidimensional experience of this particular coastal landscape … spatially, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually." iLAND (interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance) is directed by choreographer Jennifer Monson. [LINK]

SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, Calif., is at work on three important monuments: to Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. SPARC Founder Judy Baca's designs won commissions for all three. The Chavez monument at California's San Jose State University will honor the American labor leader and founder of the United Farm Workers of America with a Mayan corbelled arch and images illustrating his activism. The 350' King monument (with Philip Matzengeit), on the I-94 freeway in San Diego, Calif., will comprise three 30' laser-cut steel murals representing apsects of King's work: racial equality, economic justice and peace. The Kennedy monument, on facing arches at the Ambassador Hotel site in Los Angeles, where Kennedy died, will also be steel-cut murals. See SPARC's Web site for details. [LINK]

Cornerstone Theater will premiere a new production, "Eye for Eye: A Dramatic Investigation of Incarceration and Justice in American Society," at the Imagining America conference. The play, at USC October 2, explores incarceration, community retribution, the exoneration movement, prison employment and the ways children are affected by their parents’ incarceration. It's the third installment in Cornerstone's five-part series, “The Justice Cycle,” examining the relationship between laws and community creation and disruption, and "pushes audiences to think critically about the role and function of justice in our society." Cornerstone also leads a workshop earlier that day, "Initial Steps in Turning Community Stories into Art." The Imagining America conference, in Los Angeles, Calif., Oct. 1-4, 2008, is themed "Public Engagement in a Diverse America: Layers of Place, Movements of People." [LINK]

Recognizing the role arts and culture play in economic growth, the Canadian government will present Ignite The Americas: Youth Arts Policy Forum in Toronto, September 15-21, 2008. Planned and produced by the Department of Canadian Heritage in partnership with youth arts sector leaders and in collaboration with the Inter-American Committee on Culture (CIC) of the Organization of American States (OAS), Ignite the Americas will bring together young leaders and artists, cultural-policy makers and industry leaders from across OAS Member States as "an important first step towards building strong partnerships and cultivating new opportunities for cultural, professional and creative exchange between the youth arts and cultural sectors." Conference goals include a youth toolkit for creating successful cultural enterprises, cultural-policy recommendations and a hemisphere-wide network of youth arts organizations. Deadline to apply to be a delegate: August 13, 2008. [LINK]

Issue Three of Community Arts Perspectives: A Publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project is now available on CAN. The issue includes essays by Mark Carter and Rebecca Yenawine on the pedagogy of Kids on the Hill; Kate Collins on her community-based Bowling Green State course, "The Citizen Artist"; Grady Hillman on the Core Arts program in MIssissippi; Christopher Irion on his nationwide PhotoBooth Project; Geetha Iyer on Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project; Kara McDonagh on MICA's Community Arts Corps program with AmeriCorps; Ashley Minner on working as an artist with the Native American Baltimore community where she grew up; Katie Schumm on residential youth arts camps; and Carol Marie Webster on dance as activism and some questions for a little black girl. [LINK]

Application deadline is September 15, 2008, for Community-Word Project's Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program for the 2008-9 school year The 25-week program teaches practicing artists and MFA students to transform their creative processes into teaching tools to integrate the arts into the public-school curriculum, gaining experience in New York City classrooms. There are three concurrent trainings; one geared toward teaching K-6th grade students, one geared toward addressing the needs of middle- and high-school students and one geared for experienced teaching artists. Applicants will be notified of acceptance before September 26. [LINK]

By September 2009, 39 Massachusetts kids will be enrolled in the Prelude Preschool of the Arts, one of the few full-day arts-dedicated preschools in the U.S. It's in the 1930s Art Deco Fleet Bank building in downtown Springfield, Mass., which The Community Music School has been transforming into an oasis of arts and learning through a $3.1-million renovation project, says Jack Flynn on masslive.com. Presently there are 23,000 sq. ft. of studios, classrooms, offices and performance areas on four floors. In a typical week, 700 students attend the classes at the school, and another 1,000-plus receive musical tutoring at schools, day-care centers or other sites. The final goal of the campaign is transforming the lobby of the old bank into a performance hall. (Thanks, Arts Education Listserv.) [LINK]

The Future Is on the Table is "a river of art projects with sources in India, England, South Africa, Nigeria, France and the U.S." The "river" comes together September 13-October 26, 2008, in Charleston, S.C., with art installations, performances, dialogues and gift exchanges. Initiated by Charleston artists Gwylene Gallimard and Jean-Marie Mauclet, the event is the culmination of a community art collaboration that began in 2003 when Gallimard and Mauclet sent 56 handmade three-legged stools as gifts to artists around the world. The seats of the stools were cut from a single sheet of marine plywood painted with a map of the world. They were sent with a proposal to use the arts to generate conversation about water and shelter as basic human rights. The contributions and their creators meet this fall. Join the ongoing conversation on the Web. [LINK]