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« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 » 
October 24, 2007 Defining devisingLinda Frye Burnham / 11:30 AM In 2008, the Theatre/Performance program at The University of British Columbia Okanagan will inaugurate a B.F.A. that will focus on devised performance. "Devising" is a term that gets used a lot in connection with community arts, so we thought you might like to see an extensive definition of the term, by Dr. Virginie Magnat of the faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the university. (Thanks, Will Weigler.) You can find it here
October 19, 2007 Funding for your Big IdeaLinda Frye Burnham / 02:57 PM Forwarded from Echoing Green VISIONARIES WANTED * Do you have an incredible, new idea that could change your community, country, or world? If so, apply for an Echoing Green Fellowship. You could receive up to $90,000 in seed funding and support to launch a new organization that turns your innovative idea for social change into action. Follow in the footsteps of the founders of Teach For America, City Year, and over 400 other social change organizations and apply online by December 3, 2007. Watch the video: http://www.echoinggreen.org/video Find out whether you qualify: http://www.echoinggreen.org/shouldyouapply Apply online: https://apply.echoinggreen.org Questions? Contact us at apply@echoinggreen.org.
October 15, 2007 How Gertrude Stein transformed San FranciscoLinda Frye Burnham / 04:52 PM Fred Rosenbaum presents "Gertrude Stein and Her Circle of San Francisco Jewish Women," October 18, 2007, at the BJE Jewish Community Library, San Francisco, Calif. "Author Fred Rosenbaum discusses how Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas' salon in Paris attracted many other creative young Jewish women from Northern California. At Gertrude and Alice’s, their San Francisco friends learned of the latest trends in painting, literature, music, and philosophy and they returned home forever changed by the experience. Their exposure to these avant-garde movements helped to transform San Francisco into the Paris of the West." Details here.
Streets as Places Linda Frye Burnham / 11:22 AM The Project for Public Spaces will offer "Streets as Places," a two-day "transportation/placemaking training course on November 29-30, 2007. The goal of the course is to introduce participants to new ways of thinking about streets as public spaces and how placemaking can be used to build great streets and great communities. It is intended for anyone who is interested in creating a great street, including transportation professionals who want to learn more about how streets can help to build communities, civic and elected officials who realize that greater economic impact can result from changing the way that roads are designed, and citizen activists who understand that the time to change is now. "Presentations and discussion will center on how streets, roads, and transit facilities can be designed and managed to benefit communities, in addition to serving mobility needs. Practical tools for assessing a variety of street typologies and case studies of cities which have moved beyond solving mobility problems to community building will be presented, and participants will be encouraged to discuss their own projects as well as share experiences and ideas with each other. "The training session will include a walking tour and discussion of some of the recent street improvement projects in New York City, an on-site Placemaking street audit, seminar-style lectures, and open discussions about current transportation issues and challenges facing cities today." To register, contact Jess Pastore: jpastore@pps.org or (212) 620-5660
October 13, 2007 Hands-off paintingLinda Frye Burnham / 11:42 AM Says Roberta Smith in the N.Y. Times (10/13/07): "Since Rudolf Stingel’s sleek midcareer survey opened at the Whitney Museum of American art in June, hundreds of visitors have been allowed to depart radically from traditional museum protocol (hands off) and have a go at the walls in the exhibition’s first gallery, using anything they happen to have with them: pens, money, credit cards, cellphones. To accommodate such graphic urges, the large space was lined with shimmering, foil-covered Celotex insulation board, which is easily punctured with just about anything, even fingernails. When the show opened, the foil board covering the lower half of the walls was untouched; the upper half was a riot of graffiti, bas-relief carvings, patterns and drawings created during the show’s first stop, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago." Read the rest of this story and see pix here.
October 12, 2007 Don't Get Me StartedLinda Frye Burnham / 04:01 PM "Don't Get Me Started," the Huddersfield Salon, is a series of conversations about life in Huddersfield (West Yorkshire, England). They take place at the Café Ollo in Huddersfield's Media Centre, with comments on Blogspot. We heard about it from artist Adrian Sinclair of Heads Together, an arts organization focused on bringing life to the hearts of local neighborhoods. The producers of the Salon are "A Fine Bunch of People." They bring in "engaging speakers" to introduce "provocative ideas." The first Salon topic, October 8, 2007, was "Are we a Creative Town yet?" featuring a debate between Paul Chatterton, a geologist from the University of Leeds, and Charles Landry of Comedia, who dubbed Huddersfield "creative" in 1997 and went on to celebrate the town as an model for how small places could reinvent themselves in his book "The Creative City." The discussion evoked a few blog posts and left at one person sleepless. Upcoming topics: "Are You Happy Now?" and "Is Multiculturalism Dead?" There's not a lot of evidence that this venture is successful, but it could be worth trying in your town...
Brooklyn's Underground Railroad Linda Frye Burnham / 02:21 PM Today in the Arts section of the N.Y.Times (10/12/07), writer John Strasbough is "On the Trail of Brooklyn's Underground Railroad."He begins: "Last month the City of New York gave Duffield Street in downtown Brooklyn an alternate name: Abolitionist Place. It’s an acknowledgment that long before Brooklyn was veined with subway lines, it was a hub of the Underground Railroad: the network of sympathizers and safe houses throughout the North that helped as many as 100,000 slaves flee the South before the Civil War." The article details that history and current efforts to claim it. It is accompanied by a map and a downloadable audio tour of "The Freedom Trails of Brooklyn." "On the Trail of Brooklyn's Underground Railroad"
October 11, 2007 John Cusack's War, Inc.Linda Frye Burnham / 10:31 AM Actor John Cusack has written a new movie titled "War, Inc." about the current state of the military/industrial complex. You can read about it on Huffington Post, and check into a truly crucial conversation between Cusack and writer Naomi Klein about her new book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." They discuss in lengthy detail the jobbing-out of war and disaster response to private companies like Blackwater: "...disasters are dress rehearsals for a sci-fi vision of corporate rule -- it's not just that disaster response is being privatized, it's that in places like Baghdad and New Orleans, the public sphere is disappearing completely and there is no plan to bring it back. This is the warfare state..." (Klein) It's truly a stretch to say this topic belongs in this blog tangentially attached to community-based art. But I am interested in the way many Hollywood (commercial) artists are inserting themselves into the political struggles of our times by trying to make big-budget movies for social change. Whether they change anything remains to be seen, but I have been waiting for several years for somebody to tackle the monster, underlying issue of war/disaster contractors for hire -- mercenaries. They have been called "al Queda for the good guys." Catch up with the Cusack-Klein dialogue here
October 10, 2007 How do I fund my healing arts project?Linda Frye Burnham / 03:48 PM The October and November 2007 edition of AHN NEWS, the Arts & Healing Network newsletter, offers an INTRODUCTION TO FUNDING HEALING ARTS PROJECTS. It begins with an article on basic funding ideas and then feature sgrant advice from healing artist Judith Selby, a book review of Guide to Getting Arts Grants, and links to the Foundation Center and the Arts and Healing Grants Page.
How artists are spending their grants Linda Frye Burnham / 02:38 PM Stephanie Strom writes in the N.Y. Times (10/10/07) about how some artists spent their $50,000 grants from United States Artists, a fund founded last year with $22.6 million in financial backing from the Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential and Rasmuson Foundations. "Twenty-six percent of the artists reported spending part of their grants on health care. More than 60 percent spent a portion on art supplies, and 48 percent used some of the money to cover personal expenses like housing and meals. A number have also “paid it forward,” using some of their grant money to make gifts to organizations and people who have helped them in the past." One paid off a studio loan and another built a cabin in the woods.
October 09, 2007 What do you mean by that?Linda Frye Burnham / 07:26 AM When you identify segments of the community as "at-risk," "diverse" and "underserved," are you using empty jargon? An L.A. organization called Inside Out Community Arts get specific on its Web site. Here's what they mean. (Thanks, Jill Burnham.) We work with Los Angeles youth who are: Inside Out Community Arts
October 08, 2007 Join a 24-hour, live, online conferenceLinda Frye Burnham / 11:15 AM Islands Institute is hosting a free, live Web conference for 24 hours this Wednesday and Thursday. Titled "Art of Engagement," it's part of "Live in Public," a three-day artist-initiated conference in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. The real-time conference will begin at 9 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time, October 12. You may observe it online (there's already a forum in progress), or you can sign up to be linked into the conference and join the discussions. They will include "Focus on Environmental Art," "Teaching Art for Social Change," "Exploring the Goals of the Work," "Storywork and Cross-Cultural Dialogue" and more -- plus some Open Space for dialogue with the "Live" conference in Vancouver. Islands especially encourages teachers to ask their students to register and join in. See the Web site for details. The mechanics are fascinating.
CAN case study to appear in new book Linda Frye Burnham / 10:22 AM CAN's case study on Swamp Gravy, the enormously successful community-based theater project in south Georgia, will soon be published in Doug Blandy & Gaylene Carpenter's "Arts & Cultural Programming," a book to be published by Human Kinetics. The case study appeared in our book "Making Exact Change: How U.S. arts-based programs have made a significant and sustained impact on their communities" by William Cleveland, published in November 2005. You may order "Making Exact Change" from CAN, or you may read it online at http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archive/mec/index.php.
October 06, 2007 Jazz Police on "a Disease called Freedom"Linda Frye Burnham / 01:52 PM The latest entry in Pangea World Theater's Bridges series gets a nice write-up by Andrea Canter in the Twin Cities publication The Jazz Police (10/4/07). Bridges is a performance art project featuring multiethnic, multidisciplinary artists telling communal and personal stories together. The newest product of the collaboration is "a Disease called Freedom," a piece by The Ways Ensemble at Minneapolis' Avalon Theater (home of In the Heart of the Beast), through October 7. It uses the metaphor of a river, says Canter, as one point of departure, the psychiatric diagnosis of Drapetomania as another, and the Dogon concept of the Andoumboulou as a rubric for human existence. The ensemble calls it "a body of water containing our collective mythologies, carrying our stories, our music, our dance and our visual creations for the stage and is subject to, as a river is, changes in weather."
Just back from Philly Linda Frye Burnham / 09:49 AM Steve Durland and I just returned from a week in Philadelphia where we presented at the Arts in Criminal Justice conference. It was the first national convening in this field, and the first time many of these corresponding colleagues had ever seen each other face to face. It was exhilarating and exhausting, felt like the birth of something really great. Just where we like to be. I will be writing more about this and about another meeting I took part in for the first two days of the week: a group of artists and activists who were brought together by Working films to talk about Appalshop's multimedia initiative, "1000 Kites." It was a brainstorm about how each of us could use Kites in our own work. Working Films (which rolls out independent media projects and connects them with activism) described it as a focus group, but I had never participated in anything like it. It was really stimulating to meet with so many hardcore prison-reform activists and talk about how arts elements really benefit their work. More about all this later... |
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