Eco-art East of the River at Chispa on 2/17!

I am excited to announce that I will be presenting on the topic Eco-art East of the River: Green Urbanism, Business and Art in Ward 7 in the winter edition of Chispa DC, a part of this year’s Intersections Art Festival, February 17, 2011 at The Atlas Performing Arts Center , Atlas District. 1333 H Street NE Washington, DC.

Chispa is a quarterly curated media mash-up for artists, organizers and change agents in the DC area to share what they’re thinking, dreaming and doing. The event features 8 – 10 people “who have the freedom to present anything they’re passionate about.” Chispa is an opportunity for cultural creatives to connect with each other and share what they love both in and outside of their own circles – theater, organization development, community organizing, etc.

Chispa is inspired by a presentation format that emerged in Japan as a way for architects to share their work: each speaker is limited to 20 images which automatically advance after 20 seconds. Variations of this format, called Pecha Kucha, have sprung up around the world.

I will join five other exciting presenters to address one of the overall themes of this edition of Chispa by answering “How does your work/dream/idea explore an artistic or cultural intersection?” The focus will be on the fusion of art, green urbanism and entrepreneurship at the Center for Green Urbanism.

Chispa is a collaboration between Potomac Group, LLC and Spark Creativity, small organization development practitioners with deep roots in social justice and cultural creation. For more information about Chispa visit the website at http://chispadc.wordpress.com/.

INTERSECTIONS: A New America Arts Festival premiered in February 2010 and attracted over 6000 patrons to the Atlas Performing Arts Center. The festival returns in February 2011 for nine days of multidisciplinary, curated performances celebrating art as an inspiration for conversation and connection.

“We hope to create through the arts a place where we all can meet, bringing with us our past and our present, with our eyes set on what’s ahead. We will meet at a crossroads of multiple perspectives offered by over 400 artists of all ages, cultures and races. We will meet as audiences from every neighborhood in DC. From this intersection of people and place, an energy will be ignited — an energy that transforms. Our hope is that we will all go down roads we have not traveled before, and along the way, find new seeds for understanding about ourselves, our community and this richly-connected, ever-evolving place that is America.”
—Mary Hall Surface, Festival Artistic Director

For nine days over three weekends, more than 600 of Washington’s emerging and established artists will be featured in over 100 performances in the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s six intimate performance venues. Located in the heart of the burgeoning H Street corridor, the INTERSECTIONS: A New America Arts Festival celebrates the collaborative energy and spirit of Washington’s most talented and diverse arts scene.

For more information and to view a schedule of performances, visit http://intersectionsdc.org/

NEA Announces New Report on How Americans Use Electronic Media to Participate in the Arts

Source: National Endowment for the Arts, (www.nea.gov), June 25, 2010

When compared with non-media participants, Americans who participate in the arts through technology and electronic media – using the Internet, television, radio, computers, and handheld devices – are nearly three times more likely to attend live arts events; attend twice as many live arts events; and attend a greater variety of genres of live arts events, according to a report released today by the National Endowment for the Arts and available at http://www.arts.gov.

Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation looks at who is participating in the arts through electronic media, what factors affect their participation, and the relationship between media-based arts activities, live attendance, and personal arts creation. The findings in Audience 2.0 are intended to help arts organizations better understand their audiences’ uses of technology and electronic media.

“We are faced with the Internet, social media, and other new technologies, and I believe the arts field must embrace them and integrate them into our work.” said Chairman Landesman in a video greeting that posts today on the NEA website.

Audience 2.0 stems from the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). Conducted in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, the survey isthe nation’s largest, most representative study of arts participation among American adults.

Since 1982, the SPPA has measured American adult participation in activities such as attendance at jazz, classical music, opera, musical plays, non-musical plays, and ballet performances, and visits to art museums or galleries. The SPPA categorizes these as “benchmark” activities, providing a standard group of arts activities for more than two decades of consistent trend analysis. Audience 2.0 takes a closer look at how audiences use electronic media to engage in these benchmark activities.

Among the findings in Audience 2.0:

• People who participate in the arts through electronic media are nearly three times as likely to attend live benchmark arts events as non-media participants (59 percent versus 21 percent). In addition, they attend twice as many arts events on average (6 events versus 3 events in one year) and in a greater variety of live art forms. Media-based arts participation appears to encourage — rather than replace — live arts attendance.

• Education continues to be the best predictor of arts participation among adults – both for live attendance and through electronic media. Survey respondents with at least some college education were more likely than respondents with a grade school education to have used electronic media to participate in the arts.

• For many Americans — primarily older Americans, lower income, and racial/ethnic minority groups — electronic media is the only way they participate in benchmark arts events.

• The 15.4 percent of U.S. adults who use media only to engage with the arts are equally likely to be urban or rural.

• Twenty-one percent (47 million) of all U.S. adults reported using the Internet to view music, theater, or dance performances in the last 12 months. Twenty-four percent (55 million) obtained information about the arts online.

In another first for the agency, the Audience 2.0 report is being released only in an electronic format that includes multimedia features. Chairman Landesman’s video greeting will be accompanied by a video commentary on the report from Sunil Iyengar, NEA Director of Research & Analysis. Additionally, each chapter will open with videos from arts organizations that represent each of the benchmark disciplines tracked by the report.

About the National Endowment for the Arts

The NEA is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts – both new and established – bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest annual national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.  For more information, please visit http://www.arts.gov.