In 10 years, Funding Arts Broward has awarded $2 million  to Broward County art and culture nonprofits. This video celebrates the April 2013 residency of Trey McIntyre Project at Broward Performing Arts Center, winner of the 2012-13 FAB/Knight New Work Award, which supports innovative new works that creatively engage new audiences in Broward County, Florida.

McIntyre demonstrates the creation of a dance right in front of the audience. He describes the excitement of being in Fort Lauderdale and conducting residencies with high school and college students. FAB President Drazia Rubenstein and FAB Founder Francie Bishop Good share the good news as FAB celebrates its 10th birthday!

The comics of Charles Schulz.

Not a generation, but a number of generations, grew up under the influence of Charles Schulz and his drawings – those of the Peanuts characters of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, Lucy. These weren’t average characters in an average comic, they became household names, beloved by kids and adults alike for the 50 years the strip was published (there were famed TV shows as well), and continued to live on even after their creator’s death in 2000.

The Peanuts gang.

The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood (a Knight Arts grantee) has opened a summer show featuring 70 original cartoon strips from Schulz, highlighting the impact and commentary on pop life that the Peanuts comic had. It’s interesting to remember how sophisticated the strip was. Gentle and funny, but also heart-warming and heart-breaking at times – all those personalities were real reflections of real people (ok, dogs too), from the shy and awkward to the overbearing and just goofy. Throughout the five decades that Schulz brought them to life, they also revealed the pop culture world that they lived in – while they stayed the same age, the America around them changed dramatically. The so-called innocent world of the 1950s ran into the more radical times of the ’60s and ’70s, and then the era of Harry Potter.

For the very young ones who might not have been as exposed to the world of Peanuts, the center would like to change that with this exhibit. There is a play area in which you can create your own cartoons, and there will be a Florida Comic Strip Challenge in July, open to ages five and up. Those amateur strips will then be shown in August. Good summer fun in a kid-friendly but grown-up way.

“Charles M. Schulz: Pop Culture in Peanuts” runs through Sept. 1, with a Comic Strip Challenge on July 28, at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, 1650 Harrison St., Hollywood; artandculturecenter.org.

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, one of Miami’s National Historic Landmarks, is pleased to provide field study experiences in the arts, history and environment as one of the Cultural Passport partners for 4th grade students and teachers. This year Vizcaya welcomed 674 students and 69 chaperones.

Post-visit evaluations are shared with each visiting group. When asked how the field study supported student learning a first-time visiting teacher reported: “It tied into our Social Studies lesson on the Growth and History of Florida. Furthermore, surprisingly it related to our reading lesson on the book The Secret Garden. Students enjoyed making connections to the story.”

Students, many of them also first-time visitors to Vizcaya, enjoyed their learning excursion. Provided with writing prompts from Vizcaya, back at school students reflected upon how the field study would impact their learning. My visit to Vizcaya will help me… “in Science because I saw rocks that I’m studying.”

Students are also thinking about the next time they visit: “Next time when I go with my parents I can tell them what the tour guides said.” And, “What will Vizcaya look like the next time I visit?”

Vizcaya looks forward to continuing its partnership with Cultural Passport and hosting more students next year!

The Secret Garden at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Dr. Monica M. White, at the start of her impassioned lecture.

On Saturday, June 15th, Monica M. White, Ph.D gave a lecture at the Detroit Public Library Main Branch on the subject of “Black Farmers/Black Freedom.” Dr. White presented some of the research and outline for her forthcoming book on the history of black farmers in America, agriculture as a positive resistance movement within the black community, and general considerations around the connection between land, food and freedom as related to the community at large. In addition to her role as Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. White serves as Board President for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) and emphasized throughout her presentation her deep continued connection and fidelity to Detroit. The mood in the room was one of intense unity of purpose among a diverse crowd.

Many luminaries and notable figures in the Detroit urban agricultural movement were on hand to support Dr. White and hear about her findings, including DBCFSN members, D-Town farmers and folks from The Greening of Detroit.

The information presented by Dr. White was well-researched and comprehensive, for some an awakening, with an attitude of both outcry and celebration of the struggle around black land rights, the challenges faced by black farmers and landholders attempting to stay afloat in an already difficult profession, and some philosophical considerations regarding the perception of the northern migration for factory jobs, wherein a number of black farmers relinquished their holdings. Dr. White suggests that the move to the North was not the joyful “move-on-up” to better circumstances, as it is often characterized, but a squeeze play forcing black families to move where their labor was needed through extreme financial pressure and impediments to their success in agriculture.

Dr. White before a slide of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who helped to organize one of the most successful agricultural cooperatives.

Dr. White is also exploring the historical and migratory connection between Detroit and Lowndes County, Ga.

Dr. White emphasized the need for the contemporary movement to create a “lion language,” as opposed to the language of the “hunters,” meaning that the frame around the relationship between farming and the black community must shift from sharecropping/tenant farming/slavery to one of reconnection and resistance. After such an uplifting lecture, I can think of no better candidate to author this lion language and look forward to her forthcoming publication and related activities, more of which can be explored here. Dr. White is an inspiring figure and a powerful illustration in the beauty of a woman who has found her calling.

For more information on the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, visit the organization’s website.

Five 35- to 55-inch digital C-prints are mounted around the room, allowing for a considerable amount of negative space between the images. This airy openness mimics the sentiment of the prints themselves, which contain very little positive space or content to latch onto. While their composition makes the pieces somewhat cryptic, it also allows for a wash of possibilities in the same respect. Surely aware of or influenced by color field paintings by the likes of Mark Rothko, Pears provides swaths of bold, saturated hues which are only fettered by splashes of light, shadow and the objects she includes.

Gillian Pears, “_28.”

For her largest photo, a white, lightly wrinkled sheet of fabric dangles over a spread of three barely-perceptible lengths of what appears to be fishing line. In many other contexts this sheet might seem ghostly or ethereal, but here it is practically the only connection to the physical world. Behind the not-quite-wash-line fixture lies a luminous expanse of peachy orange. The fabric breaks the otherwise enveloping area of summery mango by casting a dim shadow, as if nudging a daydreamer back from the brink of fantasy.

Gillian Pears, “_35.”

The blue-green field in an adjacent piece is blasted from the right hand side by some unseen light source and the left is cast in a relative shadow, not by some object, but only by comparison to the opposite end of the frame. Slightly to the right of the midpoint, a series of strings weave through eye hooks, introducing line elements to the otherwise drowning pool of sea foam. Their thin shadows are much more subtle than in many of the other works, making their physicality all the more stark.

Artwork for sale to raise funds for CITYWIDE. Artists include: Rubens Ghenov, Douglas Witmer, Jaime Alvarez, Ezra Masch, Caroline Santa, Alexis Granwell, Anne Schaefer and Theresa Saulin Frock.

Gillian Pears provides a meditative landscape of formal elements that allows visitors to embark on a real trip “Elsewhere” while still providing footholds to obscure bits of everyday life. The door to Tiger is also adorned with work by eight artists. These pieces are for sale in order to raise proceeds for the Knight Arts challenge grant that will fund CITYWIDE, a month-long, multi-venue meeting of the minds that will serve to connect Philadelphia’s energetic and expansive artistic communities.

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is located at 319 North 11th St., 2H on the second floor, Philadelphia; tigerstrikesasteroid@gmail.com; philadelphia.tigerstrikesasteroid.com.

To the naked-eye it may appear that we’ve been a bit dormant for the past couple of months, but amidst our Rip Van Winkling has surfaced a plethora of changes. And as a company insistent on committing to the evolution of theater and community should have realized our own personal potential for evolution within.

HERE WE GO:

to quote Goldie Hawn in the cinematic masterpiece, The First Wives Club “It’s the 90’s, Bill. DOWNSIZE!” It is clearly not the 90s…but downsize we have. Former Managing Director, Ashley Olberding, will be stepping down from her post to pursue her own personal artistic evolution which we hope does not keep her too far away from us, as she is still a founding member, valued collaborator, and noted BFF.

And then there were three…Jackie and Elayne are holding steady in their artistic evolutions as well, still in residing in NYC, one could argue America’s Theater Headquarters…Jackie has been pursuing a Director’s turn and was honored and educated by the Stage Director and Choreographer’s Foundation when invited to their Symposium on directing Musicals. It was an all day event in which a roomful of 65 directors and choreographers of varying professional levels had the chance to listen in on exclusive interviews with the industries leading professional producers, directors, and choreographers.

Similarly, Elayne is riding that cutting edge of theatrical technology when she attended a workshop on the advancements of LED lighting equipment. She’s also hard at work teaching herself the art and intricacies of web animation to take our website and online profile to the next level and supply our current and future fans with the surprises and the “that’s so cool”s The Project is associated with and aspiring to bring to the miami community and beyond.

…and the cherry on this evolutionary cake is our Executive Artistic Director, David Hemphill, will be relocating back to Miami from Los Angeles once his potentially TWICE extended show at The Blank Theater closes at the end of June. Our fearless leader is coming home. After all, it’s heinously unfair to keep you all hanging on for months between our big shows…so in this regard we have started a collaboration with Miami Theater Center’s Stephen Kaiser on a Gallery experience that asks the age old question “what is art? and who says?” This project is especially exciting for a myriad of reasons, a few being…yay, a new piece! and the opportunity to collaborate with other Knight Arts backed and local Miami artists AND to smuggle ourselves into the epic visual art scene here in Miami. Get ready Wynwood…you’re about to be Project-ed!

The Ordway’s first FREE Summer Dance Event was on Thursday, June 13^th and, oh boy, what a beautiful evening in Rice Park!  The theme that night was Surf Rock and it coincided with the third night of the Ordway’s presentation of “Buddy:  The Buddy Holly Story”.  Everyone loved the band, The Fractals, who played three full sets, including a few Buddy Holly tunes.  It was a perfect evening to enjoy the weather and dance under the stars.  Here are a few photos that capture the fun:

A great night of Surf Rock in Rice Park. Photo by Leah H. Muntz

Salsa Night is next in the Summer Dance series, this Thursday, June 20^th!  Dance instruction by Manny and Carmen Rubio begins at 6PM and then the hot Latin band, Salsa del Soul, takes the stage at 7:15PM.   Salsa del Soul is a Summer Dance favorite, who perform the best Latin music styles including Son, Son Montuno, Plena, Cha-cha-cha, Bachata, Timba and, of course, Salsa!  We’ll see you in Rice Park on Thursday!

Photo courtesy of Salsa del Soul

For more information about Summer Dance, please click here.  And, be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to keep up on the latest going on at the Ordway!

The Light Factory 345 North College Street.

The Sixth Juried Annuale is now on view at the Light Factory in uptown Charlotte.  This year’s juror, Dr. Kathleen V. Jameson, president and CEO of the Mint Museum of Art, selected six finalists from 110 entries as winners of the Annuale. The winners include:

• Rachel E. Andrews from Denver, N.C., whose introspective series explores the relationship between our self conscious and our inner voice. Inspired by “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll, Andrews questions the validity of her own internal thoughts.
• Timothy McCoy from Cumming, Ga., whose gold-toned albumen prints follow the life course of a particle of water from its origin in mountain pools to its eventual flow into the sea. McCoy was intrigued by the concept of Tao and uses water as a metaphor for this concept.
• Laura Williams from Chapel Hill, N.C., for her series of photographs that explore natural objects through a variety of layers and lenses. The photos are meant to convey a clear physical feeling much like recalling a dream.
• Mitchell Kearney from Charlotte, N.C., whose series “From—A Dream” is displayed on a wall-mounted video that cycles through images connected to their companion poem from “Bedtime Story II” by Ce Scott.
• Susan Alta Martin from Cullowhee, N.C., for her photographs exploring the reality game show “Wipeout.” Alta Martin’s series questions and examines the reality TV show craze and its application to “real life” games.
• Jessica Naples from Columbus, Ohio, for her series “Here Without Me,” in which the snapshot artist’s identity is explored and questioned. “Here Without Me” utilizes the thumb of the person taking the picture, the artist, to reveal and conceal his or her identity.

The Light Factory was extremely pleased that almost all of the six artists chosen by Dr. Jameson, unbeknownst to her, came from North Carolina or nearby regions, thereby showcasing the amazing talent in the southern region of the United States.  Don’t miss this fascinating exhibition, open until September 15, 2013.

The Light Factory: 345 North College St., Charlotte; 704-333-9755; www.lightfactory.org. Gallery hours: Mon.-Sat., 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sun., 1-6 p.m.

Project L.E.A.P. Photo by Neil de la Flor

The goal of Project L.E.A.P. Is to “improve the lives and cultural outlook of our local GLBTQ teens and allies by providing them with opportunities and focus in the performing arts.” For six months, teens from across Miami-Dade County participated in weekly dance and creative communication sessions led by teaching artists Marie Whitman, Creative Communication, Marissa Nick, Dance, Pioneer Winter, Dance and myself.

Project L.E.A.P. Photo by Neil de la Flor

The weekly sessions were divided into two hour and a half sections with one section dedicated to creative communications and other dedicated to dance. Project L.E.A.P. Director Pioneer Winter also brought in visiting artists Klye Abraham, Patti Hernandez and Natasha Williams, among others, to lead special classes and focused discussions that covered topics from hip-hop to gender.

Project L.E.A.P. Photo by Neil de la Flor

“Theater is freedom,” said Cuban director Nelda Castillo at a recent panel discussion for Out in the Tropics Festival. For Castillo, theater served as a platform for expressing issues of gender and sexual identify. Though Project L.E.A.P. has come to an end—for now—the group of teens who participated in the program gained two essential things—friends and freedom of expression.

Project L.E.A.P. Photo by Neil de la Flor

“Theater is freedom,” said Cuban director Nelda Castillo at a recent panel discussion for Out in the Tropics. In many respects, Project L.E.A.P. and their excursion to Lincoln Road gave these teens that same freedom. It gave these a platform to speak, sing and move in ways that expressed who they really are rather than what society sometimes want them to be.

For more information about Project L.E.A.P., visit here.

Installation view of “String, Felt, Theory.” Photo courtesy of the MMAA

Walk in the door of Minnesota Museum of American Art’s new exhibition, “String | Felt | Theory,” and you’re assaulted by color. Just left of the entry way, Liz Miller’s “Sublime Retaliation Scheme” is suspended from the ceiling by thin wires — draped garlands of vivid felt work, like a Michael’s-made wedding arch waiting for a procession. White-white walls and floor are interrupted by jagged green blocks of color; the space is festooned with mad layers of candy-colored felt — bright lime, glittery cobalt and pink. Interlocking felt designs are hand-cut in symmetrical, repeating patterns, each one like an oversized version of the snowflakes my kids scissor from folded construction paper. The blue felt cut-out resembles a house; the pink looks vaguely vertebral, but fleshy, too – a lung butterfly. The green design is precise and wildly prolific, vegetal and invasive, the curves and leafy points intruding on its neighbors. The individual cut-outs are strung together, connected by nuts and bolts and then layered atop one another. It’s like a pergola overgrown with paper dolls. You’ll want to walk through, to see the colors play off each other and what the light is like in there, dappled through the holes.

Liz Miller, “Sublime Retaliation Scheme” installation view. Photograph taken during Northern Spark, at the exhibition opening. Courtesy of the MMAA

The artist statement for Miller’s installation indicates she’s intending to offer “a situation that alludes to both beauty and violence,” “splicing weapon-related imagery with images derived from elements of pattern, ornament, and decoration,” so that “benign forms … take on more sinister implications.” Honestly, I’m not getting that at all. To my eye, the material is primary here – its gaudy ordinariness, its homely decorative appeal. I find myself thinking less about the mix of forms and their meaning than I do the process by which they were made and assembled: the cutting, the binding and draping; the taping of the walls and subsequent painting. My eye looks for the maker’s hand in every uneven cut. The imagery is suggestive, but chaotic. I can’t fix a cogent narrative to what I’m seeing, no matter what the description says.

In the center of the room, competing for attention with a loud, shiny holler is a monumental stack of “Broken Obelisks” by Andrea Stanislav. The “theory” component of the show, metaphor and message is indeed primary in this work, and the associations intended immediately evident. It’s the Washington Monument, the icon of Western might – it invokes both the promise of a New World Order and the ugly realities of latter-day First World imperialism. The obelisk is toppling but generative, its multiple offshoots aroused and pointing at the viewer in every direction. Dr. Strangelove’s famous missile comes to mind and won’t leave.

Andrea Stanislav, “Broken Obelisks” installation view. Photo courtesy of the MMAA

The whole work is covered with a patchwork of reflective, adhesive-backed “shards”. The patterning of the surface has a prismatic effect, refracting the light into rippling rainbows of color on the installation’s surface rather than reflecting the viewer.  When I visit, the piece is beginning to shed, the mirrored edges of “shards” peeling away as they unstick from the surface; up close, the raw-edged plywood seams of the obelisks also belie the flash of the installation’s bedazzled exterior. This isn’t work for the ages.

Don’t get me wrong: Stanislav’s piece is arresting and stylish, sexy and aggressive. The imagery is clever, economical and coherently executed. But to my eye, it’s also obvious and emotionally vacant. I see “Broken Obelisks” and immediately picture it as an ironic accent piece in a some big-ticket hotel’s grand lobby. The content is challenging, loudly so, but I don’t sense a sort conviction, or fresh insight behind its message that might actually sting the powers that be. Stanislav’s title alludes a Barrett Newman sculpture of almost the same name; I find myself hungry for the palpable, but restrained populist rage and subversive sense of gravity in the late ’60s Core-ten steel original.

Randy Walker, installing “Aurora” for the exhibition. Photo courtesy of the MMAA

In fact, for me the most rewarding installation in “String | Felt | Theory” is also the most understated. Randy Walker’s “Aurora” consists of parachute cord, thousands of feet long and variously colored, which he’s stapled on adjacent walls – threading the cord back and forth, fixing it to the wall “intuitively” rather than by some predetermined grid. The resulting amorphous sculptural form spans the northeast corner of the gallery. “Aurora” is situated on various points of the wall so that its looped web is variable in width, extending up toward the ceiling from about torso-height. It’s like an elaborate re-imagining of a cat’s cradle made of string woven back and forth between your fingers. Underneath, the cords form a kind of half-formed enclosure. The nether space of the piece beckons you to stoop over, to come inside that negative space; but it’s like trying to fit into a child’s fort as a grown-up – the space can’t comfortably contain you. Look through the threaded cord, and the density changes with your vantage point. Stretched taut as they are, the strings tremble with the ambient movement in the room. The installation is always in motion. Look away from the string for a moment to the floor and walls around it: Walker’s drawing on the space in light and shadow as much as he is in colored lengths of cord. As the sun moves, so do the shadows cast on the walls converge and diverge in undulating lined patterns. It’s mesmerizing, dynamic.

Randy Walker, “Aurora”. Photo courtesy of the MMAA

I find myself returning again and again to Walker’s corner, leaving the more ornate works to explore his deceptively simple arrangement of string on the wall. The impulse to revisit the work is never disappointed; it offers some fresh surprise each time.

It’s a vexing, meaty show by accomplished artists. Go pay a visit, then come back here and argue with me, if you like, tell me what you see. You should also tell the museum: They’re crowd-sourcing the didactic panels for these works by inviting gallery-goers to leave their own comments on the pieces displayed. Weekly, over the course of the exhibition, staff will select one new viewer contribution per piece to put on the wall by way of didactic description.

“String | Felt | Theory” featuring work by Randy Walker, Liz Miller and Andrea Stanislav, will be on view in the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s Project Space (a Knight Arts grantee) through July 28. There’s an artist talk with Liz Miller and Randy Walker in the gallery on Thursday, June 27 at 7 p.m.

The Project Space is located at 332 N. Robert Street (on the corner of 4th and Robert Streets), St. Paul; 651-222-6080; mmaa.org.