IAM Global Blog
Call for Entries: Short Film
Details about the film festival, the registration form, and the entry rules can be found here: http://www.meetingrimini.org/default.asp?id=677&id_n=9063
Questions and/or requests for additional information can be directed to Simonetta d'Italia, the United States liaison for the International Short Film Festival.
E-mail to: simonetta.ditalia@gmail.com
Grant Opportunity from USA.gov Deadline Apr 2
Submit an informative, creative, and entertaining video of 30-90 seconds, showing how you use the information you find on USA.gov to improve your life. The creator of the winning video will receive $2,500.
Read the requirements, fill out and submit the online entry form, and upload your video to YouTube between February 22, 2010 and 1:00pm (EST) on April 2, 2010.
You are receiving this e-mail because you are subscribed to e-mail updates on USA.gov.
Grant Opportunity for Dance, Film, Video & Lit - Deadline Mar 8
2010 Travel and Study Grant Program
for DANCE, FILM AND VIDEO, AND LITERATURE
This program is supported by the General Mills Foundation,
the Art and Martha Kaemmer Fund of HRK Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.
General Information
The Travel and Study Grant Program awards grants to emerging artists who create new work (choreographers, film and video directors, poets, spoken word artists, fiction and creative nonfiction writers). Minnesota-based executive and program administrators working for nonprofit arts organizations in dance, film and video, and literature are eligible to apply. The program supports such activities as research leading to the creation of new work, the development of collaborations, participation in specific training programs, time for reflection and individualized study, investigating artistic work outside of Minnesota or New York City, and dialogue on aesthetic issues. This is not a program that supports the production of new work or acquiring teaching credentials.
Awards are made once per year. Three-person selection panels in each eligible discipline review proposals and recommend recipients to the Jerome Foundation Board, which approves all grants. Selection is based on the quality and potential of the applicant’s work and the significance and appropriateness of the proposed trip. Applications may be reviewed in a two-step process incorporating a first-round screening before panelists review the remaining applications. This program receives many applications and has limited funds available. Although financial need is not a requirement, please consider whether you need these funds to undertake a travel and study trip.
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Call for Participation: The Urbanity Project in Shanghai
Mission Statement
Shanghai Arts Community is committed to the truth that human beings possess a given value. Thus, we suggest that the city exists because humans exist and that the activity of the city is good insofar as it contributes to and commits to the worth and dignity of each human existence.
From this posture the Shanghai Arts Community presents The Urbanity Project as both a collaborative art publication and a movement of artists committed to creatively expressing the city in terms of its people.
Goal
Our goal is to publish a book of multidisciplinary artwork that not only communicates a common vision of “the city in terms of its people,” but one that also values collaboration and demonstrates artistic excellence. This publication will be accompanied by at least two events in Shanghai between May 2010 and July 2010 which will showcase some of the works catalogued in our publication; as well as gather, encourage, and empower artists to creatively communicate the vision of a city whose highest value is its people.
Artistic Vision
The vocabulary of the city is vast. When we come to the city, we come talking of commerce and culture, the arts and the nightlife. We come to see skylines, visit sites, discover cuisine and experience history. And the common link between every single word in the lexicon of the city is that it tries to describe what happens when humans come together.
The city is the place where humanity has collided. All that we see, hear and touch in the city are fragments of that collision, the beautiful alongside the terrible, the skyscrapers alongside the slums. All is in some way a manifestation of human interaction. And whether they leave scars or smooth edges, the signs of human presence are everywhere: on animals, on the landscape, and on us - on one another. The sound of the city is the friction of humanity.
Shanghai Arts Community presents The Urbanity Project as both a publication of art and a movement of artists committed to engaging in a vision of a city whose highest value is its people.
We believe that seeing the city for the people requires specific vision We need a vision that recognizes the city is not summed up in economics, nor in art, nor in history. It is a vision that sees the city summed up in its people.
In each step that follows, the vision broadens, curves and twists. Each person has a name and a story. Each person carries the beautiful burden of infinite meaning and value. We hold that this transforming vision, with the worth of humanity squarely at its center, is the vision of the renewed city.
More than any other construct of the city, art is uniquely suited to talk about the worth of people, because good art is not motivated by the pursuit of money or power, but by the pursuit of truth. This pursuit uniquely situates art to speak for the common good of human beings.
Finally, we believe that the subject of human worth is by nature a communal one - it takes people to talk about people. Thus, Shanghai Arts Community invites artists of all mediums to collaborate and explore together this vision of a city whose life lies in each individual and all the humanness that soaks through them.
Shanghai Arts Community
Shanghai Arts Community is a group of artists, musicians and writers committed to pursuing truth, working in collaboration, living in community, engaging in thoughtful conversation, and creating good art.
Timeline of Goals
FebruaryMarch April May1st
|-----------------------------|-----------------------------|-----------------------------|-----------------------------|
Launch and Fundraising Submissions Period----------------->Opening and Publication ----->
Publication Format
-Roughly 6”x6” gloss magazine of 60+ pages
-Sale for under $10 US dollars ~ 50元
Submission Guidelines
Deadline : March 31st, 2010. Submit to shanghaiartscommunity@gmail.com with subject line <Name, submission>. May include 50 word biography and 100 word artist statement, though neither will necessarily be published with an accepted piece.
Submit up to five pieces in any medium. All mediums will be considered. (Painting, photography, graffiti, sculpture, poetry, fiction, prose, music, dance, etc.) Video, sound, or live performance art will also be considered via file submission, and will be represented in the book by a still photography shot with a description and link to website file where entire work may be posted.
Email all questions to shanghaiartscommunity@gmail.com.
Wallace Bros. Release 2010 Valentine's Day Single, Romance Blossoms Around the World
For Immediate Release — “I knew I loved her,” stammers Artie Pyle, a shy but handsome grocery store clerk, as he clutches the hand of his beaming new girlfriend, Betsey Smith. “I just didn’t know what to say.”
“It was the Wallace Bros. who did it,” Betsey adds, rumpling his hair. “They brought us together.”
Pyle and Smith’s experience is not unique. Their budding romance is just one of literally thousands that have blossomed around the world in the wake of the release of the Wallace Bros. 2010 Valentine’s Day Single: “New Boyfriend.”
“I was crazy about her for years,” says Ben Hutton, gazing with adoration at Heather Stevens, a pretty coffee shop barista.
“But he never said anything!” Stevens exclaims. “He just kept telling me about all these tricks he could do with his skateboard. Until ‘New Boyfriend’ came out.”
The song’s unusual power may lie in the fact that although Mark, the band’s guitarist, bassist, and 'drummer', is responsible for most of the song’s underlying structure, his sister Carey wrote the bridge and lyrics. “She’s a female,” Mark explains. “So she knows what they want.”
“I just thought, what would be nice to hear?” says Carey. “And that’s what I wrote.”
“Basically it’s like kryptonite,” Mark adds. “For girls.”
International response has been overwhelming. Women across the globe seem unable to resist the song’s simple promises. In the twenty-four hours immediately following the single’s release, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace registered a 30% decrease in the number of profiles which list themselves as “single”, and at the time of this writing, that number continues in freefall.
As with any smash success, the song has its detractors. “Let’s be honest,” says Sharon Jones, the author of How To Marry A Millionaire (In Under A Year). “Men will tell a woman just about anything. I heard a guy last week tell one girl he’d been undercover with Mossad, and the next girl that he’d been building hospitals with Hamas. When he got stuck in between them at the bar, he started speaking French and pretended he’d never met either of them. ‘New Boyfriend’ is a nice song, but it just gives men another script."
Thousands of happy couples around the world beg to differ. “I feel a lot of things,” says William McLeod. “But putting them into words has never been easy.” The afternoon clerk at his local library, McLeod read every book that pretty Laurie Avery checked out after she returned them. With each volume, his love grew – but despite the reams of poetry that lined the shelves around him, he couldn’t find the words to express his devotion until the release of ‘New Boyfriend.’
“He copied them out for me and slipped them in the dust jacket of the new Cortazar translation,” says Avery, waiting at the foot of the library stairs for McLeod’s shift to end. “I don’t know if it was what he actually said that mattered so much. Just that he said something.”
Read more at The Wallace Bros. web site.
DOWNLOAD
A-side: New Boyfriend
B-side: We Shouldn't Be Friends
Ruminate Magazine Call for Entry
Currently, we are seeking images that engage questions raised by our contemporary world through the lens of faith--with all of the hope, questioning, and also sorrow that accompanies such faith. We are now looking for submissions for Summer Issue 16. The deadline is February 28. Artists interested may submit online at www.ruminatemagazine.org. And for more information, please email us.
When Creative Catalysts Unite...
This “fractured-ness” extends into the artist community. Like any city, there is stiff competition for gallery and studio space, residencies, grants, and other opportunities. But unlike many cities, this is an unhealthy competition. The President of the Kennedy Center (a nationally-recognized non-profit that assists struggling arts organizations) Michael Kaiser recently spoke in St. Louis. He explained that the number one problem keeping the arts community in St. Louis from flourishing is that there are many great organizations doing incredible things to support the arts, and few if any of them are even talking to each other. While many explicitly state that they have a holistic, city-wide vision for artistic renewal, they ignore their own rhetoric when it requires them to cooperatively work with other like-minded organizations. Once opportunities are created, they are jealously guarded and protected.
Now for an important disclaimer: I am not an artist, I am a seminary student. Formally, I am pursuing a Master’s degree in theology, but informally I love to study people, culture, faith, communities and the interactions between all of these. To steal a term from IAM Founder Makoto Fujimura, I am a “creative catalyst.” I am an “art enabler,” seeking to support the engagement of our “world that is” and the creation of a “world that ought to be” by any means possible.
I am passionate about the arts for many reasons, partly because I have many friends who are artists. They valiantly and creatively wrestle with values, ideas and potential both fulfilled and unfulfilled. If art is, as Fujimura posits, “society’s existential statement” and “answers the question of ‘why live’?” I cannot help but see how the work of my artist friends - those both inside and outside formal faith communities - empowers and challenges my own understanding of truth, reality and the world in which I live. I am served by their passion to create, and my passion as a “creative catalyst” is to serve them.
So how does one serve the artists in St. Louis in such a way that addresses the unique needs that come with living and working in this city, with an eye on creating an environment in which all of humanity will flourish?
This is the question that Art Underground has been asking everyone we can get to listen to us. One way we have sought to bring healing to this “fractured-ness” is by partnering with other like-minded creative catalysts. On January 27th this year, 14 church-based leaders of various initiatives to serve the local artist community convened to discuss what that partnership could look like. Unified by a common foundation as creative catalysts, we discovered that virtually everyone who came that morning felt the same need to collaborate. We saw the same fractured city, the same fractured community, the same need for collaboration to spark healing.
Each organization represented had a unique niche, complete with corresponding strengths and weaknesses that could complement the other initiatives represented. Non-profit leaders are now conspiring to connect artists with the manager of a grant-funded residency program. A communications director is lending her expertise in the theatre community to help a gallery manager think creatively about how to bring performance into a space that has been, until now, a purely static display. An experienced entrepreneur offered advice on how to help artists see their work as a business and gain valuable professional development.
While we certainly did not solve all the problems of the world (much less of St. Louis), it is our hope that this sparked the beginning of a conversation that will bear fruit in healing our fractured city. All of us were excited about the potential to build a community that, rather than contributing to unhealthy competition, facilitates a spirit of grace and cooperation unified by the same desire to see all of St. Louis engulfed in a living, breathing vision of a “world that ought to be.”
# # #
Brad Edwards leads Art Underground (STL), an affiliate of International Arts Movement.
Arts Patronage: So Simple, Even a Child Can Do It
Hi everyone,
First, I want to thank those of you who became early supporters of my project, LOVETOWN PA, on Kickstarter. I am encouraged by what has been pledged so far and by the fact that people other than myself are excited about this project and want to see it happen. Thank you. We have a long way to go to reach our goal before the deadline, so if you know of anyone who might be interested in becoming a backer, please send them the link to the kickstarter page.
I want to remind everyone else that there is still plenty of time to back the project. And yes, my six-year-old nephew and my eleven-year-old niece have both made pledges. It just goes to show how easy and fun it is to become an arts patron. Put it on your resume. Bring it up in conversation at a dinner party. Say it to yourself as you drift off to sleep. "I'm an arts patron." Sounds nice, right? I know this has been a tough year for most of us, and I know there are needs in this world much more pressing than my little jaunt through Philadelphia. So I would never try to convince anyone what they should do with their money. I'm simply presenting you with an opportunity to be a part of something that I think is kind of exciting. So if you are able, and if you would like to, would you consider helping to make this project happen? Please follow this link to learn how.
Thank you
Gene Schmidt
"The artist is a bridge between despair and hope." Jon Foreman on Huffington Post
The artist is a bridge between despair and hope. The artist, more than anyone else is responsible for the re-creation, re-definition and re-thinking the world around us. Every poem, every song, every painting has tremendous possibility. Each of these creations could be a letter of resignation to The World That Is or a window into The World That Is Not. Each poem/painting/song could be a vehicle to a new reality, one in which the artist plays a part no matter how small. The artist paints a world into existence. The canvas, the paint, the brush--these known quantities of existence and reality are tools for stepping into the unknown. The notes of the song are a bridge from what is to what is not yet.Click here to read the rest of this excellent article.
Charis Exhibit in Hong Kong Extended to Feb. 20
Makoto FUJIMURA: Charis, extended to 20 February 2010
Gallery EXIT, G/F, 1 Shin Hing Street, Central, Hong Kong
Mon - Sat, 1100 - 1900
Charis, the first solo exhibition of Makoto Fujimura in Hong Kong, will be extended to 20 February 2010. A few new works will be on view from 25 January onwards.
IAM Global Blog
The IAM Global blog discusses news and updates for the entire International Arts Movement.