[Organization, project ideas, newsletter, webinars, and national resources] US Department of Art & Culture:is a people-powered department—a grassroots action
network inciting creativity and social imagination to shape a culture of
empathy, equity, and belonging.
- Citizen Artist Pledge:
CITIZEN ARTIST PLEDGE:
I DO HEREBY JOIN WITH THE USDAC IN ASSERTING THAT:
- Access to culture is fundamental human right;
- Culture is created by all and thus should represent all;
- Cultural diversity is a social good and the wellspring of free expression;
- A deep investment in creativity is critical to cultivating empathy and social imagination;
- Art and artists are powerful forces for accomplishing social change and strengthening social fabric.
AS A FOUNDING CITIZEN ARTIST, I PLEDGE TO ALL OTHERS AFFIRMING THESE
VALUES MY CREATIVITY, INTEGRITY, AND COMMITMENT TO CULTIVATE THE PUBLIC
INTEREST IN ART AND CULTURE AND CATALYZE ART AND CULTURE IN THE PUBLIC
INTEREST.
[Resource site & weekly calendar] Plug In PDX: a guide for folks wishing to: 1. fight against bigotry of the alt right,
fascists and that buried in each and everyone of us. 2. to win new
found liberation.
https://pluginpdx.org/
[Event] First 100 Days: ORGANIZE. - This SATURDAY, January 28th. A day of workshops to connect artists and art students to existing activist platforms and galvanize creative resistance.
http://first100dayspdx.weebly.com/january-28-organize.html
[Book] Re:Imagining Change (book) provides resources, theory, hands-on tools, and case studies on narrative-based strategies for change and amplifying progressive causes in popular culture.
Available here: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/reimagining-change
Sojourn Theatre, founded in 1999, is
an award-winning ensemble theatre company comprised of 15 artists who
live in 8 cities and make performance together around the nation.
Background: - 1992: Michael Rohd begins doing "Hope is Vital" work - 1999: Sojourn forms, focus on documentary theatre - 2001 - receives grant from Animating Democracy to team up with city planners in Lima, OH - 2003 - 2005: Focus more on site-based work, spectacle, and workshops as part of performance practice (community research) - 2008-09: Process becomes performance, models of display are opportunities (On The Table) - Current: Focus on longer-term investigation and investment Sojourn Theatre is a program of Center for Performance and Civic Practice. Its mission
is “to design bold opportunities for participation and unforgettable
experience, with rigor and striking physicality.”
Sojourn collaborates towards a vision of healthy communities and functional democracy.
Sojourn acts as a laboratory for exploring arts-based community-engaged practice across the United States by:
Developing new models of artistic practice, creation, production, distribution and replication/adaptation;
Activating the Sojourn Theatre ensemble as leaders, makers, educators and ambassadors;
Building projects that increase the visibility of this field of work in arts and non-arts sectors.
Projects
BUILT
Project Core Question: Where will we live? & Who are we responsible for?
In the course of the
75-minute performance, audience/participants talked to their neighbors,
master-planned cities from scratch, and delineated their own priorities
through a series of critical questions too often left to a city’s
planners, rather than its residents.
With its unusual theatrical approach to amplifying civic dialogue, BUILT
engaged local residents, including those from areas geographically or
socioeconomically underrepresented in city planning decisions, and
provoked them to think about how their communities are planned, and how
they might take more active roles in that process. BUILT also
generated strong interest and enthusiasm among professionals from
Portland’s city planning agency, who incorporated some of the strategies
that the game proposed to have the public engaged in discussions about
land use and resources. Video from performance at TBA at PICA in 2008: https://vimeo.com/5337210 (see 4:15, for instance) HOW TO END POVERTY IN 90 MINUTES
Sojourn Theatre’s How to End Poverty in 90 minutes (with 199 people you
may or may not know) is a devised, community specific participatory
theatre event that explores issues of poverty and democracy by
allocating $1000 from the box office at every performance to a local
organization that fights poverty. The audience decides where the money
goes.
ISLANDS OF MILWAUKEE
A city-wide process blending engagement, performance,
installation, participatory research, cross-sector partnerships, online
activity and in-home encounters.
Project Core Question: How do we create a more connected Milwaukee inclusive of all residents as they age?
- "Artistic housecalls:" The Arts At Home/IoM Team worked on the pilot project from 2012-2014.
We created partnerships and built systems to bring meaningful engagement
to elders living alone. Artists offered "artistic housecalls" and
built on/with the creativity of the elders to make radio segments,
performances and art installations. See our report and the
collaborations page for stories of all our incredible encounters! - Crossings: Street performances to create a city that sees & stops for pedestrians.
- Exhibit/performance/installation at Milwaukee City Hall
CPCP defines Civic Practice as arts-based partnership
work that is developed in service to the needs of a partner organization
or agency that does not have an arts-centered mission. Artists engage
in this work with regularity, but the work isn’t always visible- not
within larger community conversations, and not within artistic
disciplines themselves. There isn’t a shared vocabulary, and artists and
communities can end up working in isolation, often without access to
networks of support and opportunities to develop their own practice.
