ATTENTION! ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?

This article is fascinating! If you consider yourself to be one who finishes a task and then moves along to another, please read the article at the link above. If you're a multitasker, read, make notes, move around, check your Facebook, your SMS and then let's talk.

Why, you wonder, do I care about this neuroscience stuff anyway? The answer, friends, is that an artist communicates, eh? And, if an artist is a communicator, then it behooves the artist to know how the brain works, whether digital learning and stimuli changes brain functions, whether we are retaining the information that bombards us, etc ... You see. Not boring at all. In fact, it's fascinating and by paying attention to this information, we may become better communicators.

The added bonus for me is that I really appreciate the work of N. Katherine Hayles, a scholar and practitioner whose work I studied and cited in my MFA portfolio, the e-version of which is here. I  agree with her observation, "One of the basic tenets of good teaching is that you have to start where the students are. And once you find out where they are, a good teacher can lead them almost anywhere. Students today don't start in deep attention. They start in hyper attention. And our pedagogical challenge will be to combine hyper attention with deep attention and to cultivate both. And we can't do that if we start by stigmatizing hyper attention as inferior thinking."


I agree with Hayles because, as a teacher, I've abandoned syllabi to "start where the students are." It's been a great experience for me, and, I think, judging by student feedback, for them as well. 

Art WORKS! Opportunity for Cities.

For immediate release: January 21, 2010

Contact: Victoria Hutter, 202-682-5692, hutterv@arts.gov

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman Announces the NEA's Mayors' Institute on City Design Anniversary Initiative

MICD 25 to provide grants to transform communities through the arts and smart design

Washington, D.C. -- National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman gave a policy address today at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). In his speech, the chairman addressed the role of smart design and artists and arts organizations as place-makers and announced the NEA Mayors' Institute on City Design 25th Anniversary Initiative. This funding program builds on the accomplishments of the Mayors' Institute on City Design (MICD) over its 25-year history and reflects the program's tenets of transforming communities through design.

Chairman Landesman said, "Artists are entrepreneurs, small businessmen all, great place-makers and community builders. Bring artists into the center of town and that town changes profoundly. We know now that people do not migrate to businesses. It is businesses that will move to where they can find a skilled, motivated, educated workforce. And what does that workforce look for? In survey after survey, the answer is education and culture."

"Mayors understand that the arts mean business," stated Conference of Mayors President Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth B. Kautz. "The nonprofit arts sector alone generates over $166 billion annually in economic activity. An important element to making our cities places to attract and grow businesses, tourism, and jobs is for a community to maintain good urban design. The initiatives announced today by Chairman Landesman will help mayors to implement projects and programs locally to ensure that their communities maintain design standards that will promote business and jobs."

Application to MICD 25 is open to the 600 cities (or their designees) that have participated in the MICD since 1986 or are committed to participate in an institute in 2010. All phases of a project -- planning, development, design, implementation, and related innovative arts activities-- are eligible for support. The NEA encourages partnerships which can further the success of MICD projects, especially when involving public and private sector resources.

"The Mayors Institute on City Design has been an important part of the Conference of Mayors for the last 25 years," stated Conference of Mayors CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran. "We look forward to working with Chairman Landesman and the National Endowment for the Arts as they implement this new grant program to assist mayors in their urban design efforts."

The NEA anticipates awarding up to 15 grants ranging from $25,000 to $250,000. Guidelines and application materials are now available on the NEA website.

Since its inception in 1986, more than 800 mayors from 600 cities -- from small town to metropolises -- have participated in a session of the MICD. These mayors learn that through design and the engagement of arts and cultural activities, communities experience a celebration of place that can have a powerful impact on community sustainability and vitality. This place-making is accomplished by providing opportunities for creativity, building social networks, facilitating connections across geographic boundaries, and serving as magnets for attracting a vibrant workforce.

# # #

Chairman Rocco Landesman remarks before the United States Conference of Mayors, Thursday, January 21, 2010
Washington, DC

Thank you, Mayor Kautz. Thank you Bobn Lynch. I said to Tom Cochran yesterday - and I meant it - that I think the US Conference of Mayors is probably the most important ally the NEA can have. Especially when your ranks include such great leaders as Mayor Diaz, Mayor Hanneman, and Governor Kulongoski. Thank you for inviting me here this morning.

Art works. I mean this in a number of ways.

One of our jobs at the NEA is to fund the very best art works: paintings, sculptures, plays, ballets, operas, concerts. Our support is based on simple criteria: excellence and merit.

Art works in another way that each of you gathered here this morning know very well: it transforms people and communities. The child who is in fact left behind by programs that train teachers to train students to perform on standardized tests, that child - who has a special talent or passion or imagination - will realize his or her potential on the stage or in the studio or in the orchestra.

Even those of us who are not artists can vividly recall those special, transcendent moments, when we have been deeply affected by a love song, a dramatic twist, a breath-catching, gravity-defying climax in a dance, a spontaneous, unexpected riff in a thrilling saxophone solo. At these moments we take temporary leave from our quotidian, habitual, exigent daily life and for an instant we become more ourselves and more than ourselves. We are better.

And art makes communities better: prouder, more cohesive, individuated. We know and recognize cities by their special architecture and parks and sculpture gardens and neighborhood arts fairs. And there's no such thing as just music: there's hip-hop in LA, jazz in New Orleans, blues in Memphis, country in Nashville, soul in Detroit, and Broadway musicals in New York. Art not only moves us, it tells the world what is special about us.

Art works.

But I didn't come here at 7:30 a.m. just to wax poetic about poetry. You each have cities to run and it's your luck that you've been elected to run them at an especially bad time. Tax revenues are declining, bond markets are inhospitable, state support is shrinking every month, basic services are endangered, social instability is a lurking possibility which brings me to the third iteration of "ArtWorks."

No one has a magic bullet, certainly not I, but I would suggest that when the goal is neighborhood revitalization, economic growth and civic engagement, art works. Arts workers, and there are 5.7 million of them in this country, are part of the real economy, they not only pay taxes and buy meals and cars and send their kids to college, they attract economic activity.

Artists are entrepreneurs, small business owners all, great placemakers and community builders. Bring artists into the center of town and that town changes profoundly. We know now that people do not migrate to businesses, it is the other way around. Businesses look for a skilled, motivated, educated workforce, and will move to where that is. And what does that workforce look for? In survey after survey, the answer is education and culture.


People follow other people. To turn upside down one of my favorite lines, from the movie Field of Dreams, "If you come, they will build it."

When artists do come and form clusters and build cultural institutions, what happens? Everything good. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the work of Richard Florida about the importance of the "Creative Class" in our fast-changing economy.

For now, my reference point is recent work by Mark Stern, Susan Seifert, and Jeremy Nowak based on a ten-year study at the University of Pennsylvania of the catalytic role of the arts in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Three general conclusions stand out:

1.      The arts are a force for social cohesion and civic engagement. In communities with a strong cultural presence, people are much more likely to engage in civic activities beyond the arts. Community participation increases measurably and the result is more stable neighborhoods.

2.      The arts make a major difference in child welfare. To quiote, "Low income block groups with high cultural participation were more than twice as likely to have very low truancy and delinquency rates."

3.      Art is a poverty fighter. In the cycle I have already described, artists form clusters, cultural institutions are built, people gravitate to them, and the businesses follow. The businesses hire and the virtuous cycle continues. And arts jobs leverage other jobs. Buy a ticket and see a play. You see the actors on a stage. But behind those actors are administrators, designers, ushers, stagehands, costume makers, and just outside the building are parking lot attendants, cooks, and waiters.

I know that I'm preaching to the choir. You know all this already. You've been walking this walk long before I started talking this particular talk. City Garden in my home town of St. Louis; the public-private partnership in Peoria that is moving the art museum to the river (with, amazingly, a tax increase passed with the support of organized labor); Mayor Daley's legendary renovation of the old vaudeville houses in Chicago to create a downtown theater district; Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and the Folk Arts Festivals in Butte, Montana, and Bangor, Maine; the transformations, via the arts, of Paducah, Kentucky, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

You know all this already because you've done it. So what can I add? More than a speech, I would hope. And more than the budget of the NEA, which is - how to put this? - "not that big," would allow.
The NEA, in my view, can help in two ways. As a direct funder of urban planning and design and as a catalyst for significant, broader funding from other sources.

I'll address those briefly now.
First, the direct funding. This is the 25th anniversary of the NEA Mayors' Institute on City Design, and we are marking that anniversary with a new initiative: MICD 25.

As you all hopefully know, MICD is the NEA's partnership with the US Conference of Mayors and the American Architectural Foundation (thank you, Ron Bogle).

Since 1986, MICD has helped transform communities through smart, innovative design by preparing mayors to be the chief designers of their cities. MICD organizes sessions where mayors engage leading design experts to find solutions to the most critical urban design challenges facing their cities.

Building on this quarter century of momentum, through MICD 25, we will make up to 15 grants ranging from $25,000 to a quarter of a million dollars in recognition of the role that smart design, arts, artists, and arts organizations can play in building dynamic places where people want to live and work.

These grants will be available to any city that has had a mayor go through MICD over the past 25 years - some 600 cities - whether that specific mayor is still in office or not.

And we will be looking for cities that have partnerships among arts organizations and artists, design professionals and design centers, developers, business owners, community organizations, and private foundations.

We are looking to fund planning projects, including the planning of arts districts, the mapping of cultural assets along with their development potential, and the creation of innovative plans to maximize the creative sector.

We want to fund design projects, to enhance public spaces - such as parks, public buildings, libraries, memorials, streets, and pedestrian bridges. We will fund the revitalization of neighborhoods through the adaptive reuse of historic buildings into affordable housing for artists, studios, and work space.And we want to make sure that citizens engage with the arts by having communities transform themselves through public spaces that have cultural activities - innovative festivals, outdoor exhibitions, murals and sculptures, sculpture gardens, and waterfront art parks.

We will be able to fund any phase of a project - its planning, development, design, and implementation -- and we are looking to move quickly. Cities that are interested in applying will need to submit their statement of interest by Monday, March 15, 2010.

Finally, I am a recovering Broadway producer, and theater is by far the most collaborative of the art forms in my opinion.. That same spirit of collaboration is the hallmark of this administration, and because of that - for the first time ever - the NEA has begun conversations across all the federal agencies that might intersect with the arts, to find ways that we can work together.

If there is a single, identifiable theme in this administration's domestic policy, it is that we need to do everything we can to promote complete, diverse, sustainable, livable communities, and that the federal agencies can only meet this challenge by working together. Working in silos, sometimes at cross purposes, will achieve little. But responding collectively and collaboratively to your needs can bring real, dynamic change.

Our intention is ambitious, but simple. We will start in a few selected communities where we can make a real difference, and find ways that federal agencies, in conjunction with significant private sector commitment, can build complete communities using the arts as a fulcrum.

Some examples: Affordable artists housing might involve HUD. A city that wants to expand a limited tourist streetcar line into a real mode of public transportation connecting the arts district to the rest of the city might get a hearing at the Department of Transportation. The Department of Education might encourage arts charter schools that can transform a neighborhood. The Small Business Administration might support the entrepreneurs known as artists. And so on.

We need to hear from you and hear the needs of your cities. And the agencies will make determinations within their own guidelines and policies. It is my firm conviction that there is a current or incipient arts resource in every federal agency and that a focused, collaborative effort can produce meaningful results.

Art works.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Thank you.

Don't Take My Word for It... Read this!

Art for health's sake? I believe.

A Fine Beginning to 2010

"Conception," the painting I threatened to keep and only finished two weeks ago or thereabouts, is gone but its owners have granted me visitation rights. The sale and my warm feelings for this particular painting sparked one of those artist gab sessions between Elaine Brady Smith and me. I want to share it. Elaine is an artist/colleague/friend I turn to when I feel stuck on a piece. By the way, she was the first I turned to for feedback on "Conception" because it features collage elements and Elaine does collage better than any artist on the planet. Linda Billet was also on the consult list. Like Elaine, her personal and professional advice always causes me to think. I value Linda's eyes, her soul, her artistic gifts ... and she makes me laugh. She's positively effervescent most days.

Anyway, I am sharing our chat because Elaine said something that I know to be true and she said it in such a lovely way. Without further ado:

Me: Elaine - I think I have finally found my palette. But then again, I've gone totally "cool" with the metallic blue and purple on the funky flower piece.

Overall, there is something about earthy and warm that makes neat stuff come out of me. I am sure you understand this when I say that the warm quinacridones, raw umber and green gold cause me to feel almost magical. I watch my hands put stuff on the canvas and wonder where the heck it came from... know what I mean? Of course you do!


Elaine Brady Smith: "Oh...I just love that feeling... those moments when you look at what you have created and wonder who am I really? Those moments when you get a glimps of your own soul and it feels familiar yet so surprising. Really love being in that place!"


By the way, here's a fair rendering of "Conception" as installed in a home in Mechanicsburg, PA today.

Power is Within YOU!

This morning, as I watched the snow fall, I read an email on the subject of health and fitness. Within that email, was tucked this little gem "it all starts in the mind, and if the mind is not ready to make it happen, it's not going to happen!"

While this is certainly true of fitness, it is also true of so much more. Relationships, business ... art making and selling.

Any of us who has set a goal and worked hard to achieve it knows this to be true. Without positive perceptions and thoughts, without work, we do not achieve. The problem is that the little gem is easy to forget when it seems like the world is conspiring against us.

I am resolved to continue on my path, knowing in my deepest self that to make something come to fruition, I must believe and I must work toward the goal(s) no matter what.

Innovation Philadelphia

Just sharing an observation I have found to be true:


Creativity is essential because it is at the heart of innovation, and innovation is the growth driver and, therefore, a business imperative.”

Harold G, McGraw III

Chairman, President and CEO

The McGraw-Hill Companies

Books You Can Live Without? I Don't Think So!

The New York Times article suggests one can weed out ones' library. I don't think so. I have a difficult time loaning books. I cannot imagine bequeathing them to any other place for life.

By the way, I am promised that the physical re-construction (shelving and so forth) of my library will be completed by January 31st. Perhaps then, I will be able to unpack the more than 30 boxes of books that are stacked in our storage room, pending completion of said library.

IndieBound and proud! or Got Holiday cash to spend?

First of all, whatever you celebrate, happy holidays. I am celebrating a quiet day in my studio. It's the best of presents.

Now, I am hoping to convince you to arrange a visit to our gallery or our online shop to spend your holiday cash LOCALLY. We have art of all kinds at all prices and we have Linda Billet pendants, too. Heck, stop by just because you're curious at this place.

Meanwhile, as we climb out of this economic downturn, as the spinners call it, please do be the biggest favor and think about how things are changing. As we move to greener and smarter living, we are also going BACKWARDS  in a good way - we're going back to WALKABLE communities with vibrant downtowns. So, here's my pitch and a bit of research, with a little help from IndieBound.


When you shop at an independently owned business, your entire community benefits:
The Economy

• Spend $100 at a local and $68 of that stays in your community. Spend the same $100 at a national chain, and your community only sees $43.
• Local businesses create higher-paying jobs for our neighbors.
• More of your taxes are reinvested in your community--where they belong.

The Environment

• Buying local means less packaging, less transportation, and a smaller carbon footprint.
• Shopping in a local business district means less infrastructure, less maintenance, and more money to beautify your community.

The Community

• Local retailers are your friends and neighbors—support them and they’ll support you.
• Local businesses donate to charities at more than twice the rate of national chains.
• More independents means more choice, more diversity, and a truly unique community.

Now is the time to stand up and join your fellow individuals in the IndieBound mission supporting local businesses and celebrating independents.
IndieBound supports Independent Business Alliances around the country. To find an alliance near you, visitAMIBA or BALLE.
Learn more about IndieBound.

SALE! New Paintings

Autumn Reflection
More photos

Whimsical - Opposites Attract

December

Conception - SOLD - Jan 2, 2010

Art Works

The following excerpts from NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman's recent keynote address to grant makers in the arts may be of interest to community planners as well as to artists. 

October 21, 2009

. . . . My colleagues in Washington cringe when I use words like "pathetic" and "invisible" and "embarrassing" to describe the NEA budget, so let's just say that the funds we have to work with are "not that large." England is the European country that is the worst public supporter of the arts. Their budget? $900 million. That would translate with our population to an NEA budget of $4.6 billion. That's not going to happen here in my great grand-kids lifetimes. But there are some significant things we can do with even modest amounts of new funding.

So I'm here to tell you today that we have a plan. But since this is America, before you have a plan, you have to have a motto. And it's not "no news is good news" or the recent "A great nation deserves great art."
It's a simple, two-word declaration: "Art works."

I hope you'll soon start seeing that logo everywhere. Why "art works?" The fact is that those two words sum up everything we are, or are going to be about, at the NEA. "Art works" is a triple entendre. Of course, "art works" is a noun, which encompasses the very stuff of what we do, the achievements of artists. Great "art works" is the objective of every grant we make.

Secondly, "art works" is a sentence that describes the very activity that I mentioned earlier: art works on and within people to change – that word again – and inspire them, it addresses the need we all have to create, to imagine, to aspire to something more, to become, if only for a few moments, more than we've been. It is the most hopeful of human activities. And one of the most essential.

And finally, and maybe most importantly, art works because arts jobs are real jobs. The 5.7 million people who have full-time arts-related jobs in this country are a part of the real economy. They pay taxes and spend money. Obviously. But we're going to be making a point beyond that. Any discussion of policy for coming out of this recession, any plan that addresses economic growth and urban and neighborhood revitalization has to include the arts. We know, and we can prove, that when you bring art and artists into the center of town, that town changes.

... Create an arts scene downtown, and small towns have downtowns too, and you change the place. Artists are great place-makers, they are entrepreneurs, and they should be the centerpiece of every town's strategy for the future. We know now that businesses follows labor, not the other way around.

... Companies seek a highly skilled workforce and that workforce seeks places with a high quality of life. And at the top of the "quality of life" criteria are education and culture. Business follows people and people follow other people. To twist the great line from "Field of Dreams" (here I am with sports metaphors again), "If you come, they will build it."

...I know firsthand that great art can come from the unlikeliest of places. A few years ago, I visited Eric, Oklahoma, where a museum was being dedicated to one of my idols, the great country music songwriter and singer, Roger Miller. He wrote the music for my first show, "Big River." While driving the 140 miles from Oklahoma city to Eric, you pass the hometowns of Sheb Wooley, one of the creators of rock and roll, the songwriter Jimmy Webb, and Garth Brooks. What is in the water there? There are certainly no music conservatories, probably precious few music teachers, no colleges, no arts centers, nothing. Just an inexplicable concentration of genius.

And we need to start yesterday. Between the time of my nomination and confirmation I reached out to a number of important foundation leaders and my conversations with them were more than encouraging. If there is one thing I'm sure of, it's that there are great projects, some of them already teed up, that we can work on together and achieve some inspiring early successes.