"LAND/ART," a massive six-month environmental art project involving more than 25 presenting organizations in New Mexico, opened last weekend with a symposium. Coordinated by 516 ARTS, events began June 27 with a guided bus tour by The Center for Land Use Interpretation through dramatic built landscapes. Continuing through December 2009, "LAND/ART" explores relationships of land, art and community through dozens of new exhibitions, community-based projects, site-specific art works, speakers series, performances, tours, excursions and a culminating book. "Historically," says the organizers, "New Mexico has been a place where the intersection of nature and culture is at issue. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the American Southwest was the location of the first generation of Land Art or Earthworks," including The Lightning Field, the Star Axis, Spiral Jetty, the Sun Tunnels and Roden Crater. Details are online. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

"Concrete Steel & Paint," a new documentary featuring the work of the Mural Arts Program at Graterford prison, debuts July 23, 2009, in Philadelphia. Filmmakers Cindy Burstein and Tony Heriza describe the film: "When men in a prison art class agree to collaborate with victims of crime to design a mural about healing, their views on punishment, remorse, and forgiveness collide. At times the divide seems too wide to bridge. But as the participants begin to work together, mistrust gives way to genuine moments of human contact and common purpose. Their struggle and their insights are reflected in the art they produce." "Concrete Steel & Paint" will premiere at International House, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers, project participants and restorative-justice pioneer Howard Zehr. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you an essay about an international collaboration that began in Israel when two art students organized an "urgent conference" during the 2009 Gaza war. Artist Moran Been-noon writes about Cannons and Muses, a project aimed at enabling artists around the world to collaborate and create art in the context of real-time crisis. In January 2009, writes Been-noon, two dance-theater students at the Kibbutzim Seminar art school, Premshay Hermon and Danielle Natalie Kind, decided to organize a conference at their school, while the war was still 'live,' to review and examine the role of art in real-time crisis. Been-noon (born in Israel, now studying in Dublin) relates the exchanges at the conference and describes new developments as the project has spread around the globe, with upcoming activities planned by cells in Israel, Ireland, Japan, Germany and Iceland. The story is accompanied by a call for local participation by groups all over the world. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

The Social and Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC) celebrates several significant public art works with an upcoming event at its Venice, California, headquarters. The celebration, 2-5 p.m., June 28, 2009, closes “Current Public Art Productions of the UCLA/SPARC Cesar Chavez Digital Mural Lab,” an exhibition featuring artwork by Judy Baca including the Cesar E. Chavez Monument: The Arch of Dignity, Equality and Justice at San Jose State University and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial at the RFK Learning Center in Los Angeles. The event includes an open house at the Digital Mural Lab's SPARC facilities. During the reception, there will also be a performance by The Lefteous Sisters who wrote a song for the Save LA Murals campaign initiated by Baca to bring attention to the deteriorating condition of hundreds of L.A. murals. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

August 24, 2009, is the deadline for applications to Space for Change, a new funding program supporting "building community through innovative art spaces." LINC (Leveraging Investments in Creativity) announces the program, a funding collaboration between the MetLife Foundation and Ford Foundation, beginning with the MetLife Innovative Space Awards. The program recognizes outstanding efforts in the design/development of affordable space for artists and emphasizes benefits artist spaces yield for their communities. Awards, $10,000-$50,000, will provide support for up to five winning projects. Applications may be submitted by nonprofit organizations, artists, community members, public agencies or a combination. To be eligible, a project must provide work or live/work artists' space offering ownership or favorable leases, be multi-use, be in existence for one year and demonstrate a positive contribution (social, economic, cultural) to the community in which it exists. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

CAN staff will participate in "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980," the largest collaborative initiative ever undertaken by arts entites in the Los Angeles region. A joint initiative of the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute, PST aims to document the history of art in Los Angeles in the post-WWW II decades, and to bring it to a wider audience. Twenty-one area museums, institutions and organizations are conducting research and making plans for exhibitions that will open citywide between September 2011 and June 2012. CAN's Linda Frye Burnham has been selected as an adviser to "Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement," the 18th Street Arts Center's review of artist-run spaces of the 1970s and '80s as sites of community organizing and political engagement. Burnham was a co-founder of 18th St. in 1988, and the center was the publisher of High Performance magazine, the forerunner of the Community Arts Network, founded by Art in the Public Interest in 1999. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

See a marvelous story from the June 2009 Culture Pour Tous newsletter about The Encampment, a traveling public art installation about mental disability. In 2006, writes Michel Lefebvre, Thom Sokoloski and Jenny McCowan (Studio SM) organized a huge outdoor installation on the theme of mental health. The Encampment consisted of an assemblage of tents, each containing a mini-installation created with the participation of the public and presenting poignant testimonies or stories of intellectual disability and the lives of those affected by it. They recruited “creative collaborators” who would research a story, testimony or fact related to mental illness and use found objects to present this story inside a tent. That year, 68 tents were set up in Toronto's Trinity Bellwoods Park; in 2007, The Encampment and its process moved to Roosevelt Island, N.Y.; in 2008, to Major’s Hill Park, Ottawa. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

"ReGenerating Community: Arts, Community and Governance" is an international conference in Melbourne, Australia, September 2-4, 2009. Presented by RMIT University Globalism Research Centre and the Cultural Development Network, it's about "ways in which global issues are being addressed locally through collaborations between artists, communities and local government," as well as issues of: community identity in an environment of globalised culture, energy production in the context of climate change, indigenous sovereignty on leasehold land, country becoming city and changing identity, aging, schooling, imaging futures and "having a future." Keynoters are Anmol Vellani of the Indian Foundation for the Arts, which supports more than 100 projects in 17 Indian states, and Bob McNulty of Partners for Livable Communities, known primarily for persuading local officials to view public and private partnerships as a resource for revitalizing cities in the Americas. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Baltimore community members have been donating recycled items and volunteering to help build "The Reverse Ark," an exhibition that illustrates the city's industrial past. The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, will serve as gallery, laboratory, workplace and studio to explore the social and environmental history of Baltimore's mills and textile industry in the site-based exhibition "The Reverse Ark: In the Wake," on view through August 22, 2009. Using the concept of an "ark" as a place of preservation and exploration, local citizens helped San Francisco-based Futurefarmers art collective create the multidisciplinary exhibition with locally sourced waste and surplus materials including fallen trees, hundreds of floorboards from abandoned row homes, cast-off paper and surplus clothing and textiles. Community engagement continues in The Reverse Ark Schoolhouse with public workshops, readings and discussions in an exploration of the environmental themes of the exhibition. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

The San Francisco Bay Area's Art in Action will open a new Green Youth Media Arts & Job Training Center in Oakland, Calif., August 1, 2009. The Center will offer year-round training in media arts, eco-literacy, soft skills and personal healing for under-resourced youth and young adults, and provide training for youth leaders to grow their business ventures and prepare for jobs in the green economy. For the last six months, Art in Action has participated in Green for All's Business Incubation Program, receiving mentoring through a business development process. Having built a for-profit component into their long-term strategic plan, they anticipate being fully self-sufficient by 2011 with at least 50% of the operating budget coming from diverse earned-income revenue streams. Green For All is a national organization dedicated to "building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is launching its first annual Canadian School of Peacebuilding this summer. Two five-day sessions, June 29 to July 10, 2009, each with two courses running concurrently, will be offered for academic credit or for training for practitioners. Among the offerings is "Arts Approaches to Spirituality, Peace and Social Justice," taught by Babu Ayindo, an international peacebuilder from Kenya, artistic director of Chelepe Arts and, later, founding artistic director of Amani People’s Theater. He is co-author of the book "When You Are the Peacebuilder" as well as articles on arts, peace and politics. Other courses include "Truthtelling & Peace: An Insider's Perspective on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission" and "Frameworks and Foundations of Conflict Transformation." CMU, an accredited Christian university, offers degrees in the arts, music, music therapy, theology and church ministries. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Giving 'Birth' in Little Rock" by April Gentry-Sutterfield, a new essay about the impact of a national childbirth campaign on her town. Gentry-Sutterfield attends a local production of the nationally touring project "Birth: The Play," written by Karen Brody and based on Brody’s interviews with more than 100 American women about their low-risk experiences of giving birth. Since its initial staged reading in 2004, the play has been produced with local casts more than 100 times across the U.S., and spawned BOLD, a national movement to educate women to make informed birthing choices within a system friendly to their needs and wants. Brody once lived in Little Rock, and she couldn't understand why so many of her peers, educated women with low-risk pregnancies, were treated as high-risk cases in the hospital delivery room. Then she realized that Little Rock serves as home for a teaching hospital that specializes in high-risk births, and its procedures were engendering a climate of fear around childbirth. Gentry, herself a mother, interviews the local cast of "Birth" and finds common ground. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

CAN writer and cultural critic Arlene Goldbard speaks July 7, 2009, at "Jobs for Artists! Building Momentum for a New Deal for the Arts in the 21st Century" in San Francisco. Part of LaborFest, a month of cultural events commemorating the 1934 San Francisco general strike, "Jobs for Artists" will feature a panel discussion on the legacy of federal jobs programs for artists and writers, and build support for a larger effort timed with the 75th anniversary of the WPA in 2010. Panelists are: WPA historian Gray Brechin, cultural journalist Jeff Chang and Goldbard, co-organizer of a May 2009 White House briefing on the arts, community, social justice and national recovery. Cosponsored by the CCSF Department of Labor and Community Studies Program and the Center for Political Education, the event starts at 7 p m. in the Audre Lorde Room, Women's Building, 3543 18th Street. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

MIT's Visual Arts Program donates its Armadillo trailer to Pasadena's Side Street Projects in an upcoming ceremony at Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. The handover event is June 18, 2009. The Armadillo trailer is the result of a year-long collaborative art project, the MIT FEMA Trailer Project, in which faculty and students transformed a surplus FEMA trailer into a "green" mobile composting center with vertical gardens, rainwater catchment system, permaculture library and indoor multipurpose space. The trailer has been dubbed the "Armadillo" for its ribbed retractable shell. It was originally one of thousands of trailers purchased by FEMA for temporary housing in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Side Street Projects will take the Armadillo on a tour to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and the Louisiana State Museum. (Slide show at http//www.sidestreet.org/armadillo.) [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

IssueLab has published a bonanza of arts-education case studies in its online bimonthly publication CloseUp. The collection "reveals the lessons, benefits, and pitfalls of existing and past projects, providing vital information for program staff at organizations running their own Arts Education projects." There are 67 files online, divided into subcategories: case studies, community programs, evaluation, in-school programs and students with disabilities. Contributors include Americans for the Arts, the Arts Education Partnership, CAPE, Arts for All, Hospital Audiences and many more. IssueLab is an interactive, Chicago-based online publishing forum for nonprofit research, aggregating research on social issues and pushing that research back out to other online communities and end-users. Their goal is to "mainstream nonprofit research so that users who may not know anything about nonprofits can still learn from the unique perspective these organizations bring to the study of social issues." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

“Rights and Reformers” is the theme of this year's Maryland Humanities Council's annual Chautauqua program, featuring Woody Guthrie, Jackie Robinson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Near the Fourth of July each year, MHC brings Chautauqua to communities throughout Maryland. Scholar/actors portray historical characters for community audiences, complete with costume, props, mannerisms and accents. After the presentation, the performer answers the audience's questions first in character, then as him- or herself. Presenters are scholar David Fenimore (University of Nevada, Reno), actor Gregory Gibson Kenney and professional Chautauquan Suzan King. "Chautauqua" was named for New York's Chautauqua Lake area, where the movement began in 1874 as a Methodist summer retreat. By 1900, more than 400 summer communities had developed, and touring companies presented lectures, debates and performances across the country. This summer, the Chautauquans appear throughout Maryland, June 7-July 12. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

In honor of the centennial of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, N.Y., artist Katie Holten is creating a Tree Museum, and the trees tell stories. Holten has marked out 100 trees along the Concourse, a street about four and a half miles long. Each tree will have a sign that gives a phone number and a code to listen to short recordings of people speaking about the Bronx, their lives and their work. The tree museum will open on June 21, 2009. Four of the stories can be heard online, accompanying "A Museum of Trees That Speak of History," a story about the project by Jim Dwyer. You can hear stories by architect Daniel Libeskind, preservationist Dart Westphal and community gardener Lurry Boyd, as well as Carlos Lazarte's recording of the chirps of coquis, Puerto Rican tree frogs. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

State Voices has posted a White House Briefing Report that summarizes the outcomes of the May 12, 2009, meeting of 60 artists and creative organizers in Washington, D.C. The 60 participants -- individuals engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social-justice activism and philanthropy -- came together for a White House briefing on art, community, social justice and national recovery. The meeting with policy makers was organized by cultural critic Arlene Goldbard, Claudine Brown of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, arts organizer Billy Wimsatt and Caron Atlas working with the Pratt Center for Community Development and State Voices to talk about "how the remarkable mobilizing power of community arts can be used by the Obama administration as a tool and a pathway for national recovery." State Voices is a nonprofit organization that links 16 active state voter and civic-engagement networks in the U.S. The 28-page summary is followed by a link to the entire report. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Exit Art in New York City has extended the run of an interesting show: "Vertical Gardens," a project of Papo Colo's SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics). Extended through June 6, 2009, "Vertical Gardens" is an exhibition of architectural models, renderings, drawings, photographs and ephemera that depict or imagine a vertical farm, urban garden or green roof. It features over 20 projects, both imaginary and real, by artists and architects that envision solutions for building greener urban environments. Special events have included talks by public-health scientist Dickson D. Despommier, founding director of the Vertical Farm Project; and SITE Founder James Wines on ways to meet the demands of economic crisis, energy efficiency and sustainable design without a loss of aesthetic quality; plus poetry readings and composting workshops. SEA is an endeavor that presents a diverse multimedia exhibition program and permanent archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Despite the Chinese government's suppression of reminders of the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, a soldier turned artist has unveiled his paintings about it. Andrew Jacobs in the N.Y. Times (6/3/09) says Chen Guang was only 17 years old when he participated in the massacre as an undercover soldier. "[L]ast year he began working on a series of paintings based on hundreds of photographs, taken at his unit’s request while he was on the square," writes Jacobs. They include images of exuberant students parading with pro-democracy banners and soldiers feeding their abandoned encampments into bonfires. ... Last summer, after local galleries refused to show his paintings, Mr. Chen posted them on the Internet. Within hours, however, they had been taken down. ... he has received warnings to keep his paintings to himself." There's a gallery of Chen Guang's art work: http://liaoliao1971.blogspot.com (Thanks, Edmonton Small Press Association.) [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Signs of Welcome, Signs of the Possible: Public Practice in Rural California," a new essay by Emily Roehl about a student project in a small Central Valley town. Roehl, herself a graduate student at Mills College in Oakland, attended Laton Live! REUNION / REUNIÓN, March 21, 2009. Students from the new MFA in Public Practice program at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Calif., under the leadership of Suzanne Lacy, have been working with residents of the rural town in the San Joaquin Valley on a series of art projects that "aim to engender a greater sense of civic pride in the community, particularly among young people," says Roehl. The event on March 21 was a celebration of the year’s activities and projects, culminating in an evening of performances and installations set up along Laton’s main street. "As a girl from a rural town in eastern Nebraska," Roehl writes, "I wanted to see if a project like REUNION / REUNIÓN could be a viable option for the rural spaces of my own upbringing, and how the collaboration between residents and students operated to each group’s benefit." Her essay brings the event to life. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham