Artists, Community & State Arts Organizations MUST assertively advocate direct quality of cultural presence in communities/country!

Arts Groups, Artists Face Second Year of State Budget Cuts

Faced with declining tax revenues, many states are slashing their arts funding for a second consecutive year, dealing a serious blow to arts groups and individual artists, the Associated Press reports.

According to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, states reduced their arts funding by 7 percent on average for the fiscal year that began July 1. However, the figure jumps to 14 percent when Minnesota, which this year nearly tripled its arts budget to $30.2 million, is excluded. In financially strapped states such as Arizona, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, and Florida, arts budgets fell by at least 30 percent, while in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, lawmakers are considering eliminating their state arts agencies entirely.

Indeed, over the past two years, arts budgets nationally have fallen some 20 percent, compared with 38 percent between 2001 and 2004 and 28 percent during the early 1990s, said NASAA spokeswoman Angela Han. This year, states got a bit of a boost from increases in National Endowment for the Arts and federal stimulus funding, but many state officials say the new funding won't make up for what they had lost. While states are responsible for just 2 percent of total annual arts revenue in the United States, according to Americans for the Arts, organizations often use those funds to leverage money from local governments, match federal funding, and attract private donations.

"[The cuts are] really going to have a devastating effect," said Terry Scrogum, executive director of the Illinois Arts Council, which saw its budget fall by 51 percent this year, to $7.8 million. "We're going to try to maintain as many of the operating grants as we can. They're obviously going to be at a reduced level. Others will be whittled down or suspended."

Twiddy, David. “Arts an Easy Target as Many States Cut Budgets.” Associated Press 8/29/09.

and this reader's comment: "Maybe we should just stop taking state and federal money and dispel the illusion that any govt. in the US significantly supports art or artists. Maybe then the public would stop complaining about misuse of tax money and take responsibility for funding art on themselves."
9/2/2009 10:17AM

A Room of Her Own Foundation

A Room Of Her Own such an incredible commitment this non-profit has, to the works of women writers! Discovering the founding women of AROHO and their work on behalf of women writers is enlivening for me! The discovery of my own tribe; women who think and act as I do and as I would like to in the world. I have spoken this dream for twenty years to my daughter while I raised her and made my own art!
Today, I received a notification from the Associate Director, Tracey Craven-Gras that my work will indeed be hanging in the AROHO cyberspace gallery amid the company of women artists already featured there! It is my privilege to post this recognition and invite you to visit this online resource for women in the arts. Consider making a donation while you are there! (Scroll down until you see my name: Kerrie B. Wrye, under the two images of my paintings that are included in the gallery there_ thanks!) Spelling details on my name and the paintings' working titles to be added soon!

This incredible event just in, from art:21!

ArtPrize: An Experiment in Decentralized Curation and Competition
August 27th, 2009
by Kevin Buist, ArtPrize

Maya Lin’s (Season One) “Ecliptic” in Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Production still from the Art:21 episode, Identity, © Art21, Inc. 2001.)

There’s been a fair bit of talk lately about how the recession is affecting artists, the art market, and art institutions. And with good reason, pocket books are tight everywhere, and most art, no matter its intended relation to market forces, can’t exist without some kind of capital. It’s not a coincidence that this is also the era of the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, and the like are facilitating massive realtime networks that are free (as long as you’re connected). These networks become a conduit of exchange for new kinds of goods, and value is now being measured in new ways. Stock prices still matter, but Google rankings are starting to matter, too. Content is aggregated by algorithms that calculate value from the unconscious input of millions of users.

How does this new method of exchange and valuation affect the art world? If social networks naturally become markets, placing value on instantly exchanged bits of info, what would happen if we gave that value a monetary correlation, apart from a traditional marketplace? I’ve been working to help develop an new art event that seeks to do exactly that. ArtPrize is a radically open art competition. The annual event will run September 23 to October 10 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Hundreds of artists from around the world have created online profiles, which are a cross between an artist bio and an open-ended proposal. Hundreds of property owners, institutions, and public spaces in downtown Grand Rapids have volunteered to open their space to artists. We’ve built ArtPrize.org to enable these artists and venues to connect to one another, without a central curator or jury. If that weren’t unorthodox enough, the winner of the cash prize (currently the world’s largest, at $250,000, with additional prizes for the rest of the top ten) will be decided by public vote. Anyone can come to Grand Rapids, register to vote for free, and rank each entry with either an up or a down vote, online or by text message.

ArtPrize is an experiment that seeks to utilize the connectivity that social networking allows to build an art event from the ground up. We could have made an online art contest, where everyone uploads a .jpg and users click to vote while in their pajamas. We did not want to do that. We believe that the true value of most works of art are experienced during a physical or social encounter. Incentivizing these encounters in the city of Grand Rapids has tremendous civic value. Artists are tuning in to the possibilities inherent with this level of direct engagement with the city and audience. There are exciting projects coming that push the boundaries of how art interacts with social structures, architecture, and an overall sense of place.
Jimmy Kuehnle, ArtPrize participant. Stuffed Full, installation in Kyoto, Japan, 2008.

For those who can’t make it to Grand Rapids this fall, there will still be plenty of ways to track the event online. During the first round of voting, which takes place in the first week, visitors to ArtPrize.org will be able to track which artists are taking the lead. On October first, the top ten from the general vote will be announced, and final the winners will be announced October 8, after the second round of voting. To keep up during the event, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and our blog. It’s important to us that the event is grounded in a physical location, but we’re also eager to see how the discussion spurred by ArtPrize spreads across the web.

The idea of an incentive is central to ArtPrize. The prize and the vote primarily do one thing: they deliver an engaged audience. To many, this is a scary prospect. Who are all these people, and what do they know about art? Who are they to say what’s good and what isn’t? The voting audience will certainly be diverse, ranging from experts to complete novices. The event will likely create a vacuum of critical art knowledge, people may not have the language, or the art-historical context, to process what they’re seeing. The great thing is that this vacuum can be perfectly filled by educators, artists, and critics. Experts work tirelessly to supply cultural capital, we’re looking to create a demand. We’re working to produce educational programming and resources, but we’re really excited to see what pops up on its own. How will artists advocate for their own works? How will critics make an argument for what should get votes and what shouldn’t? What happens when friends go to the bar after looking at art and argue about what they voted for and why?

Kurt Perschke’s RedBall Project, shown above from the June 2009 installation in Toronto, will come to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize. (Photo by Flickr user inastral.)

ArtPrize has been the target of some criticism, and that’s not surprising. Some assume that putting on an art contest without a jury is a referendum against traditional art world practices, or even an affront to the very idea of curation. This is not the intent. Curators, juries, galleries, and other art institutions are playing a large role the formation of the event, each presenting a collection of entries that reflect their own sensibilities and expertise.

There are two interrelated questions that drive much of the thinking behind ArtPrize. One, how do works of art create and maintain value given the current state technological and cultural progress? This is a question Walter Benjamin began to ask with his 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. We’re way beyond the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but new versions of the same question keep coming up. And the second question, who decides what that value is? What, or who, is the art world, if such a thing can be concretely defined? And who is the public? How do social media technologies, with their ability to level all users to a single node in a network, affect these distinctions? ArtPrize doesn’t claim to know the answers to these questions, but we are doing everything we can to energize the debate.

Kevin Buist is an artist, freelance writer, and Director of Artist Relations for ArtPrize, he lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI. He received a BFA from Calvin College, and attended the New York Center for Art and Media Studies. He has written about film for SpoutBlog and co-produced FilmCouch, a Webby-nominated podcast. Before helping launch ArtPrize, he ran Calvin College’s 106 Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI. He can be found on the web at kevinbuist.com and on his blog, The Porcupine School of Poetry.


How might you reproduce this idea in your community?

Why I Make Art!

Art has been my lifelong companion/catalyst supporting the wellbeing of my soul; I was seven years old when this very refined alliance first occurred.
Later in my early thirties I revisited this peculiar, childhood epiphany again, to examine specifically, the relevance that art truly has in my own life. Even more specifically, what value my life has to the whole of humanity, identified as artist! And as a result of looking back, to ask what kind of artist, may have been meant in that early childhood epiphany.


With greater understanding for the value of nurturing my soul and developing my own identity through creative expression, this gifted refined ally is now a deeply integrated internal resource, out of which I can envision facilitating, creative somatic-centered healing empowerment with others, in the not-so-distant future. How did this parallel of disciplines occur, you might ask? Therein lies this solo artist's lifelong journey thus far! Do ask.

For me, the first step toward the goal of creative somatic-centered empowerment work with others, is to apply to an MFA program that fits me.
How does a somatic-centered direction of pursuit, fit into a soul's well being in art_ again, you might ask? Ah-h, put that way, things may make some sense intuitively, and therein lays this solo artist's lifelong journey thus far! Really, it’s ok! Do ask.

Keeping a steady focus on current practical steps that I see are needed, I invite you to examine the thesis project I take into the MFA environment of study. Find it posted to Fractured Atlas, under my member account/project page; Timeless Rhythms.

Can I share with you that lately, from what I read in the media, it's time for those creatives such as myself to co-lead what solutions may come from looking differently, into what is possible for our country from here.
I propose that journeying through the personal toward an inner clarity and stability, plays a creatively empowering role for individual solution-building; a creatively empowering role in overall health and well being in this life in general, and in the imminent times ahead for all. Journeying the path of personal examination, playfully experienced through creative Somatic Psychology, can be a most solid way for kinesthetic types to show up to life: with inner coping skills that are creatively developed! We all have to do some training in this life for what we are called to do, yes?! Why should appropriate self-examination at the right time in life, be any different?
Intelligently playing with the prospects of a self-commitment of this nature and magnitude, is what I am reaching to offer and facilitate with others, who resonate with an examination of the intuitive intelligence of their own physical medium, over the long-term of life!


In the interim intent-of-accomplishment of these (partnering) goals (art and somatics), I invite you to support this artist-with-life's study at this time, with a tax deductible donation to my project.

What questions do you have about the future in general? How do you see yourself getting there? Dialog with me; let's see what comes of the contact!
I invite you to stay in contact with my progress over the duration of reaching the overall goals of combining Somatic Psychology practices with the empowering expression of art. The first personal step to getting there, is through the portal of the creative. Empower yourself; follow my progress!

L'art brut

Josef Hofer, People; Mixed media on paper 2006; 42 x 30 cm

A cool video about this art form on Bablegum can be found here! Do check THIS out!!

WOW!! keep up! The boom of the Artist is happening NOW!!

Fractured Atlas (Liberate the Artist) has just launched a hosted web-channel through YouTube's Non-Profit Program. As you peruse the Fractured Atlas webpage, find my 501c3 sponsored project here, scroll down to: "Timeless Rhythms," and donate, tax-free, online, directly to my project! Thank-you!

Red Hen Press Interview

Take a listen!