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!

Hey everybody!

I’m at Gatwick, headed to Dublin and got to thinking its a good time to share some highlights from Dennis’ trip here in the U.S. – a wonderful experience for the two of us that many of you helped to create. Between October 20 and 28 we visited four community-based NGOs, four international NGOs/networks, a major television network, two Universities, and lots of amazing individuals doing solo projects – all of this spread across 5 states. We also got our dose of culture along the way! So here goes:

– New York –
We arrived Saturday evening in time to check in to the Millennium Hilton hotel which, if you don’t know it, sits adjacent to the former World Trade Center site.  It offered an amazing view of the site below as well as the Statue of Liberty to the south and uptown Manhattan to the north. It was a pretty awesome view of the city – can’t imagine the impression for a first-time visitor to the U.S.!

Later that night we went to see ‘Tings Dey Happen,’ a one-person play by Dan Hoyle chronicling the oil situation in the Nigerian delta region through the eyes of a range of actors – Scottish oil men, commercial sex workers, pipe workers and gangsters.  From the front row, we had a rare view of a talented, plasticine actor at work, complete with all the un-amplified sounds of his craft.  Afterward we met with a new producer at the Culture Project (http://www.cultureproject.org) at the Antique Alley where we learned more about their efforts to use theater as a tool to engage citizens more deeply in democratic life. And Dennis had his first Martini… *not* a hit.

Monday we had the chance to meet young people (teens) studying economic and political participation at the Global Citizenship High School (http://hs-gc.org/) through a weekly global affairs course taught by Global Kids staff (http://www.globalkids.org). It was a great opportunity so talk about Peace Tiles, link it to larger communication efforts like theater – specifically the Magnet Theater approach Dennis employs – and talk about Kenya over the course of two class periods.  Sounds like they might have an interest in keeping in touch as they deepen their studies around the economic and political impact of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It was my first opportunity to see Dennis in action, and he kept the questions coming!

Later in the day we went round to the Staying Alive Foundation and MTV Studios at Times Square.  We were introduced around by a new – and for now the only – staff member who was completely enthusiastic about Dennis’ work and arranged a meeting for us the next day with one of the Staying Alive Foundation board members. I was so impressed by his active interest in Dennis’ work and his ability to link the visual arts to important dimensions of youth expression-education-empowerment. I am sure Dennis made a lasting impression on this important ally in youth-focused efforts to raise awareness around HIV/AIDS in Kenya.

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Summary: I am raising travel funds for Kenyan community-based arts and theater educator Dennis Kimambo to join me in Vermont, USA during October.

This Fall Peace Tiles founder Lars Hasselblad Torres and Kenyan educator Dennis Kimambo are planning a get-together in Cabot, Vermont. The purpose of this meeting is to share how each of us uses the workshop format, discuss ways the Peace Tiles process has been used at the community level to promote social inclusion and education, and awareness-raising at the global level. At the same time, we are planning to strategize ways to strengthen the growing Peace Tiles network in Kenya.

Dennis Kimambo is a truly outstanding peer educator from Kenya who, among many other exciting things, is finding ways to use the Peace Tiles process in prison settings to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS prevention. Dennis also has a long track-record of building unique partnerships with local and international organizations to realize his education programs, including MTV and Family Health International. Our meeting in Cabot represents an opportunity to strengthen our relationship and define ways to deepen our collaboration.

I would very much like Dennis to come to Vermont at this beautiful time of year. To make this happen, we need to jointly raise about $2,300 to cover visa (Update: Dennis has secured a visa, which cost $350 and has already been covered!) and airfare as well as a modest travel stipend. I hope you will join me in helping to raise the funds necessary to bring this dynamic educator to the US for ten days in October . I am convinced that Dennis’ visit will be a wonderful learning and networking opportunity, as well as help to strengthen a Peace Tiles link the to grassroots in Kenya.

To learn more about Dennis, please visit the Omidyar Network online community. To make a donation, click on the badge below

Deepest thanks,

lars