Opening Reception: Only Birds Sing the Music of Heaven in this World
Thursday, March 22, 6-8pm

This exhibition explores the relationship between art and agriculture from a variety of perspectives including historical and current day agricultural imagery, alternative farming projects, and the representation of farm labor. It was conceived with allegiances to folk art, outsider art, craft, experimental art and social practice. These allegiances share a kinship with activist art, social work, community art and relational aesthetics and signal a socially engaged return to art practice with a strong representational dimension.

Only Birds Sing the Music of Heaven in this World not only presents an interesting and topical set of works, but attempts to expand the idea of what can be considered “craft and folk art” by presenting work that in many cases functions outside of the art world, while at the same time is not typical of received historical ideas of “outsider art.”

Participating artists and organizations include John Cerney, Jen Delos Reyes, Farm School, Amy Franceschini with Futurefarmers, Eliza Gregory, Sadie Harmon, Pie Ranch, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Natasha Wheat, as well as a selection of California agricultural paintings and prints from the Nelson Gallery and the Oakland Museum of California and photographic documentation from the National Chavez Center.

Art and Social Practice

This lecture will examine the primary tenants of art and social practice through focusing on several key figures and projects that have informed the direction and sensibility of this approach to art making. The practices of Stephen Willats, Group Material, The Artist Placement Group, and  Mierle Laderman Ukeles have shaped numerous approaches to socially engaged art making including the relationship between artist, audience, artwork and context, neighborhood based approaches, the artists’ role in society, art and daily life, useful art, artist in residence models, and alternate forms of sustainability for an art practice outside of market constraints. This talk will also survey the educational turn towards art and social practice in the academy and education reform towards changing how we teach art and what art is for.

I am pleased to announce that the Social Practice Art: A History box sets created by my fall 2011 History of Art and Social Practice students are now available at Nationale and Reading Frenzy in Portland, OR. Some great zines on socially engaged art!

I am pleased to announce the release of the Manitoba Folkways Collection!

All three volumes are available for digital download are available here: http://www.canadianfolkways.com

Limited edition vinyl of Volume 1 are available while quantities last. Contact me for details if you are interested.

Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music and spent much of the early part of the 20th century driving across America in a car that he modified to house his recording equipment so that he could record the folk music of the American people. He contributed a large amount of recording to what would come to be the Smithsonian Folkways Collection. Smithsonian Folkways states that their mission “is to document people’s music.”

Manitoba Folkways is an endeavor similar in nature to Lomax’s and the mission of the Folkways Collection. Artists Jen Delos Reyes and Kerri-Lynn Reeves drove across Manitoba in search of examples of contemporary vernacular music about the lives of Manitobans. Manitoba Folkways is an audio portrait of the province today.

“Short Verses in Small Spaces,” were micro-readings set in small spaces in the Portland Art Museum perfect for a short reading with a intimate audience. These readings and the locations selected reflect what poet Lisa Ciccarello describes as the New Intimacy poetry movement.

Poets Sarah Bartlett, Lisa Ciccarello, Matthew Dickman, Donald Dunbar, James Gendron, Emily Kendal Frey, and Rodney Koeneke each gave poetry readings in the sometimes overlooked spaces of the Portland Art Museum, such as storage closets, in-between spaces, and more.

What is the effect when artworks are perfectly visually combined in a space? When it is the right combination, does it look like a perfect harmony sounds? In Polyphony Jen Delos Reyes selects a set of short vocal harmonies inspired by The Beach Boys to pair with four of the sculptures in the Portland Art Museum’s contemporary and modern collection. Each sculpture is literally given its own voice that it contributes to a four-part harmony. The effect when standing in the sculpture court is like being surrounded by a group of harmonizing singers.

While the visitors to the museum may not get to fill the walls of the galleries with their own selections, WPAM Portland Art Museum Radio allowed them to fill the airwaves. Visitors to the museum could request a song from a WPAM DJ that they dedicated to people or pieces of the Portland Art Museum.

This October CS13 will close out our two-and-a-half year run as a multi-disciplinary art space with one last act of social dreaming. This final gallery project is a group exhibition themed around the small river town of Utopia, located 45 miles out of Cincinnati along U.S. Route 52. The town is marked by a green road sign, a convenience store with a single gas pump, a handful of half-mile long streets that run down to the riverbank, and a Ohio Historical Marker that reads:

“Utopia, Ohio was founded in 1844 by followers of French philosopher Charles Fourier. Fourierism, based on utopian socialism and the idea of equal sharing of investments in money and labor, reached peak popularity in the United States about 1824 until 1846. The experimental community of Utopia dissolved in 1846 due to lack of financial success and disenchantment with Fourierism. John O. Wattles, leader of a society of spiritualists, purchased the land and brought his followers to Utopia in 1847. The spiritualists, who sought secluded areas to practice their religion, built a two-story brick house on the shore of the Ohio River. A flash flood on December 13, 1847, killed most of Wattles’ people. The majority of the few survivors left the area. Thus, the idea of the perfect society, or utopia, died. Henry Jernegan of Amelia, laid out the present village in 1847.”

Utopia, perhaps the most confidently named, was only one of approximately 270 utopian communities that existed in the United States between 1787 and 1919. Due to Ohio’s unique location on the nation’s frontier, the state found itself the site of much of this activity, in both religious settlements established by Shakers and Amish as well as secular attempts based on the writings of Charles Fourier and Welsh social reformer Robert Owen.

These secular communities, Utopia included, while short lived, are memorable for the challenges they presented to existing social and economic order, presenting alternative notions about religion, marriage, family, sexuality, property ownership, and wage labor. Revisiting and interacting with these historical moments provides a window into an era of American history where frontiers were both physical and ideological, and where quixotic or even bizarre ideas of how people can best coexist were of primary interest to these diverse populations and their thinkers. Such communities were, so to speak, efforts in which political science, economics, and sociology were wedded with the literary imagination.

Our final gallery project, Utopia, OH will present different reflections on American utopian history: These works range from those that look to the specific history and spirit of the town of Utopia, those that address the narratives and philosophies that led to the short 19th century flourish of likeminded projects, those that look at the the the diminished presence of a “utopian” spirit in contemporary American political and social thinking, and finally those that look to the future with a Fourierist sense of curiosity, whim, and possibility.

In this way, this project is both a love letter and a fond farewell, stuffed full of history and myth, nostalgia, and wishful thinking for the future, as only goodbyes can be.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS INCLUDE:

-Randall Szott in conversation with Shannon Stratton, Nancy Zastudil and Duncan MacKenzie

-The Order of the Third Bird (Sal Randolph and D. Graham Burnett)

-Cheon Lee and Arthur Brum

-Jen Delos Reyes

-Mark Harris

-Wyatt Niehaus

-Kelly Frigard

Music Education by Radio Broadcast is not a new concept.  In the spirit of the former CBS School of the Air or the the University of Wisconsin’s “Wisconsin College of the Air,” among many more have inspired, School of the Air Band Class. School of the Air Band Class is a weekly broadcast focused on exploring music, social implications, collaboration, and group dynamics. Each broadcast is approximately 30 minutes in length

These four weekly broadcasts will look at group singing and social music. We will listen to songs of Work and Play, Union and Protest, Choirs and A Capella and in the last week focusing on Bands and Groups.

Through recordings, readings, and activities listeners can engage in an exploration of social music.  Weekly assignments will be given on the air that will encourage you to gather together a group to engage in these musical forms.

These readings and most albums featured on these broadcasts are available in their entireties at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon from September 3- October 1st, 2011.

The broadcasts are available for download here:

Week 1: Work and Play
Week 2: Union and Protest
Week 3: Choirs and A Cappella
Week 4: Bands and Groups

To obtain copies of the weekly reading packets that accompany these broadcasts please contact me for pricing.

Special thanks to Stefan Ransom, sound engineer and editor of the School of the Air Band Class recordings