I explored the http://www.radioproject.org/ site and it's glorious. Thanks for the advance notice of The St. Valentine's Day Inspiration. Hallmark can't touch this!
ArtInAction facilitates healing via alchemy. Blight and pain transmute into the light of insight and beauty. ArtInAction is shamanistic -- it's about community coming together to explore, remember, interpret; for folks to reclaim their city, their memories, and the ghosts that haunt both.
You once wrote to me that I must love New Orleans. That I do, but New Orleans is now imbibed with meaning, laden with symbolism as it once wore beads. Beyond being one of America's historically rich and culturally vibrant cities, New Orleans has become a prism, a telescope, a speculum to open and examine the body politic. Interested in race relations? Economics? Urban planning? Demographics? Immigration? Prison reform? Transportation? Public safety? Housing? Medical care? Infrastructure? Here's your test case.
We needn't be content to merely recreate The Crescent City. We can work towards a City that does not forget to care. Ms. Elizabeth, through your writing, photography and art installations you're working tirelessly on behalf of those who are rich in empathy and compassion, as well as the economically disenfranchised.
For these reasons, I am excited and happy to see the lovely, lyrical work ArtInAction is gifting to New Orleans and the world. ArtInAction lifts the spirit and rouses the soul like a spirited strut in a lively Second Line to a badass bass beat.
And on a purely personal and prurient note, I love to look!
Merci Marci. It's the people of the city that make it possible for me to do anything at all - even the people who can't be here.
Did you see the PBS "American Experience" show on New Orleans? Wow, it's beyond great. Illustrates the history of this city/this country in such a profound way - explains how & why the aftermath of Katrina was/is what it was/is - I hope they offer it on dvd soon I'm going to have to buy it. Great footage of powerful NOrleanian artists/writers/etc saying really kick ass things - John Scott's interview was priceless. "We can teach America how to be America - if anybody's watching."
I was in New Orleans in April and had a chance to take a tour with Elizabeth of many of the ArtinAction sites. I had read about them before I came and was most looking forward to seeing the pink tree. It seemed like such a wild and feminine statement. I was not disappointed. The tree rises up out of the still largely gray, though now greening, landscape, utterly ridiculous and, at the same time, hopeful. Elizabeth told us the story of painting the tree, returning to her old neighborhood, and of the conversations she had with recovery workers and neighbors as she painted and grieved many losses. I loved hearing her story and experiencing art that has so many layers and connections to a very specific life.
I hope that at some point, each of the ArtinAction sites can have more of the stories behind them as part of the installation. The pieces themselves are small, shy almost, but as Elizabeth told me and my companion about each artist and how the individual installations were made, she really communicated the individual human experience of New Orlean's disaster and rebuilding.
I am glad to see that New Orlean's artists have such a fierce love and will to rebuild and create!
Manifesto! ARTinACTION! On The Front-Lines Since JULY 2006
"What was here is inseperable from what is here." - Lucy Lippard AORTA Projects (formerly ARTinACTION) is a grass-roots, on-going, public art project. Believing the creative process to be a powerful tool for affecting social change and healing from trauma, the core mission of AORTA Projects is to participate in the physical and spiritual re/animation of post-disaster landscapes, beginning with our hometown New Orleans. Through this work, the artist's role in a very challenging modern world expands and crisis becomes an opportunity for positive growth.
We recognize that man-made and/or natural disasters are devastating historical events that can be transmutated into powerful medicine only by maintaining a dignified honesty about their continued impact. By galvanizing a wide variety of contemporary artists to create site-specific art only in areas struggling to recover from trauma, working only with permission from with land owners and neighbors, AORTA Projects supports efforts toward renewal and participates in the dialog concerning the conceptual and social potential of contemporary art. This is "free art", ephemeral, offered as a temporary gesture in the liminal space created by crisis; in this way we actively participate in the re/definition of our evolving world.
Governed by the AORTA Projects requirement that participating artists intimately connect with the people of post-disaster landscapes, we assert that personal experience of a site must inform work that attempts to function as site-specific. What we mean is that by adhering to the parameters of ARTinACTION's manifesto, the artist is not doing favors for the people or the land - it is always and only the other way around. The art object and specific goals of "finality" take a backseat to the fluid experience of intimate connection.
Furthermore, we suggest that by cultivating process-based methodologies we maintain creative cultural traditions that define New Orleans and that persevere as a message of hope for people who find themselves embroiled in current and/or future disasters. Ultimately AORTA Projects can function as a model of one way that artists can respond to the long-term challenges of future catastrophic events. AORTA Projects' sincere intention is to motivate empowered regeneration and set in motion an inspired process that can perform itself under multiple guises for many years to come.
Artists interested in participating in AORTA Projects are invited to contact us at the email below for further information. Please feel free to write us with project and/or site suggestions, feedback, etcetera. If you are interested in sponsoring an AORTA Projects installation we would love to hear from you.
AORTA Projects Tours are available - please contact us at the email below for availability.
Contact: Elizabeth Underwood, Director aortaprojects@gmail.com
This project is supported in part by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Neither AORTA Projects nor their financial and/or site sponsors are responsible for any damage to art works or any damage to persons or property that may occur while installing, volunteering, or visiting AORTA Projects sites.
COMING SOON
ON-GOING INSTALLATIONS: Jennifer Odem "Blue Fence" (Upper 9th Ward), Jonathan Traviesa "Native & Contemporary" (St. Bernard Parish)
FUTURE INSTALLATIONS: Homemade Parachutes, Susan Neely, Nick Stillman, Minka Stoyanova, X Collective and more.
PAST INSTALLATIONS: Jessica Bizer, Stephen Collier, Beth Dary, Maxime Demetrio, Sean Derry, Courtney Egan, Generic Art Solutions, Butch Merigoni, The Neighborhood Project, Terrence Sanders, Secret Gardeners, Christy Speakman, [ ] Projects, and others.
3 comments:
Elizabeth,
I explored the http://www.radioproject.org/ site and it's glorious. Thanks for the advance notice of The St. Valentine's Day Inspiration. Hallmark can't touch this!
ArtInAction facilitates healing via alchemy. Blight and pain transmute into the light of insight and beauty. ArtInAction is shamanistic -- it's about community coming together to explore, remember, interpret; for folks to reclaim their city, their memories, and the ghosts that haunt both.
You once wrote to me that I must love New Orleans. That I do, but New Orleans is now imbibed with meaning, laden with symbolism as it once wore beads. Beyond being one of America's historically rich and culturally vibrant cities, New Orleans has become a prism, a telescope, a speculum to open and examine the body politic. Interested in race relations? Economics? Urban planning? Demographics? Immigration? Prison reform? Transportation? Public safety? Housing? Medical care? Infrastructure? Here's your test case.
We needn't be content to merely recreate The Crescent City. We can work towards a City that does not forget to care. Ms. Elizabeth, through your writing, photography and art installations you're working tirelessly on behalf of those who are rich in empathy and compassion, as well as the economically disenfranchised.
For these reasons, I am excited and happy to see the lovely, lyrical work ArtInAction is gifting to New Orleans and the world. ArtInAction lifts the spirit and rouses the soul like a spirited strut in a lively Second Line to a badass bass beat.
And on a purely personal and prurient note, I love to look!
Cheers,
Marci “Merci” Davis
Merci Marci. It's the people of the city that make it possible for me to do anything at all - even the people who can't be here.
Did you see the PBS "American Experience" show on New Orleans? Wow, it's beyond great. Illustrates the history of this city/this country in such a profound way - explains how & why the aftermath of Katrina was/is what it was/is - I hope they offer it on dvd soon I'm going to have to buy it. Great footage of powerful NOrleanian artists/writers/etc saying really kick ass things - John Scott's interview was priceless. "We can teach America how to be America - if anybody's watching."
I was in New Orleans in April and had a chance to take a tour with Elizabeth of many of the ArtinAction sites. I had read about them before I came and was most looking forward to seeing the pink tree. It seemed like such a wild and feminine statement. I was not disappointed. The tree rises up out of the still largely gray, though now greening, landscape, utterly ridiculous and, at the same time, hopeful. Elizabeth told us the story of painting the tree, returning to her old neighborhood, and of the conversations she had with recovery workers and neighbors as she painted and grieved many losses. I loved hearing her story and experiencing art that has so many layers and connections to a very specific life.
I hope that at some point, each of the ArtinAction sites can have more of the stories behind them as part of the installation. The pieces themselves are small, shy almost, but as Elizabeth told me and my companion about each artist and how the individual installations were made, she really communicated the individual human experience of New Orlean's disaster and rebuilding.
I am glad to see that New Orlean's artists have such a fierce love and will to rebuild and create!
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