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Arts and Social Justice: The Media Connection
20-23 October 2011
University of Nicosia, Cyprus
We are proud to announce that the Department of Communications in conjunction with the Mass Media and Communications Institute at The University of Nicosia will be hosting The 2011 Arts and Social Justice Conference which will be held from 20-23 October 2011 at the University of Nicosia. The title of this year’s conference is Arts and Social Justice: The Media Connection (ASJ). The ASJ is a well established international conference based on arts, expression and citizen activism, and its various mediated forms of representation. ASJ has close ties to the World Social Forum, also held annually at the same time as the Davos Economic Forum and conceived as its counterweight. In 2010, the ASJ conference was held in Durban, South Africa, with such luminaries as Albie Sachs and Rajmohan Ghandi among the plenary speakers and key presentations from William Cleveland, Mike van Graan, and Angelina Kamba.
At the 2011 conference, we expect about 200 – 300 delegates from all over the world – artists, academics, activists. Special emphasis will be put on the media and how they can and do influence societies at large to take on greater responsibilities in making this world a just place to live. There will be three strands:
1. Arts, Media and Advocacy
2. Media, Culture and Identity
3. Arts, Cultural Diversity and Conflict Resolution
Additional ideas are also welcome from participants regarding panel discussions, poster displays and artistic workshops.
Especially the first strand will give the opportunity to analyze citizen media production and how, as in the recent cases of Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries, this has contributed to giving a forceful voice to formerly disenfranchised groups. We have approached a number of important global figures and while the negotiations are still continuing, we hope to have such celebrities as Desmond Tutu, important film directors and artists to be part of the programme.
We welcome your interest and would encourage you to enroll in the conference and actively participate in it. There are several ways of doing that. A dedicated website will be up within the next few weeks where you will find the latest information and updates. Also, a conference publication is planned.
We look forward to welcoming you at the University of Nicosia!
Please indicate interest of participation by return email to the following two email addresses:
Dr Mike Hajimichael (hajimichael.m@unic.ac.cy), Dr Holger Briel (briel.h@unic.ac.cy)
University of Nicosia
BA Programme Coordinators
Communications Department
School of Humanities, Social Sciences & Law
46, Makedonitissa Ave, PO Box 24005, 1700, Nicosia-Cyprus
Tel 00 357 22 352563
Fax 00 357 22 353682
An evening of Spectacular Art, Fabulous Food and Sensuous Music with Artfully AWARE NOLA and the United Nations
Saturday March 12, 2011- 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Exhibit continues through March 20, 2011.
The global not for profit Artfully AWARE (AfA) NOLA is hosting its premier fundraiser to showcase the paintings, photography and sculpture of some of the finest contemporary artists in New Orleans in partnership with Cathedral Creative Studios at their impressive new location at 527 Julia Street, on the most prominent of thoroughfares for the arts in the Crescent City.
Featuring guest speaker Sean Cruse of the United Nations Global Compact, Col. Wayde Benson and Lisa Crossman from the World Affairs Council of New Orleans and Artfully AWARE Executive Director Hilary Wallis on the importance of using the arts in education and development.
Original artwork and prints for sale. Proceeds benefit AfA’s projects in New Orleans and around the world.
Musical entertainment provided by Quartet.
A selection of hors d’oeuvres and beverages from Bennachin Restaurant: A Taste of Africa.
We are excited to help artists and implement the global networking central to AfA’s vision. We will be delighted to see you at the grand opening or during the following week.
Saturday March 12, 2011
6:00-10:00 pm
———–
Cathedral Creative Studios
527 Julia St.
New Orleans, LA 70130
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Artfully AWARE NOLA
1310 N. Rampart St.
New Orleans, LA 70116
adam.hayden@artfullyaware.org
504.609.6353
About Artfully AWARE:
Artfully AWARE (AfA) is a global not for profit established in the United States and in the United Kingdom that uses the arts as an important tool for social improvement and emotional recovery of persons who have suffered from traumatic events, disabilities or inadequate living conditions. We are a member of the United Nations Global Compact, and our board of directors and advisors serve in leadership capacities with organizations including the Aspen Cancer Conference, The Hunger Project, Council of American Ambassadors, United Nations Fund for Women and USAID.
We implement a range of educational arts programs locally, nationally and internationally, in order to promote empowerment, cultural understanding, as well as to enable individual and community development. Our work provides the opportunity to create arts projects, exhibitions, performances and educational curriculum. All programs draw on five major categories: drama, dance, music, media and visual arts.
We wish to thank our sponsors:
Special Thanks to:
Honorary Sponsors:
Design centre open its doors to help local artisans
By NIKITA GELDENHUYS on February 18,2011
MBABANE – Swazi artists and artisans will soon be able to exhibit their art to buyers from across the globe through a new Design Centre initiative.
Proud Swazis Peter and Aleta Armstrong are the creators of the soon-to-open Yebo Art and Design centre, where artists will get the chance to exhibit their work in the gallery space or on the centre’s internet site.
The centre, which is located past the Town Board offices in Ezulwini, will be opened on February 26 and will feature a stunning first exhibition titled ‘The Year of the Rabbit’, which will feature works from 30 local artists.
Armstrong said the idea behind the centre is to create a permanent space where the work of local designers and fine artists can be promoted.
“Yebo Art and Design Centre is a venue that gives the public constant access to contemporary art in Swaziland and our vision is to help to create a professional local artists and designers and in uncovering and developing the amazing hidden talent we have in Swaziland.”
Three training and production workshops will be running at the centre, Aleta explained.
She said workshop discipline will range from learning skills for fine art and design to craft skills for jewellery design.
Armstrong also said the centre will also be open to government departments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who need to train individuals as part of income-generating projects.
Concept
“Yebo Art and Design organisation is vital to exposing Swazi society to fine art. A gallery like this can open people’s eyes to what contemporary art is about. It can show the youth there is money to make in the arts,” she said.
A consultant for the department of Arts and Culture in the Ministry of Sports, Culture and Youth Affairs, Khulekane Msweli, said he was ‘blown away’ when he first heard of the concept of Yebo Art and Design. “Yebo is a good thing for the arts and culture sector. There are not enough platforms and training for artists in Swaziland,” Msweli said.
He said the ministry is interested in using the Yebo centre for training. According to him, a directory of artists and artisans has recently been created which will enable NGOs and sponsors to connect with artists. He said sponsors can use platforms like Yebo to support developing artists.
“The ministry is in full support of the concept. It has not been decided if the ministry will sponsor artists as well. The greatest hindrance at the moment is financing programmes such as these. We are scouting for NGOs to fund artisans,” Msweli said.
He said artists who want to become part of the directory should go to the department’s Arts and Culture Office in Room 211 on the Second Floor of Bhunu Mall. Alternatively artists can call 2505 4437.
Armstrong said the gallery will open on February 26. Once the gallery is open, investors will be able to order artworks from the centre. The art gallery, with free entrance, will be open to schools and will offer workshops for the public on weekends.
Princess Revives Swati Culture One Stitch At A Time
Princess Mussarat Ahmed Zeb displays a piece of traditional Swati embroidery from her collection. The “happy colors” of the embroidery are part of the heritage of a land that has seen its share of sadness. Ahmed Zeb is reviving the heritage of Swati textiles while giving women in the war-torn region of northwest Pakistan a way to make a living.
A valley in the northwest corner of Pakistan renowned for its serenity has seen only turmoil in recent times.
Taliban militants gradually took over Swat Valley three years ago, beheading local leaders and burning girls’ schools. An army offensive to oust them last year displaced 2.5 million people. Epic floods in Swat Valley this summer brought death and vast destruction.
But in the shadow of the tumult, a princess has toiled to return a touch of beauty to the troubled valley.
Mussarat Ahmed Zeb, 49, a princess of Swat’s former royal family, is on a mission to revive the heritage of Swat Valley, “one stitch at a time.”
“I’m working on the revival of the Swat stitch,” she says, sitting amid of piles of vibrant embroidery.
When the Taliban started terrorizing the valley, Ahmed Zeb started training hundreds of women in the dying art of Swati embroidery. The electrifying colors and distinct designs are a legacy of this once princely state.
“Now this is called a punjara, meaning cage,” the princess says as she fingers a vivid black cloth with shocking pink and royal blue geometric shapes. A woman depicted as a flower sits inside the cage.
“She’s the center of it and this is her life. There is no outlet to it. She’s a prisoner,” Ahmed Zeb explains.
It’s a “very old” image in Swati embroidery, according to the princess, dating to the time of her great-grandmother, the Empress of Swat.
From Princess To Widow
As Ahmed Zeb unspools the meaning of the motifs, she recounts her own story of becoming a princess at the tender age of 14. A chance meeting changed her life when a car belonging to Prince Miangul Ahmed Zeb broke down near her home.
“I came from school to my grandma’s house, who was his aunt. He saw me, and that’s the end of the story,” she says with her signature throaty laugh.
A photograph in her memory-filled house reveals what captivated the prince. Staring down from a frame above a mantel is a voluptuous redhead with blue-gray eyes — Mussarat on her honeymoon in 1976. She married the son of the Wali, or ruler, of Swat, a prince 16 years her senior. She says he wouldn’t wait for her to finish the 10th grade.
“Before that I was in a boarding school in a convent,” Ahmed Zeb says, describing her naivete. The nuns didn’t speak of makeup, let alone marriage.
“I didn’t know what it was. But I had a good husband. He was a gentleman. Men like him are very rare,” she says.
The prince was shot dead in Swat in 1986 in circumstances still shrouded in mystery. At age 25, Ahmed Zeb was a widow with three children and one on the way. The trauma is painful to recall even decades later.
“I can understand a widow’s pain, her suffering,” she says in a trembling voice. “Being alone, bringing up her children. It’s very difficult, whether you be a royal or a pauper.”
Inspired By Another Widow
It was another widow, a poor widow, who inspired the princess to open a training center where destitute women of Swat could learn the art of stitching — and make money. The woman’s husband had belonged to the local Taliban that wreaked havoc on the area.
“Her husband got blown up. I never went into detail. For me she was a widow with children,” Ahmed Zeb says.
When the woman approached the princess for help, she offered her the choice of getting a monthly stipend or getting a job.
“Her eyes lit up,” Ahmed Zeb recalls. The Taliban widow wanted nothing more than to earn a living.
“It was then I said, ‘Start something.’ She’s not the only one. There’ll be lots of women like her,” Ahmed Zeb says.
Women flocked to the princess as much for her conviviality as for her courage. In 2007 she returned alone from Islamabad to the Swat Valley as it fell under Taliban control. The militants left her alone, despite her distinctly un-Taliban activity of teaching women a trade.
“Maybe I was lucky. Maybe I kept a low profile, but yet everybody knew,” she says.
Preserving Culture, Empowering Women
Ahmed Zeb’s vocational institution, Ladore — it’s named after a rare herb from the Swat Valley that was one of her husband’s favorites — has expanded to three centers. One occupies one wing of a large, comfortable home she inherited, one of the royal family’s private properties. The original fixtures and walled gardens of the home in Saidu Sharif, the old capital of Swat, are a throwback to an era before Swat was merged into Pakistan in 1969.
On the sun-dappled lawn, Ahmed Zeb displays the embroidered heirlooms passed down to her from her grandmother, the sister of the second Wali of Swat.
“Just to hang them on the wall, one wouldn’t tire of looking at it. It’s like a beautiful painting,” she says admiringly.
It’s a Renaissance of turquoises, pinks and greens as the women of the workshop replicate the complex pieces and much more.
“This is not a charity,” Ahmed Zeb says. “It is a business, and the women here are the shareholders.”
Merchants and tourists buy the beautiful fabric, and the women can earn up to $150 a month, a decent salary in the area.
Changing Lives
Ayesha Faisal Hadi, 32, is fully committed to her work, but her family resisted at first. She had to convince her husband that the embroidery work she is doing from home is not an affront to Swat’s conservative Pashtun culture, which prefers that women not leave the home. Her goal now is freeing her two young daughters from the “cage” that she says has them entrapped.
She explains how her brothers enjoyed the full benefits of education while she was deprived of the chance to earn a university degree.
“Had I been to university I would have a better job now,” Hadi says.
The princess says her aim is also to teach women to educate their own children about independence, “so their daughters don’t have to go through the same misery which they’ve been through.”
The women who gather at the vocational center are grateful to Ahmed Zeb and say this royal with unorthodox ways changed their lives. The self-employment, embroidery, knitting and stitching, has not only provided a livelihood but has been therapeutic as well.
“I’m encouraging my girls to stand up,” Ahmed Zeb says. “Avoid charity. Avoid begging. I’m there to teach you the art and the craft and earn with dignity.”
‘Mother’ Protector Of Swat Valley Culture
In transforming the lives of others, Ahmed Zeb has transformed her own.
In Lahore, she careens through the wholesale market of the Old City, directing rickshaw drivers and stocking up on raw materials to take back to her women in Swat. This once stay-at-home royal mom has become an intrepid entrepreneur and bargain hunter.
“It’s like a treasure hunt,” she says.
Perched on a stool, glasses balanced on the end of her nose, the princess combs through the merchandise on offer and works up a sweat negotiating for a better price.
But the merchant who supplies her colorful threads requires no haggling. It’s all affection when the princess assumes her position at Najaf Traders.
“They are the best, the best,” she adds for emphasis.
From the well-worn landing in the shop she inspects the riot of thread colors that adorn the walls. The owner, meanwhile, bellows for an ashtray for the chain-smoking princess.
“This is the hospitality they give me,” she says, laughing, as one of the owners declares, “No one can smoke in the shop, except Mama.”
They have bestowed the title of “Mother” on the princess who is reviving her culture and breathing new life into the traditions of the battered Swat Valley.
“All I need is a market,” Ahmed Zeb says, “in America.”
Deadline: February 28, 2011
Professional Women Photographers (PWP) helps both emerging and established women artists achieve recognition for their photographic work through its website, exhibitions, and calls for entries.
THEME: CONTRASTS
Dark and light, fast and slow, young and old, urban and rural, soft and hard, funny and sad, real and artificial, smooth and craggy, solid and fluid, rich and poor, true and false, etc. There are as many examples of contrast as there are adjectives and adverbs in the English language. PWP invites women photographers from around the world to submit images they feel illustrate contrast in the world and in their photography.
Exhibition juror, Ruth Fremson will award $2500 in cash prizes, a group show in Manhattan’s SohoPhoto Gallery, an online exhibition and a feature article in IMPRINTS Magazine Spring/Summer 2011 issue.
EXHIBITION AND AWARDS:
Selected artists and their work will be seen by an international audience of collectors, curators and others who appreciate fine art photography. Awarded images and Jurors’ Selections will be included in a two-week group show at Manhattan’s SohoPhoto gallery from June 21 – July 2, 2011. Awarded images, Jurors’ Selections and Honorable Mentions will also be included in PWP’s online gallery for six months from May 15 – November 15, 2011.
• Best In Show: One photographer will receive $1000 and her image will be the subject of a feature interview article in the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of IMPRINTS Magazine. IMPRINTS, the official publication of PWP, is published in hard copy and online editions. Her image will also be in the SohoPhoto Gallery show and the online exhibition.
• First Prize: One photographer will receive $600 and her selected image will appear in the Spring/Summer issue of IMPRINTS Magazine. Her image will be exhibited in the Soho Photo Gallery show and the online exhibition.
• Second Prize: One photographer will receive $500 and her image will appear in IMPRINTS Spring/Summer issue. Her image will be exhibited in the SohoPhoto Gallery show and the online exhibition.
• Third Prize: One photographer will receive $400 and her image will appear in the Spring/Summer issue of IMPRINTS. Her image will be exhibited in the SohoPhoto Gallery show and the online exhibition.
• Jurors’ Selections: 30 additional images will be included
in the SohoPhoto gallery and the online exhibition.
• Honorable Mention: 25 additional images will be included
in the online exhibition.
ELIGIBILITY: This International Call for Entries is open to ALL WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS WORLDWIDE: PWP MEMBERS AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC, AMATEUR AND PROFESSIONAL. PWP invites women photographers working in all mediums, styles and schools of thought to participate. Only 2-D work is eligible, but experimental and mixed techniques are welcome. Final artwork for SohoPhoto Gallery show must be limited in FRAMED SIZE to 24 x 30 inches. If you are submitting diptychs or triptychs, the combined FRAMED SIZES OF ALL IMAGES must not exceed 24×30 inches.
Note: Images selected by jurors for exhibition by PWP in the previous 12 months are NOT eligible. Images previously submitted but not previously selected for exhibition may be resubmitted as often as you wish.
ENTRY FEE:
The entry fee is $35 for the first three images. Additional images
may be submitted for $10 each, and there is no limit to the
number of images submitted.
JUROR: Ruth Fremson is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer whose photographs are in the collection of the Akron Arts Museum and in the traveling exhibit, “War by Women Photographers.” Her images appear in five books, including GAME FACE, Photographs of Female Athletes, A NATION CHALLENGED, September 11, 2001, A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE US ARMED FORCES, SINS OF THE MOTHER, and CAMPAIGNS, A Century of Presidential Races. A New York Times staff photographer, Ruth is a frequent contributor to the newspaper’s LENS blog.
For complete prospectus, go to:
http://www.pwponline.org/calls/individual.php?which=2010-12-02-1
Entitled to Live: An Unfiltered View of New Orleans
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Homecoming for Stark Photographs of Apartheid
New York Times
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: November 17, 2010
JOHANNESBURG — When he was only in his 20s Ernest Cole, a black photographer who stood barely five feet tall, created one of the most harrowing pictorial records of what it was like to be black in apartheid South Africa. He went into exile in 1966, and the next year his work was published in the United States in a book, “House of Bondage,” but his photographs were banned in his homeland where he and his work have remained little known.
The Ernest Cole Family Trust/Hasselblad Foundation Collection
In exile Mr. Cole’s life crumbled. For much of the late 1970s and 1980s he was homeless in New York, bereft of even his cameras. “His life had become a shadow,” a friend later said. Mr. Cole died at 49 in 1990, just a week after Nelson Mandela walked free. His sister flew back to South Africa with his ashes on her lap.
Mr. Cole is at last having another kind of homecoming. The largest retrospective of his work ever mounted is now on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, built in the neo-Classical style almost a century ago in an era when South Africa’s great mining fortunes were being made on the backs of black labor. It is a collection of images that still possesses the power to shock and anger.
“How could white people do this to us?” asked Lebogang Malebana, 14, as he stood before a photograph of nude gold-mine recruits who had been herded into a grimy room for examination. “How could they put naked black men on display like that?”
Mr. Cole conceived the idea of his own portrait of black life after seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book “People of Moscow.” He got this particular picture by sneaking his camera into the mine in his lunch bag, under sandwiches and an apple, Struan Robertson, who shared a studio and darkroom with Mr. Cole, recounted in an essay for the book that accompanies the exhibition, “Ernest Cole: Photographer.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon at the museum here in a crime-ridden downtown that long ago emptied of white people, three visitors wandered through cavernous galleries lined with Mr. Cole’s work. Lebogang, an eighth grader, had drifted in from a nearby single-room apartment that he shares with his mother, who is a maid, and his younger brother. His father is in jail. “It’s very sad,” he said as he lingered over the black-and-white images.
Jimmy Phindi Tjege, 27, who like many young black South Africans has never held a job in a society still scarred by apartheid, had come to the exhibition with his girlfriend, Nomthandazo Patience Chazo, 26, who works for the government and has a car. They had driven from their black township, Daveyton, about 30 miles away.
Ms. Chazo was struck by a photograph of four hungry children scraping porridge from a single pot set on a concrete floor. Mr. Tjege singled out another picture, one of a serious boy squatting on the floor of an unfurnished schoolroom, clutching a chalkboard, with two tears of sweat running down the side of his face.
“I feel angry,” Mr. Tjege said, as he gestured to the rest of the gallery with a sweep of his hand. “This room is full of anger.”
Mr. Cole’s captions and photographs are imbued with wrenching emotions.
Next to a photograph of a maid holding a white baby girl whose lips are pressed to the woman’s forehead, the caption says: “Servants are not forbidden to love. Woman holding child said, ‘I love this child, though she’ll grow up to treat me just like her mother does.’ ”
The caption for a picture of a hospital ward where the floor was crowded with sick children reads, “New cases have their names written on adhesive tape stuck to their foreheads.”
A series of images of tsotsis, young black gangsters, picking the pockets of white men is accompanied by a caption that reads: “Whites are angered if touched by anyone black, but a black hand under the chin is enraging. This man, distracted by his fury, does not realize his pocket is being rifled.”
The son of a washerwoman and a tailor, Mr. Cole quit high school in 1957 at 16 as the Bantu education law meant to consign blacks to menial labor went into effect.
When he was 20, the apartheid authorities deemed his family’s brick home and the black township where it sat as a “black spot” and bulldozed them into rubble.
Somehow, pretending to be an orphan, Mr. Cole had by then already managed to persuade apartheid bureaucrats to reclassify him as colored, or mixed race, despite his dark skin. His fluency in Afrikaans, the language of most coloreds, probably helped. His ability to pass as colored freed him from laws that required blacks always to carry a work permit when in “white areas,” and this mobility proved crucial to his photography.
Joseph Lelyveld, a retired executive editor of The New York Times who was The Times’s correspondent in Johannesburg in the mid-1960s and worked with Mr. Cole, then a freelancer, described the young photographer as a wry, soft-spoken man.
“His judgments could be angry, but he had an ironic, almost furtive nature, conditioned by what he was trying to pull off,” Mr. Lelyveld, who remained a friend of with Mr. Cole until his death, said in a telephone interview. “It wasn’t easy to be a black man walking around Johannesburg with expensive cameras. The presumption would be you stole them.”
In the mid-1970s, when Mr. Cole was destitute and homeless in New York, Mr. Lelyveld said they went together to a cheap hotel where Mr. Cole had left his negatives and the photographs he had of his mother, only to discover they had gone to an auction of unclaimed items.
For years rumors circulated that a suitcase of Mr. Cole’s prints had survived somewhere in Sweden. David Goldblatt, a renowned South African photographer, had heard they were with the Hasselblad Foundation there. When Mr. Goldblatt received the Hasselblad Award in 2006, and traveled to Gothenburg to accept it, he asked to see them. He said he was agape paging through the images, saying, “They can’t lie in a vault.”
Later, when he carefully studied scans of them at his home in Johannesburg, Mr. Goldblatt, now 80, said he began to realize that many of the photographs in “House of Bondage” had been cropped severely to enhance their impact in a powerful anti-apartheid polemic. But the full frames showed Mr. Cole’s artistry.
“He wasn’t just brave,” said Mr. Goldblatt, who has been photographing this country for more than a half-century. “He wasn’t just enterprising. He was a supremely fine photographer.”
For example, the picture of naked mine recruits photographed in a line from behind, their arms outstretched as if they were being held up, had a water basin on the wall at the end of the line. It was almost entirely cut out in the book.
“Cole was careful to include the basin, and the basin is like the full stop or exclamation mark in a sentence,” Mr. Goldblatt said. “It just brings another dimension. It makes it banal. It’s not just dramatic, it’s banally dramatic. This is the kind of thing photographers live by, these details.”
Next year the exhibition, organized by the Hasselblad Foundation, will travel to Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban and Mamelodi, the black township outside Pretoria where Mr. Cole’s family still lives. The foundation is now planning an American tour that probably will include San Francisco, Detroit, Atlanta and New York.
Art Spill: Disaster, Art, Activism and Recovery
November 11, 2010 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Art Spill: Disaster, Art, Activism, and Recovery
Opening 6PM November 13, 2010
with Poetry Reading hosted by 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series
Water and Wine Provided by Gold Mine Saloon; Tea by Bayou Brew
Closing Celebration, Silent Auction and Panel Saturday, November 20
Online Auctions available at http://www.tizm.com
Benefiting NOLA Emergency Response and Defenders of the Coast
Food and Drink Provided by Eiffel Restaurant, Lazy Magnolia, and Bayou Brew
St. Claude Arts District in The Marigny
2822 St. Claude Avenue, New Orleans, LA
“Darkened Hue” oil painting by Hilary Wallis
CONTACT:
Maria Brodine. 619-248-8976. mbrodine@gmail.com
Mike Kilgore. Collective World Art Community. 504-339-5237. collectiveworld@gmail.com
http://www.ethnographicterminalia.org
http://www.wix.com/multispecies/multispecies
Please attend the “Art Spill” event on Facebook and visit the Art Spill ONLINE AUCTIONS (check back for updates) at http://www.tizm.com.
This year in New Orleans, in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) 109th Annual Meeting, an eclectic array of artists, scholars, local organizations, and activists are collaborating to produce a constellation of interrelated exhibitions and panels that will take place as part of the St. Claude Arts Biennial. One of these events is called Art Spill: Disaster, Art, Activism, and Recovery in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Art Spill is a multidisciplinary event that will explore how art objects have exposed disaster, facilitated recovery, and participated in political activities in post-Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Art Spill is sponsored by Ethnographic Terminalia (http://ethnographicterminalia.org/) and Collective World Art Community, and is collaborating with Multispecies Salon III: SWARM (http://www.wix.com/multispecies/multispecies).
Art Spill consists of an exhibition, which will run from November 13-20 in the St. Claude Arts District; a poetry reading hosted by 17 Poets!; an AAA-sponsored, offsite panel consisting of scholars and artists whose work is relevant to social and ecological issues in the Gulf Coast region; and a juried art show and NOLA-style party to be held on November 20, the proceeds of which will be donated to the non-profit watchdog groups Defenders of the Coast and NOLA Emergency Response.
The Opening: 6PM November 13
Art Spill: Disaster, Art, Activism, and Recovery seeks to question the boundaries between art, activism, and science and engage with the politics of interdisciplinary work; sample the proliferation of post-Katrina “sensual culture”, including public art, documentary, demonstrations, and performances; and explore the role of the arts in recovery. After the St. Claude Arts Biennial Kick-off Party, the Art Spill exhibit will open with a poetry reading at 6PM hosted by 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series and the Gold Mine Saloon (http://www.17poets.com/) featuring work by Brenda Landry (read by Hilary Wallis), Dave Brinks, Gina Ferrara, Bill Lavender, David Rowe, and Megan Burns. Works on exhibit Nov 13-20 include disaster and recovery-themed work by Abdul Aziz, Don Blancher of Sustainable Ecosystems LLC, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Ryan Burns, Beth Chasse, Pati D’Amico with text by Joel Dailey, Hunter Daniel, Dawn DeDeaux, Rex Dingler, Lynda Frese, Andrea Garland with text by Bill Lavender, Stacy Kranitz, the Krewe of Dead Pelicans, Malcolm MacClay, Craig Morse, Crista Rock, Karel Sloan-Boekbinder, José Torres-Tama, Artfully AWARE’s Hilary Wallis with text by Brenda Landry, and local architectural and scientific visual and political work dealing with these themes. On the same night, Multispecies Salon 3: SWARM will open with edible companions, Swarm Orbs robots, and other festivities at The Front, Kawliga Studios, and Ironworks. In addition, Ethnographic Terminalia will show works at Barrister’s Gallery as an extension of the show at Du Mois. Together, we will provide a space for conversation (or creative conflict) between academic approaches to reflexivity and engagement, and the politically charged ideas, practices, and things emerging in post-Katrina New Orleans.
The Juried Art Show: Online and On Exhibit Nov 13-20
In the wake of the ongoing oil disaster, the exhibition will empower artists and visitors to contribute directly to the recovery of the Gulf Coast region by hosting a juried art show. This juried show of artwork and crafts, organized by Collective World Art Community, will be on display to the public as part of the Art Spill exhibition. Entries accepted for the juried portion of the show will be for sale through the duration of the exhibition as well as through a silent and online auction hosted by Tizm Online Auctions. The final celebration for this event will take place on Saturday, November 20th. Funds will be donated to the non-profit watchdog organizations Defenders of the Coast and NOLA Emergency Response. To view and bid online, go to the Tizm website at http://www.tizm.com and click on “Art Spill: Silent and Online Auctions.”
The Panel: November 20, 6:00pm-7:30pm
This panel, featuring participants who work or have worked in New Orleans as artists, activists, and scholars, seeks to bring local artists and art works into anthropological conversations about the role of the arts, activism, and scholarship in the revealing of disaster, the facilitation of recovery, and political action. Participants will be encouraged to use their personal biographies to explore tensions around art and technology, the roles of publics and experts, and the relationship between nature and culture.
Participants:
Barbara Allen – Associate Professor, Director of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech; author of Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) and Dynamics of Disaster: Lessons on Risk, Response, and Recovery (London: Earthscan Press) edited with Rachel Dowty, foreword by Alan Irwin, forthcoming
Craig E. Colten - Carl O. Sauer Professor, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University; author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005).
Dawn DeDeaux – Independent Artist, http://www.dawndedeaux.com/; currently working on “Project Mutants”
José Torres-Tama – Interdisciplinary Artist, Writer, Visual and Performance Artist, ArteFuturo Productions, http://www.torrestama.com/; work includes “Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina” and “Aliens, Immigrants, and Other Evildoers.” José’s talk at the panel will be called “Hard Living in the Big Easy after Katrina & Arts Activism in the Party Capital of the South”, based on a post-Katrina essay that aired as a radio commentary on NPR’s Latino USA back in the summer of 2006. The original piece can be heard at http://www.torrestama.com/
Elizabeth Underwood – Interdisciplinary Artist, AORTA Projects, http://www.elizabethunderwood.net/
Discussant:
Eben Kirksey, Cultural Anthropologist, Mellon Fellow, CUNY Graduate Center New York
Other Events
Please visit the Ethnographic Terminalia exhibition (http://ethnographicterminalia.org/), opening at 7pm, Friday Nov. 19 at the Du Mois Gallery in the historic Freret Corridor. Ethnographic Terminalia also has items on exhibit at Barrister’s Gallery in the St. Claude Arts District (http://www.barristersgallery.com/). Multispecies Salon III: SWARM will be holding events and exhibits at three sites in the St. Claude Arts District: The Ironworks, (612 Piety St.), The Front (4100 St. Claude Ave., on November 13th only), and Kawliga Studios (3331 St. Claude Ave.) For a full list of dates, events, and participants visit http://www.ethnographicterminalia.org and http://www.wix.com/multispecies/multispecies. For a complete list of St. Claude Arts Biennial/ Art Walk events, visit http://www.scab1.com/.
Sponsors
American Anthropological Association
St. Claude Arts District
Bayou Brew
Lazy Magnolia Brewery
Eiffel Society
Tizm Online Auctions
Ariodante Gallery
Robere Lord Gallery
17 Poets! and Gold Mine Saloon
Research funding provided by
the National Science Foundation
and The Wenner-Gren Foundation
Global Education Week 2010
North-South Centre of the Council of Europe presents:
“ PEACE AND NON-VIOLENCE FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD ”
The European Global Education Week is an annual awareness raising event encouraging global education practices in the member States of the Council of Europe and beyond. Global Education (which encompasses development education, human rights education, intercultural education, peace education and conflict resolution) works on the understanding of the core issues of global citizenship :
• awareness of the wider world and of our own role as a world citizens;
• attitudes of respect for diversity and intercultural communication skills;
• understanding of the causes and effects of major issues effecting the world;
• opportunities to take action to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place
While there have been a number of national initiatives for some years now, European co-ordination of these initiatives first began in 1999 at the initiative of the North-South Centre of the Council of Europe (NSC), with the pilot Global Education Week (GEW) in 12 member states. Thanks to the work of the national co-ordinators constituting the GEW network, along with the support of an increasing number of Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs Ministries, NGOs, local authorities and educational institutions, the week has grown and the GEW network counts today 37 national co-ordinators from the Council of Europe member states and four international organisations.
In 2010, the 12th European Global Education Week will take place from the 13th to the 21st of November.
The theme for Global Education Week 2010, chosen in consultation with the NSC GEW network national co-ordinators, and having the Millennium Development Goals as an inspirational background, is:
“ PEACE AND NON-VIOLENCE FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE WORLD ”
The choice of this theme, related to the United Nations International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World (2001-2010), is also in line with the mandate of the North-South Centre with regard to raising awareness on North-South and global interdependence issues. National co-ordinators are invited to add, if necessary, a short sub title or motto to adapt the theme to their particular national situations.
Global Education Week (also known in some countries as One World Week) supports teachers, youth leaders, young people and any other formal and non-formal educational actors to engage in education for global citizenship; and enhances the effectiveness of this endeavour nationally and throughout Europe, through co-ordination of initiatives and sharing of best practices.
All schools and youth organisations, as well as any other interested educational stakeholder in the Council of Europe’s member States are invited to take part in the event coordinated through the Global Education web-page on the North-South Centre web-site :
http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/nscentre/GE/GEW_en.asp
In addition, increasing and improving GE in Europe is achieved through the following complementary activities developed by the NSC Global Education & Youth Programme :
- Give visibility to, sharing and encouraging GE best practices through the World Aware Education Awards;
- Dissemination of the Global Education Newsletter, an electronic newsletter for GE practitioners, to share global education news and events, useful thematic links and educational materials, and serving as an informative support for the NSC GEW network;
- Highlighting GE policy developed in CoE Member States through Global Education country profiles;
- Pedagogical tools, namely the Global Education Guidelines, a handbook for educators to understand and implement Global Education;
- A Global Education on-line training course.
The Youth Dimension of the Programme promotes, improves and gives visibility to the role of youth and their organisations as actors of development and global interdependence through training activities like the University on Youth and Development; the global and interregional training courses for youth organisations (North-South TC, Euro-Mediterranean TC, Euro-African TC); the facilitation of interregional processes at youth level; seminars and workshops on youth participation in development; pool of trainers and training development on North-South and global youth work and research and exchange of best practices.
The NSC Global Education & Youth Programme is complemented by the Intercultural Dialogue programme which aims at facilitating dialogue between members of parliaments, local authorities, civil society organisations and governments of Europe, Mediterranean rim and Africa.
GLOBAL EDUCATION PROGRAMME
Miguel Silva – programme manager
miguel.silva@coe.int
North-South Centre of the Council of Europe
av. da República, nº15, 5º
P-1050-185 Lisboa
Tel.: (+351) 213 584 042
Fax: (+351) 213 584 072
