Solar Farm Doubles as Art Installation

Beautiful and breathtaking- you must check out this post from inhabitat.com on Light Sanctuary, designed by Martina Decker and Peter Yeadon.

Image from DeckerYeadon.com.

DATS 2010: Food for Thought update

DESIGN, ART, TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM

An Annual Piedmont Event About Important Ideas

2010: FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Sawtooth Center, Winston-Salem

October 9, 10, 11

(This notice covers my contribution to DATS 2010. Click here for the official site.—Andrew Young)

My paid role is to insure multicultural and alternative viewpoints through the creation of venues and other forums at this year’s event. Food is about culture. It is one of those rare, big tent themes in which everyone in the Piedmont has an interest. Everyone can bring their experience and know-how.
The best gardener I knew was my grandmother. The most flexible cook I knew was my mom. Both were frugal and could do a lot with a little. In my view, those are high standards for designers, artists, and technology innovators, whether in good economic times or bad. (more)
Why I proposed food as the DATS theme (more)
Food Geography (more)
Participate in a venue (more)

Recreation of a UN shelter, food and water at Festival Park.

Digital Arts & Technology Symposium 2010

There is a bit of information available on the Center for Design and Innovation's website regarding the food-focused Digital Arts & Technology Symposium (DATS) scheduled for this fall, and Greensboro artist and blogger, Andrew Young, has plenty of brainstorming available. Check out his blog to get psyched for DATS 2010.

RECYCLE LABYRINTH SWAP-A-THON

Learned of this cool community art partnership between Piedmont Craftsmen and SECCA via local blog, Life in Forsyth. Scheduled for Saturday, August 14 from 2 to 5 PM. Visit Life in Forsyth for more information!

Littoral: Redefining Art

While trying to decipher the meaning of a Lockheed Martin ad I read about in the Washington Post this morning, (It reads, "The shape of littoral dominance has a familiar look." Hmm...) I found a United Kingdom organization, Littoral, whose mission has very little to do with seashores and coasts but everything to do with community arts.

Littoral is "a nonprofit arts trust which promotes new creative partnerships, critical art practices and cultural strategies in response to issues about social, environmental and economic change."

Most of their work, collected under the title New Fields, examines and promotes the relationship between arts and agriculture.

Image from Littoral website.

A particularly unique project involves a collaboration between trade unions and artists called Routes. Littoral puts it best: "Invoking the historical links between the arts and the trade union movement, the project was framed to encourage the unions to rethink their cultural role as promoters of cross community unity in post-settlement Ireland."

In 2003, Littoral learned that "Transport House" (image below) , the trade union headquarters building, would be sold. Transport House was very important both historically and architecturally. Littoral led two artists to document the history of the building and propose future uses (such as a cultural and community arts center for working people) Again with Arts Council funding, two artists were employed to document the history of the building, and its possible future use as a cultural and community arts centre for working people. Visit Littoral's website for an extensive and captivating explanation of what has followed the initial proposal.

Photo of Transport House by Frankie Quinn.

Somebody Visit The EnergyXChange!

About 2.5 hours west of the Piedmont, the EnergyXChange is a center that uses landfill gas (methane and other gases that escape from landfills) as an energy source for a clay studio and a glass studio. Artists can do residencies at the EnergyXChange. The complex includes four greenhouses, three cold frames, a retail craft gallery, a visitor center, along with the two aforementioned studios.

And EnergyXChange encourages group visits, which is why I am emploring you to visit and tell me about it, so that I can post your journal entry here.

Image from EnergyXChange website.

My Art Generates Power. What Can Your Art Do?

Via the highly informative green design blog, inhabitat.org, I learned of a call for artists for the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). LAGI describes itself as a program that brings together...

artists, architects, scientists, landscape architects, and engineers in a
first of its kind collaboration. The goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative
is to design and construct a series of land art installations across the United
Arab Emirates that uniquely combine aesthetics with clean energy generation.

LAGI hopes to create a tourist destination around the ability to view these sculptural projects that also generate energy.

LAGI is currently holding an international design competition in which design teams can choose between three different sites, one of which is shown below. LAGI intends to see winning concepts through to construction with the artist team that proposed the design. Want to create a permanent land art structure in Abu Dhabi? Get drawing!

Image from www.landartgenerator.org.

Wake Forest University Students Design Bottle Tower for Earth Day

Wake Forest University students are busy erecting a tower made of 2,000 plus bottles for Earth Day. This project, which reuses old plastic bottles, will serve as a "pledge collector" at the Annual Piedmont Earth Day Fair on Wake Forest's campus. Visitors to the fair will be invited to write down an environmental pledge and insert the piece of paper into the tower. To get an idea of what such a structure might look like, Wake Forest students have provided pictures from past examples of bottle towers, which you can check out on their facebook page for the project.

Making Sense Out of Garbage: Artist Sayaka Ganz

Every so often, green design blog Inhabitat features incredible examples of environmental art that I immediately can't help but repost here on the Piedmont Triad Initiative for Community Art's own blog. Visit Inhabitat for a short profile of artist Sayaka Ganz, who travels the world, absorbing different cultures and making art out of trash.

From Ganz's website:

Stream

Sparkle

Flare

Convergence I

Local Notable Blog Posts

From the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership

From ARTStem

Social Innovation Fund: Matching Grants

The Social Innovation Fund, a new public-private collaboration created by the 2009 Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, is designed to create new knowledge about how to solve social challenges in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development and school support, and healthy futures, and to improve our nation’s problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities.

Community organizations will receive financial support from intermediaries on the order of no less than $100,000 per year for three to five years, as well as strategic support in areas such as management, and evaluation. Community organizations must also provide a 1:1 cash match for the total amount—Federal and private dollars—they receive from the intermediaries.

The Notice of Funds Available is scheduled to release in February 2010.

What an excellent opportunity to venture into a well-funded project that solves community issues through the arts. Not too many details are available right now on the Corporation for National & Community Service website, but be sure to check back in February.

New Year's Resolution: Utilize the Art Roads and Farm Trails of NC

Having stumbled upon a motivating website today called Homegrown Handmade, I decided to make a New Year's resolution to better support and understand North Carolina culture. Homegrown Handmade is a collaboration of artists, farmers, and rural creative entrepreneurs. It promotes sustainable tourism in rural areas of North Carolina through self-guided driving tours. It's an economic and tourism development project, but it also helps us understand how agriculture, rural living, and art have all come together to form specific and different pockets of North Carolina culture.

When one visits Homegrown Handmade's website, you are given the option of exploring one of three trails: Foothills, Piedmont, or Coast. Each "trail" is really a wealth of information on festivals, art studios, wineries, and farms to help a potential tourist to plan a trip.

Here is a long weekend trip I've already planned from the Foothills Trail for June:

Starting out Friday, leisurely drive to the Mount Airy Fiddlers' Convention. This weeklong festival is filled with old-time music performances and free demonstrations by skilled musicians. Spend the day listening, dancing, and visiting. Saturday morning, visit the Downtown Cinema Theatre for the a.m. taping of the longest-running bluegrass radio program in the United States, "Saturday Merry-Go-Round." Saturday afternoon, take a short drive to Westfield to kayak at the Hanging Rock Outdoor Recreation Center. That evening, enjoy the sunset view and listen to MORE bluegrass and folk music at Round Peak Vineyards. End the trip with a scenic drive back down 89.

That's just one trip of so many across the state. If you're interested in planning a trip, Homegrown Handmade has a great guidebook available here.

Study Community Arts: Auburn's Rural Studio

Back in the summer of 2007, I was lucky enough to get a little exposure to several former students of Auburn University's Rural Studio who were installing a public art piece in Arlington, Virginia titled CO2LED.

Rural Studio is a sought-after undergraduate program of the Auburn University School of Architecture. What most drew my attention was their outreach program. Students focusing in outreach work to further the $20K House, an experiment in innovative affordable housing. Students work out the question of what type of house can be designed for $10,000 in materials plus $10,000 in labor. Here is Version 3 of the house built in 2007.

The Rural Studio has encouraged creative ventures from many of its students, including the project CO2LED. Here are images I took while the piece was being constructed. It ran off of solar power and repurposed old water bottles into a sort of lightbulb, resembling the tops of reeds.

Artist Jack Sanders constructing CO2LED, 2007.

Close-up of water bottles, 2007.

ACCORD Grant Concept Proposals Due in Mid-November

What is the ACCORD Initiative?

ACCORD is an acronym for Artists Contributing to Civic-Oriented and Responsive Democracy. It is a project of the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, which, according to Kenan Institute materials, "sparks dialogue about the essential role of the arts and civic-minded artists within a thriving democracy.

It is an effort to encourage collaboration between nonprofits, community organizations, charitable groups, and governmental agencies with local college students to create arts-based projects that address community needs and/or social issues.

Organizations can apply for grants for up to $2,5oo to complete this type of local, collaborative project. Concept proposals are due November 19, 2009. The most important thing is for organizations to identify the social issue they would like to address.

Please e-mail Amanda Balwah at amandab@kenanarts.org for more information on guidelines. Training workshops are available for organizations who would like assistance in writing their grant proposals.

NC Museum of Art Responds to the Environment

The North Carolina Museum of Art Museum Park is a 164 acre stretch of woodlands, trails, creeks, and outdoor art pieces. At the park, visitors experience both art and the environment together and gain an understanding of how the two can respond to each other. Some of the pieces even seem to have a moral message about where items of everyday use, such as newspapers in the following piece, come from and how these relate directly to our environment. The piece, made of newspapers, will eventually decay, becoming a natural part of the cycles of the forest.

The park is also interwoven with information on the local ecology, and the museum works to preserve the natural environment.

"To see Jennie smile" by Steven Siegel. www.ncartmuseum.org

Below is an example of art that is inherently a part of the natural environment. "Pooktre art" by Peter Cook and Becky Northey benefits the environment by absorbing greenhouse gases and fostering other natural cycles of nature. It would be interesting to see what other artists have done that utilize growing, living things to create art.

Pooktre by Peter Cook and Becky Northey. www.pooktre.com

U.S. Artists' Response to Climate Change

Activity in community arts does not have to be introduced by artists.

Years ago, Bill McKibben, renown environmentalist and author, called for U.S. artists to focus on climate age and environmental issues in their work. Artists answered his call. Recently, McKibben discussed his favorite environmental artists in the U.S. in Grist, an online snarky-but-fun environmental newsletter.

A personal (nonlocal) favorite of mine is James Griffioen who documents nature's resilience in response to man-made structures. Check out his series titled "Be Patient."

Apartment Building, Detroit 2007 by James Griffioen
Jamesgriffioen.net

Global Examples of Environmental Art Can Create Local Change

As humans effect on the environment becomes more and more apparent, environmental art has moved from landscape painting to socially engaging art with vivid messages on climate change.

I've heard so much buzz about environmental art lately, I'd like to put forth a few things over the next couple days that I've come across, both near and far. We'll start with the farthest away and move closer. The following piece is located in Beijing, a place on the other side of the world. The piece is a tool of communication on the future of China's population. In my own discoveries, as I move closer to the Triad, the lessons to be learned from these artists and activists become more concrete. I've realized that environmental art can function as more than a tool of communication; it can also be an active method for improving our local ecology.

Beijing


I ran across this piece at one of my favorite blogs, Inhabitat. To prepare for this year's Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, the TckTckTck campaign positioned 100 sculptures of children carved in ice to represent the 1 billion lives that will be lost in China due to water shortages. Ice sculptures sounding cheesy as well? Check out photos of this piece, and you will see it is anything but. It is actually very beautiful and direct.


Here is a video by The Guardian which features some nice shots of the piece.