GIA Reader (2000-present)

The Alliance of Artists Communities is the service organization for artists’ colonies, communities, and residency programs — places for artists of any discipline to develop new work — with more than five hundred sites in the United States and over one thousand worldwide. While the earliest programs were developed a century ago as isolated retreats, the field has grown to include dozens of models — from urban residencies for local artists, to community-engaged art spaces in small towns, to those providing residencies alongside educational, environmental, or presenting programs.

Dance/USA has been gauging the impact of the recession on dance-based organizations in the United States through several means: a series of four Rough Waters Surveys that began in December 2008, with the most recent taking place in May 2010; conversations with our members in semiregular council calls; and regularly scanning published news articles for information about the successes and failures the dance field has experienced.

Just like its artistic counterparts, the opera industry last year made cutbacks (in jobs and salaries, for example) and compromises (fewer productions and performances) to continue to thrive. Since the recession began, funding sources have shifted, with federal funding, corporate support, and subscriptions on the decline. Foundation support varies regionally. At the same time, costs have continued to escalate at a rate significantly greater than the Consumer Price Index.

• US computer and video game software sales totaled $11.7 billion in 2008.
• Sixty-eight percent of American households play computer or video games.
• Forty percent of all game players are women.
• The average game player is thirty-five years old and has been playing video games for twelve years.
• Twenty-five percent of Americans over the age of fifty play video games.

Source: The Entertainment Software Association¹

From computer-mediated poetry, read on a laptop computer while sitting in a wireless café in Paris, to touring works of performing arts, such as composer Pamela Z’s Baggage Allowance, an installation and performance based on her world travels, new media artworks are becoming an integral part of the global cultural environment.

I’m a film teacher. I’m tech savvy. I show my students a lot of video clips. I know how to rock a DVD remote better than anybody. Yet, at a recent teaching job, there was no DVD player in the classroom. I had to show video clips off my Mac. I know my Mac inside and out, backward and forward, yet I rarely watch DVDs on it. I most certainly do not rock the DVD player application. When showing clips there are moments when I need to scan through a scene, slow shots down, or move frame by frame. With the laptop, I do this quite ineptly.

I first met Carrie Mae Weems in 1976. I was teaching a photography class at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which was then located in a large second-floor loft space above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. On the first day of class as a few students straggled in, a seemingly shy woman with big, expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand.