ArtSake

Bring on the tryptophan (or, if you prefer, an equally drowse-inducing vegan counterpart). Amidst the travels/tables/tackles/toils, here are a handful of links to keep you arts-clicking from here to Black Friday.

Creative Capital has launched a blog to build the national artists community from scrappy underdog to fierce contender. Getting strong now! Read this post on must-haves for your artist website.

Meanwhile, the fine, artists-supporting folks at Pew Center for Arts and Heritage have posted some practical financial advice for artists, care of choreographer and past Pew Fellow Amy Smith.

If you’re an admirer of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival but, in your heart of hearts, harbor the feeling that the 2011 festival was missing one very specific event – yours – now’s your chance. Submit a proposal by Dec. 1 to participate in the 2012 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which will be in Salem, April 20-22, 2012.

Former literary agent and current author/literary blogger Nathan Bransford diagnoses some common writing maladies, such as catching the Catcher in the Rye voice or being plagued by adverbs-itis. Funny stuff.

Congratulations to Jennifer Haigh (Hull), Suzanne Matson (Newton), and Sabina Murray (Amherst) for winning 2012 NEA Literature Fellowships! We humbly note that MCC has funded both Suzanne (1998) and Sabina (2002) in the past, and numerous other current NEA grantees (Amber Dermont, Tayari Jones, and Benjamin Percy) have been past reviewers in our Artist Fellowships Program.

Boston’s Grub Street, Inc. writers’ service organization is moving its HQ. Currently on 160 Boylston, they’re moving down (or is it up?) the block to the Steinway Building, adjacent to the newly christened Edgar Allan Poe Square. The move means more floor space, accommodating a “quadrupling of our programmatic offerings, and the implementation of many exciting new initiatives.”

Umbrage has shared a clip from Yabat Ida Le Lij, a film by Eric Gottesman and members of Sudden Flowers (an Ethiopian film collective started by Gottesman, comprised of children affected by AIDS/HIV). Umbrage Editions is publishing Sudden Flowers, a compendium of Eric’s work with the project, in Fall 2012.

Meanwhile, jazz composer/guitarist Eric Hofbauer shares his recent experience participating in the Penn Ar Jazz Festival in France, an experience that has “awoken a fierce confidence along with a new urgency to play and share my music with as many people as I can.” See some of that musical urgency in the clip at the top of the page, from Eric’s recent performance at Johnny D’s in Somerville.

Quip lit wit and win. Concoct a clever tagline for Carolina Quarterly and get a year’s subscription to the literary journal!

Finally, for a unique arts experience this Thanksgiving weekend, attend the Short Story Film Festival at Gallery X in New Bedford. Forty live action and animated films from 23 countries will screen on Saturday, November 26. If sweet potato overload has got you too groggy to follow long plots, don’t despair: each film is five minutes or under.

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So, you want art this weekend. You’ve come to the right place. Here’s a handy dandy guide to your art-seeking travels.

Your starting point is Taunton, Massachusetts, on Sat., June 4, 2011, for the Dighton Cow Chip Festival. There, you’ll behold chainsaw sculptor “The Machine” Jesse Green as he lives out his slogan – “Carving Dreams into Reality” – by sculpting (live, in real-time, and using the previously mentioned chainsaw) a cow sculpture that’s to become Taunton’s newest fixture.

Then, make your way due north until you reach the cool waters of the Charles River, where the Cambridge River Festival (Sat, June 4) can offer you music, puppetry, dance, theatre, improv, a parade, children’s programming, and all manners of interactive and creative fun.

Cross the Charles River to Boston – specifically, to the Rose Kennedy Greenway. There, FIGMENT Boston (June 4-5) awaits you. FIGMENT Boston is a part of the national FIGMENT project, a “forum for the creation and display of participatory and interactive art by emerging artists across disciplines.” Over 80 artists are participating in FIGMENT Boston this year, including live video installation, interactive music performance, architectural dance installation, and many, many other interesting projects that are too hard to compact into a reasonable sentence. May we humbly suggest this event is likely to be far out.

Next, head north to Salem, MA. You’ll find the Salem Arts Festival, a weekend-long (June 3-5) celebration of visual, performing, and literary art. You can take a magic carpet ride, learn bellydance, do improv, and see tons of art.

Now, I understand that, with four festivals already under your belt, you’re weary, hungry, possibly a touch over-festive. But you must persevere. For a little over 30 miles from Salem is the formidable city of Lowell, where you’ll breathlessly rush through the doors of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre. There, the Lowell National Historical Park hosts an evening of Irish dance and fiddle music Saturday night, featuring master artists and their apprentices, from the MCC’s Traditional Apprenticeship Program. Read more at our sibling blog, Keepers of Tradition, on this fascinating evening of solo, duet, and group performances.

You may rest now.

It’s Sunday morning (almost noon – you slept late). Rise, and see art.

First, head to South Boston, where there’s a Spring Open Studio at the Distillery & King Terminal (Sun., June 5, 2011). See the current participating artists and check out some previous work by some of those same artists in an older post we did about their Fall open studios.

Finally, make your way, by roller skate, rickshaw, unicycle, or – if need be – an easier mode of transport, to the Tufts University Art Gallery in Medford. A show of MCC Fellows just opened (see pictures of the opening on our Facebook page). If you want a sense of the range and vision of work being produced by visual artists in Massachusetts, you have arrived at your destination. While you’re there, use your cell to call a special number for audio commentary by the artists.

There. You’ve reached the end of our guide. But feel free to expand the map.

Image: Gallery view of paintings by Monica Nydam, from a show of MCC Fellows at Tufts University Art Gallery.

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It’s been a while since we’ve rounded up some links of interest to the Massachusetts arts community. Friends, there is much to share, so click to your hearts content on the following stuff.

I love the premise behind the California-based Sustainable Arts Foundation: help artists and writers who also happen to be parents to create their work. “Too often,” says the org, “creative impulses are set aside to meet the wonderful, but pressing, demands of raising a family. The foundation’s goal is to encourage parents to continue pursuing their creative passion, and to rekindle it in those who may have let it slide.” Until May 20, they’re accepting applications for $6000 grants to support artists/parents!

Closer to home, Playwrights’ Commons, an organization formed by dramaturg Ilana Brownstein, has developed a number of programs to serve the unmet needs of local playwrights. Commons is currently accepting applications for its Freedom Art Theatre Retreat, which will give emerging Boston-area playwrights the chance to be matched with designers and dramaturgs for an intensive, play-blossoming retreat in a remote, New England setting, this August. The organization also has intriguing plans for its Donut Hole Lab, which will aim to support playwrights “who are no longer young or new enough to be considered by producing theatres as emerging, and yet who are also not yet considered established…” More details to come.

On May 21 and 22, a conference in Cambridge called Play-jurisms will explore the complex thicket of copyright, appropriation, ethics, and creativity. All events are free, including discussions with intellectual property lawyers and artists, performances, and a film screening. The conference, organized by David Taber and Tim Devin, and will be held at the Democracy Center near Harvard Sq.

The Emerging America Festival, a partnership between The American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), Huntington Theatre Company, and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston to present “groundbreaking performance by American artists,” starts tonight and continues this weekend. Along with new theatre by local dramatists like Jay Scheib (recent Guggenheim awardee) and Ryan Landry, the festival has commissioned a fascinating library of podcast plays by artists like Kirsten Greenidge, John Kuntz, and recent MCC Fellow Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro.

Congratulations to Boston-area playwright Lydia Diamond for winning the Wimberly Award from the Huntington Theatre Company for her play Stick Fly! She also recently received an IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for “Best New Play from a Large Theatre Company” Watch the YouTube clip at the top of the post to see her gracious response.

Boston-area novelist Jane Roper frequently gets asked, “Is your novel fictional?” So, like, is it?

Still kneeling on a bed of uncooked macaroni to punish yourself for not making Salamander literary magazine’s Fiction Contest submission deadline? Well, kneel no more! The deadline has been extended until May 31. Jim Shepard is judging. Contest guidelines.

But George, the Man with the Yellow Hat told you not to get into any trouble! And yet Harvard Square’s iconic Curious George children’s bookstore is in trouble. Actually, it’s no laughing matter; without help, they may have to shut their doors. The store was launched with the help of the late Curious George co-creator (and Cambridge resident) Margaret Rey.

Recently, we discussed the many artist open studios taking place around Massachusetts this Spring. This weekend, there are open studios events in Newton, Dedham, Boston (the SoWa Art Walk), and central Cambridge.

And finally, a few updates on some past MCC Fellows: while Jamie Cat Callan (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’10) is entertainingly interviewed over at Grub Daily, Joan Wickersham (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’08) prepares to join authors Elizabeth Searle, Andre Dubus III, and Elyssa East for a live, power-packed Four Stories reading on May 23, in Cambridge (all proceeds will be donated to children orphaned in the recent earthquake disaster in Japan). Meanwhile, Jeff Zimbalist‘s (Film & Video Fellow ’05) latest film Bollywood: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told (a documentary co-directed with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra), is about to premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival! Watch a trailer.

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In our modern world, mysteries abound! On the other hand, so do plastic water bottles. And twist ties (see above). In fact, lots of things abound. Information. Celebrities. Blog posts and websites. Haters and their hatin’. Makers and their makin’. All abound.

It’s been suggested that curation will be increasingly key to our navigation, as a culture, of the overly abundant information-scape in our lives. In that spirit, we thought we’d round up some of the abundantly intriguing, or mysterious, or just plain keen stuff going on.

On The Public Humanist, blog of Mass Humanities, Natasha Haverty and Adam Bright share the backstory of their radio documentary-in-progress about a debate society formed in the 1930s by inmates in a Norfolk, MA prison – and how the team defeated debate squads from more hallowed MA institutions like MIT and Harvard.

Why should James Franco work at Grub Street, the Boston-based writers service organization? Answer this question by 5 PM today (Friday, April 15), and you may win a pair of tickets to Cocktail Hour with the Francos, an unscripted conversation with writer/actor/conceptual artist James Franco and his mother, writer Betsy Franco, at Grub Street’s great Muse and the Marketplace Conference. Just tweet “James Franco should work at Grub Street because…” and your answer, and include @GrubWriters and #musefranco in your tweet.

How big a wave could one week’s worth of plastic bottles create? The good folks of Citizens for Salem/Beverly Water Resources suspect it will yield A Mighty Wave. They’re encouraging artists to converge at Salem Common in Salem on the morning of May 7 to create a one-day public art display, creating a wave of plastic from bottles collected in just one week in Salem. All will be broken down in time for a recycling truck to break (and recycle) the wave by afternoon. Find out more.

Not since the Mayors’ Arts Challenge have two MA cities had so vigorous a rivalry! Responding to a remark by a Cambridge city councilor that Somerville doesn’t have many interesting places, Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone has challenged Cambridge to an “Interesting City Challenge.” He even invokes the arts:

It’s called authenticity, and we’ve got it in the arts too. The City and local businesses weave art into everything we do. Public art absolutely needs to be part of this Challenge, though it’s not fair because most of the artists Cambridge had long ago moved to Somerville. And we’re talking everything from painters to sculptors to comic book artists. Oh, if you happen to catch a band in Cambridge anytime soon, make sure to ask them where in Somerville they live.

(As a state agency, we are not taking sides.)

Speaking of rivalries: watch Governor Deval Patrick go head to head with The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart! Actually, it’s a really friendly conversation. They talk about Gov. Patrick’s new book, former MA governor Mitt Romney, and why The Daily Show should move production to Massachusetts.

New England Film has a terrific article on five films from New England talent screening this month at the International Film Festival of Boston (April 27-May 4, 2011).

GO SEE ART. Where? Find out at GO SEE ART. It’s a compendium of New England art exhibitions. So go there. And then go. You know. To see art.

Will it surprise you that the Boston chapter of the Awesome Foundation, which funds projects it considers awesome (that’s really the only criteria), funded a group that describes itself as “Boston’s mysterious playmate?” Banditos Misteriosos won a $1000 “Awesome” grant for its plan to create a giant puzzle to be put together by the Boston community sometime this summer. Past efforts by the Misteriosos, who aim to answer the questions “Who are these people we pass in the street?” and “How could we use those big open public spaces?” by staging whimsical public events, include massive pillow and water gun fights and a live, “Choose Your Own Adventure” game.

At the recent TransCultural Exchange Conference, attendee Ilana Manolson (Painting Fellow ’08) shared her experiences exhibiting her paintings through the ART in Embassies Program, which places American art in U.S. diplomatic residencies worldwide. Through that program, Ilana’s paintings have been on exhibit at American embassies in The Hague and Sarajevo.

I really like this post by the Our Stories literary journal that lists short stories that employ a very specific device, then carry it off with skill. Massachusetts literary rawk star Steve Almond (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow ’08) is on the list twice!

Finally: arts funding is one thing mentioned in this post that’s not nearly abundant enough. On a federal level, the NEA’s budget is under threat, and here in MA, we have our own issues. Read this testimony by Tim Robbins about how a small investment in the arts can yield a bounty – not just in terms of the tax revenues, but culturally and personally.

Image: Rachel Perry Welty, LOST IN MY LIFE (TWIST TIES) (2009), Pigmented ink print, edition of 3, 90×60 in, Courtesy of the Artist, Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston), Gallery Joe (Philadelphia), and Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York). Rachel’s solo show RACHEL PERRY WELTY 24/7 is on exhibit at the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum in Lincoln through April 24, 2011. Currently, Rachel’s video work KARAOKE WRONG NUMBER 2004-2009 is featured in Videonale 13 at Kunstmuseum Bonn, through May 29, 2011.

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It’s a busy time here at the state arts agency – but interesting arts links wait for no one. So we thought it might be a good opportunity to round up some links of interest to Massachusetts artists and art-fans.

The Emerging Filmmakers Series at the Boston Center for the Arts launches tomorrow (Thursday, April 7), with two film screenings, including the premiere of Sospia by Lana Z. Caplan (featured here on ArtSake). Sospira (watch the trailer) is a 50-minute experimental documentary about nine international women and their travels along the Amalfi Coast of Italy. The Emerging Filmmaker Series is curated by Jeff Daniel Silva (Film & Video Finalist ’09).

Need some talking points as you advocate for support of the arts? You could do worse than to borrow from Kevin Spacey (or Abe Lincoln). In this clip from “Hardball” on MSNBC, Kevin Spacey speaks eloquently about why arts funding is important, citing how Lincoln continued attending theatre and reading voraciously during the Civil War: “Lincoln understood that he needed the arts to replenish his soul.”

Cool: the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre is doing yeoman’s work exploring the world of new plays on the Playwrights Perspective blog. I love this post by BPT alum Anne Pattison about good omens she found during her world travels that gave her hope for the plight of the modern playwright.

Are you a writer? Do you like awesome, really super useful things? Okay, then you’ll like this. The Beyond the Margins blog checks in with a bunch of great writers to see what advice they might have for their earlier, not-yet-published selves. The advice ranges from the pragmatic (Ericka Robuck: “Keep it simple.”) to the gallows-ly humorous (Amy MacKinnon: “Become an accountant instead.”) to the poetic (Jackie Mitchard: “This rollercoaster ride will take you higher than swallows fly and lower than worms burrow…”).

Speaking of poetic: you’re planning on attending, taking part in, and/or heartily singing the praises of this May’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival – right? Prime the pump this month by taking part in (or organizing your own) Common Threads’ event to celebrate seven poems by poets with strong ties to Massachusetts.

And finally: the TransCultural Exchange Conference of international opportunities for artists of all disciplines starts tomorrow, April 7 and runs through April 10. Some of the terrific events are free, such as several at the Boston Public Library, including a panel on “First Books” by ArtSake faves Mira Bartok and Jedediah Berry, 1:30-3:30 PM, in the Boston Room, and a Grant Writing Workshop with David Adams of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars and Deb Todd Wheeler, 1:30-3:30 PM in Room C05/C06.

Image: still from SOSPIRA by Lana Z. Caplan.

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It’s a sleepy August morning, and you are, hopefully, supine in a hammock or in crystalline sand on some manner of cape (Cod, Ann, Canaveral, etc.). In case you brought your laptop, here’s a round-up of useful, edifying, interesting, or otherwise nifty art-related web destinations.

I brake for blogs that find unique uses for the format. Like Good Ear Review, which publishes dramatic monologues by varied writers, including some Mass. playwrights. Though its editor-in-chief is listed as Tristram Stjohn Bexindale-Webb (editor for the past 147 years), one suspects Northampton playwright KD Halpin may be more than the “Adjuncty Staff” the site claims her to be. Find out how to submit your own monologues.

Another fun one is the His Room as He Left It project blog by Ariel Kotker, where she posts additions to her ongoing, handmade installation, as she makes them. Recently, this meant sharing the Mosspocket Spittle Tabs.

The Technology in the Arts blog covers different methods to crowdfund your art. You’ve probably heard of the site Kickstarter, in which creative rewards are used as incentives to donate to projects, such as the successfully-funded Big Hammock (pictured above), a public art project in Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. The post also delves into IndieGoGo and RocketHub.

A U-Mass Amherst theatre student shares the rules of comedy directing he gleaned from participating in rehearsals for The Hound of the Baskervilles at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, such as “If You Can’t Hide It, Feature It” and “Simplify (Unless You Shouldn’t).”

Comic virtuosity, rock star-ness, and individualized pencil sharpening convene in a bookstore you can’t find. On August 20, Brookline’s native son John Hodgman (of The Daily Show and The Areas of My Expertise), David Rees (of Get Your War On), and musical performer John Roderick are joining for an event at the Montague Bookmill in Western Mass. Among the evening’s offerings are this curiosity: Rees will present a rare, live artisanal pencil sharpening demonstration. What is artisanal pencil sharpening, you ask? My guess is it resides somewhere between satire, conceptual art, and hand-sanding, but seek out the bookshop (whose slogan is “Books you don’t need in a place you can’t find”) and find out for yourself. (The Bookmill can’t be too hard to find; according to this Globe article, Hodgman wrote most of his first book there.)

Apply to our Artist Fellowships Program, and you, too, might someday model for Vogue and Time Magazine! Further reading to support the previous sentence: 1. A profile of Jonathan Franzen in Time, which includes his visage on the cover (incidentally, the last time an author graced the Time cover was Stephen King, in March 2000). 2. A story about Franzen in Vogue, which includes a Vogue-ish photo portrait. 3. Our list of notable past Massachusetts state fellows, which includes Mr. Franzen (he received the award in 1986, two years before his first novel The Twenty Seventh City was published.)

When selecting honorary chairs for your theater company, it never hurts to aim high.

Stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike? Stay alert for talking felt, in case some Massachusetts artists decide to emulate Superclogger, a puppet show for gridlocked L.A. drivers.

When writing, do you suffer from the Yoda Effect? Chatty Cathy-ness? The Old Spice Guy Effect? A San Fran literary agent breaks down common writing maladies.

A painter accepts commissions to paint people’s ideal bookshelf, a row of their most treasured or meaningful books.

Provocative filmmaker John Waters is interviewed in the Paris Review, where he talks about his longtime tradition of summering in Provincetown. In particular, his happy days working for local booksellers:

It was a magical time in my life. I worked in the bookshop. First I worked in the East End Bookshop that was run by Molly Malone Cook and her girlfriend, Mary Oliver, the poet, who was not famous yet. And then I worked at the Provincetown Bookshop for many, many years. And it’s still there. Elloyd Hansen, one of the owners, was the guy who really gave me my complete education about books. I didn’t go to school, so he’s the one who told me about Ronald Firbank, Jane Bowles; I learned everything working there.

Image: Digital prototype of THE BIG HAMMOCK, a public art project by Hansy Better. Image courtesy of The Big Hammock Project. The Big Hammock has its grand opening party on August 20th, 1:30 PM, in the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston.

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What discoveries await you in this fan blog about Williamstown writer Jim Shepard? A. the above video. B. news of a new collection coming out March 2011, and that The Millions thinks You Think That’s Bad‘ll be rad. And C. that a Project X movie may be on the way. (I guess I just spoiled all your discoveries. Sorry. But still go check out the blog.)

Boston novelist Michelle Hoover guest-writes in the highly entertaining 1st Books Blog (authors writing about publishing their first books). The takeaway: persist, writers! Some 15 years spanned between the author starting her novel to the final days of editing, when she read chapters aloud to Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich.

Local playwright, actor, and theatre artist John Kuntz has launched a blog, and he recently wrote about how the audience at Company One’s Grimm was engaged and interested in the new play process: “It was a packed house, out for the night, they wanted to be there, and they were having a great time.” Dig it. May many more new works find many more enthusiastic audiences.

Jen Mergel, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, was featured in the New American Paintings blog discussing the role of contemporary art in an institution with a strong art history tradition: “I see [emerging artists] as hugely important in terms of keeping the conversation going and the discourse alive.”

And while we’re in the hallowed halls of the MFA: the Boston Globe recently profiled Andrew Haines who, as the museum’s conservator of frames, matches frames with paintings from MFA’s collection (that is, when he’s not creating his own astutely observed paintings).

In promoting their books and advancing their work, writers should definitely do these three things and then also these five things. Then POW: instant fame! Or at least, eight things done.

Sign of the times: Porter Square Books in Cambridge has added an e-Books buying section to its website.

Neato idea: a theatre company in NY enlists donations to cover the cost of giving away seats to audiences who otherwise may not have the opportunity to go.

In the blog of ArtCorps, an organization that sends artists to strengthen and mobilize Central American communities, Massachusetts native Laura Smith talks about using art to foster empowerment with women in El Salvador.

Always wanted to weld/wire/sew/woodwork but don’t have the tools, space, and/or know-how? Artisan’s Asylum, a non-profit community workshop in Somerville, wants to make an array of tools and classes available to current or aspiring makers of things. In preparing their upcoming class schedule, they’re asking for artist/artisans to take an interest survey.

Attend the London Biennale – in Boston. No inter-dimensional wormhole required! TransCultural Exchange, a Mass. org specializing in connecting international cultural communities, is holding a local satellite event – a Curated Salon – as Boston’s contribution to the London Biennale’s three month calendar of cultural events. If you’re interested, bring yourself and a non-artist guest for an evening of brilliant conversation. All participants will be listed on TransCultural Exchange’s website as official participants in the London Biennale. The salon takes place on August 19, 6-8 PM, at the Hampshire House. Download the press release, which includes ticket information, here.

Finally, two “Notes” we missed in our recent Artist Fellows Notes: Wendy Jehlen’s (Choreography Finalist ’04) Anikai Dance Company is producing a free site-specific outdoor performance at Georges Island on the Boston Harbor Islands on Saturday, August 7, 1:30 PM. And Vico Fabbris (Painting Fellow ’06) is featured in the July/August 2010 Design New England. His art was selected as part of a model unit by interior designer Meichi Peng (see art overlooking pillow, below).

Media: clip of Jim Shepard reading the story “Boys Town” at Skidmore College; detail of model unit at the W Boston Hotel & Residences in Back Bay, Meichi Peng, designer and Michael J. Lee, photographer, from Design New England Magazine.

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Exported (temporarily): If you spent last Wednesday searching up and down Massachusetts for master balafon player Balla Kouyate, here’s why you couldn’t find him. Balla, a recent Artist Fellow in Traditional Arts, was in D.C. performing at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and later at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. Our sibling blog, Keepers of Tradition, has the scoop on this unique honor.

Exported (less temporarily): Jason Schupbach, the state’s very first creative economy industry director, is also D.C.-bound, but for more than a visit. He’s been named Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts. Jason, who’s also the former director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s ArtistLink project, introduces himself in a Q&A on the NEA Art Works blog. Full of surprises: who knew Jason has a cheese-themed video blog?

Exported (virtually): Evan Garza, who recently served on our Painting panel in the Artist Fellowships Program and is an editor at large at New American Paintings and curator/gallery manager at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, is guest blogging at the Art21 blog.

And: the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog talks with Cambridge author Allegra Goodman (on the occasion of the publishing of her Cambridge-set short story “La Vita Nuova”).

Imported: we recently covered Hannah Barrett (Painting ’04) and her artistic partnership with the historic Gibson House in Boston. Another historic Massachusetts site, Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires, has caught the contemporary artist-in-residence bug, and is hosting a master woodworker from Syracuse.

Locally made (and played): at the Huntington Theatre blog announces an intriguing series of site-specific audio plays by its Huntington Playwriting Fellows. A sampling: Kirsten Greenidge “eavesdrops” on two sisters outside the Co-op in Harvard Square, Martha Jane Kaufman slips between different types of “tea parties” at the Boston Harbor, and Ken Urban orchestrates a meet-up (set up online) at an MBTA station.

Looking for perfect synchronicity between a documentary subject and its screening venue? Just follow the green arrows behind Fresh Pond Cinema. A free rough-cut screening of Foreign Parts, a documentary by Verena Parvel and J.P. Sniadecki, will take place at Aladdin Auto Service, 162 Alewife Brook Parkway in Cambridge, on Saturday, May 8th at 6 PM (reception at 7 PM). Verena Parvel will be on hand to discuss the film, about a New York junkyard under the threat of demolition.

Arts blogger Greg Cook continues to do yeoman’s work (not that I understand precisely what a “yeoman” does – but I mean it as a compliment), covering the region’s highs, such as art inspired by Boston’s recent aquapolypse, and lows, such as the sad news of the impending closure of the Judi Rotenberg Gallery on Newbury Street.

New to the whole artist/gallery partnership process? The GYST blog has your starter kit: everything you ever wanted to know about galleries.

Finally, we thought you might enjoy this quote from writer James Arthur, from the Ploughshares blog, on the notion of “experience” as a writer:

At 19, I interpreted experience as mild psychedelic adventures and having a girlfriend. At 22, after a lackluster undergraduate career, I felt that I needed more job experience: more experience of what I then called “the real world.” At 27, I was in an MFA program, and I knew that a writer is someone who sits at a desk and writes.

Yep. To paraphrase what the wise man – or was it the massive transnational corporation? – once said: “Just do it, artists.”

Image: Balla Kouyate on balafon and Markane Kouyate on talking drum. Photo by Maggie Holtzberg.

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It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving. Shopping malls are abuzz. And so are the arts! (In a much different way but, still.) Here are some interesting links from around the art-o-webs.

For artists of all disciplines
Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts held the Cultural Workforce Forum, a daylong discussion of how art works as part of the real economy. An archive version of the event, with video and slideshows, is now online.

At North Shore Art Throb (which, by the way, you should read if you make, enjoy, or are in any way curious about the art scene in the North Shore region), Dinah Cardin has a thoughtful post on online arts writing and where it’s headed.

Film
The documentary film The Way We Get By, featured on our blog here, received an IFP and Fledgling Fund Grant for Outreach and Community Engagement. Up top, TWWGB!

At the Bunker Hill Community College Art Gallery in Charlestown, a group of Massachusetts filmmakers will screen film & video works as part of Art Gone Green, an arts program exploring environmental issues. On Tuesday, December 1, 2009, at 6:30 PM in the A300 Lounge, there will be a screening of short films by eight filmmakers, including Kristin Alexander, Tim Geers, and Michael Sheridan. On Friday, December 4, 6:00 PM, is a screening of Talking to the Wall: The Story of an American Bargain. The film, by Western Mass. filmmaker Steve Alves, takes a critical look at the effects of chain stores on communities. Both events are free.

Writing
In the Porter Square Books blog, Cambridge author Matthew Pearl discusses why his book reading events include surprisingly little reading from his books. (And he shares details, some historical, some imagined, of Charles Dickens’s reading at the Tremont Temple in Boston).

Sadly, bidding is closed, but check out the original postcards from Grub Street’s Postcard Auction. The Boston-based writers’ service organization sent 29 blank postcards to writers and auctioned off the resulting creations. I especially like the slogan on Pagan Kennedy‘s card: “Drink the Kool-Aid of your own invention. Write.”

On the Valley Poetry blog, Allegra Mira looks at seven female poets who light her way as she considers her future on poetry (one is recent MCC Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Fellow D.M. Gordon!).

In the WomenArts blog, Northampton novelist Susan Stinson writes movingly about the ways the arts have sustained her in hard times.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was in college, my father warned me that a livelihood as an artist would be hard to come by, especially for a woman. I spent the next couple of decades throwing everything I had into making the strongest art I could, working around practical constraints – like jobs—as necessary. Now, four published books and one wandering manuscript later, during a year in which individual, national and global economies are all shaky, I’m facing the unpleasantly specific realities of being close to fifty and far from financial stability. My father was right.

He was right, but so was I.

Read the full post.

Performing arts
The Explore Boston Theatre blog features a host of voices from the theater community with its lively Proust Questionnaire. Example question/answer… Q: “Which historical figure do you most identify with?”
A: “Scheherazade and Bugs Bunny.” (from writer/performer John Kuntz).

Berkshire Creative notes that the American Airlines in-flight magazine profiles playwright Julianne Hiam as a way to highlight the creative heritage of her region: the bucolic (and artistically prolific) Berkshire Hills.

Visual arts
In the Boston Globe, there’s a great description of photographer Cary Wolinsky’s solo show Fiber of Life, at the South Shore Art Center in Cohasset. MCC connections: Cary is a member of the artists collective TRIIIBE along with Alicia, Kelly, and Sara Casilio; TRIIIBE received an Artist Fellowship in Sculpture/Installation in 2009. Also, the article is written by Robert Knox, a past finalist in Fiction/Creative Nonfiction. (For other fellows/finalists news, read our monthly Fellows Notes).

Finally, Boston Handmade opens its Downtown Gallery in Boston’s Downtown Crossing today. The gallery features handmade work of artists and artisans – a great way to de-Black Friday your artistic consciousness.

Image: Matthew Rich, WALL (2006), mdf, latex paint 25x34x1.5 in.

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It’s been a while since we’ve rounded up assorted arts splendors from throughout our fair land (so there’s a lot to round up!). Here’s the latest miscellany.

Veterans Day Arts

The Way We Get By, a documentary about a devoted group of troop greeters in Bangor, Maine (featured on ArtSake) will have its PBS premiere on POV tomorrow night (Nov. 11, 2009). Check local listings to see this moving film, developed in part during a WGBH filmmakers residency.

Krzysztof Wodiczko will be In Conversation with Veterans on Wednesday, November 11 at 6:30 pm at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The Veterans Day talk will feature the artist, veterans, and an Iraqi citizen discussing the collaborative process behind the new work …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project. Free tickets available first-come, first-served for veterans with military ID; more ticket info here.

From elsewhere in the blogosphere
Congratulations to Small Beer Press of Easthampton, which recently won a World Fantasy Award.

Interested in using Facebook to network as a professional artist? Writer Mitali Perkins offers five what-not-to-do’s in Facebook networking, such as: don’t be too humble to create a “fan” page (’cause we all would totally fan you).

While we’re on a “five things” kick: on the Valley Poetry blog, Allegra Mira serves up five ways to get involved in your local poetry scene.

MCC artists being great
The Somerville News Writers Festival takes place this Saturday, November 14, and includes past MCC Artist Fellows Steve Almond and Richard Hoffman among a host of talented authors. A daytime bookfair and evening readings are among the happenings at the spiffily renovated Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville.

From one weapons-depository-turned-arts-venue to another… at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown, past Painting Fellow Ilana Manolson will be in conversation with author Allegra Goodman in Text and Context, a free event about craft, the creative process, and the surprising links between different disciplines, on Monday, November 16, 7 PM.

World-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, winner of an MCC Commonwealth Award, was among those named to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities (putting him in the company of Forest Whitaker, Edward Norton, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Teresa Heinz).

Check out the Public Humanist blog of Mass Humanities, where past Film & Video Finalist Julie Mallozzi talks movingly about the relationship between a filmmaker and her subject:

My late colleague Dick Rogers used to tell students, “The true subject of all documentary is the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject.” … I think this statement speaks to the deeper truths that are recorded besides “content” when the world is converted into media. What is the power dynamic between filmmaker and subject? What are their understandings of each other’s motivations to participate? How deeply do they know each other?

Read the full post. Incidentally, Angkor Dance, the troop featured in Julie’s film Monkey Dance, has been numerously awarded by the MCC, and performs this Sunday, November 15, 3 PM at UMass Amherst, along with a screening of Julie’s film.

To read about other goings-on featuring past MCC Fellows/Finalists, check out Fellows Notes.

Images/media: promo for THE WAY WE GET on POV; video clip of Krzysztof Wodiczko talking about his work for This World & Nearer Ones, the first edition of PLOT, a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time.

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