MixedMedia

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!

In memoriam

Perhaps more later…

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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Today I’m headed to Ithaca, New York to give a talk, run a workshop and in other ways participate in Earth Day celebrations that take place there each year through the Center for Environmental Sustainability (CES) which will sponsor,”GREENING THE ARTS.”  They’ve asked me to be part of an informal panel on Friday morning exploring the questions, “What IS ‘green’ art” and “Why is it important”?

Other panelists will hopefully include Liesel Fenner, Coordinator of Americans for the Arts’ Pubic Art Network; Sam Bowers, founder/director of greenmuseum.org; 2 local Ithaca artists who have curated ‘green’ art shows; and the director of Cornell University’s art museum. After the panel session, folks will be invited to form lunch groups to come up with their own definitions – and then to return for an afternoon Open Space aimed at generating action plans both for local next steps and for the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. We’ll also do a Peace Tiles workshop that Saturday.

This should be really cool. There’s only one glitch, which is that I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly “green” artist, neither in outlook nor technique. Put differently, this is not the standpoint from which I approach my artwork, although I can see many intersections. Which is why I’m excited: the connections to sustainability, development, and important frameworks like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Now these I can get excited about.

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April, T.S. Elliot famously wrote, is the cruelest month. Like an inconstant lover perhaps, at least in the northern climes, it teases with hints of warm days to come, then retreats to separate quarters, letting the cold slip back again. Even without the early Crocus and Skunk Cabbage, the sweet smell of burning wood and steaming Maple vats mingles with the sour earth’s decay that begins its thaw.

So with that lovely imagery, perhaps its good to write about some of the goings on – it feels like years since I’ve sat to gather my thoughts. But reading through the regular musing of my high school classmate Ben Byerly, I was inspired to sit and muse a while this early day, and so here I offer April’s “downdate.”

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