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« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 » 
April 28, 2008 Notice the work of Matthew DehaemersLinda Frye Burnham / 10:41 AM Take a look at the work of Matthew Dehaemer, a Kansas City sculptor and public artist who has done fascinating work with numerous communities, including Alzheimer's patients and caregivers. During his 2007 residency at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, he helped caregivers record the journeys of their family members affected by the disease, creating multimedia installations containing reliquaries and video testaments. They also crafted a labyrinth based on a PET scan of an Alzheimer patient's brain, combined with the marble floor labyrinth in Chartres cathedral. It's inscribed with various texts from the project, written backwards as you walk to the center of the labyrinth, then coming into clarity as you walk back out. This project is still being featured in Memory Walks and other events sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association of Delaware. It's worth a visit on Dehaemers' Web site, as is the award-winning installation he did in 2006 commemorating the 87th anniversary of the 1919 Omaha Race Riot resulting in the hanging, shooting, dragging and burning of William Brown. (Thanks to the DCCA for sending us their lovely "Art & Community 2006-2007" catalogue, including the community work of Dehaemers, Claire Sherwood, Yukie Kobayashi and Aria Anasazi.)
April 24, 2008 Curriculum Project Education Survey deadline extendedLinda Frye Burnham / 03:07 PM You still have time to take part in Imagining America's Curriculum Project Education Survey; the deadline has been extended to June 1. It's all about assessing the current state of community cultural development education, both its strengths and its needs.
April 23, 2008 Making "Exact Change" on the bus in New HavenLinda Frye Burnham / 11:59 AM Here's a fun e-mail from Kara Arsenault at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, Conn.: We hope that the Community Arts Network might consider posting information about our recent event, Exact Change. It was a fantastic afternoon, with folks from around the region traveling to ride on a "performance" bus. Our staff traveled with kids who were riding the bus for the first time; an adult who had been riding the bus for 35 years, but said this would be the ride she would always fondly remember; and many innocent bystanders who were just riding the bus to get to their next stop, but ended up becoming enthralled with the performances. We specifically tried to pick routes that traveled through diverse communities, in an attempt to showcase our talented local performance artists and to bring the arts to diverse communities that don't always have easy access to the arts.
April 22, 2008 S.F. kids know how to listen and learnLinda Frye Burnham / 01:48 PM From "Thanks to ambitious music education program, kids across the city know how to listen and learn" by Mary Ellen Hunt, S.F. Chronicle, 4/15/08, about the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music program, which aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the S.F.U.S.D. (Thanks, Arts Ed Listserv.): "It's a 'snare guitar,' " one little girl says quite matter-of-factly. Four girls from Julianne Eng's fourth- and fifth-grade class explain the ins and outs of their newest creation, pointing out main features of the design on their drawing, "It's got a button for turning on the snare drum at the top and an amp built in at the bottom - and it's solar-powered." Eng puts on a CD and Saint-Saëns' Algerian Suite thumps mildly in the background amid the chatter of young voices. While the girls continue embellishing the neck of their snare guitar with flames that would make Ted Nugent proud, the other kids in the comfortably cluttered room at Argonne Alternative Elementary in the Richmond District of San Francisco are working on their own fascinating menagerie of instruments - a "viano," a "clarolin," "drymbals" and other exotic inventions, which they describe with varying degrees of technical detail. One pair of girls is carefully copyrighting their instrument's description, and they casually, but deftly, turn the paper over when I come closer to have a look. Read the rest of the story right here:
April 21, 2008 News from P.O.V.Linda Frye Burnham / 01:22 PM One of the community-arts areas we cover is media arts, especially documentaries made by artists in collaboration with communities. We try to keep abreast of the quickly growing independent-media field, and one of the ways we do it is to subscribe to the P.O.V. newsletter.
See the NPAC blog Linda Frye Burnham / 12:30 PM Forwarded from Amanda Ameer, who's doing promo for NPAC: Hi, just wanted to let you know about a new, temporary blog on ArtsJournal called “Program Notes”, built around the National Performing Arts Convention in June. This week, playwright Jason Grote writes on the usefulness (rather, lack of usefulness) of audience surveys in measuring audience response to the performing arts, and I thought your readers would be especially interested: All comments – agreements and arguments alike! - are very welcome on the site. Amanda
April 17, 2008 Need live/work space? Try the Rust BeltLinda Frye Burnham / 11:23 AM "From Rust Belt to Artist Belt" is a one-day conference in Cleveland, Ohio, May 14, 2008, to educate community-development professionals working in “Rust Belt” cities about "the unique challenges and opportunities that such communities face in conducting artist-oriented community development." It's part of Creative Compass, a multi-year initiative of northeast Ohio's Community Partnership for Arts and Culture "to increase artists’ access to affordable home and business space and to make them more active partners in revitalizing our urban neighborhoods." Participants in the "Rust Belt" conference will hear from national leaders in the field and will begin to talk about what a regional agenda for moving such initiatives forward might look like, says CPAC. They'll launch other Creative Compass programming in the coming months, including educational programming for artists seeking space, a housing expo where artists will be able to meet with community development professionals in a “one-stop shop” and an online clearinghouse of resources available to artists in Northeast Ohio, including information on affordable space opportunities, low-interest loans and housing grants. This Creative Compass programming is in partnership with Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC).
April 16, 2008 "Intervention" = "community building"?Linda Frye Burnham / 12:03 PM "Community" is a frequent stated theme of a U.C. Santa Cruz conference, May 14-17, 2008, titled "Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice." According to the conference announcement, "Interventionist practices use interruptions to question norms by using humor, surprise, and unusual associations to overturn assumptions about the world. Such practices work within societal structures to re-examine set ideas, subvert norms, map hidden systems and allow us to see and think in new ways." Themes include: --"Interruption of Hierarchies: the academy and the gallery" (How do the academy and the gallery impact interventionist art practices?); Events include panel discussions, performance art, interventionist actions, creative lunches, a Wikipedia, a publication and interventionist exhibitions at Sesnon Gallery, UCSC; the LAB, San Francisco; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose. Considering that participants include performance artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Linda Montano and Annie Sprinkle, and one of the premises is that intervention/interruption is community-building -- well, it's almost irresistible.
April 15, 2008 Where have all the bohemians gone?Linda Frye Burnham / 11:02 AM James Hannaham on Salon has a review of Richard Florida's latest book, "Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life." It's a withering, derisive view of the "Swami of the Creative Class," who "limits his consideration to American cities, though he has chosen to emigrate to Toronto himself." "Where have all the bohemians gone?"
Stephen Wiltshire, the Living Camera Linda Frye Burnham / 10:46 AM Here's a completely astounding video of Stephen "The Living Camera" Wiltshire, a London artist with autism, drawing a perfectly accurate, five-and-a half-yard drawing of Rome's City Center after one 45-minute helicopter flight over the city. (Thanks, Darrell Taylor.) "Beautiful Minds: Stephen Wiltshire"
April 14, 2008 Call for Papers: Popular Arts & EducationLinda Frye Burnham / 12:37 PM Here's a special call for papers from CAN writer John Sullivan, who's editing an issue of "New Solutions," a quarterly report from The Community Solution (http://www.communitysolution.org). "Popular Arts & Education in Community-Based Participatory Research" Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is a methodology based ideally on flexible power relationships and the unobstructed flow of expert and local knowledge among project partners. The potential of success in CBPR depends on authentic dialogue among partners, free flow of information, and trust. But accurate, unmediated and timely channels of communications, while key to successful CBPR, are difficult to create and maintain. As participatory methodologies evolve, the arts have increasingly taken center stage as culturally fluent modalities for information, communication, advocacy and organizing. Methods such as Theater of the Oppressed (TO), Photovoice, video, spoken word, hip-hop, visual arts, and more give community values and needs a strong, authentic voice and ensure that methods and messages are rooted in local cultures and delivered clearly, directly, and respectfully.
April 11, 2008 NEA increased support for rural theatersLinda Frye Burnham / 10:14 AM Back Stage has a (slightly) heartening article by Nicole Kristal (4/3/08) about the 14% increase in support from the National Endowment for the Arts for rural theaters over the last five years through the Challenge America: Reaching Every Community Fast-Track Review Grants program. The NEA has slowly but steadily demonstrated an effort to support art outside of urban hubs, says Kristal. "There has been a lot of encouragement from Congress to be aware of that national commitment, and I think that there's always been an understanding that the agency should seek ways to be as broad in its support as it can be," said Bill O'Brien, director of theater and musical theater for the NEA. Small theater companies in rural areas also are garnering NEA grants through the Access to Artistic Excellence program, in which they compete with major theaters in New York and Chicago for funds. She profiles some rural theaters, including Roadside. Federal Support Grows for Rural Theatre Companies
Zero Evictions Campaign in New Orleans Linda Frye Burnham / 08:21 AM Those following the unfolding of the Zero Evictions Campaign in New Orleans may be interested in the participation of the International Alliance of Inhabitants, a global network of associations and social movements of inhabitants, cooperatives, communities, tenants, house owners, homeless, slum dwellers, indigenous populations and people from working-class neighborhoods.
April 10, 2008 Hidden Portland: kids' pix and stories onlineLinda Frye Burnham / 03:23 PM Maine schoolteachers Fran Vita-Taylor and Susan Porter are conducting a workshop (through April 12) called "Hidden Portland: Writing and Photography" for grades 6-8. The lovely place-making project has an online portfolio of photos and writing by the children. They are worth looking at and the format worth copying. Also, an exhibition (one large-printed photo and one piece of written work each) will be on display for the month of May in the Addison Wooley Gallery in Portland's Old Port. The workshop is through an organization in Portland called "The Telling Room," whose mission is to "privilege the act of storytelling as a vital means of expression and community building."
The Teaching Artist: a brief history of the field Linda Frye Burnham / 02:47 PM S.F. WritersCorps has added a class – “The Work of a Teaching Artist” – to the training WritersCorps offers its teachers. Yesterday (4/9/08), they posted a brief the history of their field on their Web site, discussing six strands of that history: literary arts programs, government programs, nonprofits, educators and universities, and research, advocacy and arts policy. This short piece is crammed with hyperlinked references. A nice resource. Thanks, Judith Tannenbaum.
April 09, 2008 At Full Frame: "The Last Conquistador"Linda Frye Burnham / 01:25 PM I am fortunate to live near one of the world's great film fests: The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, N.C. At this year's festival I saw a film CAN readers would enjoy: "The Last Conquistador" by John J. Valadez and Christina Ibarra. It will be broadcast on PBS this summer (2008).
Photographing the Ninth Ward Linda Frye Burnham / 08:48 AM North Carolina photographer-writer John L. Rosenthal has a beautiful photo essay on The Huffington Post about photographing in New Orleans images of "a disappearing city." "The Ninth Ward," he says, "was disappearing, it seemed to me, not only because of Katrina, but because of a long-standing indifference to the poor, an indifference now transforming itself into a mercilessly strategic land-grab." He shot everything he perceived as "imperiled" ... "the vestiges of a working-class community in which aspiration contended with scarcity, and where religious faith found expression on every block. From my perspective, the floodwaters had washed away not only bricks and mortar, but also the toxic stereotypes that separate us from each other. What was left, in other words, was the vanishing common ground, and it is this familiar terrain that I have photographed." Take a look.
April 07, 2008 Notes online from the Berkeley conferenceLinda Frye Burnham / 09:52 AM Thanks so much to U.C. Berkeley's Center for Community Innovation for posting online the notes from "Arts, Neighborhoods, and Social Practice: The arts as integral to processes of urban community revitalization and civic engagement," January 25, 2008, a very interesting cross-sector convening by the Center for Community Innovation and The Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies. The posting includes notes on presentations as well as the discussions that followed:
E-mail from across the bridge Linda Frye Burnham / 09:00 AM Here's a lovely e-mail we received from film producer Alexandra Bekiaris: Hello-
April 04, 2008 Comments on the MICA conferenceLinda Frye Burnham / 07:20 AM There is an interesting discussion in process in the "Comments" section following my blog post of 3/24: "Thoughts on the MICA conference." Go here, scroll to the post, then scroll to the bottom: http://www.communityarts.net/blog/index.php
April 03, 2008 Obama talks about the artsSteven Durland / 10:33 AM Nick Rabkin from the Chicago Center for Arts Policy sends us a heads-up on this uTube video of a Barack Obama campaign talk addressing the importance of the arts. Nick says: "Stay tuned for the last line of this little talk about the arts and arts ed, and what they can do for us in these times." The caption says this video is of Barack Obama answering a question about reforming the education system at a town hall meeting in Wallingford, Pennsylvania on April 2, 2008. View it here or on uTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN2Zy_68RcY
April 01, 2008 New doc: "Preacher's Sons"Linda Frye Burnham / 03:17 PM Forwarded from L.A. artist Cheri Gaulke: Dear friends, |
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