ArtSake

In the latest issue of Big RED & Shiny, independent curator, artist, and film producer Jim Manning contributes a terrific video profile of Monica Nydam (Painting Fellow ‘10). In it, Monica speaks about her affection for the local art scene and shares the origins of her intriguing horse portraits. She also tells the story of learning she won an MCC fellowship: the night before, her apartment had run out of hot water, so she took the call still smelling of paint and thinner from yesterday’s studio work. The grant (along with, we hope, helping her upgrade apartments) let her take time off work to prepare for a recent solo show at Boston’s LaMontagne Gallery.

In the same issue, publisher Matthew Nash announced that Big RED & Shiny, an online journal that has explored and championed the New England arts scene since 2002, will no longer publish new issues. Big RED always contained a variety of voices and an unparalleled engagement with New England artists. Happily, Our Daily RED, the journal’s blog, will continue.

To all contributors and collaborators on Big RED & Shiny: thanks for making the local scene a little bit smarter, a little bit more fun, and a little bit better understood.

Images: Monica Nydam, UNTITLED HORSE PAINTING (2009), Oil on Board, 24×48 in; UNTITLED HORSE PAINTING (courtesy of La Montagne Gallery) (2008), Oil on canvas 9×12 in.

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Have you always wanted to participate in the London Biennale but aren’t near enough to the London-centered DIY arts festival to do so? Well, if you’re near enough to Boston this Thursday evening (August 19), you’re in luck. 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 Boston’s Hampshire House. Download the press release, which includes ticket information, here.

To learn more about TransCultural Exchange, read their Horses for Courses post on ArtSake.

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That Cloud Looks Like Ireland
Filmmakers: Big Sky Documentary Film Festival is accepting entries for their film festival which will take place February 11-20, 2011 in Missoula, Montana.
Deadline: September 3, 2010

They Look Down at the Ground Missing
Painters: the New American Paintings 2010 Northeast Competition is accepting submissions from artists in CT, DE, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, and VT. New American Paintings is a museum-quality, soft-cover art periodical. The competition’s 40 winners will appear in the Feb/March 2011 edition of New American Paintings. All styles and media are welcome, as long as the work is singular and two-dimensional. The juror is Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York, NY. Enter the competition and find more information at newamericanpaintings.com.
Deadline: August 31, 2010

Let’s Pause for the Jets
Public Art: The Berlin Underground Train Network for 2011. The Neue Gesellschaft fuer Bildende Kunst (NGBK) in Berlin, are looking for situation specific and/or participatory ideas, visions, experiments and interventions which address the future meaning of ‘public’ in Berlin’s public Underground Network. The projects can range from being short, interventionistic artistic reactions to specific occurrences on the Underground to being long term collaborations aimed at creating sustainable relationships to Underground staff and/or users over a number of years. A total budget of 30.000 Euro for artist’s fees, production, travel and accommodation is available for a maximum of four projects to be realised from May to December 2011. Questions, contact ngbk@ngbk.de Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (New Society for Visual Arts), Oranienstrasse 25, 10999 Berlin, Germany
See Deadline: October 1, 2010

Rolling Over Like a Great Big Cloud
Call for Artists: Gallery 110 is looking for art for their international juried Couplings. The exhibit will explore personal relationships that celebrate parings and the power of the bonds they create. Juror is Rock Hushka, Curator of Contemporary and Northwest Art for the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, WA. Be sure to check out the prospectus.
Deadline: November 1, 2010

What Was the Question? I Was Looking At the Big Sky.
Call to Artists: Salon 241 is looking for artists to display art in their salon located in downtown Northampton, MA. To be considered, email your Web site and/or 4-6 jpgs to salon241@gmail.com. Be advised that their preference is to display artwork on the walls of their salon due to limited floor space. Artists take 100% of the proceeds of any sales of work that result from exhibiting at Salon 241. Questions, contact Brynn at salon241@gmail.com.
Deadline: Ongoing

Image credit: Photograph of sky by ArtSake. Titles from song Big Sky by Kate Bush

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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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I don’t know about you, but I’ve been blood-curdlingly screaming nonstop since the moment I woke up. It’s Friday the 13th!

On this creepiest of possible day-of-the-week/day-of-the-month combinations, we offer the eerie and evocative soundscape Leg, from composer John Mallia (Music Composition Fellow ‘09).

Gallery Glimpse is a weekly sampling from our Gallery@MCC.

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This Sunday, August 15 is the deadline to submit your entry to the Salem Literary Festival Writing Contest.

What should you submit? Original short fiction exploring the theme of New England history, which the contest encourages writers to define broadly and creatively.

Entries will be judged by authors Brunonia Barry (The Lace Reader) and Katherine Howe (The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane), both of whom delved deep into local history to conjure their bestselling novels. The winning writer will receive a $200 honorarium and will be invited to read at the Salem Literary Festival (September 17–19, 2010). The festival will include numerous readings, events, and workshops on topics like self-publishing (with Steve Almond) and memoir writing (with Ethan Gilsdorf).

Read more about the contest and the festival.

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Amid concrete and clay
And general decay
Nature must still find a way…
- The Smiths, Stretch Out and Wait

Site-Specific Dance: White Wave of Brooklyn, NY is proposing a series of site-specific dance works during the 2010 Dumbo Dance Festival. The seven sites are situated within two designated areas; the Brooklyn Bridge Park (near the entrance at Washington and Plymouth Streets), and along the Pier 1 waterfront (entrance at Old Fulton and Water Streets). There is no application fee to apply. Ideally they would like work to be collaborations between dancers, movement artists and multimedia artists of all kinds: musicians, composers, fashion/costume designers, video artists, photographers etc. You may apply as collaborators or as individual artists and they will will match you together. They are primarily a dance festival but are open to creative applications from artists in different media who can make a strong case for the way their work would fit in a dance context. The sites are presented raw.  Before submitting an application, they strongly suggest you visit the site–specific designated areas. Learn More
Deadline: Postmarked August 15, 2010

Call for Digital Art: Digital’2010: PLANET EARTH, an international digital print competition and exhibition organized by Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI) is looking for artists and scientists to submit digital prints that reflect their perceptions of our planet. Jurors are Maddy Rosenberg, owner/director of Central Booking in DUMBO, Brooklyn; and Patrick Hamilton of the Science Museum of Minnesota. Selected works will be exhibited at the New York Hall of Science from October 3, 2010 through January 31, 2011. For more information, visit ASCI’s Web site.
Deadline: August 16, 2010

Funding for Media Artists: The National Endowment for the Humanities is offering Media Development & Media Production Grants.
Deadline: August 18, 2010

Call to Artists: Turners Falls RiverCulture is looking for artists to make art in downtown Turners Falls. Submit a proposal for the participatory/public art you want to make/do and if you’re selected, they will give you money to make that art happen. The criteria are inventiveness/beauty/aha-ness, use of location in a new/reimagined/creative way, likelihood you can pull it off, participatory nature/reach, use of the money, submitted by deadline. Questions, contact Lisa Davol.
Deadline: August 30, 2010

Call to Dorchester Area Artists: The Dorchester Arts Collaborative (DAC) is looking for artists to participate in their 2010 Open Studios October 23-24. For more, see DAC Web site or the DAC blog.

Business Development for Visual Artists: The Artist’s Professional Toolbox Program is a business development program specifically designed for visual artists. The Toolbox is an eight-month intensive course in which artists will learn marketing, networking and business skills with the additional benefits of peer group interaction, mentorship, and feedback. Apply to the program.
Deadline: September 24, 2010

Call for Public Art: Pittsfield’s Artscape invites artists to submit proposals for new work in the 2010-2011 exhibition season. Artists will receive a $1000 honorarium. For more information, call 413-499-9348.
Deadline: October, 31, 2010

Image Credit: Photograph of squirrel by ArtSake.

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Steven Bogart (Playwriting Finalist ‘09) is the director of a new production of Cabaret, opening at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge on August 31. It’s an intriguing gig, and a good fit for an artist whose creative reach includes work as a playwright, director, designer, painter, and teacher.

We spoke to Steven about the new production and his ongoing work as a multi-disciplinary artist.

ArtSake: You’re directing Cabaret at the A.R.T. (opens August 31). Amanda Palmer, who will play the Emcee in the production, said on her blog that the show will be “interactive and dark,” with “lots of room for inclusion.” With those tantalizing hints, plus the storied history of the musical, I have to ask: how, as a director, do you prepare for a project like this?

Steven: For me, preparation usually begins with something emotional that pulls me into the script. I try not to worry about other productions of Cabaret. I try to engage in the material on a personal level and trust my instincts around choices, and I encourage the creative team and the actors to do the same. I’ve been in love with Dada, German Expressionist painters and film since I was a boy so I had an immediate visceral response to the themes and images in Cabaret. Then, I think, in the same manner in which I try to write a play, I make sure that the main feeling, idea or image that is resonating is always in front of me. In the case of this production of Cabaret, it is an image of Charlotte Rampling in the film, “The Night Porter” that captured me. You can see that we used that image as a template for the poster.

This production is challenging because we are staging it as an environmental piece where the line between the Klub, the audience and the story of the characters is blurred. I am trying to set up a rehearsal environment where there can be lots of freedom for the actors to engage through improvisation within the Klub and the scenes.

ArtSake: You also worked with Palmer to create The Needle That Sings in Her Heart, performed in 2009 at Lexington High School (where you teach and where Palmer went to high school). Can you talk a little bit about that project – how it came to be, and the process of collaboratively creating a new work from scratch?

Steven: Amanda and I have been trying to do Cabaret together since 2001. After several failed attempts to set it up with different theaters, we decided to workshop a new piece. We were planning to do this in Australia at the Sydney Opera House, and actually had a big meeting in NYC with the Opera House. They were ready to book the project, but then our producer at the time, crunched numbers and it turned out to be too expensive. So Amanda and I decided to do the project at Lexington High School where the students were used to the collaborative playwriting process with me. Of course this was true of Amanda when she was my student. Even though Amanda was 15 years out of high school, It seemed like a great fit.

The process is challenging but incredibly exciting. The way I usually begin is by setting up a jumping off point. It could be an image, a theme, a headline from a newspaper article, or a piece of music. For example, one year I created a piece with students where the starting point was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony digitally stretched over 24 hours. Another time, we used the paintings of Joan Miro as a way in, another time it was stop-motion animation and the Kabbalah. With, The Needle That Sings in Her Heart, the jumping off point was the Neutral Milk Hotel album In an Aeroplane Over the Sea and Anne Frank. We chose this because Amanda and I loved the album and we knew the kids would fall in love with it.

In the rehearsals, we do lots of brainstorming and structured improvisations where the cast is divided into smaller groups and given a certain amount of time to create a short improvisational piece. The n the groups share their pieces, we record the images, ideas, and characters that come out of this work. We keep this process going for a while, usually until something really grabs all of us, and then we hone in on what seems to be emerging. Then the improvisations are more directed towards developing the specifics of the piece. The investment and commitment in this kind of process is amazing and is often life changing for students. We all walk away with a deeper understanding of the possibility of theater and creativity. I love it!

ArtSake: What do you gain through a continued creative relationship, such as your ongoing collaborations with Palmer?

Steven: Amanda is a brilliant artist, and when it comes to theater, our aesthetic and artistic values are quite similar. It is exciting to work with others who ultimately want similar results artistically. She also challenges me with all her ideas, and of course I love working with alums as much as I love working with my current students. I’m pretty lucky.

ArtSake: I’m fascinated by the range of your creative work. Along with directing and teaching theater, you also write plays, do theatrical design, and have a separate, accomplished career as a fine arts painter. How does your work in one artistic discipline interact and inform the others?

Steven: Oh man, I think this is complicated. I’m not really sure I know, and for many years I struggled with this because I felt so schizophrenic. Maybe it’s all the same. I just got excited by art. If I could dance, I think I would do that too. Even now, as I embark on Cabaret, a new idea for a play hit me and I’m excited about diving in, but I am also consumed by Cabaret. However, I think when the juices are flowing in one medium, at least for me, it can get things going everywhere. The problem becomes about time. At one point, my stepmother said, why don’t I pick one art form and become great at it, but I can’t seem to ignore all my loves. My teaching and directing at school allow me to experiment a lot. This answer is all over the place because I really don’t know.

ArtSake: You received a finalist award from the MCC Artist Fellowships for your play Pigcat (read an excerpt). Can you talk about the development of that play, and where it’s headed next?

Steven: I was surprised and grateful to have received that fellowship. The seed for the play came from a short poem I wrote about fishing when I was a boy. The poem led to a ten minute play that was performed in the Boston Theater Marathon, and from there it became a full length one act. It took me two years to write the first draft. I was struggling with it, so I put it aside for a couple of months. I had only thirty pages of the play and some vague notes about where it wanted to go. Getting the finalist award gave me an extra boost of energy to dig in and finish a draft of Pigcat. This led to Pigcat receiving The Holland New Voices Award at the Great Plains Theater Conference. I was very lucky to have had David Lindsay-Abaire, Marshall Mason, Eric Ehn, and Connie Congdon respond to the piece. Now, I’m doing some minor tweaking and plan on sending it out to theaters. We’ll see though. It’s such a difficult process to get a play produced.

ArtSake: What’s the most important idea you try to instill in emerging artists you teach?

Steven: Be patient and give yourself permission, lots of permission to explore anything that stirs your heart and imagination: We hear the word “no” way too much in our lives and it puts a vice grip on our creative impulses. I see this all the time in schools. As a director and theater teacher, my mantra to them is to be invested in the success of every other person in the room with you. I don’t believe the art of theater can be achieved without this kind of commitment.

ArtSake: Can you point to any one decision you’ve made as an artist that has had the most impact on your career?

Steven: Hmm, well I decided to stay in education and that has had its ups and downs as I’ve struggle to find time for my own personal artistic endeavors. And I’ve wondered what a professional life in the theater would have meant, but at the same time, I have created some amazing and mind blowing theater with my students that I probably would not have been able to do professionally and pay my bills. I love creating with my students, and my work in education has really informed my approach and ideas about theater–what it is, and what it could be. Working with students keeps giving back to me in wonderful ways. I’m still connected with many of my alums and it has been personally and artistically rewarding. In this production of Cabaret, I have eight alums involved as performers, designers, etc. I wanted them around me, like a family reunion, but in the theater. I’m so happy about this, I well up now and then. So I guess staying in education has had the most impact.

Cabaret opens at the A.R.T. in Cambridge on August 31, 2010.

Steven Bogart writes, directs, paints and teaches theater in the Boston area. His play Conspiracy of Memory was a Kennedy Center Finalist for New American Plays in 2002. His play Alice In War was part the Summer Play Festival in New York City in 2007 and Chicago’s Stage Left Theater’s Leapfest in 2008. Additionally, his plays have been performed at the Boston Theatre Marathon, ACME Theatre, Boston Theatre Works, and MIT. He is cofounder of Rouged Ape, a paratheatrical theater company working in the Boston area.

Images: Steven Bogart; Steven Bogart and Amanda Palmer at a rehearsal for Cabaret, photo by Kati Mitchell; Steven Bogart, LE GIBET (2009), oil and rustoleum, 16×16 in, photo by Erik Hansen.

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Here’s a Gallery Glimpse, a sampling from our Gallery@MCC, showcasing past MCC Artist Fellows/Finalists.

Today’s Glimpse: an excerpt from South of Ten by Liza Johnson (Film & Video Finalist ‘07). The filmmaker worked with Gulf Coast survivors of Hurricane Katrina to create atmospheric scenes of everyday life.

Liza Johnson teaches at Williams College and will shoot her feature film RETURN, starring Linda Cardellini, Michael Shannon, and Tim Blake Nelson, in Ontario this fall.

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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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