ArtSake

At Kino-Eye are nifty photos from the Berwick Research Institute’s recent Artist Encampment on Bumpkin Island. Ten groups of artists embarked to the Boston Harbor island with only the art supplies on their backs to “homestead” and adapt their creative ideas over five days. Berwick’s website called the project “part residency, part survivalist experiment, and fully impressionable, malleable, speculative and reflective.”

Recently, the Mellon Foundation announced it has awarded $10 million in organizational grants to support new plays. I’m amused by Culture Monster’s take on the announcement: “(With) state arts budgets being slashed as though they were screaming victims in a horror movie, every donated dollar helps.” Alas, no Massachusetts institutions were granted, but Massachusetts playwrights have been supported by some of the funded orgs – recently, Sundance Institute named Kirsten Greenidge a Time Warner Storytelling Fellow, the Playwrights Center is currently hosting Monica Raymond as one of its Jerome Fellows, and Steppenwolf Theater Company produced Melinda Lopez’s play Sonya Flew in the 2006/07 season.

The theater world being an opinionated sort of place, it shouldn’t surprise you that not everyone was thrilled by Mellon’s move.

It appears that the worlds of Massachusetts photographer Sage Sohier are nearly perfect in the eyes of the We Can’t Paint photography blog.

Sly as ever, Alex Ross riffs on the intersection between contemporary composers and presidential politics, at The Rest Is Noise. (Don’t miss the YouTube clip; strictly on aesthetic, nonpartisan terms, the original jazz score accompanying Sarah Palin’s interview is too brilliant to miss.) Speaking of politics, the Globe’s Off the Shelf book blog shares how three publishers (including two from Massachusetts) are getting directly involved in campaign donations.

Good job, The Healing Arts: New Pathways to Health! The 2006 documentary was honored with a “Best of the Festival” award from the Focus Film Festival. And also, good job to director Benjamin Mayer, and also to Vermont Arts Exchange, who produced. Oh, and good job to us (MCC). Cuz we co-produced. So, an inclusive good job.

Rejoicing in fifth anniversary-hood, Chicks Make Flicks screens The Axe in the Attic, which takes documentary filmmakers Lucia Small and Ed Pincus on a 60-day road trip from New England to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Thursday, October 30, 7 PM at MIT (77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge Room 6-120).

Exploring the indie film experience a little further… a California cinematographer discusses creative shooting and lighting decisions for an ultra-cheap indie shoot. (Props to the Filmmaker Magazine blog for linking to this first.)

Any arts administrators out there? Andrew Taylor has composed your theme song.

The old writing workshop chestnut “that’s dated” fails to hold up under poet and editor Elisa Gabbert’s scrutiny, at the Ploughshares blog.

(Did you catch the acrostic? Yipeee!!)

Image: Andrew Neumann, HAL (VERTICAL CONVERSATION) (2001), wood, motor, micro-processor, camera, LCD screen, 36 in x 12 in x 8 in. Andrew, a 2003 Sculpture/Installation finalist, exhibits kinetic sculptures in “The Last Picture Show” at AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media in Boston, October 24-December 13. Opening reception Friday, October 24, 6 PM, artist talk Saturday, December 13, 3:30 PM.

At the blog of the venerable literary journal Ploughshares, 2006 Poetry Fellow Simeon Berry calls our attention to, in his own droll and idiosyncratic way, a spirited discussion within the online poetry community about one poet’s disastrous experience with a poetry contest.

So you want to build yourself a super-duper artist’s website, and you want to do it free, gratis, and for nothin’? Over at the Technology in the Arts blog, Brad Stephenson wants to help you. Because as he puts it, “You’re cheap, and I love you.”

Art critic Sebastian Smee, recent emigre from The Australian to the Boston Globe, shares his first impressions on first impressions (oh, and on Massachusetts art museums).

Perhaps instead of Artist Fellowships, we should award Olympic medals in the arts.

MacDowell Colony doesn’t oppose Divine Mercy. But the isolated artists retreat (which has welcomed many Massachusetts artists over the years) would prefer the new church not be built quite so close to MacDowell’s, you know, isolation.

Where do the presidential candidates stand on the arts? Here, a couple of bloggers offer opinions on the arts policies of Obama and McCain. You can also investigate on your own at ArtsVote, a program of Americans for the Arts Action Fund. The site links to current and former presidential candidates’ arts policies, including Clinton, Richardson, and Huckabee (Did you know Mike Huckabee is a big supporter of arts and music in education, calling them “Weapons of Mass Instruction?”).

Disclaimer (spoken in robot voice): No candidate or opinion of same candidate being advocated for by ArtSake blog. Just sharing Internet data. Affirmative. End transmission.

Image: Sarah Slavick, TRANSMIT (2005), oil on wood, 36 in. X 36 in.

Mary Sherman (Painting Finalist ‘04) is currently a Fulbright Senior Scholar and artist-in-residence at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, Taiwan, and she sent us a fascinating update on her projects there. While in Taipei, Mary is running a workshop called “Here, There and Everywhere” collaborating with students and faculty from Taipei National University of the Arts, as well as local artists, to create an exhibition at the Kuandu Museum (running July 11 to August 31). Below are posts from Mary’s KdMoFa Collaborative Workshops blog, detailing projects by two of the artists teams participating in the workshop.

TEAM D

Mary Sherman / Pan Ping-Yu / Fujui Wang /Tao Ya-Lun/ Chang Ling/Josef Bares

Starry Night (on Mars)

When we were all showing each other our work, the idea of a shooting star came up; and everyone instantly locked onto it. Then, when we met again at the museum, we decided that we would create a sky - complete with shooting stars and a cosmic atmosphere. At the same time, we talked about how we all have the same sky above us; but we are culturally different and as such our myths and tales about the stars differ. However, what does seem universal in these stories is that they represent a projection of our desires, resulting in our interest to also make a star manual that would be open to everyone’s own cultural interpretation.

***

TEAM C

Chong Yi-Kei / Fan Sih-Ci / Ho Tsan-Wen / Lin Shin-Mei / Chang Feng-Shih / Huang Po-Chih

Crack Down 2.2

All our work, on some level, is an investigation of fragments of the human body or personality. Our investigation is undertaken to better understand the complexities of both these fragments and their role in understanding ourselves and those around us. For this exhibition we have decided to switch from our more usual visual format to focus on the sound of the human voice. We, thus, have created a dialog of disembodied voices so that the audience also can experience what we believe - that such a fragment of ourselves can convey a great deal.

See more images from the collaboration.

Here Comes the Sun

Along with her work in Taipei, Mary collaborated with Italian artist Rudi Punzo on another project, a massive public art performance in partnership with Shanghai’s Zendai Museum of Modern Art. Here Comes the Sun featured 800 hand-printed Kongming lanterns, launched into the sky in a carefully choreographed sequence to spell “here comes the sun” in ASCII programming code. A sound design accompanied each launch.

The text “here comes the sun” (along with its obvious debt to the Beatles) is a rough translation of a Chinese blessing, a tribute to Chinese citizens following the recent earthquake disaster. Mary and her collaborator invited the public to add their own messages being sent to the heavens.

Mary Sherman is the founder of TransCultural Exchange. As an artist, she has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, including New York, Seoul, Vienna, Chicago, London, and Venice.

“Starry Night (on Mars)” by Team D, KdMoFa Collaborative Workshops, Taipei, Taiwan; “Crack Down 2.2″ by Team C, KdMoFa Collaborative Workshops, Taipei, Taiwan; Artists prepare to launch Kongming lanterns, “Here Comes the Sun,” Zendai MoMA, Shanghai, China; Mary Sherman works with artists to prepare lanterns for “Here Comes the Sun,” Shanghai, China; Another view of “Here Comes the Sun,” Zendai MoMA, Shanghai, China

Picture this: no high definition television to watch, no tangled ipod headphone wires to unravel, no traffic to raise your blood pressure, just you and your imagination in a magnificent place to create your work.

Residencies for visual artists (one $500 fellowship), writers and the public are available in Provincetown’s historic dune shacks. The deadline to apply for a residency is fast approaching.