Looking for a good place to track the results on Election Night 2008? Try Georgetown University's Davis Performing Arts Center in D.C. Follow the election in real time with live media reports from around the country, beginning at 8 p.m. November 4. Special guests include the cast of "The Race," a performance conceived and directed by Visiting Professor Michael Rohd of Oregon's Sojourn Theatre, showing at the Davis' Gonda Theatre, October 30-November 8. Act One is a performance that sets up rules and questions about the upcoming election, like: Who will vote for whom? Who won’t? Why? And what does leadership mean today? Act Two asks the questions and uses interactive media and structures to involve the audience and participants around the country. Act Three mines completely different territory by marrying elements of a town-hall meeting and a karaoke bar. [LINK]

Public artist Rene Yung and community partners have invited a group of East Oakland, Calif., residents to jump-start a new digital archive called "Our Oakland: Eastside Stories." The bilingual digital archive is part of Yung's commission for the new East Oakland Community Library. Yung conceived the project "to counter negative portrayals of the neighborhood that confine the community’s sense of hope." The archive will be structured around five linked themes: Our Place, Our Culture, Our Family, Our History, and Our Dreams. On October 25, 2008, families will convene at the shared campus of ACORN Woodland School and EnCompass Academy to record stories, songs, photos and other artifacts. Community media partner Youth Uprising will interview and record participants, while the 100 Families program of the Alameda County Office of Education will lead visual-art projects relating to the project themes. [LINK]

Appalshop's Roadside Theater has received a grant of $1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to "bring stories about the working class to the stage." The four-year grant to Roadside, in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields, is part of nearly $10 million granted by Mellon to playwriting organizations and theaters in the hopes of getting more fresh voices before an audience, says Patricia Cohen in the N.Y. Times (10/20/08). Roadside's other goals include connecting new plays to video, radio and Internet production to address national issues; connecting campus and community; and speaking up for "pluralism, equity and participation in the national conversations about art and culture." Celebrating Appalshop's 40th anniversary, Roadside and Teatro Pregones will present a special performance of their musical collaboration, "Betsy," in the Bronx, N.Y., November 20, 2008. "Betsy" runs November 19-23. [LINK]

Prospect.1 New Orleans, "the largest exhibition of contemporary art ever held on American soil," is intended to help restore the cultural vibrancy of New Orleans, says Shaila Dewan in the N.Y. Times (10/29/08.) The show, November 1-January 18, curated by Dan Cameron of N.Y.'s New Museum, has "a star-filled roster of 81 artists and a projected 50,000 visitors from out of town." Installations, many referring to Hurricane Katrina, are all over the city, including Wangechi Mutu's “ghost house,” sited on the property of an elderly woman whose attempts to rebuild were stymied by a vanishing contractor. At the U.S. Mint, L.A.'s Stephen G. Rhodes is building a Hall of Presidents, with the presidents themselves largely absent. "Residents have volunteered by the hundreds to act as docents, provide exhibition sites and assist the artists," says Dewan. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you a new essay by Arlene Goldbard, "The Metric Syndrome," refuting the idea that the value of community art can be quantifiably measured. “'Metrics'” has become common jargon for quantifiable measurements of success," says Goldbard. "This language originated in corporate America, where it at least makes some sense. ... But every time I hear someone talk about community creativity as if it were widget-world, my blood runs cold." Goldbard talks about metrics as a manifestation of scientism, or "taking methods and ways of thinking that work very well in the physical sciences and misapplying them to highly complex human endeavors, where they don’t work at all." She sympathizes with those who resort to metrics when arguing for increased arts funding but, she says, it hasn't worked so far. Goldbard thinks community artists are "standing at the frontier between old and new paradigms" at "a liminal time in human history, where an old way of thinking, one that seems secure in its dominance, is actually weakening, beginning to make way for a new paradigm." [LINK]

"Arts and Activism - Is There a Disconnect?" is an interesting podcast by Movement Vision Lab that references many of the resources you read about on CAN. In this 30-minute podcast, Sean Thomas-Breitfeld talks with Amalia Anderson of the Main Street Project and Caron Atlas with The Center for Civic Participation and the Pratt Center for Community Development about the potential power and imagination that arts and culture can bring to organizations and movements for change. They talk about their own organizations, plus CAN, Third World Majority, Urban Bush Women, People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, Appalshop, Thousand Kites, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth and Alternate ROOTS. The Movement Vision Lab is a project of the Center for Community Change. MVL's Web site brings together grassroots organizers and social-justice advocates. [LINK]

Joining the worldwide celebration of the Day of the Dead, November 1, SPARC in Venice, Calif., is taking an unusual approach with "The Death of the Bush Era: What Next?" The Social and Pubic Art Resources Center, located in the old Venice Jail, will build a community altar with prayers, offerings and photos of loved ones for its annual celebration of Dia de los Muertos. At the same time, the gallery will open "The Death of the Bush Era" exhibition, curated by Rio Diaz. A follow-up to 2004's "Elect This! A Creative Response to the State of Our Democracy," the Bush Era show will include selected works from the group show, "Just How Does a Patriot Act?" Go to the SPARC Web site to view works on the theme submitted online by artists from around the world; they will be shown in the gallery on a large plasma screen. [LINK]

The James Irvine Foundation has issued a report that could change the meaning of "cultural engagement." "Cultural Engagement in California's Inland Regions" identifies activities that occur “off the radar” of the traditional infrastructure of nonprofit arts organizations and facilities, and which, "if supported at higher levels, might equitably raise participation levels and achieve higher levels of cultural vitality in millions of homes and hundreds of communities." The report broadens the definition of cultural engagement to include playing in a band, social dancing, curatorial experiences like downloading music and burning CDs, quilting, taking photographs, preparing foods that represent your heritage and others activities that take place in nonarts venues -- public schools, parks, stores and churches. The report recommends promoting transmission of cultural traditions, customs and values; including ethnic-specific spaces and programs; and communicating in multiple languages. [LINK]

City Lore has launched "Weavings of War," an online exhibition of contemporary textiles depicting wars and upheavals in Asia, Latin America and South Africa. Over the past 50 years, says City Lore folklorist Steve Zeitlin, traditional textile artists in seemingly unrelated cultures worldwide have broken with tradition to record their experiences of modern warfare, "down to the last coil of barbed wire or the shape of a machine gun." The virtual exhibit, curated by Ariel Zeitlin Cooke, features Afghan war rugs, Hmong story cloths, human-rights arpilleras from Chile and Peru and South African memory cloths. Paco Levine's virtual design recreates the experience of traveling through the gallery show, a collaborative project among CityLore, Michigan State University Museum and Vermont Folklife Center, which had a two-year national tour. The online exhibition includes a teachers guide, a bibliography and a conversation with folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. [LINK]

This summer, Toronto's Jumblies Theatre carried out an unusual project at Camp Naivelt, a historic secular, Jewish, socialist community in Brampton. On November 5, 2008, Director Ruth Howard and other Jumbies will conduct a seminar at Toronto's Fixt Point Theatre Studio to discuss their summer project, including a historical re-enactment of a 1920’s Russian Jewish children’s work commune. Howard describes Naivelt as "a remnant of cottage country captured by suburban sprawl on the Credit River in Brampton; a haven for idealists, artists and activists: a community swaying between deterioration and renewal, whose future is direly threatened by economic and urban forces." Also, Jumblies is looking for new interns for 2009. Applicants are required to take "Arts4All Essentials," a six-day Jumblies Studio intensive, December 1-6, on the principals, practices and underpinnings of Jumblies and community arts (open to the public). [LINK]

A new term pertinent to community arts will be explored at , Forum La Recontre, the International Colloquium on Cultural Mediation in Montreal, December 4-5, 2008. "In Québec," says the colloquium sponsor, Culture pour tous, "the term 'cultural mediation' is currently being used by a growing number of cultural actors and covers a broad spectrum of practices ranging from audience development activities to participative and community arts." The colloquium "seeks to gather shared viewpoints and concerns regarding the term’s emergence conditions, its role, pertinence and function in the context of current cultural practices." The two-day colloquium, with 30 guests from Canada, France, U.K. and the U.S., will be in English and French, with simultaneous interpretation. CAN writer Bill Cleveland, director of the Center for Art and Community in Washington state, will sit on an international panel. [LINK]

The latest addition to the CAN Bookstore is "Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion" by Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim. The international anthology, out next month from Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md., is available for pre-order. The articles examine the regulation and exploitation of dancers and dance activity by government and authoritative groups, including abusive treatment within the dance profession; choreography involving human rights as a central theme; engagement of dance as a means of healing victims of human-rights abuses; and social/political movements in which dance plays a role in fighting oppression. Issues range from slavery and the Holocaust to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, First Amendment cases and the AIDS epidemic. CAN Director Linda Burnham authored an essay on Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. [LINK]

Just added to CAN's Places To Study database: a Master of Arts in Transformative Arts at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, Calif. The two-year graduate degree program addresses "a growing cultural imperative that art must re-assume its integral position in the community," aiming to develop the artist's creative work with a focus on healing and personal growth. Curriculum includes courses, seminars and practicums in "paradigms of consciousness." A two-quarter sequence in the second year, Community Collaboration A & B, is taught by Bay Area community artist Sharon Siskin. It requires a supervised community internship as a foundation for the student's final project: a "40-page written document that both chronicles their experiences in the community and links the experience both to their own artwork and the cultural and philosophical traditions of which they are a part." [LINK]

The Fund for Folk Culture has published an enlightening paper by scholar Maribel Alvarez as part of its Changing Demographics Initiative, and it's online. "Strike a Global Pose: Considerations for Working with Folk and Traditional Cultures in the 21st Century" speaks to many of the issues boiling up across the country as traditional-arts and folk-culture organizations begin to organize. Alvarez says "the ground underneath folk cultures is shifting" due to new market forces, trans-generational challenges to bounded identities, intellectual awakenings and newcomer demographics. New ways of working at a policy level are necessary, she says, now that "the local" has become "the new site of the renewal of the social imaginary." Folklorists and traditional cultural practitioners crafted and honed working at the local level long before this trend. [LINK]

The 12th Annual Trailing of the Sheep Festival gets underway in Ketchum and Hailey, Idaho, October 10-12, 2008. Every year the Trailing of the Sheep Festival celebrates the 150-year-long tradition of moving sheep from mountain summer pastures south through the Wood River Valley to traditional winter desert areas. The festival honors many sheep-ranching cultures: Basque, Polish, Peruvian, Irish, Scottish and Navajo. Events include concerts, storytelling, art exhibitions, dog trials, lamb cooking, knitting, oral-history gathering, a guided tour of sheepherder carvings on aspen trees in Neal Canyon, a sheep folklife fair and the sheep parade, when close to 1800 sheep from the Salmon Falls Sheep Ranch will move through town along Ketchum's Main Street. The project has a rich Web site, including the history of the festival. [LINK]

Today CAN and MICA bring you another issue of Community Arts Perspectives; A Publication of the Community Arts Research and Convening Project. In this issue, UT Austin's Christopher Adejumo writes about using critical pedagogy as a method of instruction and learning in the Greater Tomorrow Youth Art Program, which he founded. Sharon Verner Chappell, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University, offers a taste of her dissertation, in which she analyzes 30 artworks created by young people who are marginalized and in struggle. John Giordano, who founded the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at Massachusetts College of Art & Design, writes about student choice at the center of artistic growth and youth development in Arts Jump Off!, a middle-school afterschool arts program in Boston. His essay is includes a section from a graduate student journal by Kassandra Derby. Cal State Monterey Bay's Amalia Mesa-Bains poses a new definition of community arts in an essay on the practices and pedagogy of artist Pepon Osorio. And recent MICA graduate Christina Rallis takes us on a comic roller-coaster ride through her first year as a community arts major. [LINK]

Artists who use their talents to promote human rights, freedom of expression, empathy, equality and understanding qualify for the ArtVenture Freedom to Create Prize. October 31, 2008, is the deadline to apply for a piece of the $100,000 prize, divided between three categories: the main prize, a youth prize and an imprisoned artist prize. ArtVenture is a grant-making philanthropic organization that "seeks to harness the powers of the arts to improve the lives of people in the hardest communities of the world. By the virtues of the arts, we hope to help make our global community nobler and healthier in body, mind and soul." ArtVenture is joined in the program by Article 19, an anti-censorship organization. To apply or nominate someone, send for the application packet online. According to the Web site, there are already 625 entries from 76 countries. [LINK]

"The Marfa Sessions" is a series of sound projects embedded in public and private spaces to create a portrait of an unusual southwest Texas town. Say the producers of the exhibition (opened September 27, 2008) : "With site-specific works activating various locations across town, and with the collaboration of the community, The Marfa Sessions aims to amplify the varied set of physical and metaphoric characteristics that define Marfa – its geopolitical position, local identity, myths, as well as its significant relationship to 20th Century Minimalism and Land Art." The environs of the remote desert town include The McDonald Observatory, Big Bend National Park, The Marfa Lights, a U.S. border patrol station, The Chinati Foundation (former WWII military base), the Judd Foundation and filming locations for "Giant," "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country for Old Men." More online. [LINK]

The U.K.'s Arts Catalyst makes news again with Nuclear Talkaoke, a mobile chat-show inside its exhibition "NUCLEAR: Art & Radioactivity," November 13-30, 2008. The show, in London's Spitalfields, is a response to the re-emrgence of nuclear power, calling up both "the failed utopian promises of modernism and a fresh hope for a carbon-free future." Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou will show an installation, "The Nightwatchman," new work from their residency at The British Atomic Nuclear Group and their work with B.A.N.G’s public consultation process into the possibility of siting a nuclear power facility in the heart of London. Chris Oakley's new film "Half-life" looks at the histories of Harwell, birthplace of the U.K. nuclear industry, and the new development of fusion energy technology at the Culham facility in Oxfordshire. [LINK]

Americans for the Arts Action Fund has released a summary of the arts positions of the 2008 Presidential candidates as part of its ArtsVote2008 initiative. The summary reveals whether the candidates have met with the Action Fund to discuss arts issues, the candidates' and their parties' published policy proposals on the arts and/or arts education, their statements on federal support of the arts, and their Congressional voting records on the arts. Obama’s comprehensive arts policy proposal was released in February 2008, says ArtsVote, while "the McCain campaign has not been as forthcoming, despite numerous formal requests." ArtsVote recommends sharing these results by e-mail and posting them on social-networking sites, blogging about the issue, asking questions of the candidates in online chats and public forums, and sending letters to local newspaper editors (ArtsVote has drafted a customizable letter). [LINK]

The deadline has been extended for presentations at "Creativity: Worlds in the Making," a symposium on creative engagement as a core literacy in today’s global environment. The deadline is October 25, 2008, for proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, demonstrations and other innovative formats for the March 18-20, 2009, symposium, which is an Initiative from the Office of Entrepreneurship and Liberal Arts and the Program for Creativity and Innovation at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Featured guests include: Harvard biochemist, author of "Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation" and social entrepreneur David Edwards; performance artist and MacArthur “genius” award recipient, Meredith Monk; Josh Frieman, astrophysicist at Fermilab and researcher for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey; filmmaker, poet and author Abigail Child; and Emil Kang, director of Carolina Performing Arts at UNC Chapel Hill. [LINK]

December 1, 2008, is the deadline for proposing presentations for the 15th Annual Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, May 18-25, 2009. The conference, in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn., is titled "Mad as Hell? Now Move (or Draw, or Act…): Organizing for Social Justice @ PTO Gathering ‘09." PTO asks: "What makes you mad? What injustices compel us to act? What are the success stories? How do we organize long-standing and sustainable changes for the good of our communities? How might we use problem-posing to address the conflicts that confront us? How do we navigate the spaces between the World As It Is and the World As It Should Be?" PTO wants interactive presentations, panels, performances, dialogues and workshops that wrestle with its organizational mission: "To challenge oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice." See Web for details. [LINK]