ArtWorks for Milwaukee's unique approach to employment

As part of Gallery Night and Day, ArtWorks for Milwaukee unveiled two separate projects created during their Fall 2010 programs, "Positive Influence Project" and "Safe Place Mural". Each project conveyed positive youth driven messages, including anti-gun/gang/drug and residents who make a difference.

Beyond the messages in the art itself, ArtWorks for Milwaukee sends a strong message to the teens they work with on each project. Their mission is to prepare underserved teens to enter Milwaukee's workforce by utilizing the arts as a method to teach employability skills.

ArtWorks for Milwaukee believes...

• Strong employment supports strong communities.
• Underserved teens who develop employability skills contribute to strong communities.
• Utilizing paid internships is an effective way to engage underserved teens and train highly transferable job skills. 

Image Courtesy of 88.9 Radio Milwaukee

To date, with over 50 successful diverse arts-based programs being completed by over 250 Interns since 2001...

• 75% have gone on to complete high school
• 51% have secured gainful employment
• 23% have successfully applied to other Internship projects through ArtWorks

Keep an eye out for ArtWorks for Milwaukee's upcoming spring and summer projects!

In Akkadian, Sabû means “To Paint.”

"Surviving solely on art in today's society can be extremely difficult...As a pack it will be easier for us to stay strong, thrive off our work, and flourish in our creativity." - creator of Sabû Collective.

Image courtesy of Nick Hartley (blog contributor)

A local artist, Sean Bodley, has developed a communal art blog, Sabû Collective. Launched in August 2010, the Sabû Collective is a community of determined artists. Together, they seek growth in their technical and conceptual skills as working artists. Their strength lies in their ability to share ideas, inspire each other, gather information and resources, document their progress as artists, and have a blast doing what they love doing, making art. 

As part of the collective, each member must make two blog posts each much that relate to art. In addition, each member is required to maintain a professional profile, where visitors of the blog can learn more about the contributors.

Check out Sabû Collective at http://sabucollective.com/

a few tid bits

Yesterday I met with a friend for coffee and a regular catch up session. We got into a rather deep conversation about the current state of our careers and our instinctive abilities to take on as much as we can. He is holding four jobs, working on commissioned paintings, managing a successful collaborative blog (Sabu Collective), creating his own work, and somehow still managing a social life. Although we confessed this lifestyle is somewhat unhealthy at times, I know its part of who we are.. organizers, motivators, creative problem-solvers, visual researchers, entrepreneurs, and sometimes, downright crazies.

I left the coffee shop feeling motivated to take a step forward with my current work. I purchased two cable releases and began photographing stereoscopically. For those who are not familiar, stereoscopic photography is a technique that simulates 3D vision. Two images are taken of the same object, one from the view of the left eye and the other from the view of the right eye. When viewed through a special viewer, the two images become one 3D image.

Traditional stereoscopic cameras:

Image Courtesy of Rick Soloway

My camera set-up:

Yevgeniya Kaganovich at the Ploch Art Gallery

Yevgeniya Kaganovich has created a site specific installation in the Ploch Art Gallery. The primary medium of this installation consists of sheets of latex that drapes from the ceilings, extends over the walls, and transforms the space. Kaganovich, in writing about her own work says, "inhabit/infest implies that the Center is more than an edifice for art and culture; it is a living organism that we too are a part of."

Image courtesy of the artist's website

Words from Kaganovich's website: "inhabit/infest is an intervention into the unusual interior architecture of the Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts. The Center’s art gallery is carved out with rectilinear shapes and columns that are unconventionally interspersed with small nooks and alcoves. This site-specific installation connects its ceilings, walls and niches with a system of organic forms.  Here large and misshapen latex tubes, elongated and inflated volumes, originate from, project towards, and interweave with, the building’s irregular anatomy."

inhibit/infest will open this Friday and continue through Thursday, February 24, 2011.
Location: Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, Ploch Art Gallery - Brookfield, WI
Opening Reception: Friday, January 14, 6:00-8:00pm
Slide Lecture: 5:30-6:00pm

"Tiny Furniture" utilizes new technology..

"Tiny Furniture" is one of the first feature films to utilize a HD SLR still/video camera, the Canon 7D, for the entire film.

Story: 22-year-old Aura returns home to her artist mother's TriBeCa loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her Youtube page, a boyfriend who's left her to find himself at Burning Man, a dying hamster, and her tail between her legs. Luckily, her trainwreck childhood best friend never left home, the restaurant down the block is hiring, and ill-advised romantic possibilities lurk around every corner. Aura quickly throws away her liberal-arts clogs and careens into her old/new life: a dead-end hostess job, parties on chilly East Village fire escapes, stealing twenties out of her mother's Prada purse, pathetic Brooklyn "art shows," prison-style tattoos done out of sheer boredom, drinking all the wine in her mother's neatly organized cabinets, competing with her prodigious teenage sister, and desperate sex in a giant metal pipe. Surrounded on all sides by what she could become, Aura just wants someone to tell her who she is.

Trailer

World's largest photograph...

The Legacy Project, a non-profit documentary project, is dedicated to producing comprehensive documentation of the shuttered El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. The project, which began in April 2001, will continue over the next decade as the park is created and will employ photographs, video, and oral histories to provide a unique record of an extraordinary development in the history of Southern California.

In the summer of 2006, the six photographic artists of The Legacy Project unveiled the world's largest photograph, The Great Picture. The special reception took place inside the camera that created the world's largest photograph, a gigantic airplane hanger converted into a camera obscura, 44'-2" feet high by 79'-6" feet deep by 161'-6" feet wide. The photograph took 35 minutes to develop!

The Great Picture has been declared the world's largest photograph by The Guinness Book of World Records. It measures three stories high by eleven stories wide and cost $65,000 to produce. The best part about it is that it is, in fact, a silver gelatin print!

Kodachrome's last remaining roll developed

A friend of mine brought this to my attention and I thought I'd also share...

According to BBC News, the last remaining roll of Kodachrome has been developed in Kansas.

Since Kodak announced it was discontinuing Kodachrome, the number of labs that process the film has declined dramatically. Because of its difficult process and required attention, Dwayne's Photo in Kansas was the last remaining lab up until a few days ago.

Check out the full story at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12095771 
 A tribute to Kodachrome: http://1000words.kodak.com/post/?id=2388083