So Live! Arts own, Fly Lady Di will be hosting a HUGE ART SHOW called FRESH PRODUCE on MAY 7th At the GALLERY BAR. This is sure to be the pre-summer art JUMP OFF so come out and check her new work and Live! performances from Honey Larochelle, Igmar Thomas and the Cypher, and DJ MELO - X on the 1's and 2's!
Pratt Institute will host activist, writer, philosopher, and teacher Angela Davis as Scholar in Residence for Spring 2008 on Tuesday, April 22 and Wednesday, April 23. As part of her residency, Davis will participate in a series of events that are free and open to the public.
Davis will give a keynote address titled "Identifying Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism" at 7 PM on Tuesday, April 22 following a 5 PM screening of The Farm: Angola. On April 23 Davis will participate in roundtable discussion "Urban Artists and the Politics of Visibility" with New York-based artists Dread Scott, Hank Willis Thomas, Alain "KET" Mariduea, and Amy Sananman. All events are to be held in Memorial Auditorium on Pratt's Brooklyn Campus. Admission will be offered on a first-come-first-served basis.
Davis was associated with the Blank Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Educated at the Frankfurt School, Davis first came to national attention when she was placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, driven underground, arrested, and incarcerated for 16 months. While in prison, she wrote brilliant articles and became the focus of the international solidarity movement -the "Free Angela Davis" campaign-which brought about her acquittal.
Davis ran for U.S. Vice President under the Communist Party ticket in 1980, and in 1997 helped found Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to dismantling the prison-industrial complex.
Today, she holds the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies in the History of Consciousness Department at the Santa Cruz campus. She is the author of eight acclaimed books, including The Autobiography of Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.
Her residency is sponsored by the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the Department of English and Humanities; and the Initiative for Art, Community, and Social Change with support from the Office of the Provost, the Critical and Visual Studies Program, and the Pratt Film Society.
So Live! Arts will now be an official sponsor for the Trust Your Struggle Tour. We are proud and excited to be a part of this dynamic movement.
The Trust Your Struggle Collective is a group of visual artists, educators, and friends dedicated to social justice and community activism through the medium of visual art. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City they work in conjunction with several other collectives and groups to produce art exhibits and community based events. In the year of 2006 the collective completed a tour in which they painted political and socially conscious murals throughout parts of Latin America. The tour, entitled Trust Your Hustle Mural tour was a 2 month long traveling mural project based on developing and painting murals in communities that they felt were misrepresented, repressed, and forgotten by the majority. The collective is currently preparing to create a national U.S. tour based on this model. The 2008 Trust Your Hustle Mural tour will take place from July to August. It will begin in Brooklyn, New York and travel through Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Seattle. The tour will end in San Francisco, California with a culminating exhibition at the Galeriade La Raza.
The Trust Your Struggle Collective believes in working with groups that are striving to make a positive change in their environment. In a larger sense, the tour is an exchange of culture, visual art, and political education. All murals are created in collaboration with local artists, cultural centers, youth, activists, or graffiti collectives. The 2006 tour took the crew through the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
An integral part of the mural tour is to help facilitate mural/art workshops or participate on speaking panels in the communities where the mural is to be painted. This way the group is not only developing and painting the mural with members of the community, but also showing those communities that the tour goes further than just painting, it is an experience in the human connection through the arts. Trust Your Struggle Collective has facilitated workshops and participated on panels at: Virginia Tech University, Trinity College in Connecticut, University of the Arts in Boston, and CasadeArtesana and University of San Carlos, both in Guatemala.
Recently So Live! Arts got an exciting MySpace message about an artist space in Brooklyn. Alicia Boone, the founder of So Live! Arts decided to go view the space.
Yo! This space is crazy! On Monday I went to view this space called Creative Heights at St. Marks and New York Avenue. Sara Hart, manager of the space and founder of the artist collective called Studio Art Works gave me a tour. The space used to be a homeless shelter and is now being renovated. It is going to be an exclusive art space with artists and art centered residents, a gallery space for residents, a basement workspace, laundry room, roof top access, murals, and a community garden! This is so live! for the in artists community in Brooklyn and abroad because our realm of possibility has just expanded. Essentially, we can make ourselves available to manage spaces like this all over the world! Currently, Creative Heights is accepting applications. The apartments are affordable, big, and bright -- you better get on your grind and see the space!
Please email solivearts@gmail.com for more information.
Alright ya’ll, that’s my knowledge for this week ☺
Remember, “Art can be YOUR business” Random thought ... How people come to Starbucks with a DESKTOP computer? YO! That’s crazzzy! Talk about convenience, lol!
