[We are in the last 3 days of the Artist and Social Responsibility (ASR) IndieGoGo campaign. Make a contribution today to keep the Artist and Social Responsibility (ASR) project alive! And read about some of our great Guest Speakers to this groundbreaking pilot project!]
Meet some of our great Guest Speakers
The 2015 ASR Class has a roster of outstanding Guest Speakers including renowned artists and curators from all over the country. When they couldn’t be in Philadelphia in person, we SKYPED with the artists! Either way we got into discussions with them about their projects and issues related to creating art with communities. Here’s how to support this award-winning project.
Mark Strandquist and Courtney Bowles of People’s Paper Coop (now in residence at the Village of Arts and Humanities) told us of creating paper from expunged criminal records and hope for community members.
Amy Franceschini of FutureFarmers in San Francisco SKYPED with us about her group’s work with designers, architects and artists on outside-the-box community creative projects.
Village of Arts and Humanities founder, Lily Yeh (center) spoke with us about her work with communities around the world and helping empower them through art.
Village Manager, El Sawyer, takes the ASR class on a tour of the Village and tells us about his video projects with the prison population.
Mary Mattingly SKYPED with us from Brooklyn. She talked about her eco-centered community projects like WaterPod and WetLand, a self-sustaining ecosystem on a barge on the Delaware River in Philadelphia.
Nato Thompson, Curator of Creative Time in New York, told us about working with artists on new projects with community impact. We were intrigued by many of the projects, especially Paul Ramirez Jonas’s “Keys to the City,” which we would love to see in Philadelphia.
Rashida Bumbray, Curator at Creative TIme, told us about projects creating new forms of community health clinics, a tap dancing class and a project to unearth buried history.
Rick Lowe, founder of Project Row Houses in Houston, SKYPED with us. He talked about the real impact of creating housing for people versus the wider impact of the symbolism in Project Row Houses. We found it fascinating.
Village of Arts and Humanities Managers (left-right, Aviva Kapust, Jon Hopkins, Marangeli “Maggie” Mejia-Rabell and Brenda Toler) told us of their personal journeys to the Village and the complexitites of running a big art and community project in North Philadelphia.
We are very excited for our last two Guest Speakers — muralist Betsy Casanas and dancer Julia Lopez! AND, right now, the students are working on final project presentations, coming up with ideas of their own. More about that tomorrow. Thank you for contributing to the ASR IndieGoGo!
