Verge

NOMAD Invasion!

Spartan Trailer, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Children with Evelyn Serrano’s NOMAD Lab Art Project toured Sam’s trailer to inspect the progress since his last visit to their neighborhood in December.

Sam and friends gave neighborhood children a tour of the trailer during the Valle del Oro Neighborhood Festival, held May 6th at an apartment complex near Cal Arts. The festival was a chance to highlight the art work of  at-risk children, age 6-14, who participate in the NOMAD Lab Art Project.  Trailer Trash partners with the NOMAD Lab, exploring the importance of home and community through art.

In a public art “lab”,  the children made signs stating their views on the ingredients necessary for a safe and happy neighborhood.  In another lab they designed furniture for the inside of Sam’s trailer and gave pointers how to make it a welcoming place for young people.

Artist and teacher Evelyn Serrano directs the volunteer-run NOMAD Lab with help from Cal Arts students and others. The City of Santa Clarita is one of the project’s boosters and helps with the cost of materials.  In an email thanking the project’s teachers and helpers, Evelyn described  how happy the children were  to put their art (music, drawing, story-telling and photography) on display at festival:

Children at the Valle del Oro Neighborhood Festival watch as NOMADS receive certificates for participating in art projects held throughout the school year on the grounds of their apartment complex.

Test run on an experimental design for modular furniture inside the trailer.

Nomad signage filled in the blanks: "A good home is....", "A safe neighborhood is..."

I was at the verge of tears more than once during the festival. I was just so very proud of the young people and of the work we have accomplished this year. I can’t tell you how many of them came to me pleading that we have class THIS Saturday, that they can’t wait till September…

They have made friends in the program, they have become advocates of the program and understand the importance of it.

A NOMAD reads one of his stories while Evelyn Serrano holds the mike.

The girls shocked me with their impromptu speeches [saying why they like the NOMAD Project].  How proud I was! To see them exercise their collective and individual voices with power and fearlessness. How energized I felt after witnessing them. And seeing the boys so proud of their work (and rightly so).

My best wishes for an extraordinary summer.

Lots of love, Evelyn

Stay Tuned: On June 4th the NOMAD kids will exhibit their signs in a show called “ Slanguage” at a gallery in Willmington, CA.  For more information, check out the blog for the NOMAD Lab Art Project.

This post is part of a series documenting Sam Breen’a Spartan Restoration Project. Please see his first post here and check out the archive here. The CSPA is helping Sam by serving in an advisory role, offering modest support and featuring Sam’s Progress by syndicating his feed from http://spartantrailerrestoration.wordpress.com as part of our CSPA Supports Program.

Native Flags project in Miami

news, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Miami-based artist Xavier Cortada will present his artwork Native Flags at the Verge Miami Art Fair Dec. 3–6. The goal of the project is reforestation and awareness of global warming and its impact on political jostling for control of the Northwest Passage. Cortada planted his green flag at the North Pole this past summer, essentially claiming the territory for reforestation rather than global shipping routes.

More about the project at the ecoartspace blog and xaviercortada.com.

Go to Eco Art Blog

RSA AGM: Rethinking the community garden

news, RSA Arts & Ecology, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

grow your ownTomorrow is the RSA’s AGM; the house will be full of RSA Fellows here to discuss the organisation, its future and the new charter. We’ve decided to shamelessly exploit the presence of all these experts being in a single place on a single day by running a series of brain-picking seminars.

I’m doing one with the excellentConnected Communities project which gives me a chance to start talking about something that I’ve been working on for a little while now. Back in the spring I was researching the subject of artists working in productive gardens, talking to people like Fallen Fruit, Amy Francheschini – and more recently Clare Patey of Feast. There is a huge enthusiasm around for this stuff. How can we create new ways to garden? How can we create new places to garden?

That connected with an idea that was put forward by a Fellow and so we’re now on the verge of launching our own project, Rethinking the community garden. The recession has meant that there is a lot of land – particularly building land – which is on hold in cities right now. How can we change the idea of gardens as permanent fixtures to something that’s more flexible, something that maximises land use throughout a city turning semi-derelict land into an asset?

We want to attach that to Fellow’s expertise and experience to make the project come to life in New Cross Gate, South London, an area that Connected Communities are already working in. If you are an RSA Fellow and you want to come along to this, or to any of the other seminars, it’s not to late to register. We need bright heads to brainstorm along the the following lines:

  • How can we persuade landowners to let us use small parcels of land for one, two or more years, and leave them confident that there’s not going to be local resentment when they need them back?
  • How can we persuade gardeners to pour their work into a piece of land they might only have for a single growing season?
  • How can we help the users design gardens in a practical way on land that may only be available for 18 months?
  • Research shows that successful garden projects are often run by a small group of people. How can we make a successful garden project that engages a wide slice of the local population?

Thanks to Harmen de Hoop for the use of Grow Your Own Vegetables – again.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Are there too many climate campaigns?

news, RSA Arts & Ecology, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Just as we’ve been publishing our ever expanding lists of campaigns in the run up to COP15, and as we’re on the verge of launching our own one, Arts for COP15, Green.tv asks the question “Are there too many climate campaigns?” [Their blog is currently down today… so you’ll have to take my word for it]. Have we become “bored” with the issue of climate change because of campaign overload?

For climate campaigners the real frustration is the slowness of change. The public still seem reluctant to clamour at politicians in the way we’d like them to. Could this be because they are just getting too many messages? That list of sixteen actions for COP15 is by no means exhaustive. Is this a case of too much information?

I don’t think so. Three reasons:

1) For a start, the nature of social media means that this fragmentation is going to happen, whether we like it or not. For better or worse, there will no longer be a single source of authority on any political discussion like this. On the plus side, climate campaigners like Franny Armstrong have shown how incredibly effective social media are for spreading a message.

2) Secondly, though the campaigns are diverse,  climate NGOs are showing a great deal of resourcefulness. Most of the campaigns listed below are actually partnerships between several campaigns – Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam, Age of Stupid et al. Charities usually have a parochial tendency to defend their own turf with one eye on their own future fundraising – but in this case there is a lot of sharing going on.

3) So what’s the problem? With all this heat being created why aren’t more poeple taking action? Perhaps in this case we’re blaming the medium, not the message.  Most campaigns on energy and climate do not interest the mass of the people worldwide. The avaaz.org map of actions for Monday 21 September is worth looking at. Why is there a huge disparity between the numbers of actions being taken in different countries? We have to think hard about what messages appeal to the mass of people who are more aspirational than ourselves. (That’s not to say they need to be directly aspirational messages; the most effective political campaigns in recent times have usually been based on fear.)

We are in a research period, still looking for the right message. We have not found it yet. Now is not the time to start cutting down on the multiplicity of voices. Eventually one of us is going to get the right campaign, the killer one, the one that convinces more than just our friends.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology