Archive for May, 2009
Art, be not proud. Here’s an innovative idea out of Berkeley, California that would brighten the ever-increasing number of empty storefronts in downtown Jackson. In fact, it is a wonderful idea even when times are good, when streets are paved with, if not gold, lots of C-notes. Local artists have a tough time finding venues; we’re very creative, and space is limited. Artists wait months for an exhibit at PSB, Koshu, Hard Drive or the Brew Pub. Jackson’s operative businesses could set aside a corner of their store window to display a little local art. Take a percentage—just don’t take 50%! Think 20%.
Berkeley’s economic downturn has inspired an innovative use of empty downtown commercial space. Empty store window display spaces are being used to exhibit the work of local visual artists. The practice brightens an otherwise increasingly gloomy, doldrums downtown.
According to releases, a year-long discussion between Berkeley’s Office of Economic Development and the Downtown Berkeley Association culminated in a spring kickoff of Berkeley’s new window art program. Click here to see a slide show.
“We really wanted to bring the community into the Downtown,” said the association’s Marketing Manager Katherine Scherbel, who coordinated the project. “We wanted to make it fun and bright, celebrating the Downtown instead of letting it feel dismal and empty.”
Window displays include ceramics, jewelry, photography, paintings and works from the Habitot Children’s Museum and local high school students. Empty commercial space had reached 15.1 percent of total commercial space when organizers began discussing the project.
Public Art and Placemaking are, as many of us in the arts community have been saying, inextricable from contemporary, smart, even green, urban growth. Right now, the Teton County Comprehensive Plan is available to for the public to review. This is our chance to comment on the way we will grow, not only quantitatively, but qualitatively. Quality urban growth must include public urban spaces and public art.
If Jackson Hole’s citizens do not make reviewing this plan a priority, we essentially determine not to vote. And those of us determining not to vote lose a lot of “street cred.” Writing letters to the editor is a crucial public right; writing them when you’ve opted not to be a part of the process by showing up at town meetings or workshops is a bit fraudulent. The Comprehensive Planning process has been activated for many, many months.
YOU are the Plan.
I know it’s hard; but make this a priority. Here’s a way to start.
TUESDAY, MAY 12, beginning at 5:30 p.m., attend a public meeting at the CENTER FOR THE ARTS. The meeting takes place on the Center’s third floor, in Teton Art Lab’s new space. The Art Association’s digital photography studio will be available for those wanting to contribute comments electronically. Members of our arts community will ask questions and submit comments on the inclusion of public art and placemaking in Teton County’s Comprehensive Plan. Please try and make time to study Themes 3 and 7, in particular.
Preserving environment and quality of place, managing growth, and creating a 
more viable, broad-based economy are Jackson’s great challenges. Most crucial is ensuring we promote and protect our wildlife, its habitat and other environmentally sensitive areas. In our region, the arts are a keystone in preserving place. Although our Town Square’s monument, various land art and myriad creative educational projects provide continual reminders of our inherent love for the arts, we’ve so far not included researching and moving towards making the arts a part of our “constitution,” as it were. We can remind ourselves and all visitors of this history by including beautiful and lasting public place making in our Comprehensive Plan. Such planning aids in building tourism and strong market values. Think logo.
Art captures the essence of the places dear to our hearts. Successful public art resonates on a national level. Our traditional themes may be translated traditionally; they may also be translated using contemporary aesthetics and materials.
We must not only include the words. We must decide upon a logical process of implementation. Without implementation any plan is simply an exercise.
For information, contact Don Kushner at don@jhcenterforthearts.org or Carrie Geracie at carrie@centerofwonder.org.
If you missed, as I did, the opening of “People of the Plateau: Native American Photography by Edward S. Curtis,” on loan to the Art Association from the University of Wyoming Art Museum, you have through May 25 to see this historic collection of photographs of Native Americans. Curtis’s great work, “The North American Indian,” is 20 volumes in length, with 20 portfolios of over 700 copperplate photogravures. The exhibition is on display upstairs, in the ArtSpace Loft Gallery.
Terry Winchell, owner of Fighting Bear Antiques, opened the show April 10th.
The magnitude of Curtis’ work cannot be overstated. It brings together myriad people and languages. I’m grieved to have missed Winchell’s talk, and in an effort to assuage myself and learn more about Curtis, I did a bit of research. I found a wonderful site, Edward S. Curtis’s “The North American Indian”/Edward S. Curtis in Context.
There you will find five other pages that together provide an excellent context on Curtis: A biographical timeline for Curtis; Curtis and the North American Indian; The Myth of the Vanishing Race; Curtis as Pictorialist and Ethnographic Adventurist; and a map of the North American Indians as experienced by Curtis.
Mick Gidley, Professor of American Literature, School of English, University of Leeds, England’s essay on “The North American Indian” is excellent. Here is an excerpt:
“But when the seeming white brother appeared on the mesas of Arizona in the sixteenth century, the Hopi had been expecting him for hundreds of years. That is, they had an extensive history quite their own, and a corresponding literature. Indeed, all of the Indian peoples–however much the coming of horses and other later imports affected the bases of their cultures–had a history, a religion, a system of government, social customs, handicrafts, and myths and songs of their own which predated the coming of white people among them. Edward Sheriff Curtis’ The North American Indian was a truly magnificent effort to record a vast amount of very many of these aboriginal cultures. Published between 1907 and 1930 in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios containing more than seven hundred large-sized photogravures, The North American Indian, which was issued in a very limited edition and sold rather expensively on a subscription basis, contains millions of words: descriptions of homelands; accounts of religious beliefs that some might find strange; accounts of tribal organizations ranging from the aristocratic to the casually democratic; records of ceremonies so subtle in their significance, or so seemingly bizarre, that an alien eyewitness could easily not understand what it all meant; versions of haunting myths, songs and stories; descriptions of domestic chores and of intricate and skilled arts and hunting practices; and heroic tales of arms and men. In short. The North American Indian is a monument in words and pictures to a range of cultures which most white men could not or would not see.”
A Wyoming Arts Council (WAC) release has announced that applications are available for the new “Art Works for Wyoming” grant program. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is providing this one-time opportunity, and is able to offer the program as a result of its recently secured federal stimulus funding package. Any and all Wyoming arts organizations may apply, which, of course, includes Jackson arts entities. Grants are available to all qualifying arts venues.
WAC manager Rita Bascom says, “We are fortunate to live in a time when the arts are recognized for the impact they have on our economy. The fact that the NEA was included in our nation’s Stimulus Funding Plan is a credit to all of the artists, arts businesses, and nonprofit arts organizations who make their living through the arts, or hire artists to paint, dance, act, write, sculpt, design, etc. – not just at this point in time, but throughout our nation’s history.”
Throughout world history.
The program offers up to $25,000 in grants monies for projects meeting one of the following two criteria:
Salary support, full or partial, for one or more positions that are critical to an organization’s artistic mission and that are in jeopardy or have been eliminated as a result of the current economic collapse.
Fees for previously engaged artists and/or contractual personnel to maintain or expand the period during which such persons would be engaged.
Applications are due at the WAC by May 15, 2009. Applications will be forwarded to the Western States Arts Federation on June 1. June 3-5, applications will be considered and winning grants will be notified by mail on July 1. NO PAPER APPLICATIONS will be accepted.
For full application information on this program, log on to WAC’s online granting site here.
“We are excited to be a part of this national effort to save arts jobs. And we encourage all qualified Wyoming organizations to apply for funding,” Bascom said.
