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« November 2007 | Main | January 2008 » 
December 28, 2007 The Migration of the NegroLinda Frye Burnham / 10:52 AM 'What’s more real, after all, art or the feeling of it? History or the telling of it? Medium or message? We know the conventional market wisdom. It’s important to have the alternative." That's how the superb art critic Holland Cotter ends his story in the N.Y. Times (12/28/07) about two exhibition of Jacob Lawrence's "Migration of the Negro" series in New York this month. In brief, Lawrence painted the series (60 small works in tempera on hardboard panels) in Harlem in 1941 when he was 24, and he painted them all at the same time. Though clearly a single narrative work, they are rarely shown together, which Cotter says (elegantly) is a mistake. He talks about the partial show now at the Whitney and relates it to a second exhibition, “Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of ‘The Migration of the Negro’ by Jacob Lawrence,” at Triple Candie in Harlem.
What I got for Christmas Linda Frye Burnham / 10:03 AM My most favorite book in a long time: "Fairy Houses ... Everywhere" by Barry & Tracy Kane. It's a picture book of little houses built in the forests, backyards, beaches and islands of coastal Maine, made of twigs, stones, barks, shells, etc. Apparently there are hundreds of them all over the place. Tracy Kane says that when she discovered them, she felt a "twinge of jealousy, realizing no one had introduced this delightful activity to her when she was growing up." I immediately sent copies to my grandchildren, who live in places where they stay indoors most of the time and play with manufactured toys. Building fairy houses takes no tools or plastic parts, just your imagination. What does this have to do with community art? In September 2006, an innovative neighborhood in Portsmouth, N.H., launched a fairy houses garden tour. The Friends of the South End Neighborhood Association and the City of Portsmouth invited everybody to build fairy houses in their gardens and participants ranged from 3 to 93, "exploring skills from preschoolers to professional architects, with house construction ranging from rustic to mansion." This was a gift from myself, following a suggestion by my old friend Darrell Taylor, who lives in Portland, Me. Somehow it makes me feel better about everything. To buy a copy, see the CAN bookstore.
December 22, 2007 Sam's Story -- Music That HealsLinda Frye Burnham / 02:47 PM There's a great story about the power of music in the winter newsletter of Hospital Audiences, a New York organization with programs that 'inspire healing, growth and learning through engagement in the arts for the culturally underserved." HAI musician Kathy Lord writes about what happened when she and Susan Weber brought their Music That Heals program to a pediatric intensive care unit in a Brooklyn Hospital. As they were singing, a three-month-old boy named Sam, presumed deaf, clearly responded to their music. "Up to this point, Sam had failed every hearing test. All of us watched as he continued to move his right arm in the air and sway with the music." Sam's mother, Carrie, found hope for the first time in the boy's life. She and her husband began to sing to Sam and pushed the doctors to insert ventilation tubes in his ears, sooner rather than later. The persistent musical stimulation helped create new pathways in Sam's brain. Lord continues to work with Sam as he improves. (The newsletter is downloadable as a .pdf.)
AS-AP moves to Bard's CCS Linda Frye Burnham / 02:07 PM The Art Spaces Archive Project (AS-AP) has established a partnership with the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. AS-AP, founded in 2003 by a consortium of alternative art organizations, is a collaborative visual-arts initiative created to document the history of alternative, avant-garde and contemporary art movements of the 1950s to the present throughout the U.S. The project has a online National Index of the Avant Garde, now expanded and improved with the aid of CCS. In addition, their combines efforts present outstanding resources on archiving.
December 20, 2007 RAND's midterm report card on NCLBLinda Frye Burnham / 12:18 PM "States should ... be encouraged to develop assessments that measure higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills," says the RAND corporation in "Passing or Failing? A Midterm Report Card for No Child Left Behind” (RAND Review, Fall 2007). This study looks at NCLB, the largest insertion of federal authority into school management in U.S. history, signed in January 2002 with goals stretching to 2014. Having analyzed the effects of the law at nearly every level of the education system, the authors issue a set of mixed grades, early warnings and general guidelines that can help the law fulfill its promise. They don't mention the arts, which are mandated as an area of curriculum by NCLB, but not included in "proficiency" testing, which drives the whole mechanism. Their recommendation on assessment prompts us to point out that assessment strategies being used in arts education would be enormously useful in measuring higher-order thinking and problem-solving. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education) has published the NAEP Arts Education Assessment Framework. There's an excellent case study of that framework on The Nation's Report Card (from the National Center for Education Statistics). It explores "useful strategies for developing an arts performance assessment." We wish the government would read its own reports. "Passing or Failing? A Midterm Report Card for No Child Left Behind” "Developing an Arts Assessment: Some Selected Strategies"
Design plays a part in New York Harbor Linda Frye Burnham / 09:59 AM "The winning design for a 40-acre park that would unfold across the southern half of Governors Island is not the kind of grand public-works project the city once championed. But in an age when developers regularly usurp the government’s planning role, it reflects the kind of imaginative, civic-minded thinking that can restore our faith in city and state leaders," says Nicolai Ouroussoff in the N.Y. Times (12/20/07). His is one of two articles (the other is by Robin Pogrebin) in today's Times about the design for Governor's Island in New York Harbor. The two stories discuss a number of interesting questions about the design as a "cultural destination," a "whimsical" landscape, one that is "humble in scale but big on ambition." Both are worth reading. www.nytimes.com.
December 19, 2007 Police Bust "Party with a Purpose" in NOLALinda Frye Burnham / 11:58 AM Catch up with the fight to keep New Orleans public housing (undamaged by Katrina) from being demolished. A video titled "New Orleans Police Attack Peaceful March at St. Bernard" was posted on YouTube on December 16, 2007, with the following description: "Residents of the St. Bernard Housing Development served food and danced to the music of the Hot 8 Brass Band in a 'Party With a Purpose' to protest the planned demolition of 4,600 units of public housing in New Orleans. New Orleans police attacked the peaceful, festive event without provocation and dragged away a journalist and two protesters. Footage from Jacqueline Soohen and Richard Rowley of Big Noise Films, Michael Boedigheimer and Luisa Doucas of JoLu Productions, and the Yes Men." CAN received notice of the YouTube posting through an e-blast from Finding Our Folk, with the announcement: "Your action has helped impact the on-the-ground battle in New Orleans! Thanks to your efforts, the demonstrations in different parts of the country, the marches and acts of civil disobedience in New Orleans, and legal efforts, the New Orleans Housing Authority agreed not to demolish the C.J. Peete, Lafitte or St. Bernard public housing developments unless the New Orleans City Council approves permits for the work. Senator Vitter and the New Orleans City Council still needs to hear from more of us. They need to know that residents need to have more access to the decision making process and that a 1:1 replacement of public housing is a necessity. Please forward this information widely and visit www.katrinaaction.org for more updates." New Orleans Police Attack Peaceful March at St. Bernard
December 18, 2007 Music and Murder in MexicoLinda Frye Burnham / 09:45 AM "Mexico’s country music stars are being killed at an alarming rate — 13 in the past year and a half, three already in December — in a trend that has gone hand in hand with the surge in violence between drug gangs," says James McKinley in the N.Y. Times (12/18/07). "None of the cases have been solved. All have borne the signs of Mexican underworld executions, sending a chill through the ranks of other grupero musicians, who sing to a country beat about love, violence and drugs in modern Mexico. ... In some cases, the musicians appeared to have ties to organized crime figures, making them potential targets in reprisal attacks from rival gangs. Others had composed ballads known as narcocorridos, glorifying the shadow world of drug dealers and hit men, which can offend other drug dealers and hit men." Songs of Love and Murder, Silenced by Killings
December 11, 2007 The House of Dance and FeathersLinda Frye Burnham / 12:20 PM When I was in New Orleans last week for the NPN meeting (and more -- report upcoming), I heard about the House of Dance and Feathers, Ronald Lewis' small private museum in the Lower Ninth Ward that housed a collection of artifacts and costumes associated with the African-American way of celebrating Mardi Gras. It was lost in the Katrina flood and rebuilt by a team of design students from Kansas State U., led by their professor Patrick Rhodes. It's a great story. There's info/audio/pix about it on the Web at the Voice of America
Discovering an Ohio community’s heart Linda Frye Burnham / 10:07 AM Here's a nice short report from THE Ohio State University: "Discovering a Community’s Heart through Community Art." A report from one of the Service-Learning Initiative’s 2007 Course Development Grants, Service-Learning through Collaborative Art in Weinland Park (Karen Hutzel, Assistant Professor, Department of Art Education; partner: Catherine Girves, Director, University Area Enrichment Association): “Children in Weinland Park wave when you drive by. They ask your name. They want to be ballerinas and teachers and basketball players. They are creative and funny and rascally.” Columbus Dispatch, July 12, 2007.
December 10, 2007 Help create a West Philly muralLinda Frye Burnham / 05:02 PM Artist Michael Schwartz invites you to join Collective Imprints, a "consensus-based participatory visual art project that celebrates the life and history of the Rotunda cultural arts center in West Philadelphia." The project will adorn two 20’x 5 ‘ balcony walls inside the Rotunda. Specific content of the mural are decided exclusively by the participants. “Part of what makes this project so innovative is the use of movement arts, music and writing as a means of collectively designing a work of art. We are fusing together popular education and community arts to empower and engage participants in a critical process of storytelling,” says Schwartz. Free community workshops happen every Tuesday from 6-8pm through January 22, 2008, at the Rotunda, 4014 Walnut Street. The project's features the testimony of participants, descriptions of workshops and a discussion about the content of the work of art.
December 03, 2007 L.A. Opera's Community Program gets TV ravesLinda Frye Burnham / 03:48 PM The L.A. Opera's Education and Community Program got raves in November from two Los Angeles TV news stations -- one of them in Spanish. (Disclosure: My daughter, Jill Burnham, is the Opera's education manager.) Watch clips here: KNBC-TV 5PM News – November 28, 2007; 11AM News – November 29, 2007
News you can use Linda Frye Burnham / 01:46 PM Forwarding (with permission) a testament to the usability of well-done "working methods" materials. |
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