The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage : Blog

Changing Expectations: An Interview with Andrea Clearfield

2013-06-19T12:20:07+00:00

This spring, on the occasion of the Center’s “New Spaces/New Formats” work group, Music Director Bill Adair sat down with Andrea Clearfield—a working musician, composer, curator, and member of the group—to discuss how making and listening to music is changing. On the topic of changing curatorial models, Clearfield, who has been holding monthly performances in her loft for the past 27 years, had this to say: This is a multisensory world now. People really respond to diverse programs. They may have come to experience something that they are familiar with and they are hearing and seeing things that are new and I think that that is part of our culture: We are craving the new. Listen here to an excerpt of Adair and Clearfield’s conversation: Stay tuned for more details about the “New Spaces/New Formats” pilot project at Christ Church/Neighborhood House in Philadelphia during the last week of September 2013. ...

Braindrop: Sarah Sze

2013-06-17T09:36:22+00:00

"What a viewer experiences before and after one work is so influential. I think about this all the time. If it’s a group show or a biennial, I’m always interested in who the artists are before and after me, and how people are going to walk through the exhibition space, because it’s always a fluctuating volume of space that you come into." —Visual artist Sarah Sze, from an interview with The Brooklyn Rail (2010). Sze is currently representing the United States at the Venice Biennale. The Fabric Workshop and Museum will open a major, building-wide installation by Sze in December 2013. CATCH MORE BRAINDROPS >

Center Rewind, 6/14/13

2013-06-14T18:55:40+00:00

San Francisco-based marketing strategist Marnie Burke de Guzman talks with us about rich opportunities for marketing and audience engagement in the arts > Donald Nally, conductor of The Crossing, discusses how the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico moved him to commission works by three very diverse composers > Catch Braindrops from composer Pauline Oliveros, writer Julio Cortázar, and scholar and critic bell hooks > No Idea Is Too Ridiculous project facilitators, consultant Kathy McLean and Performa curator Mark Beasley, discuss barriers to creativity in arts organizations > Data Garden co-founders Alex Tyson and Joe Patitucci speak with us about the relationships among music, plants and technology > Image of Data Garden event participants by Inna Spivakova, courtesy of Data Garden.

Talking with Data Garden: Co-composing with Plants

2013-06-10T13:47:31+00:00

Data Garden received a research grant in 2012 from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to explore relationships among music, plants and technology. Co-founders Alex Tyson and Joe Patitucci answered some of our questions about co-composing with plants. What is Data Garden? Joe Patitucci: Data Garden is an arts organization and record label making advances in digital music technology and distribution. We encourage the discovery of new electronic music by examining its history, as well as advances in science that made electronic music possible, and by creating spaces (physical and digital) where the electronic music community can engage in dialogue. What fuels your thinking about music and composition, particularly as it relates to your collaborations with plants? Alex Tyson: In 2003, I discovered an album of plant-generated music by media artist Mileece Petre, titled Formations. The artist on that record used custom interfaces to interpret signals that were amplified...

Braindrop: Julio Cortazar

2013-06-07T10:24:12+00:00

"Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny...It’s not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one’s mouth shut." —Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), from the story "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" CATCH MORE BRAINDROPS >

Braindrop: bell hooks

2013-06-06T11:32:23+00:00

"At the conference, I confessed that I have really violent impulses that sometimes listening to some panels I had wanted to come out and shoot people. The audience laughed, but I wasn’t being funny, and I wasn’t saying it to be cute or exhibitionist. I was acknowledging that the violent impulses don’t just exist out there in black youth or in the underclass, but that they reside in people like myself as well—people who have our PhDs and our good jobs. But that doesn’t mean that my life is not tormented by rageful or irrational, violent impulses. It does mean that instead of shooting people, I go home and write a critique." — Scholar and critic bell hooks, from a 1994 interview in Bomb magazine CATCH MORE BRAINDROPS >

Kathleen McLean and Mark Beasley on Creativity in Cultural Practice

2013-06-04T17:28:21+00:00

What gets in the way of creativity in cultural practice? The Center’s "No Idea Is Too Ridiculous" project is aimed at helping participants identify both real and imagined constraints to doing imaginative work in their organizations (or in their own practice). The workshop and small grant opportunity are designed to provide an environment in which participants’ risk-taking is encouraged and supported, allowing them to “practice” new ways of working. We asked this year’s project facilitators, Kathleen McLean and Mark Beasley, to reflect on where they see constraints to doing creative work. McLean comes to this project with years of experience working with museums, and Beasley has curated projects in both the visual and performing arts worlds. They’ve identified some common challenges that persistently confront cultural organizations, and have each provided us with five reasons people working in cultural organizations aren’t as creative as they could be, and five ways that...

Braindrop: Pauline Oliveros

2013-06-03T12:23:45+00:00

"The key to multi-level existence is deep listening. Deep listening includes language and its syntax, the nature of its sound, atmosphere and environmental context. This is essential to the process of unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning and memory down to the cellular level of human experience. Listening is the key to performance. Responses, whatever the discipline, that originate from deep listening are connected in resonance with being and inform the artist, art and audience in an effortless harmony." —Composer Pauline Oliveros, quoted in an interview in EST magazine. In 2013, Philadelphia's Leah Stein Dance Company received a planning grant to work with Oliveros. CATCH MORE BRAINDROPS >

The Crossing: Preconcert Program for “The Gulf (between you and me)”

2013-06-03T12:08:42+00:00

Donald Nally, conductor of Philadelphia professional chamber choir The Crossing, discusses how the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico moved him to commission works by three very diverse composers: “I began to think that it could be a very beautiful thing to commission works that essentially used human relationships as a metaphor for our relationship with the Earth. Human beings that are in relationships soon lose their ability to listen to each other […] I feel that is the relationship we have with the Earth: It keeps telling us all these very obvious things and we’re not listening to it.” This commissioned project, The Gulf (between you and me), includes choral compositions by experimental Philadelphia-based composer Gene Coleman that draw on Japanese influences, improvisation, and extended techniques; a new work by Santa Fe composer Chris Jonas with accompanying graphics created by Philadelphia visual artist Dan Cole,...

Talking Exhibitions with Marnie Burke de Guzman, Marketing Specialist

2013-05-20T13:55:35+00:00

“Exhibitions are some of the most dynamic ways of presenting art at this moment because they exist as open-ended platforms for engagement,” Marnie Burke de Guzman says. She distinguishes exhibitions from time-based performances that demand considerable, uninterrupted time for their consumption. In this video, the San Francisco-based marketing strategist points out how this “open-ended” experience—echoed by the non-linear way we generate and receive content in the digital realm—provides rich opportunities for marketing and audience engagement. Marnie Burke de Guzman has more than 20 years of experience in strategic branding, marketing, user centered design, program and content development, and community relations for cultural organizations. She was the director of marketing and audience strategy for SFMoma and director of external affairs at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. She is a founding member of the steering committee of the Art Museum Marketing Association and a member...