What can we do with unemployed artists and art-starved children?

In all the buzz of the recent election, the references to a second New Deal are abundant. So, in the spirit of FDR, let’s solve opposing needs by uniting them. Artist and promoter Michael David Nolan proposes we start a National Campaign to Hire Artists to Work in Schools.  The idea is as simple as it sounds: use federal job stimulus money to employ artists in schools for educational advancement and cultural enrichment.

Check out their website and show your support by voting for this idea on change.org by clicking on the blue “vote!” button to the left and registering.

Thanks for your vote!

photo credit: Kala Art Institute

New Village Press authors Bill Cleveland and Maryo Gard join four other creative community builders in this new rotational blog launched by the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Wild Caught Stories seeks to serve as a forum for diverse perspectives on culture, community and current affairs, focusing on a new topic every six weeks. One author will respond per week until each has contributed his or her own thoughts and the cycle starts again. The first question: ‘What Next? Now that the page has turned, what stories will we need to change our world?’

The Wild Caught authors are: William Cleveland, Maryo Gard, Puanani Burgess, Milenko Matanovic, Martin Tull and Alice Lovelace.

The dialogue is open for reader comments, so check it out and join the conversation!

Shifting through fliers and business cards of organizations, with mission statements and exhibition notices falling from my lap to the floor, I try to organize dates, addresses and names. In the process I come across a Washington Post article that summed up one of the best success stories I’ve heard from an organization. The Workhouse Arts Center of Lorton Virginia has opened the doors of a former prison as a newly-created artist residency and center. Few times do two causes so happily meet.

These days we hear more and more of prison construction and overcrowding. Art programs being cut in schools and the money used to build penitentiaries to house the same students who could have benefited from such a program.

But in Lorton, a former prison has been given over to the purpose of housing artists, community groups, presentations, classes and performances. The space has been reconstructed, repaired and reused to provide a unique setting for artists and for those aspiring.