GIA Reader (2000-present)

On my desk stands a miniature of an Easter Island moai, carved for me by a Rapa Nui craftsman. It’s precious to me, hewn from the same stone his ancestors used for the world-famous monoliths, textured with the tiny air-bubbles of millennia-old lava, and carrying memories of the friends I made on my voyage there.

Pigeon Fancier  Ingrid, what about you — for whom do you curate?

A day celebrating Latino playwrights? Yeah, right. Ha ha. Very funny. Though today does not appear to be April 1. . . Hm. And these flyers are pretty slick and well designed. If someone wanted to prank me, they really went out of their way to do so. Hm. Do we get the entire twenty-four hours? Or do they just give us like from noon to four and then kick us out? Oh, hold on. “They” don’t give “us” anything? We made the day ourselves? And invited whoever was game to join in the fun? And people who weren’t Latino actually came? Holy shit, that’s amazing! Oops.

As they always have, artists are working in, with, and for communities. They are working as animators, cultural organizers, and teaching artists and in a myriad of other roles. They are making work in community settings by choice. For many, this work is their central creative practice, while for others, it is a dimension or portion of their work. Interest, opportunity, and training for community-based work are growing despite the fact that such work is often underfunded and the artists are poorly paid.

Marco Sanchez was in the third grade in 2010 when the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory (SDYS) launched the Community Opus Project in Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD). Participating in the after-school El Sistema–inspired music program, Marco went home from his Community Opus sessions two days a week and taught his younger brother Rodrigo what he was learning in class. This was not unusual for a Community Opus student, who has been immersed in a program that encourages peer teaching as a cornerstone of its pedagogy.

An American lady traveling to Paris in 1913 — the kind of American lady who will still be traveling to Paris in 2013 — asked Ezra Pound what he thought art was for. Pound replied: “Ask me what a rose bush is for.”

Europe was on the edge of war. Do rose bushes matter in a war? What can art do for us now, in the likelihood of another war?

For several years my brother, Alex Laing, principal clarinetist for the Phoenix Symphony, and I, senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments, have been having often intense conversations, where my brother probed the thinking behind Heinz Endowments’ grantmaking that placed an emphasis on African and African diasporic culture, distressed neighborhoods, and teaching artists. Heinz Endowments, having taken the advice of Anasa Troutman of the consulting firm Lion and Butterfly, has begun to call this work transformative arts education.

In January I had the privilege to attend the Future Aesthetics 2.0 retreat, co-organized by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, director of Performing Arts of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and James Kass, executive director of Youth Speaks. Participating were twenty-three performance-based artists, Helicon Collaborative partners Holly Sidford and Alexis Frasz, and Cheryl Ikemiya from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which funded the project through its Fund for National Projects.