Help US Advocate for the National Endowment for the Arts

Tell Legislators that the Arts Mean Jobs & a Strong Economy!

The other NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funds grants to dance, design, folk & traditional arts, literature, local arts agencies, media arts, multidisciplinary, museums, music, musical theater, opera, presenting, theater, and visual arts.  MANY OF THESE ARTISTS WORK IN OUR SCHOOLS.  Please take a few minutes to write to your Members of Congress to urge them to support the National Endowment for the Arts in widening citizen access to the cultural, educational, and economic benefits of the arts, and advancing creativity and innovation in communities across the United States.  If you've ever used CAP WIZ in writing your legislator through the Association, you know how easy it is.  The ARTS ACTION FUND of AMERICAN FOR THE ARTS (Let me encourage you to join), uses this as well and will allow you to paste pieces of pre-written messages AND add your own original words.

To learn more about the programs of the National Endowment for the Arts and to see the Americans for the Arts Position/Policy paper on the National Endowment for the Arts, click here.  Please download, save and share this piece.  Please take five or ten minutes to do this. 

Cirque du Soleil's QUIDAM--Arts Integration at Work in OUR Work

We integrate our ARTS disciplines all the time...maybe that's why the STEAM initiative isn't such a threat to us.

A little bit circus, a little bit dance, a little bit concert, a little bit drama all rolled up into one brilliant ARTS piece--Quidam.  In this post, you'll find no crunched numbers, no great quotes, no charts or graphs.  Just a little bit of inspiration, fun and the art of what we artist's do--making something that isn't easy, look easy.  Take a few minutes to enjoy.  We recommend Cirque.  If you haven't seen QUIDAM, you might just enjoy it.

Why Arts Education Must Be Saved

from EDUTOPIA

Schools draw on the community to bring art and music to students.



Almost every one of us can point back to a creative pursuit, in or out of school, that enhanced our skills, knowledge, or understanding. Yet the majority of secondary school students in the United States aren't required to enroll in arts courses, many elementary schools nationwide lack art classes or activities, and arts and music instruction is often the first thing to go when schools feel the pressure to improve test scores.

Happily, from this admittedly grim background spring many rays of hope. In our special report on arts education, Edutopia paints a bright picture of how schools are forging innovative community partnerships to bring rich, academically integrated arts curriculum to their students:


Read about a network of educators committed to offering essential activities (1) based on Howard Gardner's eight intelligences, including integrated daily arts instruction.
Watch students sing opera through a program built on theories about brain-based learning (2) and research into children's neurological development.
Discover how one school district grew a program to link children with the city's vast cultural resources (3) by working with community professionals from orchestras, dance companies, theaters, and museums.
Follow the design and testing of an arts-integrated curriculum that includes theater arts, spoken word poetry, and hip-hop (4) to make the arts more accessible to the most marginalized students.

And, in celebrating National Novel Writing Month, we discover a nationwide program that encourages would-be student novelists (5) to write their hearts out -- not for glory or grades but just for the intrinsic reward of writing the story.

When you click on any of these links, you'll also find links to the rest of this special report about the advantages of arts education -- more articles, a video, and a slide show -- so read on, and we think you'll agree that all of us should support the arts in school with all our vigor.

More Resources for Art Educators

Thanks to our friend Jennifer Jenkins for sharing even more great art education resources from online university.  Lots of links to online museum exhibits and on painters.  We appreciate your contribution Jennifer.

Visual art is one of the oldest forms of human expression, stretching all the way back to the cave paintings at el Castillo in Northern Spain to the massive installations by Damien Hurst in the 1990s. This resource will concentrate mainly on visual art, such as sculpture, painting, ceramics and drawing, some specific periods and movements in the history of art and galleries and influential museums which house online resources for those interested in viewing art and learning more about particular forms.

Museums

There are several museums which have large collections of prehistoric and ancient art:

• The Bradshaw Foundation maintains a comprehensive online resource on cave and rock paintings found around the world.
• The Museum of the Terracotta Army opened in 1979 to exhibit the collection of terracotta figures representing the armies of Qin Shi Huang the first emperor of China. Found in 1974 it was an amazing discovery thought to be the largest ceramic figurine collection in China.
• The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University houses a large collection of Ancient Egyptian and Nubian Antiquities.
• The Brooklyn Museum houses one of the world’s foremost collections of Egyptian, Classical and Near Eastern Art.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a large collection of medieval art as well as collections that range into the 21st century.
• The International Center of Medieval Art promotes the study of medieval art and culture.
• The University of Pittsburgh has a growing collection of images of medieval art and architecture.

Major Museums that house Renaissance to Romantic art include:

• The Uffizi Art Gallery in Florence, Italy is the world’s oldest art gallery and hosts some of the finest examples of Renaissance art.
• Home of the Catholic Church, Vatican City in Rome is an enormous museum playing host to many of the Renaissance’s most important artists.
• The Louvre, situated in the center of Paris, has an enormous collection of Renaissance art, including the world famous Mona Lisa.
• The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Holland is one of the world’s premier museums for Golden Age Dutch art as well as world art.

Major Museums that house modern art include:

• The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929 in New York City as a museum to house the growing amount of modern art proliferating.
• The Tate Modern, located in London is another home to large collections of Modern and contemporary art.

Painters

Although many of the artists listed below are multi-talented, being architects, sculptors, inventors or writers, most of the are best known as painters.
Major painters from the medieval up to modernism include:

• Giotto- Considered to be a medieval painter, Giotto is the first of the Italian painters to begin to move toward what is known as the Italian Renaissance, breaking with the Byzantine style which dominated art at the time.
• Donatello- One of the earliest Renaissance artists, Donatello is famous for his sculptures and bas relief and contributed to developments in perspective.
• Masaccio- The first influential painter of the Quattrocento period of the Renaissance, Masaccio was skilled at creating lifelike figures and movements.
• Leonardo da Vinci- Master painter, inventor, engineer and writer, da Vinci is one of the most widely known figures in the Renaissance.
• Michaelangelo- A master of the High Renaissance, he was a poet, architect, sculptor and engineer in addition to his painting. His statue of David and the Sistine Chapel are some of the most famous pieces of art ever created.
• Raphael- Another High Renaissance painter and architect, Raphael’s clarity and composition made him the third great master of the period.
• Vasari- Now known more for his important biographies of other painters, Vasari was the first great art historian and an accomplished painter as well.
• Titian- An influential member of the Venetian school, Titian was an adept landscape and portrait painter as well as a master of color and technique.
• Caravaggio- Painting at the beginning of the Baroque period, Caravaggio was forgotten after his death and only in the 20th century has his reputation been renewed. However, he was extremely influential on many painters who proceded him.
• Hieronymus Bosch- The idiosyncratic Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch has one of the most recognizable styles of painting, using fantastic imagery to tell stories.
• Holbein- the premier painter of the English court under Henry VIII, Holbein’s paintings were often of leading figures in world literature and politics
• Pieter Bruegel the Elder- A Flemish Renaissance painter, Bruegel is a member of a family of painters and is best known for his work Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
• Peter Paul Reubens- The Flemish Baroque painter Reubens has one of the more distinct styles of any age. His use of color and movement was pronounced and he was also known as a Humanist scholar.
• Rembrandt van Rijn- The most famous of the Dutch painters during the Golden Age of painting in the Netherlands, Rembrandt’s masterworks include The Night Watch, housed at the Rijksmuseum.
• Johannes Vermeer- A slow working and modest painter during his lifetime, only 34 paintings have been attributed to him, mostly Dutch interiors, but he is considered to be one of the premier painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

ROMNEY ANNOUNCES RYAN AS RUNNING MATE

If there was ever a doubt that Wisconsin-like, anti-education politics will be a part of this race--which there was not--today's announcement makes the threats to quality public education even more pressing.  As ARTS EDUCATORS we should have some serious concerns about this candidate and his running mate's views on what is "essential" in our "public schools."

Friends:

Can you believe it? Governor Romney has doubled down on failed economic policies, those of which we know harm the middle class and do nothing to invest in our kids and schools. By naming Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidential running mate, it is crystal clear where he wants to take the country.

Ryan has repeatedly supported cuts to education funding, including blocking support intended to help avoid educator layoffs. Ryan has proposed cutting $1.1 billion from early childhood education, which would deny more than 2 million poor children the opportunity for high-quality early education.

Ryan and Romney have shown over and over again that they are more willing to run up trillion dollar deficits to help the rich get richer while undercutting opportunity for middle class families.

As an Educator for Obama, we must do everything we can to ensure the president's re-election this November. Will you join me TONIGHT in phone banking your fellow members so we can spread the message?

We need to reach out to as many fellow members as possible to let them know the stakes in this election. It is now clear that Gov. Romney and his running mate are no friends the middle class and our members need to hear it from us!

Join me tonight, at 5 pm your time, for a national phone bank. It is fun and easy and you will love connecting with members across the country, telling them the importance of re-electing President Obama.

Onward!

P.S. Sign the open letter asking Romney and Ryan to make investments in education and public schools a priority and be sure to share on Facebook and twitter to ask your friends to sign too!

London's 2012 Cultural Olympiad

The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad is the largest cultural celebration in the history of the modern Olympic and Paralympic Movements. Since 2008, the Cultural Olympiad has featured programmes and projects inspired by London 2012, funded by our principal funders and sponsors. As part of the Cultural Olympiad:

• More than 16 million people across the UK took have taken part in or attended performances.
• Over 169,000 people have attended more than 8,300 workshops.
• More than 3.7 million people took part in nearly 3,700 Open Weekend events.
• Some 2,500 cultural projects have been awarded the London 2012 Inspire mark
  
  

The culmination of the Cultural Olympiad is the London 2012 Festival, providing over 10 million chances to see free world-class events throughout the UK.
To find out more about what’s been happening in the Cultural Olympiad around the UK, click on the links below.

London 2012 Festival
Inspire
Artists Taking the Lead
Discovering Places
Film Nation: Shorts
Legacy Trust UK
New Music 20x12
Stories of the World
Unlimited

Why We Should Bring Back the Arts Olympics

by Lucas Kavner HUFFINGTON POST 8/5/2012, Posted by NEA FAC on August 9, 2012

Culture Reporter, Huffington PostMarina Abramovic is probably the most celebrated performance artist in the world. She's also the subject of a new, engaging documentary called The Artist is Present, currently airing on HBO and in select cities around the world. For the first half of this new film we see Abramovic's past performance work, learn about her unique history, and follow the months leading up to her historic and wildly successful 2010 show at MoMA.

And then in the second half, we watch her do nothing but sit in a chair in the middle of an empty room and stare at thousands of strangers in the eyes, every single day, for over two months.

The event was a feat of performance endurance, surely, and also a beautiful collection of moving images, with thousands of visitors rounding the globe just to sit with Abramovic in New York and join in the project. It was art and prowess mixed, the largest performance exhibition ever mounted at the MoMA, and the longest duration piece ever performed in a museum, spanning 736 hours and 30 minutes.


Though the piece was still Art with a capital A, something most of America remains skeptical of (see many of the angry responses to these pieces for proof,) the show received national media attention. Even Fox News was forced to cover this thing, although in the segment featured in the documentary, anchor Megyn Kelly questions whether we should actually call this whole show "art" at all, and she refers to Abramovic, who has won countless international awards and accolades, as "some Yugoslavian-born provocateur" you might find on the street.

But still. Still! They were paying attention, and that says something. With a project of this scale, so physically demanding and impossible to ignore, they had to. Even if Megyn Kelly doesn't care that the National Endowment for the Arts budget is continuously slashed year after year, or that major orchestras and museums are going bankrupt, constantly defending their ability to simply exist anymore, she has to care if something extraordinary is happening, even if it is a piece of art.

We have to remind people that art is important, impressive, even virtuosic, even if it seems absurd to do so, since these days we spend more time arguing about "what art is" than about how we can continue to keep it alive. What if we told you that our dangerously low art-appreciation levels are also affecting kids? The NEA has released countless studies detailing how beneficial arts education can be for young people -- students exposed to arts education in high school were far more likely to read newspapers, to vote in elections and go to college, according to the most recent -- yet our country continues to slash arts education in public schools (less than 50 percent of 18-year-olds reported having received any arts education at all, the NEA reported,) with barely a peep from the country at large.

But if capital-a-Art can reach those who are most skeptical, those who might not donate to their local modern art museum but still appreciate feats of human strength and American talent, then here's an idea for putting the Arts back in the public consciousness...

The Arts Olympics.

Apparently we used to have them. From 1912 to 1948 the Olympic Games had a subdivision dedicated to handing out medals in arts events, like literature and architecture and visual arts and music (ironic for the latter, since this year musicians were barely paid to participate even on the sidelines.) Is it crazy to imagine us bringing them back?

Smithsonian recently interviewed author Richard Stanton, whose "Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions" is still the only English-language book ever published on the subject, and he reminded us that at the Olympiads of Ancient Greece, "the sport exhibitions walked in equality with artistic exhibitions." But in the arts events of the 1900s, he said, all the entries had to be "sports-themed," i.e, paintings about sports, writing about sports, sculptures of athletes, etc. so more serious artists were often skeptical of entering (although Picasso probably could have drawn a pretty sick bobsledder.)

Ironically, the closest that serious -- what some would consider capital-A -- artists come to performing for the masses, at least in the last decade, is through reality television. Opera singers have made it to the finals on The Voice, music and dance virtuosos perform on America's Got Talent, and designers of various stripes compete on Bravo's reality smorgasbord.

There are more artists working in America than ever before, and more online outlets for them to showcase their work, yet by aligning themselves with higher art institutions, they often limit the amount of people they can reach, since so many people remain skeptical of anything remotely highbrow.

But imagine: prodigal guitarists competing for a gold, sculptors given an hour to do something incredible with clay, filmmakers scrambling together a 24-hour film festival for an international audience, the world's greatest writers delivering readings of their work on the steps of the Coliseum.

Maybe you're thinking that art isn't supposed to be a competition. On NPR, Olympic historian John MacAloon said artists who participated in the earlier Olympic events were skeptical of competing against fellow artists, leading many to avoid the events. "Artists themselves are not always really happy to compete directly with one another. And when they do, they would prefer a jury of their peers," he said.

So fine -- the judges will be other artists, just like we do with the Grammys and the Oscars and the host of other awards we give out every year.

But here's a chance for the Megyn Kellys of the world to actually root for other artists, to cheer them on with a big "U.S.A! U.S.A!" instead of shitting on them, and isn't that what this country is all about? Beating other countries? Somehow, it doesn't seem too unrealistic to imagine.

Artists will always be here and money will always be scarce -- it's part of the game -- but we need to start thinking of new ways to reach people who might not want to spend a gazillion dollars on a ticket to Broadway or the opera or the philharmonic, to show them that masterful Artists still exist, and they can still impress the hell out of you.