APInews

Call: Community Arts Development Convening, 2010

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:26:06 -0500

December 21, 2009, is the deadline for proposals for presentations during "At the Crossroads: A Community Arts and Development Convening," in St. Louis, Mo., March 25-27, 2010. The Community Arts Training Institute of the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission calls for proposals for papers, presentations, dialogues and workshops focused on new strategies and provocative thinking for the future of community arts development and art for social change. Among the participants are CAN writers Bill Cleveland of the Center for the Study for Art and Community and Barbara Schaffer Bacon and Pam Korza of Animating Democracy, a program of American for the Arts. Artist Marty Pottenger and researcher Chris Dwyer will present a preconvening workshop, "What Difference Are We Making? Assessing Social Impact of Arts for Community Change," on an evaluation framework they created around Pottenger's Arts & Equity Initiative in Portland, Me.

New on CAN: Our Privilege To Move On

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:08:41 -0500

Today CAN brings you a new essay by community artist Laura D. Cohen, who asks, "How many of us who work with community choose to leave when things get tough? Cohen observes, in her essay, "The Choices We Have and Our Privilege To Move On," that "when working in a community that is different from our own, it is essential to reflect, address and confront our own privilege in order to become conscious and committed to the work and to the community." Her evidence comes from her work in an afterschool program involving Kids With A Statement, boys and girls 13-18 who were investigating themes of social justice, community and the arts to create interactive performances surrounding power and community problem solving. The class worked in extremely difficult conditions in a public school where there was almost no heat but plenty of rats, mice, cockroaches, trashcan fires and hallway shootings. She relates her agonizing decision-making process about whether to stay or leave, and vows to "configure ways to encourage those who are working in communities foreign to their own to stay on and keep going." This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 3.

New MIT Program in Art, Culture, Technology

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:51:45 -0500

Collaborative public projects that invite community participation will be among the artistic practices explored in the new Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) at MIT. The program, formerly titled the Visual Arts Program (VAP), examines the role of art, culture and technology in society and considers artistic practice to be knowledge production. The emphasis is on how cultural and artistic practices critically engage science and technology and envision their transformation. The program hosts a weekly lecture series of artists, urbanists and scholars from a broad range of disciplines from the campus, the region and from around the world. The faculty includes Program Director Ute Meta Bauer, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Joan Jonas, Gediminas Urbonas and Antoni Muntadas. The two-year program grants a Master of Science in Visual Studies degree; applications are due December 15, 2009.

Yes Men Punk U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:57:53 -0500

The Yes Men set up a mock U.S. Chamber of Commerce Web site, October 19, 2009, and held a press conference announcing that the Chamber was changing its position on global warming. The Blog of the National Coalition Against Censorship reports that, in response to the mock announcement that the Chamber was shifting its opposition to serious efforts to address global warming, the Chamber tried to have the mock site taken down by sending a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice to the site's upstream provider, Hurricane Electric, and is suing for trademark infringement. "This may be a good thing," says NCAC. "The current case should make it clear that political commentary is protected no matter whether it appears as a screed in a newspaper or takes the form of a satirical art prank." See video on CANtv.

CAN Is a Focus of ArtsRising Giving Circle 2009-10

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:01:08 -0500

ArtRising, the innovative funding program founded in 2006 by the Zing Foundation, has announced its plans for 2009-10 and included CAN as one of the five projects for this year's Giving Circle. The program was launched to engage individuals to learn about and support arts and social change. Over the past two years 80 individuals have contributed to the funding circle, and 50 people have been more actively involved, distributing 20 grants totaling $230,000; Art in the Public Interest received two of those grants for the support of the Community Arts Network. ArtRising has reorganized to allow donors of smaller amounts to participate in its membership program and giving circle. Members can establish a giving account and direct their donations to any of this year's five selected grantees. ArtsRising will host dinner parties across the U.S. in the coming year. See the Web for details.

Arts Ed: Did We Shy Away from the Heavy Lifting?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:47:22 -0500

"We took the road of least resistance and ... shied away from the heavy lifting: the work of public policy," says Janet Brown, director of Grantmakers in the Arts, in the GIA blog (11/3/09). In "What's Up with Arts Education?" Brown asks "why forty years of funding has not produced the desired results." We should, she says, have done "the work of harnessing the will of the people to advocate for schools and children. ... Instead, we’ve asked them to support artists in the classroom and to allow children to visit the museum, symphony or ballet once or twice a semester [and] asked our arts organizations to go beyond their missions to become educators." Arouse the sleeping giant of parents, artists and organizations," says Brown. "Something needs to change before another 40 years goes by. We just need to join hands and get it done."

Obama Names Celebrities to PCAH

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:54:07 -0500

President Obama has named 25 new members to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which combines representatives of federal cultural agencies with presidential appointees from the private sector. The list includes celebrities like Edward Norton, Anna Wintour, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Sarah Jessica Parker and Yo Yo Ma. Cultural critic Arlene Goldbard is not impressed. As she says in her latest blog post (11/5/09), "there is not a single appointment reflecting the knowledge and perspective" of the community artists and teaching artists who support the Obama arts platform and are actually practicing cultural democracy. "Nor is there anyone who is known for a body of work on the important issues of culture, community, democracy and equity that ought to inform the deliberations of any such body. Nor is there anyone whose work focuses entirely on art in the service of social justice."

Activism & Social Justice in the Traditional Arts, S.F.

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:29:25 -0500

"Standing Up/Acting Out: Activism & Social Justice in the Traditional Arts" is a panel discussion during the upcoming "Performing Diaspora" symposium at CounterPulse in San Francisco. The panel addresses the question: Can tradition-based forms of cultural expression be used to convey messages of political protest and express social justice-oriented concerns related to class, gender, race? Other topics in the symposium, November 7, 2009, include criticism and aesthetics, representation and appropriation. It's co-presented by CounterPULSE and the Alliance for California Traditional Arts in association with the African and African American Performing Arts Coalition, Dance Mission Theater, and the Dance Studies Working Group at UC Berkeley. "Performing Diaspora" is a two-year initiative including a festival (November 5-22), residency program and commissioning program "at the intersection of traditional arts, contemporary performance and California's changing demographics."

Iowa State Writing Students Reach Out

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:44:38 -0500

Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander’s poetry classes at Iowa State University are collaborating on "More Than Words," an "accessible" poetry and art event, December 1, 2009. Swander's classes and the Iowa Department for the Blind partnered to create “tactile poetry," says Riki Saltzman, Iowa ARTS Council accessibility coordinator, in Iowa Arts News (11/09). It's a new, nonvisual way “to enjoy poetry that is more accessible to the blind. They are recording poems that they’ve infused with music and sound, and some are creating tactile pieces of art to go with the poetry.” They'll present it at the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, December 1, and exhibit it at ISU in spring. Last year, Swander's students authored "Farmscape: Documenting the Changing Rural Environment," a play based on interviews with Iowa farmers. It spawned Agarts, a campus group that formally explores agriculture and the arts.

Kingsolver on Political Art & Dissidents in U.S.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:34:11 -0500

Novelist Barbara Kingsolver wonders why "politics have such a peculiar relationship to the arts in the United States," in New Hampshire's Portsmouth Herald (10/20/09). Talking with interviewer Deborah Mcdermott about her new novel, "The Lacuna," Kingsolver says, "Art and politics are considered fairly inseparable in other parts of the world, but why not here? I had a feeling it happened during the McCarthy era, but why would it last 50 years? Why didn't we get over it? What happened in the middle of the 20th century that left us so suspicious of political art? . ... After Sept. 11, 2001, the whole country was primed to react fiercely against artists who betrayed any sense of dissident politics. And I came to understand it's bred into us as Americans. We're not just suspicious of political art but of dissidents." (Thanks, Sarah Ingersoll.)

New on CAN: Briding the Gap with Today's Students

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:32:47 -0500

Today CAN brings you an essay by artist Stephanie Johnson on the personal and pedagogical challenges of working with today’s student population. Johnson teaches the Community Research Service Learning course in the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University Monterey Bay. She addresses training this generation "for community arts placements with skills of analysis, compassionate observation, active cultural alliance, self-reflection and, most important, an understanding of issues related to ethnicity, gender, race, class, language and disability." Here she explores bridging the age, race and lived-experience gaps between herself and her students. An African-American baby boomer the age of their mothers, she's teaching primarily Latina/o and white students, most of whom are immersed in fast, long-distance, disembodied contact with numerous friends, groups and strangers through electronic communications, and for whom 'otherness' is perceived as nonexistent. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 3.

New on CAN: Defining Community Art Methodology

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:20:23 -0500

Today CAN brings you "The Art of Discussion: Defining Community Art Methodology" by Rebecca Yenawine, offering six strategies for success in making community art that addresses social issues. Yenawine, an artist who founded Kids on the Hill (KOH) in Baltimore and directed it for 12 years and is currently the director of New Lens, writes, "The quality of discussion that happens prior to art making can make the difference between getting students engaged or not, between a superficial message and a probing one, between a project that has meaning to the greater community and one that remains personal." In 2008, Yenawine and Mark Carter wrote an essay for CAN explicating Art Action for Social Change, a pedagogy they developed by KOH staff for the creation of community art with a focus on social justice. Here Yenawine drills down on the discussion phase of their process, based in dialogue theory and Visual Thinking Strategies. She breaks it down into six steps, illustrated with examples from past KOH work. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 3.

NEA, NEH Each Get $12.5M Boost from Congress

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:20:14 -0500

On October 29, 2009, both houses of Congress voted increases of $12.5 million in the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. "President Obama is scheduled to sign this bill into law by October 31," says Arts Action News, "which concludes National Arts and Humanities Month. The nation's two federal grantmaking cultural agencies will now each have budgets of $167.5 million, their highest funding levels in 16 years. As so many state and local governments have had to cut arts budgets across the country, this well-timed federal appropriations increase for the arts is a welcome infusion of funds." NEA Chair Rocco Landesman issued a statement saying he is "particularly grateful to Representatives Norm Dicks and Mike Simpson and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Lamar Alexander for their leadership."

New on CAN: Community Arts and Green Jobs

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:21:40 -0500

Today CAN brings you a new, thoughtful essay by artist Michael B Schwartz, "Neighborhood-based Cultural Programs and the Emerging Eco-industrial Era." "The practices, tools and techniques employed in community-based cultural development," writes Schwartz, "are symbiotic with the green-job training process and struggles for self-determination. ... Community artists exist at the center of this change, equipped with the skills and sensibilities essential to focusing group creative energy and building grassroots social, cultural and economic networks." Schwartz illustrates this link with examples from the work of his community-based mural collective, Tucson Arts Brigade, and his own collaborative work in Delaware and Philadelphia. He also presents themes for a curriculum for green community arts training programs. This essay is part of Community Arts Perspectives, a publication of the Community Arts Convening and Research Project, Vol. II, Issue 2.

More News of Interest from Animating Democracy

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:04:02 -0500

Animating Democracy has been busy issuing concept papers from its Arts & Civic Engagement Impact Initiative. The initiative is a serious effort toward quantitative measurement of the arts' impact on social change. Its working group is convening and writing about research in the field and how to make it useful in the real world. This year, AD published online three Impact Initiative reports, including a solid framework for the discussion by Chris Dwyer of RMC Research. The Urban Institute's Maria Rosario Jackson wrote "Shifting Expectations: An Urban Planner’s Reflections on Evaluating Community-Based Arts," and Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert of the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania wrote "Civic Engagement and the Arts: Issues of Conceptualization and Measurement" from the point of view of the social sciences, humanities, and public policy.