August 2009 Archives
Job Posting: Program Assistant, Arts & Culture Program
Click here for full description and application instructions.
Decade of Dignity and Development Conference - Lower Cost!
Decade of Dignity and Development Conference
September 25-27, 2009
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
World Youth Alliance will be holding a three-day conference at Yale University to celebrate WYA’s achievements in their decade of work and to launch their vision for WYA’s future. You are cordially invited to attend the event at Yale in New Haven, CT, which will include events designed to encourage the physical, intellectual and artistic interests of the participants.
The conference will include keynote addresses by internationally renowned bio-ethicist Margaret Sommerville, classical scholar and acclaimed writer Anthony Esolen and pioneering educator in the field of conflict resolution Dr. Robert Enright. The conference will also consist of panel discussions by distinguished speakers on issues such as the family, international health and human rights as well as a visual arts exhibition by young artists and a networking fair with other non-profit organizations. Registration is $50 - a huge discount from the original price of $150.
For online registration and complete information about the conference, check out our DDD Website. Space is filling up fast, so register today.
Ontario Barn Festival
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CONTACT:
Christopher Staub
Ontario Barn Festival
716 982 2164
Christopher.staub@yahoo.com
www.OntarioBarnFestival.com
Vibrant Labor Day Weekend Festival Celebrates Live Bluegrass and Roots Music, Promotes Solar Energy
Ontario, New York, September 5, 2009 – An 11 acre Christmas tree and fruit farm with bucolic views of 19th century red barns is the backdrop for this all-day live music event located about twelve miles east of Rochester. The Ontario Barn Festival combines live bluegrass and roots music with outdoor BBQ, arts & crafts, apple picking and other activities. The festival is nonprofit, promoting solar energy.
“The Ontario Barn Festival is the only music festival in the state that promotes the use of solar energy," said Chris Schaefer of Solar and Wind FX of Canandaigua, New York. The festival aims to facilitate networking between solar vendors, builders and most importantly would-be consumers interested in incorporating solar energy into their homes.
The scheduled bands include the Atkinson Family Band, well known in New York state and national bluegrass circles, along with York Pennsylvania’s Waitin’ on a Train and others. The show contains an ample dose of bluegrass for the most serious of fans. Yet the Ontario Barn Festival avoids being pegged as purely bluegrass by bringing forth dashes of eclecticism with youthful electric ensembles and the funk / klezmer / pop of Rochester’s Hypnotic Clambake.
The Ontario Barn Festival will take place on Saturday September 5th from 11 am to 7 pm at 513 Whitney Road in Ontario, New York. For more information, including directions, admission, sponsorship and band details, see the festival’s website:
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You Reading About Me Looking at a Painting
The following is a guest blog by our summer intern, Thomas Alberti. Tom is a student at Grove City College, where he is majoring in philosophy (BA, 2010).
Time, it seems, is fleeting. My summer in the city is coming to an end, and for the last three weeks, I’ve decided to do a multi-part viewing of Rembrandt’s self-portrait. I plan to dig into the topics that I’ve previously only scratched. I’m thinking of reading up on Rembrandt and his historical context, and I hope to consult a critical review of the painting; but for the first viewing, I just went in as before.
I have wanted to make a return to the Met since I first came. During my initial visit, I dashed through the Rembrandt section, making a mental note to come again, and so all this past week I’ve been looking forward to spending some quality time with the Dutch master. When I entered his section of the European Paintings gallery, I took a moment to browse some of his other works, as kind of a warm up, before settling down with the centerpiece of the room—Self-portrait.As I sat down on the bench taking out my pen and notebook, I looked at the painting and considered the time we would be spending together, as if I were sitting down with an interviewee or an old wise-man. It’s common for us to personify objects, especially those that resemble people, which of course include portraits, but with self-portraits the connection of the object to a person might very well transcend mere resemblance. The self-portrait seems to bear some intrinsic relationship with its author; it is an artifact seemingly imbued with the very essence of its maker. So the notion came to me that over the next few weeks, I’d be getting to know this painting pretty well—or rather, that I’d be getting to know Rembrandt pretty well.
I see brown. They arere some reds too, but mostly browns. The background accounts for most of the brown. It’s a murky, cloudy, amorphous mass of brown. The lighter browns extend to the periphery and fade into darker colors as they near the center. The figure’s coat is also brown, with some red and yellowy highlights. But his hat—it is not brown. The hat is black. The absolute darkest part of the painting, the hat hardly even has any texture; it’s an obsidian silhouette. The hat contrasts the rest of the painting with its definite and concrete form. It’s shape, unlike the background, is defined by straight, level lines which give the painting some geometric structure. The hat slants downward at about 45 degrees from left to right, creating a line parallel to the one made by the figure’s left shoulder and collar. Between these two lines rests the main subject of the painting: Rembrandt’s own face.
Unlike either the background or the hat, or even the coat, the face is articulate. Not only is it the brightest part of the painting, but it’s the object rendered with the most detail. The right side is in shadow, the left in light. There are splashes of red on the cheek and nose, shadows near the mouth; the lips are thin, drawn, and deflated and are a more subdued, dulled red. Thin but distinct furrows run the length of his forehead, and at the bottom-center the eyebrows draw together to form a ‘v’-shaped notch. His forehead also, like his nose, reflects the light coming from the right; these two places are the only ones painted with white. His eyes, in contrast, are shadowy, black-brown orbs, the right being the closer, and therefore the larger and more penetrating of the two.The way Rembrandt captures the light makes the face pop, so that it lifts from the two dimensional canvas as if it were a relief sculpture. And it’s not that it’s exceedingly realistic—it’s clearly a painting and not a photograph. In fact, I think it’s because it’s a painting that the face almost seems there. It looks like flesh, like I could touch it and mold it and feel it. The face is content and mature; it is soft, yet set. While the face holds no overt emotions, there is an understated inquisition within. It’s almost as if the face knows that it’s being studied, and in response it studies its own observer, as if to ask the question, “Who is studying whom?”
After looking at Self-portrait, I began to consider the complexities of the genre. It some ways, the self-portrait is an ancestor of the meta-narrative. The self-portrait is simultaneously a thing of the author and a thing about the author. It both proceeds from and goes beyond the author, such that the portrait can look back at its maker, who in turn looks back at it, and thus the self-portrait folds in on itself in a way that speaks not only of postmodernism’s love for meta-narrative, but also of the fact that we have ourselves a maker who saw fit to make us in His own image. And so here we are, beings made in His own image, now making things in our own image, but to what end?
IAM Artists at the NYC Fringe Festival
As far as I know, there are three artists from the IAM community in this year's NY Fringe Festival (if you know of others, please email me!)
Please support the following plays and be sure to place your votes for awards at the festival!
- Brian Watkins (actor, Curator Magazine contributor): High Plains: A Western Myth
- Threads Theater Company: Afterlight
- Christine Brown: Harold Pinter Pair
Reflections of Generosity: Toward Restoration and Peace
International Arts Movement is pleased to announce our participation with "Reflections of Generosity: Toward Restoration and Peace." The art exhibition on the Ft. Drum Army Base in Ft. Drum, NY, will open with a reception on August 19, featuring IAM's Makoto Fujimura, Christy Tennant, Ron Kelsey, Joyce Lee, Jay Walker, Pamela Moore and Gerda Liebmann, along with many other participating artists.
Dedicated to the memory of the heroes of 9-11 and soldiers who have given their lives in recent conflicts, this exhibition celebrates the power of painting, sculpture, and song to facilitate restoration through generosity, community and beauty. The artwork and performances reflect the spirit of ongoing generosity demonstrated by the military.
Price Sheets (PDF's):
- Charles Westfall
- John Russell (36" X 48")
- Joyce Lee (1) (36"x36")
- Joyce Lee (2) (36"x36")
- Joyce Lee (3) (36"x36")
- Sandra Jean Ceas (12' from ceiling to floor (it takes around 6 hours for vessels to empty sand)
- Craig Hawkins (10' X 3')
- Tim Sheesley (30"x22")
- Sharon Graham Sargent
- Clay Enoch
- C. Robin Janning
- Anne Nelson
- Macon
- Pamela Moore
- Makoto Fujimura
- Jay Walker
- Ron Kelsey
- Ron Kelsey 2
- Gerda Liebmann
Call for Work: Arts on Earth, U of Michigan
Work sought: Scholarly and creative work in any form that can be circulated electronically and illuminates some aspect of the relationship between arts and bodies. Work sought includes but is not limited to performing arts, visual and design arts, language arts, network and broadcast media arts, and scholarly work.
End product: To be published electronically in May 2010, this is the first in an ongoing series by Arts on Earth at the University of Michigan (www.artsonearth.org). Each publication will present 20 pieces of interdisciplinary creative and scholarly work on Arts on Earth’s chosen theme, published by University of Michigan Press and distributed internationally.
Deadline: Submissions are due October 15, 2009, to a&bsubmissions@umich.edu.
Review process: Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean of the Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, is Editor-in-Chief. Submissions will be blindly reviewed by at least two experts in appropriate fields at U-M and peer institutions internationally.
ABOUT ARTS ON EARTH
Launched in 2006 at the University of Michigan, Arts on Earth’s aim is to integrate artistic modes of thinking and working into the life of the research university. To that end, Arts on Earth is piloting a new interdisciplinary, undergraduate course called “Creative Process”; fostering creative collaborations among faculty and students from diverse units on varying annual themes; launching interdisciplinary research on undergraduate creativity; developing an undergraduate living-learning community focused on interdisciplinary creative work in engineering, the arts, and other disciplines; and initiating other programs. For full information, www.artsonearth.org.
Arts on Earth is directed by:
Christopher Kendall, Dean of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance
David Munson, Dean of the College of Engineering
Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean of the Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning
Bryan Rogers, Dean of the School of Art & Design
ABOUT ARTS & BODIES
People often speak of their experience of the arts as “transcendent” – transcendently beautiful, transcending normal human limits of performance and perception, speaking directly to the transcendent “soul.”
CALL FOR WORK
Yet art is inescapably made by corporeal beings, whose very corporeality determines the media, methods, instruments, forms, colors, tones, and materials through which we create. Furthermore, the very experience of transcendence is a corporeal one, determined by the state of the sensory and cognitive apparatus of the co-creating perceiver of art. Finally, the production of art can take a heavy toll on artists’ bodies, through the absorption of lead, the stresses of poverty and creative work, and the punishment of muscles, joints, vocal cords, eyes, and other body parts.
The purpose of Arts & Bodies is to explore the dynamic, tortured, joyful, complex relationship between our arts and our bodies across epochs and cultures. Arts & Bodies has four parts:
- An intensive, interdisciplinary, experiential ArtsLab in U-M’s Video Studio (www.umich.edu/dmc/ video/index.html) (November 5 and 6, 2009).
- A body-music, body-percussion residency by Keith Terry and colleagues (November 1 – 8, 2009; www.crosspulse.com).
- A festival of work in all media on the Ann Arbor campus (October and November, 2009).
- The electronic publication, “Arts & Bodies.”
MECHANICS
Type of work sought: Scholarly and creative work that illuminates some aspect of the relationship between arts and bodies is sought. Scholarly papers and other writing should be complete within 3,000 words and submitted as .pdf files. Time-based work should transpire within 8 minutes and be submitted in Quicktime, MPEG, Real Media, or flash Movie formats. Still images should number 20 frames or fewer, submitted as .pdf files. Sound works may be up to 8 minutes in length, and submitted as an MP3 file. For information about forms or formats not listed, contact us at a&bquestions@umich.edu.
Evaluation criteria: Work will be blindly peer reviewed, and assessed for creativity; originality and depth of vision; and rigor of thought and expression.
Copyright will be held by the authors/artists.
Deadlines: All submissions are due at midnight on October 15, 2009 to a&bsubmissions@umich.edu. Submissions must be accompanied by the cover sheet at www.artsonearth.org/artsbodies/submissionform.pdf and otherwise clear of obvious identifying information. Decisions will be issued on January 15, 2010, with final revisions due on March 15, 2010.
For more information: www.artsonearth.org/artsbodies.
Jake Armerding Dates in the Northeast
Saturday, August 8
Folk for Feathers Festival (Benefit for the Mass Audobon Society), Barnstable, MA. Co-bill with Greg Greenway. Details can be found here.
Sunday, August 9
Pilgrim Pines, 220 West Shore Rd., Swanzey, NH. Details at PilgrimPines.org.
Thursday, August 13
Castle Hill, the end of Argilla Rd., Ipswich, MA. The ultimate in summer evening picnic concerts. If you've never been, trust me -- come. Details here.
Friday, August 14
Club Passim, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. Featuring the fabulous Mark Erelli, (IAM's own) Kevin Gosa and Richard Gates. This will be the last Passim show of the year for the Jake Armerding Band, so help us pack it out, yeah? Details at www.clubpassim.com.
Coming up:
Saturday 9.5 / Storyhill Fest Midwest, Deerwood, MN
Sunday 9.6 / Four Corners Folk Festival, Pagosa Springs, CO (with Eddie From Ohio)
Wednesday 9.9 / Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, MN
Saturday 9.12 / House Show, Newton, MA (limited seating -- email Joyce at joycefriedman [at] rcn.com)
Sunday 9.13 / Boston Folk Festival, Boston, MA
Tuesday 9.22 / The Fine Line, Minneapolis, MN (album release show)
JAKE'S WEB SITE
JOIN JAKE'S FACEBOOK PAGE!
Hurray For “Hillywood"
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A testimony to ingenuity and creativity, The Hillywood Show (www.thehillywoodshow.com), created by two sisters, is simply brilliant from the word “go,” and is by far the most worthwhile entertainment that I’ve seen in a long time.
The incredibly talented sisters not only play almost every role themselves (for example, Hilly Hindi takes on Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands, Bella Swann, The Joker, Sweeney Todd, Doc (from “Back To The Future”), and Beetlejuice, while Hannah plays Will Turner, Ms. Lovett, Alice Cullen, Harley Quinn, Dolorus Fuller, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, just to name a few, all to great aplomb), but also do everything else on the production themselves (Hannah directs and does make-up, Hilly edits, both produce.) What makes this so extraordinary is that these two girls single-handedly create work that rivals that done in the original films.
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Ashley is a proud member of Actors Equity Association (AEA) and has worked extensively as a performer in New York, L.A, Chicago, and the U.K, and recently made her Broadway debut as Elphaba in the Wicked “For Good” special event concert at the Gershwin Theater. As a writer, her plays have been produced off-Broadway, as well as in L.A and Chicago.
LL Barkat's Art Pilgrimage
Follow L.L. Barkat's pilgrimage musings here.
I am walking now.
But when did I begin? Was it as a child with those first crayons, which I lost to the burning barrel one by one, watching them melt before my eyes because I'd left them out and this was my punishment? Was it in the fields picking wildflowers, hot pink and cornflower blue, to press between pages of a book? Or was it in middle-school art class, as I sat trying to capture things realistically with my pencil, while my friends went out the side door and got high with the teacher?
Where did this journey start? Was it when I morphed from editorial assistant to graphic designer, in a technical writing department, because I was the one who could sorta draw and was not afraid of the new computer tools? Did I start this path when I went to Paris and saw 'real art' and came home to dump my design career and become a teacher instead?I do not know where I began. Like the spiritual pilgrim who cannot say where she first stepped onto the road, or felt it beneath her feet, or started noticing she was not alone. I do not know.
But there are things I have done and will do to say, "I'm on a journey." Just the other day, I donated to International Arts Movement. It was easy with Paypal. Then I set off for AC Moore and filled my cart: gouache, watercolor, soft pastels, sketch books, acrylics, canvases, brushes. On my Sabbath, I sat quietly and tried out the pastels. I may not want to be an artist, but I'm thinking I should be a participant rather than just an observer. I will commit to at least a year of focused "pilgriming," making art and viewing it and reading about it and discussing it.
I feel shy participating. My skills are simple. It's like being a child in a grownup's world. Is it a coincidence that my first attempt was an empty, dead bush being graced by powder-blue dragonflies? I chose golden colors for the water over which it would lean, made mistakes that caused me to blend things I hadn't intended to blend. The bush became one with the background.
My girls said the picture looks like a desert, with the sand swirling, rising. Why yes. And perhaps that is no coincidence either. A tentative bush in the desert, graced by dragonflies, breathing blue-flamed beauty... which burns but does not consume.
Image: Dragonfly Bush in pastels, by L.L. Barkat.
"Women in War Zones" Film & Filmmakers at IAM
The screening of the film will be followed by a question and answer session with the filmmakers.
Staff of World Youth Alliance and International Arts Movement will also be on hand to answer questions about their work, how it relates to this film, and how you may become more involved.
August 27, 2009
7:00pm
International Arts Movement's
Space 38|39
38 West 39th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10018
Tickets are $4 and proceeds will go to the filmmakers. You must purchase tickets to secure your seat at the International Arts Movement site here.
For more information please contact Christy Tennant at christy@iamny.org or Casey Downing at casey@wya.net.
Pamela Moore Painting Featured at Adelaide Gallery
Pamela Moore (View Bio)
Diving Within
Mixed Media, 34 x 38 inches
Sun-Mon-Tues: By Chance or Appointment
Wed-Thurs: 11-5, Fri-Sat: 11-5 & 6:30-9:30pm
Please call ahead if you are traveling to the gallery.
ADELAIDE FINE ART
84 Main Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
(203) 966-3300
adelaidefineart@gmail.com
The Blog
The IAM Global blog discusses news and updates for the entire International Arts Movement.