ArtSake

You get the sense DangerMilana is a unique law firm when you learn that A. They’ve created their own board game, and B. They invite your dog (socialized and well-behaved, naturally) to their events. The firm, which specializes in areas of importance to creative individuals – entertainment law, intellectual property & copyrights, and estate planning – is holding a series of free workshops to discuss legal issues relevant to artists, inventors and entrepreneurs.

You can join attorneys Deborah Danger and Jenny Milana on upcoming Fridays as part of a free workshop series, with discussion and refreshments starting at 6:30 PM at their Allston, MA office. Here’s the upcoming schedule:

• Protecting Your Work with Copyrights, 4/23/2010, Come learn about the basics of copyright law and how your copyright can generate more income for you.
• Digital Works in a Digital World, 4/30/2010, In the digital world we live in, come learn about the importance of inventorying and how to keep up with advancing technologies.
• Protecting Your Work with a Will, 5/7/2010, We’ll discuss how important an estate plan is for the creative person’s work and the effects of not having a plan in place.
• Contract Drafting, Negotiating and Reviewing, 5/14/2010, If your work is hanging in a gallery, whose responsible if your work is damaged? We’ll cover questions like that and more for many of the different industries.
• Running a Business as an Artist, Inventor or Entrepreneur, 5/21/2010, Learn about which business entity best suits your goals, financial needs and envisioned format of your venture.
• Board Game Testing, 5/28/2010, Come test the firm’s new board game! There will be prizes and candy!

All events take place at 6:30 PM, at DangerMilana, 119 Braintree Street, Studio 416 Allston, MA 02134. You can also drop in or call each Friday between 4:30-6:30 for a free, private and confidential 15 minute consultation. (And yes, you are encouraged to bring your socialized and well behaved dog to the workshops.)

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There are a handful of ways you could celebrate National Poetry Month: cake… mouthfuls and mouthfuls of cake; become a poet’s wealthy (and infinitely generous) patron; write a poem a day for NaPoWriMo; or enjoy the poems of past MCC fellows and finalists here on ArtSake.

Our next poem is by the terrific Caroline Knox (Poetry Fellow ’96, ’06) – an oddly timely verse in these days of real-life, high seas piracy.

QUAKER GUNS

Your handsome workmanlike fourmaster,
out on a reach, no sight of land,
mirrors the adventure tales for children and grownups – oh, isn’t the brightwork
bright; oh, the cannon royal, the twenty-four pounders.
It’s safe to assume that you have eighty-six guns.

But these aren’t worth the powder
it takes to blow them to hell.
Shipmasters long ago thought up this protection:

they’re Quaker guns, a creative ruse, the kind you couldn’t and wouldn’t
shoot: they’re flotsam and jetsam, or any old trees, ships’ logs.
They’re broken masts. They’re the Friends of the Friends.
These logs are laid in the loading trays -
you have twelve cannon at most, but they look like an armada.
So privateers mistake the logs for guns, and they scarpa,
intimidated by driftwood posing as ordnance.
No pirate would go anywhere near you.

Caroline Knox, “Quaker Guns” from Quaker Guns. Copyright 2008 by Caroline Knox. Reprinted with permission of Wave Books.

Caroline Knox is the author of numerous books, including Quaker Guns and the upcoming limited-edition, hand-sewn volume of prose, Nine Worthies, which will be part of Wave Book’s 2010 subscription.

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This just in: Boston Sculptors Gallery call for new members deadline has been EXTENDED to Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Boston Sculptors is a landmark cooperative and has served as an alternative venue for exciting, innovative sculpture exhibitions since 1992. The gallery is located at 486 Harrison Avenue, in Boston’s SOWA district, the gallery seeks to fill up to four vacant positions.

Members are provided with an exhibition approximately every 24 – 30 months at the gallery and receive promotional benefits including gallery web site, catalogues, group shows, invitational offerings, etc. and the shared energy of 36 wide ranging sculptors for networking, problem solving, access to tools, and socializing. In exchange, Members pay annual dues, a percentage of sales, and additional expenses when exhibiting.

Applicants will be reviewed for quality of work, capability to mount exhibitions and ability to complete Member responsibilities. Artists working in new media are encouraged to apply as are artists of diverse backgrounds and those without extensive exhibition experience. Artists can work in a single medium or embrace several mediums; BSG is open to work that may have social, cultural, historical, intellectual, or political concepts behind them.

The full call and submission requirements are available here. Deadline to receive materials is Wednesday, May 5th at 5 pm.

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Speck’s Last in the Boston International Film Festival and Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen at the Boston University Tsai Center

Last fall, we wrote about Speck’s Last, Michael Dowling‘s (Playwriting Fellow ’09) play-turned-screenplay-turned-short film (read about the work’s origins and metamorphosis). The film had an initial screening at Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington in September ’09, and has since been finalized in post-production and is about to screen at the Boston International Film Festival on Friday, April 23.

It is not, in our humble yet earnest opinion, one to miss. The play (which garnered Michael an Artist Fellowship) is a lean, edgy, and gripping work about three siblings in the aftermath of their brother Speck’s death, under mysterious circumstances.

The film version, brought to life by stage/screen actors Gretchen Egolf, Chris Innvar, and Charley Tucker, is truly a Massachusetts project. It’s written by a state-honored artist, funded in part from Michael’s MCC grant money, and filmed and produced here. Fittingly, it shows in Boston this Friday, then at the Berkshire International Film Festival in early June, and hopefully onward and elsewhere as the film lives on.

You can follow the film’s journey on its Facebook page.

This Friday, April 23, is also the world premiere of Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen, a multi-media chamber opera by Shirish Korde (Music Composition Fellow ’79, ’01, ’07). The opera, which had a series of preview performances at The College of the Holy Cross (where Shirish teaches) last week, is about Phoolan Devi, a controversial figure in contemporary Indian history who was assassinated in 2001. Celebrated by some as a Robin Hood-like outlaw and reviled by others as a ruthless killer, her story makes for fascinating – if grim – source material for the new opera. From the official website:

Drawing on the ancient traditions of India such as Vedic Chant, the ecstatic and spiritual style known as Qawwali (made popular in the US by the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), Bollywood, Jazz, propulsive rhythms of tabla drumming, and contemporary music; the composer unifies these styles into a seamless lyrical score.

Two classical Indian singers and a tabla player join Boston Musica Viva for Shirish Korde’s world premiere Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen, with stage direction by Lynn Kremer. Performances are Friday, April 23, and Saturday, April 24, 2010, 8 pm, at the Tsai Performance Center at Boston University.

Images: Promotional images from Specks Last, from top: featuring (l to r) Charley Tucker, Gretchen Egolf, and Chris Innvar; Charley Tucker (as Tuck) and Chris Innvar (as Ivan); promotional image for PHOOLAN DEVI: THE BANDIT QUEEN.

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Call to Artists – Mural
Easthampton City Arts seeks proposals from artists for painting a mural on a 500 sq.ft. downtown brick wall. A minimum of 400 sq.ft. Compensation, including supplies, is $3,000. The Call to Artists is available from ECA, 43 Main Street, or by calling or emailing the Coordinator at info@easthamptoncityarts.com or 413-527-8278.
Deadline: Proposals are due by 5pm, June 4, 2010.

Second round of LCC grants in Northampton
The Northampton Arts Council is unique among our Local Cultural Councils in that it offers a second round of grants every spring (this in addition to its annual October deadline). The council raises money for this second cycle through events like Transperformance (every August) and Four Sundays in February Series. Up to $20,000 will be awarded this spring in the following categories: dance, film/video, literature, mixed media, music, schools, theater, and visual arts.
The ArtsEZ Spring 2010 grant program deadline is May 14, 2010.

Boston Pops Art Contest for Kids
As part of its 125th anniversary season celebration, the Boston Pops is having a student art contest. Students grades K-12 throughout Massachusetts are invited to create original art pieces to be displayed on screens in Symphony Hall during their May 4 to June 20 season. Contact: Sam Brewer at 617-638-9284.
Deadline: May 14, 2010

Call to Artists
The Governors Island Art Fair is accepting submissions for its 3rd annual exhibition in September. GIAF is dedicated to promoting independent artists. Governors Island is a 5 minute free-ferry ride from Lower Manhattan, and even closer to Brooklyn. It is, perhaps, the very last great expanse of undeveloped space for public use in NYC. The call for submissions is open to all artists, 2D, 3D, video, performance and installation. For more information contact: Jack Robinson or visit www.4heads.org.
Deadline: Midnight, June 30, 2010

Boston’s Top 50 Emerging Artists
Rifrákt Artist Collective, a Boston-area collective of emerging artists, seeks artists to feature in their first publication. Each artist selected for inclusion in Boston’s Top 50 Emerging Artists 2010 will be given a 2-page spread of their imagery and supporting text. The finished book will be made available online and distributed locally. Contact Carolyn Hulbert or read their call for artists.
Deadline: April 30, 2010.

Image credit: Photograph of Skylab 4 crew in preflight training at Apollo Telescope Mount mock-up from NASA’s JSC Digital Image Collection.

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We could’ve celebrated National Poetry Month with a series of decorative, commemorative plates. But in the end, it seemed a tad more intuitive to celebrate with actual poetry (though we have nothing against plates, Plate Fans!).

Today’s poem is by Michael Teig (Poetry Fellow ’08), about a common phenomenon of Spring’s warmer temperatures: the lazy man.

I ABANDONED MY PLANS. I HAD NO PLANS.

Some men are so lazy
they should be revered as saints.

Not improved. Not working.
No lift or tilt.

Trying to put on one sock
in the morning they are one man.

A centipede of trouble.
He pretends

to be hit with a stick.
He looks at the world

as though it arrived in an airplane.
The new world’s new, quickening sun

taps the stadium whose retractable roof
pulls back till a single crow comes out,

sideways, slurring over the skyline and wires.
It lays out evidence and empty space:

A woman beside you sleeping. A little clerk
hurrying past like all the capitals of Europe.

Drowsy projectionist, the sun
does nothing but ticket the leaves.

Some men are so beautiful that their insides
are lined with the skin of lions,

with the narrow skin of birds.
With no help from me,

the names of ships, with
the teeth of mice, the overdue snow.

Michael Teig is the author Big Back Yard (BOA Editions, 2003) and is a co-founder and editor-at-large of jubilat.

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Around the Webs
A Very Martha Engagement: when Crystal Hanehan, a Boston-area artist specializing in handmade, vintage-inspired, spun cotton creations through her business Vintage by Crystal, appeared on The Martha Stewart Show, it was already shaping up to be a propitious day. Then she was proposed to by her boyfriend. On air. (I’ve heard of using Martha designs for your special occasions, but adorning the moment with the actual Martha – now that’s good style.)

From the Boston Globe: a local architectural firm wants to transform an abandoned T tunnel into a subterreanean art space. The proposal, called TUTS (Tremont Underground Theater Space) won the ShiftBoston Ideas Competition 2009 for “provocative wild visions for the City of Boston.” The proposed space would be multi-use, and best of all, wouldn’t be overrun with vicious Morlocks for another 800,000 years!

The Art21 blog talks to Laura Thompson at Kidspace, which has incorporated the work of dozens of individual artists during its 10 years providing young museum goers with creative awesomeness at MASS MoCA in North Adams.

A new online publication, Defunct Magazine, collects essays about things that have gone – or are going – bye bye. AGNI editor Sven Birkerts contributes musings on the rake – “not yet a relic, but a technology on the verge.”

Congratulations, Massachusetts
Bravo to Paul Harding of Georgetown, Mass., whose novel Tinkers won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His debut novel, no less. The New York Times Paper Cut blog calls the novel “one that got away” – as in went under the paper’s radar when it came out, but one will no doubt get its due now.

The Berkshire Taconic ART Fund has announced over $150,000-worth of smiles/grants to New England artists and arts organizations.

I need a hero. Had Bonnie Tyler meant, in her classic 1980s ballad “Holding Out for a Hero,” a hero of the theater, in the Boston area, the next line could’ve been, “More specifically, Michael Maso, Managing Director of the Huntington Theatre Company, who was just named Theatre Hero by the theatre service organization StageSource!” (Would’ve changed the nature of the song a bit, but still.)

Congratulations to writer Brendan Mathews of Great Barrington, whose short story “My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer” was selected by Richard Russo for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2010. Brendan has been published all over the place, including Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Southwest Review, and teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. (Incidentally, does anyone know about other Massachusetts writers who have been selected for the upcoming Best American collection? Leave a comment and spread the love!)

Getting Strong Now
On New England Film, the Screenplay Doctor answers some screenwriters’ questions, mostly about agents: the need for, and the locating of, the writing to.

Fractured Atlas, a national artists’ services organization, has online courses – free, gratis, and fer nuthin’! Courses on marketing, fundraising, working with agents, and more are available to members (and it’s free to become a Fractured Atlas “Community Member”).

Interested in finding an agent/publisher for your novel? Boston-area writer Dell Smith gets down to the basics of that most basic effort of the would-be published author: the Query Letter.

Image: Crystal Hanehan of Vintage by Crystal, Vintage Style Spun Cotton Birds in a Tree Wedding Cake Topper. See more of her creations at her Etsy store.

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Yesterday, the House Ways & Means Committee released a proposed state budget for the coming fiscal year that calls for $9.1 million for arts and cultural funding through the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC). Thanks to everyone who advocated on our behalf.

Read more about this news, and the next steps in the state budget process.

Also yesterday, the House approved future revenues from casinos for arts & culture.

Image: Cristi Rinklin (Painting Fellow ’10), BOUND FOR GLORY (2009), Flashe on Duralar 17×14 in.

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TRIIIBE at Gallery Kayafas; The New Media Curious Experimental Moving Images Festival at Axiom

You know TRIIIBE is an intriguing group of artists when the fact that three of the four members are identical triplets is only part of what makes them compelling (and not necessarily the most majority part!). The work of TRIIIBE, aka Alicia Casilio, Sara Casilio, Kelly Casilio, and Cary Wolinsky (Sculpture/Installation Fellows ’09), lives in that curious place between performance, photography, video, and conceptual art. A solo show at Gallery Kayafas in Boston this month offers a unique opportunity to see the range of their photographic work, with a revealing focus on identity and the politics of identity.

See a video excerpt from Art on Art/People on Plywood, TRIIIBE’s surprise performance at the ICA Boston

The show runs at Gallery Kayafas in Boston, April 17-May 29, 2010. Dates to know: Saturday, April 17, opening reception, 6-9 PM; Friday, April 30, Crime Night, 6-9 PM; First Friday, May 7, Multiples Night (for look-alikes and like-a-looking), 6-9 PM; Friday, May 28, Last Chance!, 6-9 PM.

Something curious is afoot on Thursday nights this April at the Axiom Center For New and Experimental Media in Jamaica Plain. Axiom and Art Technology New England are hosting The New Media Curious Experimental Moving Images Festival. Like the work of TRIIIBE, experimentation and innovation is at the heart of the festival, with work from the borderlands (or brand new territories) of creative disciplines.

This Thursday, April 15 will feature INtransit V.6: Scientific American, a video journal of art and technoscience produced by AstroDime Transit Authority. in V.6, artists and scientists examine the question “what is a scientific American” through the lens of their disciplines. Massachusetts filmmaker Karen Aqua (whose interview with ArtSake you can read here), is among the artists featured.

Thursday, April 22 will include Experimental Moving Images from the ATNE, a burgeoning community of people working at the intersection of technology and the arts. Thursday April 29 brings What if? 60x60x60, a participatory media experiment that uses 60 video and 60 sound clips of 60 seconds each, from media artist Gene Gort and composer/sound artist, Ken Steen.

Both Axiom and ATNE are programs of Boston Cyberarts. All show times are at 7:30 PM. Find more info and purchase tickets here.

AXIOM is located on the ground floor level of the Green Street Subway (“T”) station on the Orange line, at the corner of Amory and Green Streets in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Images: TRIIIBE, THE COMPATIBILITY QUIZ; video excerpt from Art on Art/People on Plywood by TRIIIBE; Still from SENSORIUM (2007), co-directed/co-produced by Karen Aqua & Ken Field.

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Our next poem commemorating National Poetry Month is by Caroline Berry Klocksiem (Poetry Fellow ’08), imagining the surreal meteorology of the American Plains, this very day, 75 years ago.

Enough to make the chickens roost at noon
April 14, 1935

Nervous bird chatter then flatlining hush
over miles the day grows dark as crow
The day so black the air was smoke
heavy like tarred black lungs, dark
enough to need a new name for black
The smoke built a wall just before
your face, the wall slashing light from our homes
and darkness broadcast its siren for acres

Blackness swooping and swallowing like dry-as-a-bone
throat, black as pork blood, black as the long gone prairie,
black as long gone and black as seeping back
like the monster come back rolling out
from your dreams, well, just ask Old Job
how black or Jonah for that matter bigger than
behemoth, the belly of the whale turned insight out,
when the blizzard hit it gutted the day wide open
like brim, black insides gushing and tumbling to death

when the blizzard hit we’d finished the last drop of honey
when the blizzard hit it was 3 am at noon
when the blizzard hit it was the first and last day that black
blizzard forever like time, like testimony,
like not going nowhere, and black as a matter
of fact, as can’t hardly breathe, as pulling
our breaths together, counting them like the trees.

Originally published in Blood Orange Review 4.3

Caroline Berry Klocksiem is poetry editor at 42opus and teaches literature and writing at the University of Alabama and Holyoke Community College.

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