On October 29, 2009, both houses of Congress voted increases of $12.5 million in the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. "President Obama is scheduled to sign this bill into law by October 31," says Arts Action News, "which concludes National Arts and Humanities Month. The nation's two federal grantmaking cultural agencies will now each have budgets of $167.5 million, their highest funding levels in 16 years. As so many state and local governments have had to cut arts budgets across the country, this well-timed federal appropriations increase for the arts is a welcome infusion of funds." NEA Chair Rocco Landesman issued a statement saying he is "particularly grateful to Representatives Norm Dicks and Mike Simpson and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Lamar Alexander for their leadership." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you a new, thoughtful essay by artist Michael B Schwartz, "Neighborhood-based Cultural Programs and the Emerging Eco-industrial Era." "The practices, tools and techniques employed in community-based cultural development," writes Schwartz, "are symbiotic with the green-job training process and struggles for self-determination. ... Community artists exist at the center of this change, equipped with the skills and sensibilities essential to focusing group creative energy and building grassroots social, cultural and economic networks." Schwartz illustrates this link with examples from the work of his community-based mural collective, Tucson Arts Brigade, and his own collaborative work in Delaware and Philadelphia. He also presents themes for a curriculum for green community arts training programs. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Animating Democracy has been busy issuing concept papers from its Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative. The initiative is a serious effort toward quantitative measurement of the arts' impact on social change. Its working group is convening and writing about research in the field and how to make it useful in the real world. This year, AD published online three Impact Initiative reports, including a solid framework for the discussion by Chris Dwyer of RMC Research. The Urban Institute's Maria Rosario Jackson wrote "Shifting Expectations: An Urban Planner’s Reflections on Evaluating Community-Based Arts," and Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert of the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania wrote "Civic Engagement and the Arts: Issues of Conceptualization and Measurement" from the point of view of the social sciences, humanities, and public policy. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Animating Democracy has commissioned "Community-Based Arts Organizations: A New Center of Gravity," a seminal essay by Ron Chew, making a case for greater support for small and mid-sized, "value-based" organizations. "Amid changing demographics, a new political climate, technological advances, and globalization," says Chew, these organizations "offer artistic excellence and innovation, astute leadership connected to community needs, and important institutional and engagement models for the arts field. ... They often work in partnerships that cross silos and sectors to connect art organically with other areas such as health, community development, humanities, and social justice." The essay reviews histories, strategies of and support for such organizations as Houston's Arte Publico Press, Oakland's East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Chew is former director of Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

StoryCorps, "the most ambitious oral history project ever undertaken," has announced the second annual National Day of Listening, November 27, 2009. The National Day of Listening, says StoryCorps, is "an effort to encourage all Americans to honor a friend, a loved one, or a member of their community by interviewing them about their lives. Participants are encouraged to record their National Day of Listening interviews using equipment that is readily available in most homes – from cell phones to tape recorders to computers or even pen and paper. StoryCorps has created a free Do-It-Yourself interview guide with equipment recommendations and interview instructions available online." Also on the project Web site: a question generator, Education and Community Service Toolkits and a DIY companion video. StoryCorps’ national project partners include NPR, the Corporation for National and Community Service and the American Library Association. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Four San Francisco artists have created a multimedia portrait of their neighborhood, "Portola at Play," nominated for a People's Choice Design Award at the Smithsonian/Cooper Hewitt Museum. The project includes a board game with images of the Portola District, a movie about the neighborhood, a CD of original music that describes the district and a book that tells its story. The creators are visual artists Kate Connell and Oscar Melara, filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez and musician/composer John Calloway. "The Portola has long been home to the city's workforce," says Kate Connell, who is also a reference librarian, "but its history and current vitality have been virtually unknown and undocumented until now." See the movie trailer on CANtv. You can vote for "Portola at Play" at the People's Design Award Web site. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Art & The Public Purpose: A New Framework Launches" by Arlene Goldbard, an introduction to a new way to think about and act on cultural policy. "Art & The Public Purpose" spells out five basic policy recommendations from the artists who attended the May 12, 2009, White House Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery. Goldbard and the other endorsers of the Framework call it “a bold new investment in culture, a policy recognizing that culture holds the key to a future we can believe in.” Goldbard describes the group's collective efforts to craft a document that others can sign on to and send to their representatives in government. "Because it isn’t tied to a specific piece of legislation or an election" she writes," a tax-exempt organization can endorse it without endangering its legal status. We are urging people to circulate it, write about it, speak about it and generally raise a ruckus in support of a major new investment in culture." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Five media artists are on Midway Atoll near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre, a huge circular current in which vast quantities of floating plastic trash are trapped. Artists Chris Jordan, Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan and Manuel Maqueda are exploring the beaches, shooting photographs and video, writing poetry, and trying to respond to what they find, says Brooke Jarvis in YES! Magazine (9/16/09). The island of trash is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area twice the size of Texas where tiny bits of plastic outweigh zooplankton seven to one. They've found thousands of bird skeletons with piles of plastic where their stomachs had been. In some cases, the skeleton had entirely biodegraded; the plastic remained, unchanged. The YES! article is linked to the project's Web site. See video on CANtv. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Mildred Howard and Amalia Mesa-Bains: A Conversation on Community and Public Art," reflecting on the role of the artist in culturally diverse communities. Mesa-Bains and Howard are leading community and public artists based in California. Both include installations in their visual artwork. Mesa-Bains instigated the conversation to focus on the intersection of "community" and "public" in their work, which, she says, "relies often on a deep understanding of histories and memories of a community. In the case of Mildred Howard, this insight into community history is rooted in her own memories and experience in an African-American community and through her family’s relationship to spirituality." They discuss their values as artists, their own roots and the way they connect in their communities, their involvement in cultural institutions and as arts commissioners in the Bay Area, aesthetics and memory, community definitions and practices, community arts as a field of study and the value of convenings. Mesa-Bains is director of the Department of Visual and Public Art at California State University Monterey Bay. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2, of which Mesa-Bains is the coordinating editor. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

People and animals at the bank of the Hudson River on the upper west side of Manhattan will gather with artist Aviva Rahmani as part of "350," the largest global day of climate action ever. On October 24, 2009, Rahmani will alternately walk to the water and sing Puccini's aria "Vissi d'arte," a capella, a song "about beauty and betrayal," and stop at the shore to draw pictures of the waters, reflecting on "how they are rising in some places under the assault of global warming while in other places, fresh clean water is vanishing." Simultaneously, people worldwide will be taking up to 4,000 similar actions, from climbers with 350 banners high on the melting slopes of Mount Everest to government officials in the Maldive Islands holding an underwater cabinet meeting to demand action on climate change before their nation disappears. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is presenting "Mark Tribe: Port Huron Project," a large-scale video installation depicting reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movement of the Vietnam era. The exhibition, October 21, 2009-January 24, 2010, screens reenactments that took place at the sites of the original speeches, delivered by actors or performance artists to audiences of invited guests and passers-by. The project aims to examine "artists’ relationships with the roots of American democracy, and the way in which these issues are still relevant today." Last year, LACE, Creative Time and Mark Tribe presented Cesar Chavez's 1971 speech "We Are Also Responsible" at L.A.'s Exposition Park. The documentation of this performance and other Port Huron Project reenactments, including "The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008" and "Let Another World Be Born: Stokeley Carmichael 1967/2008," have been screened worldwide and online. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

New York's Exit Art is presenting "American for Sale," through November 21, 2009, a project in its series SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics). "America for Sale" is an exhibition of photography, sculpture, video and installation that addresses "America’s spiraling national debt, struggling global economy and the ramifications of our extravagant spending." Public events include "The Institute of Aesthetic Research," a weekly series of open discussions, guest speakers, reading groups, screenings and other forms of collective discursive practice in which organizers David Baumflek and Daniel Lichtman will attempt to translate the traditional role of the "think tank" into the sphere of cultural production and visual art. The Institute will be held Wednesdays, October 21-November 18. Guests include such artists and scholars as Timothy Murray, Renate Ferro, John Baldacchino, Ethan Spigland and Adam Simon. The Institute is online: http://www.instituteforaestheticresearch.org/ [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

New York's New School celebrates its 90th anniversary with a series of events inside the Parts & Labor Gallery, a converted 18-foot commercial box truck parked outside Tishman Auditorium. "By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School," October 19-24, 2009, comprises discussions, lectures and workshops (inside the truck) that examine the institutional and pedagogical histories of the university as they have grown alongside a community and its urban site. Each day, the service of a psychic is enlisted to "assist in navigating the future." Parts & Labor's N.Y. stop is one in a series of encounters in a traveling countrywide exhibition, exploring site- and community-specific experiences of the transformation of the American landscape. The Chicago-based alternative art collective was founded in 2006 by Daniel Gerdes as "a DIY network of creatives building an alternative to the tired gallery system." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

California College of Art faculty members will talk about the relationship between the practices of young artists and established artists in higher education during an upcoming event in Oakland, Calif. The CCA artists will talk October 17, 2009, at a reception for "The Self as Super-Hero: Exchange and Response," an exhibition of their new works (October 16-28) created in response to artworks by 16 youth artists featured in ArtEsteem's "Reflections of Me and My World" 2009 Exhibit held this past May. The project is presented by CCA's Center for Art and Public Life in partnership with Attitudinal Healing Connection’s ArtEsteem program, in which the Center's Community Student Fellows carry out work-study externships. The Attitudinal Healing Connection is a nontraditional mental-health program with spiritual and educational programs that incorporate art, health and diversity/ social justice. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

The Dream Rocket project invites everyone to contribute a panel to the 36,467-square-foot Dream Quilt that will wrap the 37-story-tall Saturn V rocket replica in Huntsville, Alabama. Located at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Saturn V will be wrapped by May 2010 in a quilt of 8,000 panels collected from contributors worldwide. Each panel will express a “dream theme” - hopes and dreams for a better tomorrow, says public artist Jennifer Marsh, Dream Rocket's director. “We want people all over the world to dream those audacious dreams, and to inspire them to make their dreams come true. The Dream Rocket will symbolize not just the dreams of individuals, but also the power of global collaboration.” Reserve a two-foot-square panel for $100 or reserve a panel for those who cannot afford the cost. Details are online. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Cardboard Citizens, the U.K.'s only homeless people's theater company, has announced Theatre of the Oppressed Professional Training courses for 2009-2010, in London. Brazilian theater maker Augusto Boal, founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, died in May 2009, but his work goes on all over the world. With Cardboard Citizens, Adrian Jackson, Boal’s translator and frequent collaborator, will lead courses in techniques and approaches for those interested in using theater to encourage social change. "This work can be used in an incredible variety of settings," say Cardboard Citizens, "from classroom to prison, from development situation to legislative chamber, from youth centre to elders club. The techniques are also used within the therapeutic community, to empower participants and to eliminate blocks to action. Variously Augusto Boal described his work as a ‘rehearsal for revolution’ and a ‘rehearsal for reality’." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

CAN is delighted to add to its Places To Study database a new graduate program called "Arts, Community, and Education: Master of Education in Community Arts" in Cambridge, Mass. Lesley University is offering a 36-credit program that provides "a dynamic and interdisciplinary foundation in community arts studies," including grant writing, arts administration, networking, fundraising, curriculum planning, assessment and advocacy. The program requires students to pursue in-depth knowledge in one of five specializations: Arts and Literacy, Integrated Arts, Multicultural Education, Theatre Studies, or Visual Art. Research and field experiences that expose students to the power of community arts as an instrument for social change are integral to the program. With this addition, Places To Study now lists 55 community arts degree programs in the U.S. and elsewhere, along with 52 other nondegree courses, workshops, institutes, fellowships, apprenticeships and internships. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

"The Yes Men Fix the World" opened October 8, 2009, at the New York's Film Forum, touching off weeks of activism by The Yes Men and their allies. The film's story, say the artists, is "simple: two guys, armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, infiltrate the world of big business, where we make a lot of bad, powerful people really uncomfortable. You'll see us knock $2 billion off Dow Chemical's share price, expose New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin for the corporate lackey he is, and show some of the most powerful free-market spokesmen to be C-level liars." Follow their blog for reports on planned civil disobedience in connection with showings in Bhopal, Calgary and New Orleans with the Raging Grannies, Gray Panthers, Reverend Billy, Common Ground, CODEPINK, Rainforest Action Network, Picture the Homeless, Center for Constitutional Rights and more. See the trailer on CANtv. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Good Work: Ethics and Community Cultural Development with Children and Youth," a new essay by educator Stephani Etheridge Woodson. With this discussion, Woodson hopes to excite "an awareness of the complex power dynamics and ethical dexterity demanded by community-based work with children and youth above and beyond similar work with adults." And, she believes, "The term 'good work' addresses both the social awareness of the art process and product and the quality of the art itself." Woodson defines and discusses four ethical components shared by all “good work” residencies: competence, justice/fairness, appropriate relationships (respect) and shared authority & authorship. She offers some tools that she employs at Arizona State University in her "Place: Vision & Voice" project, a community-based digital storytelling and performance program for youth. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

If you're searching for new program-assessment methods, you'll be interested in a report on a new trend in evaluation, reviewed today on Createquity, part of CAN's BlogNet. Guy Yedward reviews “Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact” from FSG Social Impact Advisors, a look at ways foundations and their grantees are tackling the lack of performance-measurement standards in the nonprofit sector. The report documents the efforts of 20 nonprofits that are developing strategies and pooling resources based on an agreed-upon set of benchmarks developed by funding organizations and their grantees and shared on the Web. Yedward says it offers new strategy for approaching philanthropy and, by extension, arts and culture. Its power, writes Yedward, is that "it proposes an informational infrastructure for the arts" and it "provides a clear method of cutting overhead, sharing information, and eventually building a strategy for coordinating the arts." [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

A werewolf will prowl at dawn and dusk in the abandoned City Park of New Orleans as residents gather for "Loup Garou," "part performance, part ritual, part howl to the world about southeast Louisiana’s plight." The artists of Mondo Bizarro and ArtSpot Productions will present the outdoor performance Thursdays-Sundays, October 8-25, 2009, including post-show discussions about coastal land loss with experts from the Gulf Restoration Network. The artists say a "loup garou" is a "wild and dangerous entity (some say a werewolf) well anchored in the folk traditions of southern Louisiana," going back to France and Acadia. The event is "environmental performance that uses rigorous physicality, poetry, music and visual installation to investigate the deep interconnectedness between land and culture in Louisiana." Thursday performances begin at sunrise and weekend performances end at sunset; free gumbo on Fridays. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Acting Crazy: Spying on, Jamming with and Crooning about Anxiety and Depression," a new essay by performance artist Gail Marlene Schwartz. She writes about the journey she took from solo performance to community art as her successful solo about mental health, “Crazy: One Woman’s Search for Sanity,” expanded into a community dialogue, an arts workshop, a blog, an evolving “creativity and wellness” curriculum and "a paradigm of interconnectedness." She says "Crazy" has become "a public conversation (as opposed to the private ones occurring in doctors’ and therapists’ offices) about an issue that I strongly believe has social roots (and therefore social remedies), such as isolation, economic injustice, environmental toxicity, nutritional issues and violence." She discusses the changes she experienced as an artist within a framework of theoretical questions, with a particular focus on stories about her interactions with audiences throughout the process. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Signals of Exchange," a new essay by artist Johnna Poethig about building community across cultural, political and geographic boundaries in an era of globalism. Poethig describes the processes of two projects in her California State University Monterey Bay painting and mural class as well as her own participation in The Galleon Trade, a global artist exchange. For "Streaming Signals," Poethig's students made art based on "signals" collected from around the globe through blogs, cell phones, Web sites and personal e-mail contacts. Secondly, students are using community process to design a permanent mural for the CSUMB World Languages and Cultures Buildings. In The Galleon Trade, Poethig is helping create "new routes of cultural exchange along old routes of commerce and trade" by taking the historic Acapulco-Manila galleon route as a metaphor of origin and collaborating with artists in the Philippines, Mexico and California. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "One Mosaic, Many Voices: Piecing Together the Story of Baltimore’s 1968 Riots," a new essay by artist Christina Ralls. Ralls describes and analyzes the experience of creating a collaborative project with local residents who were impacted by the 1968 riots in Baltimore, Md., after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Baltimore ‘68 mosaic monument was part of a multifaceted history project, the University of Baltimore's Baltimore '68: Riots and Rebirth initiative. The disturbances left six dead, over 700 injured, and over $13 million worth of property damage. "What happened during the race riots in Baltimore City is a very contested and difficult story to tell," says Ralls, but "art can be that common ground to create a safe environment." Twelve people participated, including Ralls' own parents, who lost everything in the riots. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Math students at the Christopher Columbus Family Academy learn about angles by measuring whimsical figures of hot-air balloons, paper airplanes and pinwheels built right into the walls of their school. So says Winnie Hu in the N.Y. Times (10/2/09. The New Haven, Conn., school, says Hu, is one of a growing number of new/renovated U.S. public schools that look more like cultural centers than the austere, utilitarian houses of learning of the past, displaying museum-worthy pieces commissioned from artists. Schools that are aesthetically pleasing as well as functional turn plain brick-and-mortar walls into show-and-tell lessons. A series of 11 fiberglass panels, which look as if they were made of terra cotta, run along the outside of Columbus Academy, resembling a children’s puzzle with an array of wind- and water-themed figures, including parachutes, birds and Columbus’ ships. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Arts in healthcare programs can significantly reduce the costs of our health system, such as those related to hospital stays and staff retention, says a new report. "State of the Field Report: Arts in Healthcare 2009" is the first report of its kind to offer in-depth analysis of the field, say the report sponors, the Society for the Arts in Healthcare, Americans for the Arts, The Joint Commission and the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Healthcare. The report summarizes the results of two national surveys indicating that half of healthcare institutions in the U.S. have arts programming. The majority are in hospitals and long-term care and hospice/palliative care organizations. Research shows benefits include shorter hospital stays, reduced need for medications and improved workplace satisfaction and employee retention. It's downloadable. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Angelenos will be talking about transportation in Los Angeles, Calif., during "Without a Car in the World," an upcoming project at Santa Monica's 18th Street Arts Center. Central to the project is artist Diane Meyer's installation, October 17-December 11, 2009: 100 photographs with narratives from those living carless in the vast car culture of L.A., where public transportation is spotty. "The subjects I am photographing have given up their cars for a variety of reasons ranging from ideological, financial or health-related situations, anxiety after traumatic car accidents, environmental activism, or a simple disinterest in car culture," says Meyer. Events include discussions with artists, urban planners, historians, writers, single moms and "green people." It's part of "Almost Utopia," a series about Los Angeles over the next decade, curated by 18th St. Artistic Director Clayton Campbell. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham

Today CAN brings you "Enlightenment Through Collaboration," a new essay by artist Brett Cook analyzing the spiritual aspects of making art with others. Cook has collaborated with communities on projects all over the U.S., and there's ample evidence on his Web site (http://web.mac.com/brettcookdizney/brett-cook.com/Brett_Cook.html). Here Cook uses one of those experiences, a residency in Los Angeles called "South Central Collaborative Community Project -- Divine." In relating his story, Cook examines collaborative art as "magic": "At this time of unparalleled global connection amongst humanity, there is a growing discussion in academic circles about broader cultural and social political considerations that involve collaborative practices. These practices are magical in their ability to develop cross-cultural dialogue without sacrificing the unique identities of individual speakers." This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham