(Susie Husted is a Boston-based social justice activist. Her relationship with the Foundry dates back to 2005 when the Foundry invited her and other Boston Social Forum organizers to speak at a social forum teach-in for NYC artists.)
New York City’s Foundry Theatre sets a rigorous standard for artist and activist collaboration. In 2010, they re-imagined their city through a intense series of public forums exploring topics from the policing of sex and gender to isolation and injustice in the workplace, and produced five new theatrical works this spring for their NYC…Just Like I Pictured It festival including an adaptation of the 1937 labor musical Pins & Needles in collaboration with FUREE, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, running at Brooklyn’s Irondale Center through July 9.
Boston will have a chance to experience the Foundry’s unique theatrical vision this summer and fall with the production How Much is Enough: Our Values in Question, exploring the fundamental concepts of value in our communities. Partially inspired by reading Marx’s Capital, playwright Kirk Lynn, and Foundry artistic director, Melanie Joseph, have developed a production requiring an interactive audience for each rehearsal – giving the Boston public a unique opportunity to help create and shape the play before it officially hits the stage. Check the ArtsEmerson website for August rehearsal and September show dates. (For NYC folks, email the Foundry for July rehearsals in Manhattan.)
How Much is Enough is the Foundry’s third collaboration with Austin-based Kirk Lynn after 2006’s Major Bang, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dirty Bomb, and 2001’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, an adaptation of Marcus Griel’s cult classic of the same name.
Founded by Melanie Joseph in 1994, the Foundry’s productions have been critically recognized and honored with eight Obie Awards and three Drama Desk nominations for “Unique Theatrical Experience.” In 2000, The Foundry received the Ross Wetzsteon Obie Award for its “overall contribution to the Off and Off-Off Broadway community” as a theater that both “fosters new envelope-pushing work and that engages artists in the thorniest issues of the world we inhabit” and most recently received the 2011 national Peter Zeisler Award in recognition of “innovative practice and dedication to freedom of expression.”
Kirk Lynn is a playwright-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin, and co-founder and Co-Producing Artistic Director of the Austin theater collective Rude Mechanicals. Kirk’s original scripts include Pale Idiots, Cherrywood, Requiem for Tesla, and El Paraiso: An Humiliation of Pleasures.
(Susie Husted is social justice activist inspired by projects exploring art and activism in the Boston area including those of the LPC and Rough Mountain Studios.)
Longtime Boston radical bookstore, Lucy Parsons Center, has purchased its own storefront after more than forty years of operation. They are moving on up to 358A Centre Street this summer.
Before this move, LPC had been at the same home for more than a dozen years. 549 Columbus Ave has seen hundreds of local, national and international radicals gather for organizing meetings, potlucks, book talks and much more over the years – and thanks to the building owner, the tradition will not stop once LPC moves to its new home in Jamaica Plain next month.
The building owner at 549 Columbus Ave has turned down offers from major chain stores, deciding instead to rent to Justin Francese and Danielle Connor from Rough Mountain Studios. The two collaborators are turning the site in a social justice and mission-drive artists collective. Planned as combined work, inspiration, collaboration and gallery space, 549 Columbus Ave has not seen the last of the radicals yet!
Joining Rough Mountain Studios at Columbus Ave are Quilted (Ben Mauer, web development), Golden Arrows (Nerissa Cooney & Alex Hage, graphic design) and Kelly Creedon (documentary photography & multimedia production), but space is still available for other interested artists!
An Open House for friends and potential collaborators will be Monday, July 11th, 6-9:00pm.
Contact Justin and Danielle at CreativeCoopSpace@gmail.com for more information!
(Susie Husted is a Boston-based social justice activist who acted as a community advisor to Artists in Context’s conference planning. Susie’s been a strategic player in the planning of many Boston-based events including the annual HONK! Festival, 2010 Food not Bombs 30th Anniversary Festival and A People’s Celebration of Howard Zinn, as well as city-wide student teach-ins and regional anti-war demonstrations.)
Hybrid practice is not new, but in Boston, a community of practice around inter-disciplinary, inter-sectional, collaborative and socially engaged art is emerging. In that respect, Boston-based arts organization, Artists in Context, forged new ground this weekend. Over 100 local activists, academics and artists gathered at Artist in Context’s Connected & Consequential conference to witness each other’s work, and begin laying the ground from which to develop and understand the mechanisms, scope, and intentional practice of hybrid art in greater Boston.
Founded by Louisa McCall and Marie Cieri in 2009, AIC seeks to support the research-based, multidisciplinary, embedded practices of contemporary artists and other creative thinkers who seek to invent alternative approaches to existing societal challenges. Connected & Consequential in Boston was AIC’s first large city-wide event to develop a community of practice in New England. Additional gatherings on the same theme are planned for the fall 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island, Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley and Maine, as well as workshops and community dialogues to further explore the specificity of hybrid practice in greater Boston.
What follows is a summary of the Greater Boston Connected & Consequential events in the participants own words.
“Bearing witness takes a long time, “but is necessary “to let the call from the community be authentic, and our answer be authentic.”
Michael Dowling, Medicine
Wheel Productions, Stories from
the Field panel
“The question from the community wasn’t ‘what will [the project] look like?’, but ‘what will it say?’”
Gavin Kroeber & Dan Borelli
Case Study: Crossing the Rubicon, a project-in-progress with the community of Ashland, MA about the Nyanza Superfund Site.“I don’t want to be a ‘parachute’ artist.”
John Osorio-Buck
Stories from the Field panel
Kelly Dobson’s “Blendie Diagram” (2003-2004). Dobson joined Artistic Director of Artlink, Edinburgh, Alison Stirling, and artists Steve Hollingsworth and Wendy Jacob on AIC’s Ideas Team case study.
We sought to “make machines with the agency of care.”
Kelly Dobson, Case Study: Ideas Team
“We reached organizational overwhelm. We said, ‘we’re doing a lot of stuff – but is it effective?”
“We want to address huge issues and how they trickle down into our neighborhoods,” but by silo-ing our different practices (cultural organizing, arts and activism), “we structurally set ourselves up to not meet our goals. We have to think more deeply about how we connect these issues.”
Mariamma White-Hammond, Project HIP HOP,
Stories from the Field panel
We “embrace complexity and find a container that creates connections”
Andi Sutton, National Bitter Melon Council
Stories from the Field panel
Video clips, conference findings and future programs will be posted at the Artists in Context website this summer.
(Anne Elizabeth Moore is an author, editor, artist, teacher, and Groundswell guest blogger. She divides her time between Chicago and Cambodia, where she teaches young women the art of self-publishing.)
Material Exchange’s Soup Repair (2009)
Material Exchange, the IL artists with a project on display in Buffalo, NY called Repair Shop (alongside Adam Bobbette and InCUBATE), sat down with me for an interview a few weeks ago. Here’s an excerpt:
Calling them recyclers misses the point. Chicago-based artist’s group Material Exchange makes use of the detritus of our consumer culture, sure. But not to save you money that you can turn around and spend on other consumer goods. No: Material Exchange wants you to think about the objects you surround yourself with. What purpose do they serve now? And to what better use might they be put in the future?
Often, even the final object created is merely the start of the work—which can include a social event, permanent installation, or public resource. Last winter, as part of the touring sustainable art exhibition Beyond Green, Material Exchange built an elaborate structure in the shape of a turtle from an old boat alongside students at Northern Michigan University. The structure was then set out in the middle of the frozen lake by a group of volunteers, where it remained a static sculpture throughout the winter. In the spring, the ice melted and the sculpture sunk to the bottom of the lake. No longer an aesthetic object of admiration, nor a useful vehicle, the old boat—built to the Department of Natural Resources’ specifications—was now a fish habitat.
“We can only guess at how well it’s working,” the group’s John Preus explains.
Now, for the kicker—and I think one of the tricks with work that sits at the intersection between social change and art—check their documentation of this project.
Damn clever, innit?
(Anne Elizabeth Moore is an author, editor, artist, teacher, and Groundswell guest blogger. She divides her time between Chicago and Cambodia, where she teaches young women the art of self-publishing.)
I’ve been talking to the artist Sarah Lewison about some time she spent living in Berlin lately. In honor of the 20 year fall of the Wall today, I specifically asked her what she remembered about the East.
Some how, I don’t remember how, I met a few girls from the east who invited me to visit them in East Berlin. Likely, they were a connection through someone in the West—family members who introduced us, because I was curious to go east. At that time it was very cumbersome for an American to cross. I had to pay 5 marks to cross over at Checkpoint Charlie. I remember going with the two girls to a gigantic restaurant for “tea”. there were carts rolling around with really opulent cakes. It felt like we were in a movie, in the 50s. The girls I was visiting were quite hip, had good english and expressed the thought that the most oppressive part about living in the DDR was the fact they could not travel freely and with that, the separation of families.
The comic above is from an outdoor installation of comics currently at the site of the future Berlin Wall Memorial, an engaging public art installation called Da War Mal Was. Comics? Outside? For real? It’s pretty great. This image details the “Westernization” of East Berlin, a process quickly embraced by giant soda manufacturers. (On that subject, I wrote a piece this morning on 20 years of Berlin Wall sales in the US, which might lend some interesting fodder for discussion about how resistance to capitalism gets sold anyway.)
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