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Thanks for checking in with me while I get into the swing of a new semester.
(one of the kid’s drawings, see slide show here)
BAKER, La., Sept. 16 — One of the most common images in children’s art is the house: a square, topped by a pointy roof, outfitted with doors and windows.
So Karla Leopold, an art therapist from California, was intrigued when she noticed that for many of the young victims of Hurricane Katrina, the house had morphed into a triangle.
“At first we thought it was a fluke, but we saw it repeatedly in children of all ages,” said Ms. Leopold, who with a team of therapists has made nine visits to Renaissance Village here, the largest trailer park for Katrina evacuees, to work with children. “Then we realized the internal schema of these children had changed. They weren’t drawing the house as a place of safety, they were drawing the roof.”
Countless articles and at least five major studies have focused on the lasting trauma experienced by Hurricane Katrina survivors, warning of anxiety, difficulty in school, even suicidal impulses. But few things illustrate the impact as effectively as the art that has come out of sessions under the large white tent that is the only community gathering spot at Renaissance Village, a gravel-covered former cow pasture with high truancy rates and little to occupy youngsters who do not know when, or if, they will return home.
Even now the children’s drawings are populated by alligators, dead birds, helicopters and rescue boats. At a session in May one 8-year-old, Brittney Barbarin, drew a swimming pool full of squiggly black lines. Asked who was in the pool, she replied, “Snakes.”
read the whole story here
Marianne Weems, currently the artist-in-residence at Berkeley, is artistic director of The Builders Association, an award-winning performance and media company that uses contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. This fall, Weems and several company members will collaborate with UC Berkeley students and faculty to develop The Builders’ current work-in-progress, Continuous City. Described as “looking at the sense of ‘place’ within a global context,” the project will include a social networking site where video uploads can become part of the performance.
To participate, visit: http://www.continuouscity.org/. Look for a symposium and workshop performance at Berkeley in October.
(from DIA’s website) Ethiopia-born, Michigan-raised artist Julie Mehretu has received international critical acclaim for her complex compositions that layer varied graphic elements recalling architectural renderings, calligraphy, and graffiti. Classically trained and well versed in the history of art, Mehretu brings technical and intellectual insight to her work. At the same time, her art shows the spontaneity, gesture and energy inherent in her creative process. The City Sitings exhibition and catalog will highlight three important elements of Mehretu’s work—Citizenship & Belonging, Mobility, and Mapping—to look at the interplay among ideas, visual arts, and people’s lived experiences. A central component of the exhibition will be a site-specific installation in galleries next to Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes. Mehretu’s large-scale mural will pose a counterpoint to those by Rivera, and will likewise draw a connection to the local Detroit community. Watch this video about her work and the upcoming exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Art Daily LINCOLN, MA.-The Curators of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park are delighted to announce that Boston-based artist María Magdalena (Magda) Campos-Pons has won the Rappaport Prize, a collaborative initiative of the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation and DeCordova. The Prize, one of the largest in New England, is an annual award of $25,000 made to a contemporary artist. Campos-Pons is the eighth artist to receive the Rappaport Prize.The work of internationally recognized artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and in biennials around the world. In her many-layered bodies of work she has used photography, painting, sculpture, video, film, installation, and performance to investigate issues of identity, displacement, autobiography, matriarchy, domestic labor, race, femininity, memory, and acculturation. Campos-Pons uses aspects of personal and collective memories to reflect on her own heritage as a woman of Nigerian descent, now exiled from Cuba and living as a black woman in North America.
