“An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution.”
— Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)
Play to be Produced in St. Louis
My play The Elephant in the Room was named a finalist in the first annual Labute New Theater Festival, started by the St. Louis Actors’ Studio in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ll post more details here as I learn them, but the play will be produced as part of the festival in July 2013, at the Gaslight Theater in St. Louis.
I’m hoping to be able to travel to see it, but I’m actually in rehearsal for another show that we were going to do a work-in-progress showing of in late July, so it will depend on the timing. But either way, I’m excited to have the play be part of this new festival.
Continue readingBring Your Own Discussion
I was invited to be part of a discussion taking place at Harvard. The discussion will focus on the challenges that artists working in all forms face in getting paid for their creative work. Many discussions have been taking place live and online around these topics over the past couple of years, and they have taken place in different forms in decades past. Of course, no single discussion will solve the problem, but I’m looking forward to comparing notes with my fellow speakers, Jesal Kapadia of MIT and and Lise Soskolne of W.A.G.E.
Please join if you’re in the Boston area:
Wednesday, April 10 @ 7.00pm
Capenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
This event is free and doesn’t require tickets or RSVP.
Further info
Recent Arts Journalism and Discussion
I was asked to take part in Flux Factory’s Death Match: Arts Funding, Follow the $$$$ in January of this year. It was a bit raucous and a laugh, but it got me thinking about a few things. Lucky for me, the National Endowment for the Arts blog editor asked me to write a recap of the event for them, so I had a chance to think through some of what we talked about in the debate. Read it here:
• A Fight to the Death for Arts Funding?
That piece follows up on a series of articles and essays I’ve been writing over at Hyperallergic about the role of the arts in US society. All this writing builds on the research I’m doing for a book that I’m writing about the value of the arts in America.
Here are a couple of the other pieces that I’ve written lately:
• Failure, Success, and Community in Contemporary Performance
• Recovering the History of the Puerto Rican Art Workers’ Coalition
• A Grand Unified Theory of Art?
• The Perplexing Role of Metrics in the Arts
• It Is Broke, We Should Probably Fix It: The Nonprofit Model and the Arts
• Good Intentions and Big Ideas: Feel Good Grants That Exploit Artists and Reduce Arts Funding
View the complete archive of my pieces for Hyperallergic here.
Continue readingResearch, research, research
Most of what I’m doing these is connected in some way to research I’m doing for the book I’m working on about value and the arts. In the process, I’ve come across some resources that make me really happy that data geeks and life-long researchers do their work. Here are a few good resources:
• CPANDA (The Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive – has links to just about every major arts-related data set out there)
• Some 2001 data from Princeton on the question of “How many artists are there [in the US]?” (it has holes, but it’s a great and very digestible jumping off point to larger questions about how we name and count artists)
• Most of this woman’s writing: Ellen Dissanayake
• This book, for many reasons: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex
• Not being an educator, I’m coming to find as I dip further into a framework for better understanding the arts, that the term “inquiry” has achieved a vogue in education now, as in “inquiry-based learning.” Inquiring minds want to know…
But it’s not all research all the time. This fall I started a Queer Writing Group with Ella Boureau of In the Flesh Magazine. And in November I co-organized a marathon reading of work by Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. My brain can’t sit still these days.
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Between Recent and Older Readings
A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World, Marcia Tucker, with help and editing from Liza Lou (Like Smith’s book below, I felt like there was a certain insistence on being clear about what it felt like to live her life and make the choices she made. She was a remarkable lady. I’m only sorry it took me this long to get to know her work.)
among others…
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