Art in the Time of Now
We're Back!! From an economically challenged summer where everyone's spare time was spent trying to make financial ends meet.
Consequently, we suspended our summer issue but are ready for the fall. We welcome learning of upcoming events, however we do not post events without a story, conversation, or gallery. We want more collaborators to sustain our OD-CAP community. Remember, on OD-CAP you are not just a reader - we ask you to find yourself on this site as part of a community of creative people who share a relationship between writing about art and creating it. Contact me now with your ideas!
About OD-CAP
Open Door-Contemporary Art Projects (OD-CAP) offers a novel approach
to accessing art and culture information. Using a combination of
different media, OD-CAP exists in a new virtual territory and takes
the “best practices” in the complex world of art museums
and exhibitions to “extend the white cube” making it
possible for artists, scholars, and curators to interact with off
and online communities.
OD-CAP is a specific content-oriented social-networking interactive collaborative
site to change long held assumptions about audiences and their engagement
with art. The OD-CAP website explores and develops the intersection between
technology and community-building. At OD-CAP, visitors at all levels can
discover new colleagues and collaborators through shared interests. Visitors
can also adapt new media habits through the OD-CAP site exploring technology
to make a difference in their personal visual literacy and the visual literacy
of their communities.
I posed with Madame Tussaud's wax figure of Samuel L. Jackson and Snoop Dog and took advantage of a photo-op with a live white-gloved Michael Jackson look-a-like. There are "brothers" who perform mime and are variously in whiteface in black suits and donning black top hats as in minstrelsy or others who are painted completely in silver or gold. I wondered, "Is this their day job too?"
A series of artist interventions for the Kumasi Symposium are posted in the Gallery section this fall. (See Voices section for a report on the symposium by Barthosa Nkurumeh, AfriCOAE General Secretary). Most notable are two solo galleries--Flip/flop House by Patrick Tagoe-Turkson, from Ghana and collaboration Re-Painting the Red by Charlie Michaels, Rex Akinruntan, Kwadwo Asare Apori, Ralitsa Diana Debrah, and Faisal and his Family who own a home in Kumasi, Ghana.
Johnny Desarmes has been screening his full-length film, Life Outside of Pearl (2002) about a Haitian-American family who tries to maintain their cultural identity while adapting to life in the United States. As their lives unravel, the stresses of urban life in their home in New Jersey reveal family secrets causing fissures between the parents and their children.
Laura James sent me a note on Facebook where I saw a few examples of her work. I wanted to see more, especially works from her Nannies and Other Mothers series. We are sharing them with you in our Galleries section but I want you to know more about Laura before you go there to give you a sense of how she came to create this engaging series.
I am a member of the International Advisory Board to NKA Foundation’s Arts Village at Abetenim, a design-build-and-live-in project in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. My colleague Barthosa Nkurumeh sent me a report of this Kumasi Symposium, a first in a series of planned symposiums that encourage collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to art and community interactions. The next one is planned for 2011.
Berlin's new Moeller Fine Art shows Mildred Howard's work in a three person show entitled Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth century doctrine used to justify the territorial expansion of the United States as God's will. The show includes two other artists, Tom Molloy from Ireland and Simon Norfolk from England/Nigeria.
May 2009 Thesis Projects from Visual Arts Programs
Rameses Muslim, BFA Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA
Ming-Ta Du, MFA San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA
“I want to know the world” is what a writer told me while I visited with her in Petrer, Spain. Originally from Peru, a lawyer turned poet, she resides with her Spanish husband and their two daughters. Working for immigrant rights in Spain, she belongs to a growing number of social practice artists whose creative work intersects with social advocacy, affecting what is happening in the world.
Filmmaker, Ron Craig's film, Searching for York, really started when he was a young man in a Portland, OR Boy Scout troop. He pondered, “Who is that Black man standing next to Clark?” (of the Lewis and Clark Corp of Discovery team)
This January, David Damoison sent me a link to a set of photographs that he took during a festival in Paris celebrating the cultures of African descendants from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Haiti, and Reunion. I asked David if I could create a gallery on OD-CAP because most people visiting Paris, including US Blacks, do not experience this Paris. Please visit the Galleries to see more.
San Francisco Bay Area muralist Eduardo Pineda completed a mural at Association Sante Communautaire Mekin Sikoro and Centre D'Espoir, a community health clinic in Mekin Sikoro colonia of Bamako Mali in January 2009. The mural project was sponsored by the Global Alliance to Immunize Against AIDS (GAIA) Vaccine Foundation, based in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Eduardo shares a few observations about cultural perceptions from his month long experience. You can read about the mural project at storytellingwalls.blogspot.com
Portland friends invited my husband and I to a local jazz club to hear Devin Phillips. Once hearing and meeting him, I invited him to have a conversation with me for OD-CAP. Devin leads New Orleans Straight Ahead Jazz Band and two other bands. He came to Portland by way of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and has an interesting story to tell and a thoughtful perspective on jazz and his embrace of the music.
Since Eduardo Pineda was in Bamako painting a mural, I asked him if he could contact photographer, Amadou Keita and have a conversation with him about his photographic work. Amadou only speaks French and time didn’t permit a sit-down conversation with a translator but Amadou and I have been communicating via email and he sent me a statement on how he got into photography, how he approaches his work, and how he sees it in the lager context of image-making in Africa. Visit his gallery, Bamako at Night. His curatorial statement has been translated from French.
Visit a new March gallery. See what the curator, Bisi Sliva says about the work in the gallery.
Bozo Gnanadje is a cultural practice of the Bozo people of Mali that is traditionally tied to fishing. The Bozos mastered the evolution and reproduction of different types of fish. Photographer, Amadou Keita discusses and shares his photographs of this Bozo ceremony which is part of a festival on the river Niger that aims to recall, promote, and safeguard the cultural heritage of Mali through song, dance, and puppetry.
In 2005 during a curatorial research visit to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka for the 2006 Dak’Art Biennale, Bright Eke was one of the artists whose work seemed compelling. Eke’s focus has been one of the topical issues in recent times; the environment and man’s gradual destruction of the ecosystem. Bisi Silva
Imagine breathing life into inanimate objects. That’s how Osi Audu has described his art process.
section.