This Sand Art Lightbox from Filth Wizardry is an awesome project to try this weekend. Sure, it's made with kids in mind, but I'm guessing the adults won't be able to resist playing with it, too.
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A NEW non-governmental organization (NGO) that aims to use art to promote human rights, tolerance, co-existence and cultural understanding has been launched in Bahrain.
Artists Without Borders was opened under the umbrella of the Bahrain Human Rights Watch Society (BHRWS) to coincide with the UN's International Day in Support of Torture Victims on June 26.
It aims to provide direct psychological relief to victims through art and entertainment.
The group intends to promote the work of volunteer and contributing artists, as well as raise consciousness about victims worldwide through artistic expression.
Other goals are to raise awareness about the problems of intolerance and cultural clash that are occurring worldwide and are likely to intensify with the processes of internationalisation and immigration.
The group supports finding solutions to conflicts and favours political dialogue and non-violence, harmonious coexistence, tolerance and reconciliation.
It wants to alleviate the "clash of civilisations" by celebrating the cultural and ethnic diversity of the world through artistic expression.
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Artists Without Borders will promote and encourage inter-cultural study, tolerant understanding and aesthetic enjoyment of the enormously diverse races, ethnicities, religions, languages and cultures of the world through artistic expression.
The group also strives to preserve the world's cultural diversity by raising consciousness about the minorities that are facing cultural extinction.
"The whole idea is to present human rights issues in an innovative way and spread culture," Artists Without Borders co-ordinator Abdulla Abdulaziz told the GDN.
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"Artists have their own way of spreading a particular statement about issues.
"The media has its own pressure points but art remains forever.
"If you bring a piece of art it stays with you and it continues to carry a meaning."
Other members of Artists Without Borders include, spokeswoman Nagma Mohseni, David Cohen, Warqaa Roohani, Maria Cecilia, Khalid Fairooz, Shahram Soltani and Elizabeth J.
Artists Without Borders plans to promote the work of well-known or yet unrecognised talented artists and help them gain experience by donating their work to a humanitarian cause.
Famous artists will gain reputation and popularity by linking their names to the group's humanitarian mission.
Both unrecognised and celebrated artists that volunteer or are contributing members will share the quality of being outstanding.
Artists Without Borders was started by a group of artists who represent various religions in Bahrain, including Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Baha'i and Hinduism.
It is a non-profit, international humanitarian organisation and operates independently of any institutional, corporate, political, economic, religious or ethnic influence.
The group comprises volunteer members who will carry out the humanitarian mission of bringing art to the victims, ethno-artists who promote peace and mutual understanding by celebrating the cultural and ethnic diversity of the world and talented artists of all disciplines who donate their work and talent to the humanitarian duty of helping people in distress.
"The aim is to serve the community through art and improve morality and love between communities," said Ms Mohseni, who is a Bahraini artist.
"Our aim is to do community service through art and promote good in the world."
For more information about the group visit the website http"//sites.google.com/artistswithoutborders20 or email artistswithoutborders20@gmail.com. becky@gdn.com.bh
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To see more of the Gulf Daily News or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.gulf-daily-news.com.
Copyright (c) 2010, Gulf Daily News, Manama, Bahrain
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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A plan to eliminate the directors of art and music may end up costing the school district more than the $250,000 the budget-cutting measure would save.
Several arts groups that supply the district thousands in free services, equipment and expertise say they have no desire to support a district that thinks so little of the arts.
"We're really just getting started, and if they get rid of (those) positions, my board is probably going to say, 'Let's go someplace else,' " said Bennie Wallace, artistic director of Backcountry Jazz, a Greenwich-based organization that two weeks ago helped pull off a citywide youth concert and was in the process of securing free instruments and music lessons for city students.
The Board of Education meets Monday at 6 p.m. in Room 305 of City Hall to vote on a 2010-11 operating budget that is $19 million leaner than the one it approved back in March. Until last week, the board's finance committee was prepared to recommend a budget that closed two schools, Dunbar and Roosevelt. It has since backed off that unpopular plan, and last week acted on a new set of recommendations from Superintendent John Ramos that would not only cut the art and music directors' jobs -- which together cost $250,000 between salaries and benefits -- but more than 50 teaching positions, five assistant principals and their secretaries, 25 math and library aides and three family literacy coordinators.
Ramos told the board no one is happy about reducing art, music, physical education and libraries and that he valued them as much as so-called core subjects. Consideration had been given to reverting both positions to part time, with both teaching the rest of the time. When that was done in the past it didn't work out so well, Ramos said.
Having no point persons within the district would be worse, countered Brett Raphael, artistic director for the Connecticut Ballet, which has worked in Bridgeport since 1981. "This action will cripple our efforts and cripple the delivery of arts in the city to the kids. To take the top people out is to completely handicap the whole thing," said Raphael. He estimates the arts community has leveraged several hundred thousand dollars in services into the district in recent years.
Members of the new Bridgeport Arts Initiative Task force, meeting last week at Housatonic Community College, spent a good part of the session talking about the proposed cuts. The group drafted a letter to Ramos and members of the school board calling on them to reverse the decision to eliminate the visual and performing arts directors. The letter called the situation "potentially catastrophic" for Bridgeport's youth.
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Performing Arts Director Tania Kelley and Visual Arts Director Ralph Buzzard both sit on the task force, which includes representation from two dozen arts and social service agencies including the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, Yale School of Music, New England Ballet and Bridgeport Public Education Fund.
Marge Hiller, director of the BPEF, said the plan to cut the positions doesn't even begin to make sense. "I am appalled," she said. "All the art and music organizations that are working in the schools with thousands of children will be shut out of the system. Without internal, experienced people to facilitate the organizing, school selection and vetting, these programs will end."
Yale's Music in Schools initiative has taken off at several city schools, said John Miller, a manager of community programs at Yale. "Where it's going is even more exciting ... We need Tania and Ralph in place to make sure these programs survive," said Miller.
One of the programs, Choice Books, connects music, art and dance to literacy skills. Students write a book, illustrate it, then a Yale grad student will write a piece of music to go along with the illustration, which is then performed by the Bridgeport symphony.
"It's really a great program," said Buzzard, who also works with groups like the Aldridge Museum of Contemporary Art to have artists help teachers develop creative lesson plans and City Lights, a downtown art gallery, who displays and critiques artwork of city students.
Internally, Buzzard said he and Kelley help with supplies, scheduling and instruction.
"We try and help art teachers infuse literacy, history and other subjects into their lessons," Buzzard said.
"I know they aren't doing it because they don't care but have to realize they are cutting a lifeline to a lot of outside help," said Wallace.
Chief of Staff Robert Henry said despite the cuts, all students will still get art and general music instruction, just less of it. If any additional funds become available, he said the art and music director jobs would be the first thing restored.
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To see more of the Connecticut Post, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.connpost.com/.
Copyright (c) 2010, Connecticut Post, Bridgeport
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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Seth Godin says anyone can be an artist. Without even becoming an artist:
Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.
What makes someone an artist? I don't think it has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paint or marble, sure. But there are artists who worked with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.
(Linchpin, Seth Godin)
He argues that the Industrial Revolution, which has shaped our culture and attitude to work for so long, has now run its course, and is in fact an aberration:
Imagine a stack of 400 quarters. Each quarter represents 250 years of human culture, and the entire stack signifies the 100,000 years we've had organised human tribes. Take the top quarter of the stack. This one quarter represents how many years our society has revolved around factories and jobs and the world as we see it. The other 399 coins stand for a very different view of commerce, economy, and culture. Our current view might be the new normal, but the old normal was around for a very long time.
(Linchpin, Seth Godin)
Because of the emergence of the creative economy, the factory has " fallen apart" – creativity is now the number one economic priority and "success means being an artist". Bad news for Lou. Great news for Jack and Marla.
Inevitably, Linchpin has provoked protests from those who believe there is something sacred about art and artists, and that calling businesspeople 'artists' flatters them and demeans the term:
Art is a special and élite area. So is being a NASA astronaut, a Math Professor or a wedding cake maker but that does not make these people artists. And a formally trained and educated artist can do and think about things that the vast, majority of people out there cannot do – no matter how hard you make a power-point presentation or plan a product launch.
Think about it this way – I believe that any artist can get into a business or arts program, or even an engineering program if they try hard enough. Isn't that what those motivational posters tell us? Conversely, there are only a few people who are able to get into a Fine Arts studio program. The difference? They have a talent, and not because they are good at listening to a client and trying really hard.
('Uh Oh, Seth Godin Is Flatter Marketing with the Word "Art"', The ArtListPro blog)
Actually, the 'artist' bit isn't even the most outrageous claim Godin makes in Linchpin:
You Are a Genius
No one is a genius all the time. Einstein had trouble finding his house when he walked home from work every day. But all of us are geniuses sometimes.
(Linchpin, Seth Godin)
At this point, you might expect to hear squawks of protest from Lateral Action, given that I've already said you don't need to be a genius to be a creative success. But semantics aside, Seth and I are really saying the same thing: don't put others on a lofty pedestal and label them 'geniuses' whom you could never hope to emulate. It may feel like modesty, but it's actually an excuse. Michelangelo's story shows us that the biggest differences between geniuses and the rest of us are not God-given talent and supernatural intelligence, but things like work, passion, critical thinking, courage and persistence – which are within the reach of all of us, once we commit.
Reading Linchpin reminded me of one of my favourite books about the creative process, The Art of Work by Roger Coleman, which was the inspiration for my piece about Michelangelo. Coleman is an 'artist turned craftsman' and Professor of Design who challenges our received assumptions about the nature of art:
The history of art is really the history of skilled work – no more, no less – and when we marvel at the products of other periods and cultures, we marvel at the achievements of a tradition of skilled work, not 'art'.
(The Art of Work, Roger Coleman)
Earlier cultures, he argues, would not have distinguished between the artist and the craftsman — they were one and the same, no matter how accomplished or refined the work. The word 'art' simply meant 'skill' or 'work'. Shakespeare used the word in this sense when he wrote "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face". And according to my Oxford English Dictionary the primary meaning of the word is still "human creative skill or its application".
For Roger Coleman, this original artistic tradition is personified in the figure of Daedalus, the fabled artisan and inventor of Greek mythology:
Daedalus is the archetypal craftsman: inventor and engineer; architect and builder; artist and sculptor; designer of labyrinths; maker of wings; problem solver and toymaker. In short, the virtuoso exponent of all that is skilful, inventive, constructive and creative.
(The Art of Work, Roger Coleman)
In other words he didn't confine his creative energies to paint or marble. He also got his hands dirty solving problems in the real world. His work was breathtaking but not perfect – as his son Icarus found to his cost.
Like Godin, Coleman blames the Industrial Revolution for stifling this tradition of art-as-skilled-work:
It was the Industrial Revolution that finally distorted our understanding of the daedalic tradition by demanding an absolute distinction between work – labour that could be exploited in the factories and fields of the nineteenth century – and an art that was to be revered and idolised as close to genius. In its original use the word art meant skill and the exercise of skill – we still use the word in this sense – but it was only in the late nineteenth century that the words art and artist developed their modern meanings. At the same time another word – artisan – was co-opted to distinguish the skilled manual worker from the intellectual, imaginative or creative artist, and artists emerged as a very special category of cultural workers, producing a rare and marginal commodity – works of art.
(The Art of Work, Roger Coleman)
So if you feel nostalgic for the good old days, when pure artists pursued their noble calling unsullied by the world of commerce and practical problems, I hate to break it to you but that's actually a manufactured modern myth. Not only that, the myth has served a pretty basic purpose: marketing. What better way to avoid the daily grind of the factory and get sky-high prices for your work than to persuade the world that the productions of your pen/paintbrush/chisel are the effusions of artistic genius? Nice work if you can get it.
I'm not saying individual artists are this cynical, or even this aware of what's been happening. But I am saying that true artists can work in any medium, and that artistic types (who include me) have no right to look down their noses at those who are outstandingly "skilful, inventive, constructive and creative" in other fields of work.
Should we reserve the term 'artist' for those who work in the arts?
Is it possible to be an artist in business, education, childcare, construction – or other non-artistic professions?
What difference would it make to your work if you decided to approach it as an artist?
About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a poet, creative coach and co-founder of Lateral Action. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
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