During a brief family holiday along the Erie Canal last week, I had the pleasure of stopping in at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative. What a thrill! Why? Several reasons:

•  Its a bright open physical space in the heart of a city ready for a rebound. Artists know what that feeling is like: a kinetik sense of opportunity that can be won or lost at any moment.
• A great show on the walls. Richard Rockford is a mixed media and assemblage artist with a knack for subtle colors, balanced proportion, and ingenious mystery.
• A working, rentable printshop crammed with manual and automated machinery dedicated to keeping the craft and art of book- and print-making alive.
• A schedule of workshops and open studio sessions through which artists, crafters, and the curious can learn basic and advanced printing techniques and more.
• A tidy shop topped off with papers, cards, notebooks and  more titillating to the fingertips, staffed by knowledgeable staff in love with the printed letter.

Overall, I was enlivened by the sense of possibility and exploration at the relatively small corner space. Buffalo you must know is a city that peaked maybe in the ’20s and ’30s, immortalized by the contributions of canonical American creatives Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmstead, Charles Burchfield and many others. One can’t help wondering on arrival, “What the hell happened - where’d the vision go?” I have a belief that, like with the Roycrofters and the Arts and Crafts movement, these traditions emerge slowly, of a synchrony of many visions that seek to reconcile an impulse to shape the future with an instinct to draw forward gleanings from the past. Anyway, that’s more philosophy than I’m used to. But my point is that efforts like the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative are inspiring because I believe they are similarly inspired - a recognition that through preservation, inspiration and reinvention we can build great movements. I wish them much success and will look forward to any opportunity to revisit. I hope you will too!

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 

Two founder-centered arts organizations, which each address the impact of violence on youth in different ways, are profiled in this month’s issue of ODE Magazine. One, founded in Los Angeles on principles of forgiveness and victim reconciliation, works with youth already deeply involved in the cycle of gang violence. The other, founded and operating in Cape Town, centering its activities on the needs of women and children who are victims of  abuse, violence and exploitation. The Tariq Khamisa Foundation (TKF), born out of the grief and generosity of a father who lost a son to a senseless act of violence. That was 12 years ago. Today, the foundation reaches millions of students in California with a message of hope, forgiveness and personal responsibility through programs that teach peace. Through community service projects, the TKF Foundation encourages children and youth to strengthen their ties to community.In South Africa, Angela Rackstraw founded Community Art Therapy after seeing children directly affected by gun violence playing among the dead victims. Her work, carried out in a shipping container structure at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Nyanga, a township skirting Cape Town, aims to bring healing to as many women as she can on the monthly income she scrapes together from individuals and foundations.I can imagine Peace Tiles being a resource for groups like these, offered as a tool to reach shared awareness-raising, therapy,  self-advocacy and research goals.

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DESIGN 21: Social Design Network
Better design for the greater good

Great looking announcement that was passed along today. The sponsors, PBS and the creators of the television show Design Squad, are looking for some sport. Hook up with some yung’uns and pitch in - looks like fun!

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