“The Arts in New Orleans and Chicago” Panel Discussion

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Claudia Cassidy Theater
Chicago Cultural Center, 2nd floor
78 E. Washington St.
Chicago, IL 60605

New Orleans Photo Alliance
1111 St. Mary Street
New Orleans, LA 70130

This Fourth Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival event featured a panel discussion about the arts in New Orleans and Chicago and a large ensemble performance of Gino Robair’s “Divination.”

“The Arts in New Orleans and Chicago” Panel Discussion
This panel discussion involved people in New Orleans and Chicago discussing the arts, curation, and the roles of the arts in society. The panelists in New Orleans included Diane Grams, Elizabeth Underwood, Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, and Keith Calhoun, with Cynthia Scott moderating. The panelists in Chicago included Barbara Koenen, Alpha Bruton, and Annie Heckman, and Matthew Golombisky, with Dan Godston moderating. The panelists in both cities were connected over the internet, using Skype.

BIOS:
Alpha Bruton completed her studies in Art Education and the Teachers Credential Program in 1990, at California State University of Sacramento. Upon moving to Illinois, she completed her studies in the Masters of Art in Administration Program at the School of the Art Institute in May of 2001. Formal training in studio art, art education, dance production, theater arts, and art gallery management gives Bruton the foundation to manage art education programs. Currently she is an artist and art consultant, for AAC LP, An Art Consulting Limited Partnership. She is the chief curator of the Phantom Gallery Chicago, where she coordinates exhibitions in alternative venues for installation artists, environmental artists, and conceptual artists to connect the arts with commerce. She is listed as a teaching artist with the Illinois Arts Council, Arts Education Roster, and Shanti Foundation for Peace.

Dan Godston teaches and lives in Chicago. His writings have appeared in Chase Park, After Hours, Versal, Drunken Boat, 580 Split, Kyoto Journal, Eratica, The Smoking Poet, Horse Less Review, Apparatus Magazine, and other print publications and online journals. His poem “Mask to Skin to Blood to Heart to Bone and Back” was nominated by the editors of 580 Split for the Pushcart Prize. He also composes and performs music, and he works with the Borderbend Arts Collective to organize the annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival.

Matthew Golombisky is an active bassist, composer, conductor, improviser, radio DJ (WNUR 89.3FM) and presenter. He currently lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but has been active in music, festival, and film scenes in Chicago, New Orleans, Asheville, North Carolina as well as touring the USA and Europe. His undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville led to a B.A. in Jazz Studies/Bass Performance, graduating with Distinction in Music, and graduate studies to a M.M. in Composition from the University of New Orleans after a brief stint at Northwestern University after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans in August 2005. His composition style is wide ranging, steeped in jazz, classical, experimental, electronic, sound design, rock and pop genres. He continues to dedicate much energy to presenting original and creative music through several groups including his 30 piece jazz/classical/rock ensemble, Tomorrow Music Orchestra. He directs the community collective known as “ears&eyes”, which “represents” bands such as Silences Sumire, Maurice, Pedway, James Davis Quintet, Algernon, among others and curates an annual music/arts/film festival under the same name. He also frequently performs with electric jazz-rock quintet, Zing!, acoustic free improv trio, Pedway, drums and bass duo, GKduo with long time collaborator, Quin Kirchner, and jazz septet led by trombonists Jeb Bishop and Jeff Albert, Lucky 7s. As a bassist, he’s also performed with NOMO, Simon Lott, WATIV, Ed Petersen, Dave Rempis, Jason Marsalis, Dr. Jimbo Walsh, and more. Currently he is working on a concerto, with bassist Larry Grenadier, to be performed by his Tomorrow Music Orchestra. Among loving all of the above, he also loves to drink slow drip, iced coffee with soy milk from PJ’s, but they’re only in New Orleans. In addition, he loves; life, friends, music, live things, people, traveling, experiencing, creating, listening, reading, looking, capturing, sleeping, running, eating, breathing, laughing, making others laugh, seeing, and being.

Diane Grams is an artist and academic. An assistant professor of sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, she teaches sociology of culture, research methods, and visual sociology while conducting research on urban culture. Prior to her appointment at Tulane she was a researcher and associate director of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago where she taught graduate courses in cultural policy and research methods at The Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies. Among her publications, Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in the Nonprofit Arts (Grams and Farrell 2007), is an in-depth investigation of efforts by leading arts organizations throughout the United States to expand and diversify participation in the arts; Producing Local Color: Ethnic Art Networks in Chicago (Grams, forthcoming University of Chicago Press), a study of arts producers in three Chicago communities, Bronzeville, Pilsen and Rogers Park. Other recent research includes a 2005 study of “Executive Compensation in the Nonprofit Arts”, a study commissioned by the Illinois Arts Alliance Foundation. She was a principal investigator for Leveraging Assets: How Small Budget Arts Activities Benefit Neighborhoods, a 2003 report funded by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She was co-author of ArtsAlive: The 2001 Report on the State of Arts Education in Michigan for Art Serve Michigan and the Michigan Board of Education. She was awarded a Schmitt Fellowship in 2002 and given the 1989 Civil Liberties Award from the Roger Baldwin Foundation of the American Civil Liberties Union of Chicago for her work in support of artistic expression. She was the Executive Director of The Peace Museum, Chicago 1992-1998. Her paintings have been in more than 40 exhibitions in the United States and in South America.

Annie Heckman is a visual artist based in Chicago. Her work explores mortality and afterlife ideologies through sculptural animation installations and works on paper. She graduated with a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA from New York University, both in Studio Art. Annie has exhibited her projects in numerous spaces, including exhibitions in Chicago, New York City, Budapest, and Białystok, Poland. Her recent projects include animation installations using phosphorescence and moving parts. She is the founder of StepSister Press and works as a museum educator with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Barbara Koenen is an artist, curator and cultural planner with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. She developed the Chicago Artists Resource and other policies and programs for artists, including Artist at Work and Musicians at Work Forums, Creative Chicago Expo, artist housing and creative industry policies. Koenen is also an artist who has exhibited paintings and installations internationally. Her recent work includes spice installations of afghan war rugs for the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Natalie Sciortino-Rinehart, a native New Orleanian, works as a full time artist, teacher, and writer in the city. After earning her MFA in 2008 from the University of New Orleans, Sciortino-Rinehart has participated in numerous exhibitions, as well as curating several shows around New Orleans. Recent exhibitions of her work include Barrister's Gallery (New Orleans), Winkleman Gallery (New York) and Galerie Im Andechof (Innsbruck, Austria). She is a founding member of the Front artist collective, located in the rapidly emerging St. Claude Arts District in New Orleans. Sciortino-Rinehart often works as a collaborative team with her partner Jeffrey. Her writings have been published in a variety of journals including ArtForum online, Afterall, Wynwood, and the New Orleans Art Review.

Cynthia Scott followed a BFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design with stints as an actress (Aliens) and singer (Red Flame/Virgin 10 Records) in New York, London and Los Angeles – eventually completing the circle by establishing a home and sculpture studio in New Orleans.
Scott is the recipient of several public art commissions, an Artist Fellowship, and numerous grants from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation, the Contemporary Arts Center’s SweetArts Fund, and Transforma Projects. She has exhibited in London, Edinburgh, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Providence, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, New Orleans, Alexandria (Louisiana), Cedar Rapids (Iowa), Minneapolis, and cities in Alabama, Texas, and Northern California. Her studio was all but destroyed by Katrina's winds, causing her to devise pieces she could carry with her and work on easily in unfamiliar spaces and less than ideal conditions during evacuation. She returned to New Orleans to rebuild and received her MFA from Tulane University in May 2008. She is currently the coordinator of Current:NOLA, a discussion group/think tank of artists and writers engaged in raising the national and international profile of contemporary New Orleans visual art through dialogue, promotion, and critical writing.

Multi-media artist Elizabeth Underwood responded to losing everything in New Orleans’ Federal levee breaks of 2005 by creating AORTA Projects, a community-based grass-roots art project. Believing the creative process to be a powerful tool for affecting social change and healing from trauma, the core mission of AORTA Projects is to intimately participate in a “liminal animation” of post-disaster landscapes. AORTA’s process-oriented and collective act of making and experiencing art can serve as a symbol of hope for post-disaster communities and to those concerned with the artist’s role in our ever-challenging world. By galvanizing a wide variety of contemporary artists to build direct relationships with these communities, AORTA supports ongoing efforts at renewal and participates in the dialog concerning the conceptual and social responsibilities of contemporary art. AORTA has initiated 36 installations in 3 years with the support of the Joan Mitchell Foundation.