CAN Blog

The Choral Arts Society of Washington: Music in Our Schools Month Blog

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:16:25 -0500

Rorwarded from the Choral Arts Society of Washington:

The Choral Arts Society of Washington is hosting a blog series throughout the month of March to help celebrate Music in Our Schools Month. We hope that by sharing of the importance of music education as well as important features of our programs we will generate a dialogue within the community about the importance of arts in schools. Please stop by to check out the latest postings throughout the month of March. We welcome comments to any of our postings.

Young Curators Speak

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:25:20 -0500

In case you're interested in what's going on with young mainstream curators, there's an interactive feature in the N.Y.Times today (March 18, 2010). Go here.

Making Your Media Matter rescheduled for May 12

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:24:28 -0500

The Center for Social Media's "Making Your Media Matter" conference has been rescheduled for Wednesday May 12, 2010.

Go here for details.

March 20 Is Obscura Day!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:17:32 -0500

People all over the world will celebrate Obscura Day, March 20, 2010, "a day of expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in your own home town." It's sponsored by the folks behind Atlas Obscura, a compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities and esoterica. Watch the Victorian Difference Engine in action at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Tour the Garden of the Gods with the Colorado Steampunks. Visit the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik. Take a flaishlight tour of NATO's Altantic North Command and Control Bunker, built during the Cold War deep under a mountain overlooking Kristiansand, Norway. Or organize an Obscura Day tour of your own.

Obscura Day

Call: The Stowe Prize for Excellence in Writing to Advance Social Justice

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:35:06 -0500

The Harret Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Conn., has established The Stowe Prize, a $10,000 award to recognize a United States author whose written work makes a tangible impact on a social-justice issue critical to contemporary society. The inaugural Prize will be awarded in 2011, and honors the 200th anniversary of Stowe's birth. Submission must be postmarked by June 1, 2010. (Thanks, Craig Zelizer.)

The Stowe Prize

How we talk about things

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:44:09 -0500

Those interested in writing about art might like this very nice essay in Art Lies by Ariel Evans, writing on the occasion of the 2009 Art-Sci Symposium, “The Nature of Place: Land Art/Land Use." She discusses how difficult it is to talk about modes of art while they are being invented and practiced. She refers to a symposium talk by Lucy Lippard in which she differentiated land artists of the 1960s from those involved in "eco-art" and "land use" today. She also quotes Steve Reich: "...for me, minimalism never existed—people existed."

"Because of the multiple and diverse approaches to land use presented at the symposium," writes Evans, "land use is difficult to write about: adjectives fail, and it’s harder to define land use after the presentation than it was before. I think it’s better to not try naming these practices. ...I think by labeling we risk closing down a plethora of possible meanings." I know the feeling, having spent my life trying to write about living artists working outside the mainstream. It's especially hard to avoid using labels ("performance art," "community art," etc.), particularly while artists are in the midst of inventing things that later turn out to be historical movements. I always dodge the definition of whatever terms I am employing. While you're trying hard not to define their ephemerality, they slip right through your fingers. Sometimes all you can do is point.

"The Nature of Place: Land Art/Land Use."

The Case of the Deviant Toad

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:41:17 -0500

England's Arts Catalyst has come up with another stunning cross-sector project; this time it's a close look at toads deformed by environmental degradation. Along with Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Arts Catalyst has commissioned New York artist Brandon Ballengée's eco-actions and study of deformed U.K. amphibians during the International Year of Biodiversity. The project has produced a new monograph about Ballengée's practice from arts, science and ecological perspectives, "Malamp: The Occurrence of Deformities in Amphibians" (with text by Lucy R. Lippard), as well as field trips and an exhibition, "The Case of the Deviant Toad," at London's Royal Institution of Great Britain, March 15-31, 2010. Ballengée will show his high-resolution scanner photographs, video and preserved specimens of deformed toads. "In a gallery context," says The Arts Catalyst, "the specimens resemble translucent gems; enchanting, terrible and other-worldly." The show includes an "art/science cafe," March 15, featuring Ballengée in conversation with Michaela Crimmin, director of arts at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Details and images are on The Arts Catalyst site.

Catch up with March Forth on March 4

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:02:19 -0500

University of California students are gearing up for "March Forth on March 4," Thursday, Mar. 4, the state's designated Student Day of Action to protest higher education budget cuts, says Huffington Post. But with the events of last week, including a spate of racial incidents at UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, the day has come to hold a greater significance.

According to the blog StudentActivism.net, Mar. 4 has become a countrywide phenomenon -- 100 events are scheduled in 28 states to protest the condition of higher education in America The UC Regent Live(blog) has a full schedule of tomorrow's events across in California, including film screenings, marches and rallies.

Here's a national activities map.

Here's the Huffpo story.

Dialogue about Water's Implications for Design

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:29:58 -0500

Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., will host, "NL - StL - NO: A Dialogue about Water's Implications for Design and Infrastructure," on design projects in the Netherlands (NL), St. Louis (StL) and New Orleans (NO). Organized by Derek Hoeferlin, senior lecturer in architecture at Washington University, the discussion will focus on different, yet related, initiatives and projects that emphasize the significant implications water holds in design and infrastructure. The event features Ambassador of the Netherlands to the United States Renée Jones-Bos, with presentations by Hoeferlin and David Waggonner, principal, Waggonner & Ball Architects. Respondents include Dorothée Imbert, chair, Master of Landscape Architecture, and Buzz Spector, dean, College & Graduate School of Art. The event will take place on Tuesday, March 2, 2010, at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

More Information

BA Community Arts @ Strathclyde University to close

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:43:23 -0500

Forwarded from Gillian Taylor:

The University of Strathclyde in Glasgow are in a 30 day consultation period to close the BA (Hons) Community Arts. Please sign the petition to save it > http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savebaca/

Also as this is a Community Arts Network I am sure that there are many who feel very strongly about the Community Arts agenda. We are currently compiling a folder of statements from like minded people about why the course should not be closed. If anyone could provide such a statement please send to this address and I will forward it on to the course director.

Gillian Taylor

(Current 2nd year BA Community Arts student - University of Strathclyde)

Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:47:24 -0500

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, says Motoko Rich in the N.Y. Times (2/21/10), Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes. Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations. See more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html

Launch: Out in the Sticks Cultural Assn.

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:15:21 -0500

"We think that people even in little villages 30 kilometers from the nearest city also have rights to access to culture, really good art and films," says Anna Szczepaniec, co-founder of Out in the Sticks. According to a story in the Napanee Beaver by Dominik Wisniewki, Szczepaniec and her husband, Polish photographer Andrej Maciejewski, recently found a home with room for a cultural space in Yarker, Ontario, a tiny village in the southeastern corner of Ontario, about three hours east of Toronto. "We run Film Discussion Club, series of lectures on art and culture, Reading Club, concerts and workshops. In June 2010 we are opening an art gallery," said Szczepaniec in an e-mail to CAN. Upcoming activities include a screening and discussion of "Shutka Book of Records," an award-winning documentary by Yugoslavia-born fimmaker Aleksandar Manic about a town in Macedonia inhabited mainly by Gypsies who are "champions" of odd disciplines like goose fight and vampire hunting." Upcoming community workshops will teach prople how to make and use a pinhole camera. The next exhibition (in the gallery windows) is Maciejewski's "Long Swamp Road Collection" of objects found over one year on the road from Bellrock to Moscow, Ontario.

Out in the Sticks

20 Additional Words for Nonprofits to Avoid

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:37:25 -0500

Forwarded from the Network for Good Learning Center:

Last week we shared 6 Words Nonprofits Should Avoid in 2010 which lit a fire under our fellow language purists' behinds to contribute their own irksome, shudder-inspiring, jargon-filled terms and punctuation usages to include on the banned list.

Call: Broadening the Digital Humanities Fellowship

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:32:17 -0500

For CAN writers interested in expanding the potential of academic publication via collaborative processes and emergent and transitional media:

Fifteen fellowships are available for a National Endowment of the Humanities summer 2010 program designed to broaden the digital humanities. Offered in collaboration with University of California’s Humanities Research Institute, University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy and the electronic journal, “Vectors,” the fellowship includes a four-week California residency, beginning June 19, 2010. To explore “central issues in the digital humanities and in multimedia authorship,” fellowship recipients will engage in existing projects and create their own draft project. The application deadline is March 24, 2010. “While we are interested in innovative modes of multimedia scholarship,” the call for proposals says, “we are not necessarily looking for projects that are about new media. Rather, we are interested in a broad array of projects across the humanities and from a variety of disciplines, periods and methodologies.”

Call for Proposals

Call: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Engagement

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:17:10 -0500

March 22, 2010, is the proposal submissions deadline for the 10th International Research Conference on Service-Learning and Community Engagement. The conference will be hosted by Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis on October 28-31, 2010. The theme is “International Perspectives: Crossing Boundaries through Research.” Proposals that present research findings are invited to address a number of questions, such as: “How does research assist in crossing boundaries between campus and community partners, between faculty and students, between disciplines or between and across cultural contexts? Is the American, westernized concept of service-learning transferable to other contexts?” Additionally, proposals are invited according to "new and continuing tracks," including assessment, technology, faculty roles and rewards and more. Conference organizers anticipate, "Understanding service-learning and community engagement from diverse cultural perspectives will add insight necessary for comparative research and to improve practice."

Call for Proposals