Rachel Pendergrass (graduating senior) right, at Networking Day.
Networking Day took place this past Wednesday in Jeanette Guinn’s Policy Class. Maggie Hendricks graduated this past December and now works for the Colleton County Arts Council. She came back for Networking Day to help students prepare for life after graduation. Students practiced their networking social skills-shaking hands, introductions, talking about what they want to do. Maggie and Rachel, both from the Arts Management program, said that they were the first people to meet here at the college and were excited to catch up!
Recently, Canon hired the creative agency behind the iPad light painting video, Dentsu London, to come up with a commercial that celebrated color for the new Pixma printer. What came from this project is a work of art in and of itself. This intricate project included individuals from NASA and a slew of artists. Essentially, the project is comprised of a speaker covered with a black balloon. Drops of different colored paint are placed on this balloon and these paint droplets jump up as the sound causes the surface of the balloon to snap. As this occurs, a high speed camera shooting 5,000 frames per second circles the speaker and captures the images which are then slowed down to create beautiful works of art.
Mikhail Baryshnikov’s magic extended beyond the stage on Tuesday morning when a panoramic cityscape of St. Petersburg, Russia, by the 19th-century painter Petr Petrovich Vereshchagin sold at Sotheby’s for $746,500. The dancer bought the painting in 1978 and recently donated it to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, which he established in 2005. The buyer was an unidentified German collector bidding by telephone who paid well above the $500,000 high estimate.
Before the auction Mr. Baryshnikov said selling the painting was his way of using “old art to generate new art.’’ The proceeds will go toward new programs at the center, a laboratory and performance space for multidisciplinary artists at 450 West 37th Street.
The artist Ai Weiwei is one of China’s most prominent artists and one
of the most outspoken critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is leading an international effort to call for the release of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese Conceptual artist who was taken into police custody in Beijing after he was detained on Sunday while trying to board a flight for Hong Kong. It has gathered the support of the museum community, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Tate in London along with the American Association of Art Museum Directors.
“By using Ai Wei Wei’s favored medium of ’social sculpture,’ we hope to hasten the release of our visionary friend and artist,’’ the Guggenheim Foundation said in a statement on its Web site. The foundation and the museums said in a letter posted with the petition on Facebook and Twitter on Friday addressed to the Minister of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, Cai Wu: “We members of the international arts community express our concern for Ai’s freedom and disappointment in China’s reluctance to live up to its promise to nurture creativity and independent thought, the keys to ‘soft power’ and cultural influence.’’
An artistic adviser for the Olympic National Stadium in Beijing, Mr. Ai has clashed with the Chinese government before. After using his work to raise questions about how officials dealt with the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which thousands of schoolchildren were killed in their classrooms, he was beaten by the police in 2009 before he was scheduled to testify at the trial of Tan Zuoren, a writer and activist who was investigating the same issue.
Meanwhile plans are still proceeding to install a 12-piece sculpture, “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,’’ in Manhattan. Inspired by the fabled fountain-clock of the Yuanming Yuan, an 18th-century imperial retreat just outside Beijing, the work is scheduled to be displayed from May 2 and through July 15 at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue.
According to Americans for the Arts, the final FY2011 federal budget levels for the nation’s cultural agencies reflect a more sensible and proportionate funding cut of 7.5 percent to the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. These cultural agencies are now set to receive $155 million each for the current fiscal year. While many people firmly believe that the nation would be better served with a more robust investment in nonprofit arts and cultural organizations in communities across the country, they acknowledge the constraints of the current budget. Fortunately, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Smithsonian Institution did not incur any cuts and $25 million were restored to the Arts in Education account at the Department of Education, which had been zeroed-out in a previous Continuing Resolution.
Last week during tense budget negotiations between Congress and the White House, Americans for the Arts convened a very timely gathering of 560 grassroots and national arts advocates for Arts Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of meetings and briefings took place in the House, Senate and at the White House.
One of the more notable interviews that followed Arts Advocacy Day was between Actor/Political Activist Kevin Spacey and Chris Mathews from Hardball. While Chris Mathews pushed for all of the blame to be placed on one side of the political scale, Spacey did a wonderful job saying that it didn’t matter what side the opposition for funding came from; but rather that our country needs art and culture to survive and strive. Below is the interview:
