MixedMedia

This summer the Africa-India Technology Institute (AITI) in Accra, Ghana will host Maker Faire Africa, a two-day showcase of African ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Modeled on the popular Maker Faire format developed in the U.S. by Make Magazine and O’Reilly media, the festival will include exhibitions of functional devices invented locally, artwork derived from found objects and materials, workshops and demonstrations such as cellphone hacking, and panel discussions across a range of topics, including financing invention and the challenges of moving from invention to production.More information and a program available at http://www.makerfaireafrica.com 

This past weekend I spent a couple of days in Ithaca, New York at the invitation of someone who runs something called ‘The Level Green Institute’ – which appears to have several offshoots, among them something called “Arts at the Heart of a Sustainable World.” Anyway, the symposium, titled “Greening the Arts” was, though poorly attended, was able to pull in a really interesting group of panelists.

Though I am pretty open to working with just about anyone when it comes to the arts, I am particularly eager to meet artists and critics whose work intersects with development in some way. Which is what drew me to the gathering: while I am not, and do not really consider myself a “green artist” (even the “artist” label is questionable, since I rarely show my own work) I was interested to learn how my work as an educator overlaps with artists whose work takes some kind of stand with regard to human impact in the natural world. And there were some great folks there:

• Steven Siegel is a New York artist working and living in the lower Hudson Valley whose work incorporates detritus of the material world. The forum made little room for us to get to know each others’ work, but I found out more at http://www.stevensiegel.net and was both struck by the range of media and its familiarity via my own friendships with artists like Jeff Spaulding and  Greg Hannan.
• Victoria Romanoff is a preservationist and mixedmedia artist whose work has had a greater impact in her home town than any other artist I know. She restored her first 19th century barn in the 1970s and has since then become an advocate for local preservation. She shared with me a wonderful manifesto-like publication she co-authored on New York’s business façades as we toured her studio-office-home in a former fire station she and her partner restored. Her vigor reminds me of the work of the Canadian duo, Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe.
• Sam Bower runs something called the greenmuseum.org. Himself an artist, Sam is leading an effort to promote works that raise awareness about the environment through the creation of an online museum. I can’t speak to that too much – yet, as its all new to me… but hopefully more to come.

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I missed the June conference in Massachussetts; it looks like the Arts for Social Healing Conference was both a success and a special time for participants, with gobs of creativity.

The event was organized June 10 by the Zing Foundation – which seeks to promote connections and collaboration in the social arts domain – and sought to explore three principle domains of work:

• Arts for Reconciliation and Civic Dialogue
• Arts for Community Development
• Arts for Civic Engagement and Social Action

These themes were explored in five different kinds of conference forum formats:

• Performance Art. Local performance and music
• Group Dialogues. Informal discussions about what participants are up to, how they can help each other, etc
• Field Building Workshops. Expert-led discussions around defining the field, creating effective partnerships, funding the field, and promoting the field.
• Visual Arts Explorations. Exhibitions of what local arts groups are doing to join visual arts with social healing
• Solo Adventures. Self-guided multi-media tours through the world of social healing arts.

You can learn more about this vibrant, growing network of artists in the Northeast as well as their programs at SocialHealingArts.org.