Community Partners in Action's annual Prison Art Show is underway, through May 28, at Capitol Community College in Hartford, Conn. The show features the work of 152 artists from 17 Connecticut correctional facilities. See the CPA Web site's home page for the remarkable poster (downloadable). Community Partners in Action, Inc., (formerly the Connecticut Prison Association) is one of the nation's oldest nonprofit agencies. It began in January 1875 as the Friends of Prisoners Society to work in the brand-new field of criminal rehabilitation. The Prison Arts Program, started in 1978, provides classes and projects, as well as publication and exhibition opportunities, to people incarcerated in several of Connecticut’s correctional facilities. The program has an annual Journal and a permanent collection that travels to public schools, universities, libraries and community centers. The program is supported by donations and the sale of artworks by prisoners, which are available on the CPA Web site.

Today CAN brings you a story by Nina Billone about a collaboration that part of the "body of urban community-based performance that has emerged over the past three decades." In February 2007, San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, the city’s oldest alternative arts space, launched The Prison Project, a yearlong exploration of the California prison system. The Prison Project’s first public performance was an Open Process Event in which representatives from the Prison Activist Resource Center, California Prison Focus and The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women entered into a public conversation with Intersection artists and staff. This essay emerges from Billone's Ph.D. dissertation research on U.S. penal-welfare performance in the 20th and 21st centuries. "In examining performance practices that spill over the boundaries between culture work and social work," she says, "I have been working to develop language with which to speak about performance practices that, like those of The Medea Project and Intersection for the Arts, are 'neither that, nor that.'"

Join the All City Waitress Marching Band in a Protest March for a Living Wage up the Grand Concourse to the Bronx Museum, Saturday, May 17, 2008. "When The Waitresses first marched in the 1979 Pasadena DooDah Parade, women made 43 cents to every dollar a man made. Now, women now make 77 cents, and people of color make 71 cents for every dollar a man makes - for the same job," says original Waitress, artist Jerri Allyn. Join Allyn and bandleader Chutney Berry, decked out in white uniforms, accented by red polka dot aprons and bowties. Rehearsal is 10:30 to 12, parade at noon, Unhappy Hour 5 p.m. The event is in conjunction with the exhibition, “Making it Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community" (March 2 - August 4), curated by Carey Lovelace.

Art in the Public Interest is proud to announce the names of four new members of the CAN Advisory Board: Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Grady Hillman, Meena Natarajan and Shannon Turner. Mañjon is director of the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts, where she developed one of the first “Community Arts” majors in the U.S. In July, she becomes vice president for diversity and strategic partnerships at Weslyan University. Hillman is a poet, folklorist, anthropologist and arts-and-education consultant, based in Austin, Texas. Natarajan is a playwright and founding executive and literary director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minn., a theater committed to bringing people together from different backgrounds and ethnicities. Turner is a 2007 graduate of the MFA in Arts Administration program at Virginia Tech, now working at Synchronicity Performance Group in Atlanta, Ga.

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

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

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

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