Art in the Time of Now
Open Door Contemporary Art Projects believes that art happens out in the world and not necessarily in rarified places like galleries and museums. Art can come from those who do not have the title of artist but who have the desire to create something of significance and to begin a dialogue between themselves and an audience. By creating works as a place of public social interaction, artists can set things in motion, illuminate connections between people and be a vehicle for life’s meaningful encounters.
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.
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.
It's March and we're uploading a new edition of ODCAP--new conversations with artists, artists' voices, and galleries throughout the month. Please keep checking in with us.
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.
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“My goal in making a painting is to get people to look at it and maybe see something they didn’t know before and want to keep looking at it until they see something else, and keep looking at it until they get what they can get from it.” Loren Holland on painting 09-09-08.
Artist and co-founder of the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles in 1967, Alonzo Davis never stopped creating art. Closing the Brockman in 1990 he continues to exhibit and has consistently been awarded commissions to create public/site specific works. He has also been awarded a number of artist residencies and a conversation with him regarding his most recent artist residency in Beijing, China is included in the Artists at Work section.
Art education can be seen as art intervention that provokes thought and discourse in communities.
Conversation with eco-chef, food justice activist, and co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban, Organic Kitchen, Bryant Terry. Bryant is currently a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Food Society Fellow and a regular contributor to www.theroot.com.
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