Grants Nurture Arts Spaces and Housing

By STEPHANIE STROM

Michael Falco for The New York Times

Luis A. Ubiñas took over as president of the Ford Foundation in 2008.

The plan, called the Supporting Diverse Art Spaces Initiative, is one of several large financing projects that have resulted from a strategic overhaul of the foundation’s operations since its president, Luis A. Ubiñas, took over in 2008. He has moved the foundation in the direction of bundling its hundreds of millions of dollars in grants — which have traditionally varied widely in their focus — into large programs oriented toward specific issues. Other recent commitments include $80 million to bolster public programs for the unemployed and underpaid, $100 million for secondary education in seven cities and $50 million to help cities buy foreclosed properties.

In addition to helping arts groups build new spaces and renovate and expand old ones, the latest initiative aims to encourage the construction of affordable housing for artists in or around some of these spaces and to spur economic development in their surrounding areas. Mr. Ubiñas said that during his travels around the country he had been astonished when he would visit an arts organization and find that “all around it have developed whole neighborhoods — of artists and their families, of businesses that cater to them, of diverse people who want to live in a thriving community.”

He offered the example of the Boston Center for the Arts, organized in 1970 to provide artists with affordable studios while injecting life into the run-down South End neighborhood. “Then the Boston Ballet was added,” Mr. Ubiñas, “and performance space for other kinds of arts organizations, and what was a struggling neighborhood characterized by housing projects is a bustling community.”

This notion of the economic benefits of the arts has become increasingly popular lately among arts financers and administrators, who are keenly aware that in times of economic paucity spending on the arts is sometimes seen as frivolous. Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has been on the road frequently in recent months for a project that involves collecting information and anecdotes to help make the case to Congress and the public that the arts pay. (“Art Works” is the official slogan of the endowment’s project.)

“From the foot traffic of people coming to studios and rehearsals to the influx of people looking for a place to eat or drink after an art opening or before a show,” Mr. Landesman said in an e-mail message, “these buildings attract new people and often expendable income to neighborhoods.”

Even before its announcement the Ford Foundation had awarded a first grant under the initiative to a Minneapolis nonprofit group that builds mixed-use developments centered on moderately priced housing for artists. That group, Artspace Projects, has received more than $1 million toward, among other things, transforming an abandoned public school in East Harlem into such a development, in partnership with El Barrio’s Operation Fightback, a New York community organization.

The project is to include 72 units of housing for artists and their families and a large space that can be used for art exhibitions, cultural events, conferences and gatherings of community groups.

The initiative is also intended to help arts organizations improve or develop the management skills needed to maintain their spaces and, ideally, to turn them into revenue generators. Some of the money has been allocated for a series of seminars on marketing, planning, fund-raising and other topics related to sustaining arts centers. The seminars will be presented over two years by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

“Physical structure is not sufficient to keep an arts organization alive,” said Michael M. Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center and an expert on turning around troubled arts institutions. Mr. Kaiser has been on a 50-state tour of the United States, offering free seminars on financial management to arts groups coping with the economic crisis.

“Many organizations put up buildings without thinking about how they will pay for all those not-very-glamorous costs like lighting and air-conditioning,” he said.

Grant applications seeking money to explore and plan for construction and development will be solicited in a request-for-proposal process to be managed by Leveraging Investments in Creativity, known as LINC, an organization that works to find living and work spaces for artists, among other things, and that keeps a database of arts centers. Members of the Ford Foundation’s staff will vet proposals along with a panel of experts in economic development and urban design and planning, and award grants of up to $100,000.

Judilee Reed, executive director of LINC, said the foundation’s initiative is particularly well timed.

“I think people are beginning to understand that spaces for artists and art are more than just buildings, structures,” she said. “The way these spaces animate their communities and the relationships they have to their communities is ripe for development.”

The exhibition, “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists” is curated by 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow Cedric Tai (Detroit). Tai was awarded the opportunity to curate a show after competing in a curatorial program at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID). The program required applicants to organize a prototype exhibition... and install it in two days. The artists in Tai’s prototype show, Adrian Hatfield (Ferndale), Megan Heeres (Detroit), Justin Marshall (Hamtramck), Isaac Richard (East Detroit), Janine Surma (Hamtramck) and Ian Swanson (St. Claire Shores) were invited to make work in collaborating with the young curator during the creation and installation process. “Cedric wanted us to create hybrid works in a holistic play of action and reaction between him and the artists. The process is unique and innovative,” says participating artist Megan Heeres. According to the curator, the show, with its title taken from a quote by Marcel Duchamp, is meant to reflect the influx nature of how artists conceive new bodies of work. “These six artists were handpicked for their diversity of aesthetics, willingness to collaborate and ability to address a unique space with their work,” says Tai.

The exhibition is the first for the newly formed Whitdel Arts (located in the gallery formerly known as Ladybug Gallery). There is an opening reception to meet the artists and curator on Saturday, April 24th from 6 – 11 p.m. The exhibit runs through May 22nd, 2010. Gallery hours are 12pm to 4pm on Saturdays or by appointment.Contact info@thecaid.org or (313) 899-2243 (313) 899-2243 ext 151 for more information. To learn more about the artists and their work go to:
http://www.thecaid.org/believe.html.

On May 8th at 6pm there will be an artist walkthrough of the exhibition where visitors will learn about the artists, their work and the processes used to create the exhibition. An exhibition catalog with contributing writers Sarah Turner and Mary Fortuna will be released during the artist walkthrough on May 8th. The exhibition and artist walkthrough are free and open to the public.

During the opening reception, visitors will have an opportunity to cast their vote for the winner of the Whitdel Arts logo design competition. Anyone can enter the competition. Submissions are due by April 17th and the guidelines are at: http://www.thecaid.org/logo_competition.pdf.

GOD CLUB

Please take a moment to visit this website for the Detroit based art collective, GOD CLUB.
godclub.org

Alex Chilton, Rock Musician, Dies

By DAVE ITZKOFF

Chad Batka for The New York Times Alex Chilton of the rock band Big Star performed at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple last November.

Alex Chilton, the mercurial if influential rock musician, whose work spanned an eclectic gamut from the soul songs of the Box Tops to the multiple incarnations of his pop band Big Star, has died, The Commercial Appeal of Memphis reported. He was 59. The cause of death is believed to have been a heart attack.

The Commercial Appeal said that Mr. Chilton, who lived in New Orleans, had recently been complaining of health problems, and was taken on Wednesday by paramedics to an emergency room in New Orleans where he was pronounced dead. His death was confirmed to the Commercial Appeal by Jody Stephens, his longtime band mate in Big Star. The group was scheduled to perform on Saturday at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin.

Mr. Chilton, who grew up in Memphis, was just 16 years old when the Box Tops, in which he sang and played guitar, had a No. 1 hit with “The Letter” in 1967. When that group broke up in 1970, Mr. Chilton formed Big Star with Mr. Stephens, a drummer, and the musicians Chris Bell and Andy Hummel. The band’s first album, “#1 Record,” in 1972, did not come close to fulfilling the commercial promise of its title, nor did the followup releases “Radio City” and “Third/Sister Lovers.” But their music – gentle and introspective songs like “The Ballad of El Goodo” and “September Gurls,” and exuberant anthems like “In the Street” – had a profound impact on generations of pop and indie acts that followed.

Perhaps the surest measure of the tug that Mr. Chilton exerted on subsequent artists can be found in the lyrics of the Replacements – another malleable rock act that moved more hearts than retail units – who sang in their song “Alex Chilton”: “Children by the million / Sing for Alex Chilton / When he comes ’round / They sing, ‘I’m in love / What’s that song? / I’m in love with that song.’”

Chido Johnson’s “Let’s Talk About Love, Baby”

By Dale Sparage ⋅ February 10, 2010 ⋅

The Art of the Artist’s Book at the Oakland University Art Gallery through April 4, 2010
Valentine’s Day Event! Special informal talk with collaborating artists, Sunday, Feb. 14 from 2 to 4 p.m.

Fahrenheit 450 (Homage to Bradbury and Orwell), 2000-2010
by IAIN BAXTER&

Not one of those touchy-feely people? Don’t like to talk about love? Well, JUST GO READ A BOOK. Seriously! Read one of the books designed and made by an artist in Chido Johnson’s traveling project/installation, “Let’s Talk About Love, Baby.”

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Johnson spent his youth reading whatever he could get his hands on. As fate would have it, the rural mission small library had an abundance of romance novels. At the time the project was conceived Johnson was living and teaching in Sweden, he came to the US at a time when love was not in the air. Politics du jour were focused on the tense situation in the Gaza Strip. Johnson responded strongly to how society diminished the individuals affected by the violence by referring to them as “these people.”

Thinking about our innate ability to homogenize individuals, Johnson turned to art, and the book project specifically, to root us back into experiencing love, life and humanity directly by living rather than being fed information off a computer screen. Picking up one of the books from the beautifully crafted wooden shelves made by Johnson himself, you are swept into the precious imaginings of artists’ creations from around the world, using cassettes, tape recorders, French literature, sculpture, painting, silversmith, collage, photography and more. We’re taken on a journey into the heart and soul that leads us to what Johnson calls the “in-between space where pain and pleasure exist simultaneously … a space the word love can only begin to describe.”

Johnson’s vision is to someday have 1,000 uniquely made books, a library of love. The website created for the artists who participate in the project is an artistic labor of love. Visit http://www.letstalkaboutlovebaby. He was also chosen to be part of a conference on February 13th with “Artists” Book Reading, at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the CAA Conference in Chicago, http://www.collegeart.org/.

Johnson’s project is part of a larger show at the Oakland University Art Gallery, The Art of the Artist’s Book, works chosen lovingly by curator Dick Goody. In the exhibition’s beautifully crafted fold-out catalogue, Goody writes articulately about artists’ books:
“Walter Benjamin implied that only little-known, little-seen works of art…retain this pejoratively perceived aura. Artist’s books are therefore problematic in the sense that they evade such mass appeal…Their conversion into the realm of mass culture is almost impossible, which makes this exhibition all that more valuable; it is an exploration into the realm of intrinsically exclusive and private material.”

Participating artists range from local artists Lynne Avadenka, Ed Fraga, Susan Goethel Campbell and Dennis Jones to internationally renowned artists like Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Mathew Barney and Christian Boltanski.

The breadth of work in the show is overwhelming, plan to take your time going through this exhibit. Like a good book you will not want to put it down.

“Get Left”: New Works by Ian Swanson

Opening Reception Friday, February 19, 2010 at 6:00pm
through Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 11:00pm
at Mosaic Productions

an Swanson is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and co-founder of the Detroit-based artist run gallery Org Contemporary. He works in a variety of media and through a number of methods. He received his BFA from Wayne State University and has exhibited extensively throughout the state. He was born, raised, and currently lives and works in the Metro Detroit area.

In this series of works, Swanson explores the relationships between generational nostalgia, popular culture, spirituality, and identity. His paintings and sculptures take to task youthful excess, artistic transcendence, media saturation, and cultural sophistication freely and interchangeably, embracing their contradictory natures and the riddles and inquiries they create. He appropriates openly from whatever varied sources fit his needs, mining imagery and ideas without restriction from kitschy ephemera, to Byzantine Iconography, to sleek modern product design. He recycles, distributes, and filters these manifold influences through an elaborate personal lexicon to create works that are richly layered with both formal and conceptual nuance.

There will be an opening reception on February 19th from 6-10 pm.
Admission is free and complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served.

MOSAIC Productions is a new gallery founded by Jeanne Moore and Billy Hunter, art curators and exhibition planners whose goal is to promote artists from the metro Detroit area and get them recognized in the art communities here and elsewhere in the US.

The gallery is located at 15531 Mack Avenue in Detroit between Alter and Cadieux, directly across the street from the Hard Luck Lounge.

For more information email mosaicproduction@hotmail.com or call 313.478.6722. Also, be sure to visit Mosaic on Facebook and stay up to date with exhibition information: http://www.facebook.com

www.iancswanson.com

This is Hamtramck Disneyland, this is practically my back yard, visit this.

Address:

Klinger St., Hamtramck, MI

Directions:

Take I-75 south, get off at Caniff, take Joseph Campau north, then right on Commer -- duck through the alley between Sobieski and Klinger Streets. Watch for wood sign.