describing your work

...can be none but devil or it can be something like this, an excerpt I found on a sculpture exhibition in Baltimore:

So, this isn’t just about color. It’s about feeling as well as seeing red, it’s about the liquid of life and the liquid of death, it’s about leftist politics and it’s about courage and it’s about Christmas – in a Santa Claus sort of way. It’s also about one third of the American flag and nearly all of the Chinese flag, and finally, it’s about empire and it’s about hell. The parameters are wide open. Interpret it as you will, as I know you will, in your own unique way.

A class act. -K

Holiday Gifts

Some crafty folks making their own gifts this year...

Queens Council on the Arts

Although not the most accessible of organizations, they're doing some great work. Check out their member gallery here. This photographer will knock your socks off.

Featured Artist of the Week: Terrance

Terrance Hughes is a funny and charming bastard with a modest and humble spirit. Originally from St. Louis, Mo, this self-taught artist has moved from state to state, befriending other artists and honing his skill in painting and drawing to become the artist that you are bearing witness to today. Check him out in the featured artist section at camp, or, learn more about him here.

Featured Artist of the Week: Diego!

This kid is basically a trip. His patience, wit, intensity and general sense of "cool" burn through his drawings. Go Diego Go! Click on the below, enter "camp" and check him out at "featured artist."

A Cotton Anniversary

Keep an eye out for Ms. Joyce Hansen; one of the most imaginative souls I have had the pleasure of intermingling with. Her bright colors pop on cotton canvases and invite the viewer into a wee world of dreams, koi ponds and goldilocks. She can be found in the camp portal under galleries>mixed media. Enjoy!

Featured Artist of the Week: Leon

Leon Miller-Out has a unique skill for capturing moments that make the viewer feel they were always a part of. Organic photography, if you will! Check him out here at camp>featured artist to see for yourself. If we're lucky enough, he will become a regular contributor to the project.

Featured Artist of the Week: Sly

This week’s featured artist is Mr. Sly. An engineer found most usually atop the highest buildings of the NYC, this crazy cat snaps pics throughout the day of birdseye views and his animal friends. Kudos to Sly! Find him in the CAMP portal under “featured artist.”

Featured Artist of the Week: Jazu

This week’s featured artist is Mr. Jazu Stine.

A New York native and regular nomad, his pursuit of creativity has led him from Mass to Australia to Mexico and back again, all the while swimming in clay, firing pots and slopping up oils. Most recently, Jazu has delved into the wild, wild world of digital photography where he explores an eerie sense of presence in (beautiful!) twilight abandonment. Sound heavy? Yeah, it is.

featured artists

Each week CommunityAMP will feature the work of an artist submitting to reunion iv. Visit the website at communityamp.org, enter the camp section and click on “featured artist” to catch a glimpse of the latest contributors.

the flood

I have about 75,000 ideas for projects lately, but I can’t seem to begin! I am going to spend a solid portion of this coming weekend tweaking the site and publishing a recent assignment entitled “a day in the life” that a few of my peeps put together. For anyone interested (be interested!) the idea is to wake up, grab your camera, click away consistently throughout the day and pick 10 shots that would help a stranger or old friend get an idea of who-you-be. This could be 10 facial expressions, 10 pieces of food, 10 locations you regularly hit in any given day- the possibilities are endless!

day 4: what cool breezes do

day 3: le feu

day 2: waves

day 1: trees

National Novel Writing Month

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.
Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: Sign-ups begin October 1, 2007. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
Still confused? Just visit the How NaNoWriMo Works page!

the lingo

I recently came across an article by Bill Cleveland, director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community, based in Minneapolis, Minn, which outlined many of the basic concepts I am trying to build upon (or from, as it were) for the Community Arts Movement Project. Really interesting, inspiring and relevant stuff here:

When my colleagues and I established the Center for the Study of Art and Community these experiences informed both the philosophy and focus of our work. Our intention was to help the field learn from itself. As our work has evolved, we have developed a dictionary of sorts to help communicate with colleagues in and out of the arts. Building a common vocabulary has also been a critical aspect of our training efforts. The increasingly cross-sector nature of ABCD has demanded an increased clarity of focus and intent. In the mix, principals and definitions from other fields have been adopted and a lot of common ground has been discovered. Especially with the areas of asset-based and sustainable community development. Here are some of the basic definitions and core concepts that have found a place in our dictionary.

• The arts: Pertaining to the performing, visual, literary or media arts.
• Artist: A person who by virtue of imagination and talent or skill is able create works of aesthetic and/or cultural value in one or more arts discipline.
• Community: Our definition of community is derived from the one used by Alternate ROOTS:groups of people with common interests defined by place, tradition, intention or spirit.
• Community-based: Activities created and produced by and with community members that combine significant elements of community access, ownership, authorship, participation and accountability.
• Arts-based community development (ABCD): Arts-centered activity that contributes to the sustained advancement of human dignity, health and/or productivity within a community. These include:
  Activities that EDUCATE and INFORM us about ourselves and the world
  Activities that INSPIRE and MOBILIZE individuals or groups.
  Activities that NURTURE and HEAL people and/or communities
  Activities that BUILD and IMPROVE community capacity and/or infrastructure.
  Historically we see ABCD as a modern iteration of perhaps the oldest "field" with a lineage that stretches back to prehistoric shamanism.
• Sustainable development: We define sustainable development as locally generated economic, social and cultural development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
• Asset-based community development: The word "sustainable" has roots in the Latin subtenir, meaning "to hold up" or "to support from below." We concur with many in the community-development field who feel that a thriving community must be supported primarily from within—by its members, resources and capacities, for the present and future.
• Cross-sector: Many people feel sustained community development requires collaborative effort that emphasizes a holistic, systems approach. This is because many community issues are diffuse, multidisciplinary, multiagency, multistakeholder and multisector in nature. In this context, "cross sector" refers to community development activities among and between often separately defined areas of influence and expertise such as education, public safety, human services and the arts.

grants for NY artists

I had a really interesting meeting the other day with some fellow arts grantmakers and found out about this no-strings-attached program through NYFA. The deadline is October 3rd- submit an application, damn it!

a poem for max

my long, lost friend

i drank a beer in your honor just now
and found that my little kitchen plant- which has been a source of utter perplexity
sprouted a tiny blossom
that I’m sure nobody can see but me
because it’s the color of your laugh
it’s the shape of your scent
and it demands a presence of redefinition
perhaps, and hopeful might I say, like this rekindling
this spark
of remembrance

and ACTION!

We're live!

Please feel free to take a look at the site and offer suggestions, comments and most importantly, additions.

call-for-entries

Aloha wee campers. Good news, the communityAMP site is up-up-up! I am just waiting for all the nerdy codes to transfer over between host & domain and will post the link most immediately. In the meantime, I've come across some new art that I thought I would share with you. Call it my online gallery of plagiarization; I'm all about it these days. Enjoy!

culture calendars

Looking for something to do this week? Click on one of these handy calendars!

Poetry
Alliance for the Arts
Salsa
DanceNYC
Triathalons
Music

Summer picks

Anti-War Expressions @ The Brecht ForumWritten and Performed by Ollin ImaginationSaturday July 7, 2007, 7pm & Sunday July 8, 2007, 1pm
Brecht Forum 451 West (between Bank and Bethune Streets), New York, NY 10014
http://ollinimagination.blogspot.com/

Cherry Poppinʼ Daddies
July 7, 2007
BB Kingʼs Blues Club
237 West 42nd St, New York, NY 10036
http://www.daddies.com/

Hip Hop Karaoke
Sat, July 14th, 2007Knitting Factory74 Leonard St (@ Church St), New York, NY 10013
http://www.hiphopkaraokenyc.com/

Ani DiFranco
July 18, 2007Wednesday, 7:30 PM
Prospect Park BandshellBrooklyn, NY

Aeroplane Pageant
July 20, 2007
Mercury Lounge
217 East Houston Street, New York, NY 10002
http://www.aeroplanepageant.com/

The Sting
Monday, July 23, 2007
5pm
Bryant Park, New York, NY
http://www.bryantpark.org/calendar/film-festival.php

Caddy Shack
August 8, 2007
8pm
Pier 1 is located on the Hudson River at 70th Street. Take the 1 train to 72nd street and walk west to Riverside Park South and enter the park there.

Beastie Boys
August 09, 2007Thursday, 5:30 PM
McCarren Park PoolBrooklyn, NY

Sneak Peek

reunion iv submissions to include:

-Matt Clark

-Peter Kelly

-Meredith Williams

-Allison Sykes

camp's inception

Five years ago I worked with a small nonprofit called the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, a division of Scholastic, Inc. The Alliance identified creative potential in kids across the nation and set up exhibits and publications featuring their work with the aim of encouraging artistic continuation through college. The works of art and writing that came through the office absolutely blew my mind and prompted me to get moving on my own artistic pursuits, having done very little since earning my degree in the visual arts 2 years prior.

So began a quest to seek out friends and family that might help to ignite a new "creative movement". As I made contact, I came to realize that we were all very sporadically working on our art; many of the best artists I knew simply stopped creating new projects and were now focused on what any 20-something was: job stability, making rent and developing a new and improved sense of self in their post-collegiate lives.

Determined to convey the newfound inspiration I obtained with the Alliance, I continued pooling these resources to create a physical space upon which to accentuate the talents of these people. I felt that by displacing individual works into a new environment, they would take on a renewed presence, impinging on both producer and observer and inspiring further creation. Thus began a series of amateur publications entitled reunion.

My original (extended) intent with the project was to create a continuance from classroom feedback and constructive criticism to the present work of a community of artists, be it academic, journalistic, visual, et cetera. I also wanted to see where everyone was in their work and to emphasize the importance of personal production in relation to where we are immediately: in school, on the job or in transition. I wanted to take this basic idea and dually use it as a means of coming together. My hope, alternately, was to create a space or situation where this group could continue to reflect upon their own work in relation to their fellow collaborators, either as inspiration or simply experience. The intended result: artistic engagement, connection, inspiration and productivity.

With three publications underway and a fourth around the corner, more and more requests for submission media alternatives have been coming my way; friends in the performing and multi-dimensional arts have exhibited interest in becoming part of the project- posing a logistical challenge. After much thought and research I developed a more inclusive model and invited some of reunion's key players to help strategize about transforming reunion into a physical concept, thus named the Community Arts Movement Project (c.a.m.p.).

This blog will serve as a tool to track the progress of the project. It will be part of a larger and further developed space, Community AMP, which should be launched later this week. Community AMP is made possible only by the participants of its contents- most especially, my close friend Meredith Williams, whose generosity and support outweigh any form of thanks I can present her with.

CAMP’s goal will be a series of live events directly resulting from these and other spaces. Participation is warmly welcomed to reunion contributors, each of their communities, friends, family and those that happen upon the work and want in. If you’re the latter, please contact me with your work and it will be posted to the site, pronto!

In the meantime, please feel free to chat me up, offer your two cents and gather up your pictures, words, music and actions- because the hounding has only just begun. In order to make this blog work, I'll need community happenings, inspiring events, gigs, creation and ideas. Bombs away!

-Kelly