Art Talk with Marilyn Chin

May 21, 2012

by Paulette Beete

Poet Marilyn Chin

Marilyn Chin. Photo by Don Romero

“I believe that “innovation” means to be courageous and to get out of your comfort zone and try new approaches.” — Marilyn Chin

Marilyn Chin’s work unflinchingly explores what it is to be both Asian and American, where those worlds intersect and where they are seemingly incompatible. An omniferous artist, the Hong Kong-born, Oregon-raised Chin is a poet, translator, editor, teacher, activist, and, recently, even a novelist. In addition to the novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Chin is the author of three collections of poetry, including Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2002. A recipient of two Creative Writing Literature Fellowships from the NEA, Chin has also received Fulbright and Stegner fellowships, four Pushcart Prizes, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Artists Foundation, among many other awards. We spoke with Chin about her version of the artist’s life, how receiving her NEA fellowships affected her life, and her unusual assignment for young poets.

NEA: What’s your artist’s life like these days?

MARILYN CHIN: I’m having a great time in mid-career! My work is getting historicized a bit; some scholars are writing on my poems. I’m getting a lot of invites from Asia. I am getting new love from Chinese fans—it’s time to take my role seriously as a Sage poet! Recently, I crossed genres and published a composite novel called Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. I’m experimenting a lot lately and am having a wonderful time.

NEA: What do you remember as your earliest engagement or experience with the arts?

CHIN: Very young I heard my grandmother chanting folk songs from the Confucian classics while being strapped to her back. As early as age four, I had memorized verses from the Cantonese opera. I loved hearing and memorizing poetry from the start.

NEA: What decision has most impacted your arts career?  

CHIN: I declared myself an activist poet and never looked back. I think that this was an important promise to myself and to my readers. I grounded my work with a sense of purpose.

NEA: What artistic tool could you not live without?

CHIN: I cannot live without my books! Oh Goddess of Mercy! I can write with a pencil if you take away my laptop, but I cannot go a day without reading good literature.

NEA: You received NEA Literature Fellowships in 1985 and 1993. What did those fellowships make possible for you?

CHIN: They were immensely helpful! The award is about “buying time.” The first NEA fellowship bought me a year off to finish my first book, Dwarf Bamboo, which helped me get my first teaching job. The second NEA gave me a reprieve from the same teaching job to finish my second book. It’s all about buying uninterrupted time. I’m one of those poets who can’t seem to teach and write at the same time. The teaching is all-consuming. I am eternally grateful for those uninterrupted semesters to concentrate on my work.

NEA: In addition to writing your own work, you have also translated work by others and edited anthologies. How do those roles—poet, translator, editor—inform each other? How are they similar? How are they different?

CHIN: All those activities are a part of the life and responsibilities of being a poet. One must give back by introducing and blurbing younger poets, and by translating and bringing obscure and neglected poets into the western world. All those activities aren’t just notches on a resume. We must be good ambassadors for our art. Read the rest of this entry »

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Postcard from North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia (Part Two)

May 18, 2012

by Rocco Landesman

NEA Chair Rocco Landesman and Alternate Roots Director Carlton Turner on stage at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta

Carlton Turner of Alternate ROOTS and I spoke in front of a group of about 450 when we chatted about creative placemaking at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Photo by Jhai James, Georgia Council on the Arts

Here’s part two of my southern arts adventures. (You can catch up on what I did in North Carolina and Mississippi here.) I started my trip to Georgia in Macon. I had lunch with Jim Coleman from the Macon Arts Alliance and Beverly Blake of the Knight Foundation. Where did we have lunch? The Steak ‘n Shake in Macon, of course! (It was delicious, by the way—a first-rate Steak ‘n Shake.) Beverly and Jim were great hosts the entire day, and I was glad they were able to make all the stops with me.

After lunch I delivered the keynote speech at the Georgia Arts Network Conference. The conference was at Macon’s Grand Opera House, which is a beautiful facility. It would be the pride of any city. It’s a gorgeous old opera house built in 1883-84, and it’s just a thing of beauty. I spoke on several topics, including creative placemaking and how we can use the arts to support service members and their families. Wayne Jones, president of the Georgia Arts Network, gave the opening remarks, and my old friend Dennis Scholl from the Knight Foundation introduced me. After the conference I was able to spend some time visiting with Macon Mayor Robert Reichert and Sam Hart, who’s the chair of the Macon City Commission.

Our next stop was the Tubman African American Museum on Walnut Street. We gave them a grant last year to help them extend their after-school arts education program. It’s a powerful museum, and it really chronicles a lot of the African-American experience. I was glad to meet Dr. Andy Ambrose, who’s the museum’s executive director.

Next, I spent some time meeting with a group from the Macon Symphony Orchestra, including Sheryl Towers, their CEO, and several of their board members. The symphony has received a couple of grants from us that they’ve put to good use for music education projects and performances.

My next stop was Atlanta. My first meeting was with Lisa Cremin, who runs the Metropolitan Arts Fund/Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. We began what I think is going to be a very productive discussion about the engagement of the NEA with community foundations and their work. You know, the community foundations are on the ground every day. They know the territory, they know what works and what doesn’t work. And they know which arts organizations are worth supporting and which ones less so. We need to start coordinating with them to really learn from their expertise and their hands-on knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

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Art Works Podcast: Natalie Merchant

May 17, 2012

By Josephine Reed

Natalie Merchant. Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that  singer/songwriter  Natalie Merchant began her musical career as the lead vocalist and lyricist for 10,000 Maniacs. Her solo career has been remarkably successful both popularly and critically. She’s known as a wonderful interpreter of song and as a composer whose lyrics demand attention. So perhaps it’s no surprise to learn that Merchant has a passion for poetry. Indeed, she served as a judge for the New York State Poetry Out Loud competition in 2009, and performed at the Poetry Out Loud National Finals in Washington, DC that same year.

She also spent six years working on a project that set 19th- and  20th-century American and British childhood poems to music. Using text from poets as disparate as Edward Lear, Mother Goose, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and Robert Louis Stevenson (to name a few), Merchant composed music that transformed the poetry into songs. The result was a two-CD set called Leave Your Sleep. Leave Your Sleep is an ambitious project: not only do the poems encompass nursery rhymes, lullabies, elegies, fantasies, and so on, but Merchant composed music that moves through more than a dozen genres. Eventually more than 100 musicians took part in performing songs that ranged from bluegrass, klezmer, chamber music, Chinese traditional ensemble, American Indian chant, and Irish music. It was a gamble that paid off; it’s a dream of a project that made many “best of” lists for 2010.

Here’s Natalie Merchant explaining her decision to compose music for other poets’ work and how the process affected her own relationship with poetry. [2:05]

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Postcard from North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia (Part One)

May 17, 2012

by Rocco Landesman

Rocco Landesman in Greensboro with Linda Carlisle, sculptor Jim Gallucci, lighting designer Scott Richardson, and Chuck Cornelio of Lincoln Financial Group

Here I am in Greensboro with Linda Carlisle, Jim Gallucci of Jim Gallucci Sculptor Ltd. who designed the gates for the project, Scott Richardson of Light Designs Form who was the lighting designer for the project, and Chuck Cornelio President of Retirement Services for Lincoln Financial Group. You can see one of the new artworks for the greenway behind us. Photo by Jeff Peck

I’m just back from an Art Works tour of some of our southern states. We started Sunday in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we visited Elsewhere, which is this very odd and unique arts space. It was originally a store owned and run by this incredibly eccentric lady, Sylvia Gray, who collected everything. There are dolls and pottery and costumes and mechanical pieces and every kind of fabric and quilt. She collected everything and threw nothing out. When she died, the space fell into complete disrepair and was just closed for many, many years. After a while Stephanie Sherman, the creative director there, and George Scheer, the collaborative director there (and Sylvia’s grandson), went in and just organized everything into stacks and shelves. One shelf has nothing but books, another has pieces of clothing in a huge big pile. And it’s now become a museum, a residency space for artists, and a place for really innovative arts education activities. It’s part of the revitalization of downtown Greensboro and a great example of creative placemaking. During my visit I was glad to meet with Stephanie; George was unfortunately out of town. I also met Barbara Peck who’s the public art consultant for the Greensboro Downtown Greenway.

It was also great to have a chance to chat with Wayne Martin, the new North Carolina Arts Council executive director and Deputy Director Nancy Trovillion. I was glad they were able to be with us pretty much the whole time. And of course I connected again with Linda Carlisle, the state’s secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources. This is probably my third or fourth meeting with Linda; she’s a fantastic state culture person and just a dynamo. Linda—who’s a Greensboro native by the way—is a real leader and absolutely passionate about the arts. I should mention that I have my own personal association with Greensboro because my old friend from high school, Ellen Fisher, one of my best and oldest friends, lives there. She started off my time in Greensboro with a trip to Steak and Shake for a reunion lunch!

After touring Elsewhere, we drove to Morehead Park, which is the site of one of our MICD25 grants. This was a sort of ribbon cutting for the project, which really transformed the greenway that surrounds Greensboro. There’s an abandoned railroad underpass, and now, thanks to the project, as you go through the underpass, you now have works of art in place. I made some remarks there, as did Chuck Cornelio from the Lincoln Financial Group, which I think has been a big patron of this. This is a really neat project, which is now going to be a wonderful walking, biking, and running loop around the town. You know, this used to be a really tough part of town, and it’s now a big part of the revitalization of that part of Greensboro. This is another great creative placemaking example of what the arts can do in transforming a place. Some of the other elements now in place are art benches and also lighting works under these overpasses that are incredibly aesthetic and compelling. It’s just a great, aesthetic setting that you really want to visit.

From Greensboro, I headed to Jackson, Mississippi. Our first outing in the morning was to the Mississippi Museum of Art, which is run by Betsy Bradley, who is a star. She is a very engaging, very passionate, very inspiring museum director. What they’ve done there is they’ve built a public garden outside the museum that connects the museum with the town. And it’s a beautiful, peaceful oasis in the middle of downtown Jackson. Here we met Malcolm White, who is the director of the Mississippi Arts Commission. You know right away when you meet Malcolm that this guy is the real deal. He’s respected everywhere and among all state arts directors as one of their real leaders. He is a dynamo, he is smart, he is passionate, and he has done wonders for the arts in Mississippi. Mississippi is probably—I started to say it’s the greatest arts state in the country per capita—but forget the per capita and think of the long line of writers, musicians, visual artists who have come from Mississippi. I could name a dozen of them and not get halfway there. For writers there’s Faulkner, Richard Ford, Eudora Welty— there are so many. Tennessee Williams is from Mississippi, too, and that just scratches the surface. There’s a tremendous literary tradition in Mississippi. Of course then you have the blues, and the great musicians who’ve come from there, like our own NEA National Heritage Fellow B.B. King. It’s really one of the most arts-centric states there is, if not the most, especially in literature and music. Malcolm has harnessed that energy and that identity and has done a tremendous job.

I also met Jim Barksdale, the founder of Netscape and one of the very prominent citizens of Jackson. Jim’s currently the Interim Executive Director of the Mississippi Development Authority, and his wife Donna is a board member of the Mississippi Arts Commission. She and Jim are both very dedicated to the arts. They get it about the role the arts play in the revitalization of a city. They’re very committed to the arts, and they’re the kind of people that, immediately when you meet them, you want to spend a day with them. I’m looking forward to getting to know them better as time goes on. It was also terrific to meet Roy Campbell, who’s the museum’s board chair.

After breakfast I was able to tour the museum’s Art Garden, which is beautiful. Very aesthetic. Very artful. They received an Our Town grant that will support educational and performance activities in the garden area. Michael Raff who works for the city as the director of human and cultural services also joined the tour, which was great. Read the rest of this entry »

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Inside the NEA: Getting to Know Michael Orlove

May 15, 2012

by Paulette Beete

Michael Orlove NEA Director of Presenting and Artist Communities

Michael Orlove. Photo by Drew Reynolds

“‘Art Works’ and is, in my opinion, the most effective democratic egalitarian system we have in the world.” —Michael Orlove

As Michael Orlove celebrates surviving his first week as the NEA’s new director of presenting and artist communities, we thought it’d be a good time to get to know the native Chicagoan a little better. Orlove leaves the city having founded Chicago SummerDance and World Music Festival: Chicago as well as having overseen the music programming for Millennium Park, a signature Chicago attraction. Twice named Chicagoan of the Year in Music by the Chicago Tribune, Orlove was also selected as a Chicago Matters Global Visionary by Chicago Public Radio and named one of “Seven Samurai” at the 2009 World Music Expo in Copenhagen, Denmark. Over e-mail this week, we chatted with Orlove about how his parents instilled in him a love of the arts, what “Art Works” means to him, and the childhood secret his mom once confided in Yo-Yo Ma.

NEA: In five words or less, who is Michael Orlove?

MICHAEL ORLOVE: Honest, curious, hard-working, compassionate, family

NEA: What do you remember as your first/earliest engagement in the arts?

ORLOVE: Growing up in Chicago, my parents did their best to expose my brothers and me to the arts. Music festivals, museums, theater—we did so much as a family. I fondly remember going downtown half a dozen times each summer to hear the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra (FOR FREE) at the old Petrillo Band Shell. We would picnic—sometimes with other friends or relatives—and by the time the music started my brothers and I were off horsing around on the grass. What I remember most is watching the crowd of people, from all parts of the city, huddled on blankets and sitting in the seats enjoying the varied classical repertoire with the Chicago skyline in the background. It left a real impression on me—something I took with me to my professional life. Music is an incredible vehicle to bring people together.

NEA: What are you most looking forward to about living in the Washington, DC metro area?

ORLOVE: Exploring DC and the metro area together as a family. I was born, raised, and lived my entire life in Chicago. And my wife Rebeca is from Granada, Spain, and came to Chicago 10 years ago. Our kids Alvaro and Lola are five and three so we all get to experience a new environment together as a family. I think that is very special. New house, new school, new neighborhoods, new museums, new friends—we all get to explore together. Family!

Also having lived in the Midwest my entire life I am now starting to get overwhelmed with how much is accessible from DC: New York City, Philly, Delaware coast, the Carolinas. My head is spinning.

NEA: What will you miss most about Chicago?

ORLOVE: Family and friends. After being in the same city since birth you forget how lucky you are to have so many people in your life. Can’t ever take that for granted. I hope they will all come to visit. Just not at the same time, of course.

And I am going to miss simple navigation. Too many angle streets and turnarounds in DC. I know DC is significantly smaller than Chicago, but I seem to get lost daily with all these angle streets.

NEA: What do you hope to learn while you’re at the NEA?

ORLOVE: I am humbled by all the incredible talent in this agency and hope to learn from all my colleagues here at the NEA. I am anxious to better understand how the other disciplines work and how I can contribute to other fields. Just reading through the NEA blog every morning is somewhat overwhelming—so much exciting work going on within this agency.

NEA: What do you hope to accomplish while you’re at the NEA?

ORLOVE: I am following in the footsteps of a respected colleague and friend, Mario Garcia Durham, who made some incredible strides in his post over the past eight years. I hope to continue his vision and passion within the presenting and artist communities fields and do the best I can to be a leader at the national level. This includes helping to bring new voices, visions, and ideas to both the presenting and artist community fields. Innovation is something that we all need to embrace, and I hope we can find interesting ways to incorporate new ideas, methods, and best practices in order to see these respective fields continue to flourish and have maximum impact throughout the country. And I am counting on my colleagues within the agency and so many remarkable contemporaries throughout the United States to work on this together. Very excited!

NEA: What are you most proud of accomplishing while you were at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs?

ORLOVE: Having spent close to two decades at the Department of Cultural Affairs I have so many great memories, experiences, and events to look back at with pride. It would be difficult to select one particular concert or event, impossible in fact. I look back, however, and can’t help but take great satisfaction in the work we collectively did to make art accessible to all. The vast amount of performing and visual art programs at the Chicago Cultural Center, Millennium Park, Chicago SummerDance, and World Music Festival all succeeded in reaching the people, the community, the lifeline of the city. I know people who met their spouses at SummerDance, friendships that began by sitting beside one another in the Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center, entire social networks that formed on the lawn of Millennium Park. This is what makes me most happy. ‘Art Works’ and is, in my opinion, the most effective democratic egalitarian system we have in the world.

NEA: Which contemporary artist do you secretly hope you run into in the elevator or the halls while you’re here? (And why?)

ORLOVE: I know this will sound trite, but I really want to run into someone in the elevator or hallway unknown to me and make a discovery. Don’t get me wrong—there are so many incredibly interesting artists out there who I would love to meet. But, technology allows us to get such a close introspective look into people’s lives you feel like you already know them. And through my former position with the City of Chicago, I had the great fortune of meeting so many unbelievable artists. But wouldn’t it be great to meet someone completely unknown to you who just knocks you out? It has happened to me so many times in my career. Seeing Doc Watson solo at the Old Town School, seeing Junior Wells for the first time at the Checkerboard Lounge in 1989, hearing Tinariwen in the Sahara Desert in Mali, listening to the great Maqam singer Alim Qasimov on a friend’s Walkman. I could go on and on. There is so much creativity out there. I guess the lesson here is eyes/ears wide open.

NEA: What would most people be surprised to learn about you?

ORLOVE: That I am from Chicago?

Seriously, I think people are always surprised to hear that I have no formal training in music. In all the commission projects I was involved in the musicians would always show me the score. It was like reading hieroglyphics. I was always into sports as a kid. Never lasted more than a week on any instrument.

Funny story: several years back when the Department of Cultural Affairs was celebrating the Year of the Silk Road in Chicago there were a number of meetings with Yo-Yo Ma and his staff. We were walking out of the office and I mentioned that my mother volunteers every Wednesday at the Chicago Cultural Center. Because Yo-Yo is such a mensch, he immediately approaches her without me being in clear view and says, “Sarah Orlove what a pleasure to meet you.” She was shell-shocked and—as only a good Jewish mother would do—she quips back and says, “What an honor to meet you. You know, Mr. Ma, I tried so hard to get Michael interested in taking music class and he just never took any interest.” So I guess it’s not a big secret. Even Yo-Yo Ma knows!

NEA: What does “Art Works” mean to you?

ORLOVE: Art Works to engage and bring people together. Art Works to inspire people young and old, rich and poor. Art Works to encourage curiosity, develop community, and give us a better understanding of the world and of each other.

NEA: Any last words?

ORLOVE: Just saw this quote by Twyla Tharp today—an appropriate way to end the interview, I think. “Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”

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Turning the Dance Floor on its Side

May 11, 2012

By Rebecca Gross

Project Bandaloop performs on the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City. Photo by Atossa Soltani

Anyone who lives in or has visited Washington knows the Old Post Office Pavilion. Built in 1899, the building is a major city landmark, renowned for its gorgeous Romanesque revival architecture and 315-foot clock tower. It’s also home to several federal agencies, including our very own NEA.

But tonight at 9 p.m., the historic Old Post Office will transform into a vertical stage when frequent NEA grantee Project Bandaloop dances, leaps, and twists along the façade as it performs its aerial production of Bound(less). Mixing intricate choreography with the rigor of rappelling, the company was founded in 1991 by Amelia Rudolph, who continues to serve as Project Bandaloop’s artistic director. Since then, the company has performed on such unusual spaces as the Seattle Space Needle, a Norwegian fjord, the Oakland Museum in California, cliff and mountain faces, and a 180-foot billboard in Times Square.

Tonight’s free performance is part of the Kennedy Center’s “Look Both Ways: Street Art Across America” festival, and will feature musician and composer Dana Leong performing on the wall alongside the dancers. In anticipation of the event, I spoke with Amelia Rudolph about her incredible, perspective-bending company, the most memorable space she’s ever danced on, and what it feels like to fly.

NEA: How did you initially dream up the idea for Project Bandaloop?

AMELIA RUDOLPH: I’ve danced my whole life. In 1989, I started to climb for the first time in the Sierra. At that time, there actually weren’t that many indoor climbing gyms like there are now; most of the climbing took place in the mountains. As I was climbing one day, high on a ridge in the Sierra, in this absolutely gorgeous place, I wondered what it would be like to create a site-specific work, or dance, in a site like that. How could you dance high in the mountains, on rock, or on a cliff? At the same time, I realized all my dance fed into climbing, and many things about climbing felt like dance to me inside my body.

At the same time, I was doing my master’s thesis as a performance, and writing about why I was doing a performance. So I wrote a master’s thesis, but I also danced it. This was all happening at the same time and out of that came a group of people, and an idea, and a new indoor climbing gym was opening. I asked the owner, Peter Mayfield, “Hey, do you think we can come into your gym and experiment with the idea of cross-pollinating climbing and dance?” He was extremely supportive. We did a show there in 1991 in the climbing gym, and people really, really responded to it. I think it was so many things: the re-framing of dance, seeing sport and art together—so many things came together in that first performance. And for 20 years now, I’ve been putting dance in unusual urban and natural places. We’re a dance company that’s rigorously performing contemporary dance, complex choreography. We are very not circus-like. We just do it in unusual spaces and on a vertical dance floor.

NEA: How do you rehearse for “stages” that are as unique as the ones you perform on, particularly when you have to take weather into account?

RUDOLPH: We treat our studio space, which is the performance space, as a cross between a stage and a rock climb, or a hike. You have to be prepared. We actually will rehearse in some drizzle and some rain; we will rehearse in wind up to a point. We’ve rehearsed in Dayton, Ohio, in 18-degree weather. You have to do what you have to do, and you have to be really prepared and mentally tough to be able to do it.

So there’s that. Then we’re bringing a complex, full-length work to the Old Post Office that we’ve done in Oakland on a flat wall, in Miami on a Frank Gehry building that was also a flat wall, and we’re adapting it to the Old Post Office. There are several sections that I’m going to completely change; you just cannot do it on this building. I’m really looking forward to finding out what that building brings out in this piece. We have four days on the building prior to show, and we’ll be rehearsing as much as they let us.

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Art Works Podcast: Maxine Hong Kingston

May 10, 2012

Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston. Photo by Michael Lionstar

This week’s podcast focuses on author, Maxine Hong Kingston. Kingston is a pioneering author who in many ways cleared the path for both ethnic and women’s literature. In language that is lyrical and poetic, she looks at the complications of leaving one country for another, often weaving strands of Chinese folk stories and myths—like the tale of the great woman warrior Fa Mu Lan—throughout her work.

A recipient of two NEA Literature Fellowships,  Kingston won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1976 for her first book, The Woman Warrior;  her second, China Men, won 1981’s National Book Award. Kingston’s greatest legacy, however, is her lasting impact on literature. As author Julia Alvarez has said, “I think Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior really was a moment in which the mainstream culture said ‘This is beautiful. This is lyrical. This is American literature…. This is part of who we are, these stories of people that have come from somewhere else, and along with everything else that they’ve brought they brought their stories.’”

Although today, ethnic and immigrant writing fills the bookshelves, that was not the case in the 1970s when Kingston began writing The Woman Warrior. She had to figure out how, as a Chinese-American woman, to write herself and an Asian oral tradition into American culture. [2:57]

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National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day

May 9, 2012

by Rocco Landesman

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius offers remarks at the interagency task force convening

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius offered remarks at the first ever-convening between our two agencies in March 2011. Photo by NEA staff

Today is Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day, an annual observance that encourages communities across the country to discuss, celebrate, and raise the visibility of issues and resources around the mental health of our nation’s young people. The national effort is spearheaded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). I spoke with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to learn more about Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day and how the arts can play a part in this important issue.

ROCCO LANDEMSAN: What is National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day and how did it come about?

KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day started as a grassroots effort in Oklahoma in 2004 when a SAMHSA Children’s Mental Health Initiative grantee celebrated community partnerships in an effort to raise awareness about children’s mental health. The idea caught on and in 2005 SAMHSA supported a national awareness day to help bring visibility to the local activities. The number of national Awareness Day collaborating organizations has grown from four in 2005 to 134 in 2012.

We use this observance each year to raise awareness about the resilience of children with mental health problems and the effectiveness of mental health services. This year Awareness Day is being celebrated with a national event in Washington, DC, and more than 1,100 communities and 130 national organizations will be involved in Awareness Day activities.

LANDESMAN: I know this is the seventh year of this program. Is there a particular focus to this year’s events?

SEBELIUS: The theme of the national event is “Heroes of Hope.” We define a “Hero of Hope” as a caring adult who provides ongoing support to a child or young person in need. This year there is a special focus on children and youth served in child welfare, juvenile justice, and education systems who have experienced a traumatic event and have thrived in spite of the challenges they face. Through dance, poetry, and spoken word, youth will pay tribute to Heroes of Hope at the National Awareness event. During the event, I will have the opportunity to present an award to Cyndi Lauper for her work on behalf of homeless LGBT youth.

LANDESMAN: How can the arts play a part in supporting the mental health of children—whether or not they are trauma survivors? And can you please speak briefly about some of the medical and scientific research that supports the positive linkages between the arts and health?

SEBELIUS: Art therapists work with youth to express their emotions when words alone are not sufficient. Creative expression of their feelings can help young people process challenges associated with trauma and conflict. Engaging young people with mental health problems in the arts can increase self-esteem and coping skills and can help them reach their full potential.

Some of the more promising work in this area was featured in a 2011 white paper The Arts and Human Development: Framing a National Research Agenda for the Arts, Lifelong Learning, and Individual Well-Being. When we released the paper with the NEA, we also jointly launched an Interagency Task Force on the Arts and Human Development comprised of 15 federal entities, including SAMHSA.

LANDESMAN:  What are some practical ways in which we can support the mental well-being of our children at home or in school?

SEBELIUS: There are many ways that adults can support the well-being of the children and youth in their lives, including: spending time with them, creating positive expectations, cultivating their interests, reinforcing  them with praise and encouragement, providing appropriate limits and boundaries, and building their self-confidence.

LANDESMAN: Do you have some recommended resources for parents or caretakers or others who are interested in learning more about this issue?

SEBELIUS: There are a lot of helpful resources for parents and caregivers who want to learn more about how they can help support the social and emotional health of young people. SAMHSA has collected resources from various organizations on this topic on its website.

Tune in tonight from 7:30-9:30 pm ET for a LIVE webcast of the Washington, DC National Childrens Mental Health Awareness Day event.

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Postcard from St. Louis

May 8, 2012

By Rocco Landesman

Mayor Buttigeig (standing) of South Bend, Indiana, presents his case study at the recent MICD conference in St. Louis. Photo courtesy of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design

At the end of April, I had the opportunity to go to my hometown, St. Louis, for the latest session of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD). It’s great to go home, especially on NEA business—and not only because I get to eat as many meals as possible at Steak n Shake.

The visit began with a tour of downtown St. Louis led by John Hoal, an urban design professor at Washington University. We spent a lot of time at Citygarden, which is a great example of creative placemaking. It’s a beautiful, three-acre urban park that opened in 2009, and is designed to reflect the natural topography of St. Louis. Just standing there and seeing kids playing in the fountains, people touring the sculpture gardens—it’s become a real downtown destination. It’s free, and people can walk in and out as they please. Historically, you go to downtown St. Louis to do business during the day or to go to the ballgame at night, then leave and go back to the suburbs. But this adds an entirely new element to the area. People really engage with it, they walk around in it. It’s a good design oasis in the middle of the city. And it’s great that this was able to happen in St. Louis, which has not been on the vanguard of new ideas in urban design and creative placemaking.

Later in the tour, we visited neighborhoods on the North Side of St. Louis, where I had never spent much time. I knew it was where the old stadium was, and I used to go down there to the old ballpark. But there are some great old bones there, some great brick buildings. A lot of them have fallen into disrepair, and a lot of them are boarded up. But now little by little, block by block, they’re starting to come back. And there is real recapture and re-use of those buildings for homes, for galleries, etc. It was great to tour the North Side.

We also talked about the CityArchRiver plan that’s set to further revamp downtown. Between the Gateway Arch, which everyone knows, and the rest of the city, there’s basically this freeway. And they’re trying to figure out a way to extend the Arch and its park past the famous Old Courthouse. There should be one long esplanade where people can wander and tour and end up at the Arch, which would give them a sense that St. Louis is a real river city. That’s in the works, and the city is raising money for that.

Then we went on to the opening dinner, which was at a restaurant called Niche. It was excellent. Niche was in the South Side, and the same sort of renewal is happening there in the Soulard District and other nearby neighborhoods. St. Louis is a city that fortunately over all the years has preserved its great buildings, and its great houses. So there’s plenty of potential for the city to become an arts Mecca, and I think that is happening.

The next day I went to the morning MICD sessions. These are hosted by the NEA, the American Architectural Foundation, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Ron Bogle was there representing the architects, as was Tom Cochran, my good friend, who represents the mayors. The mayors are our natural allies in creative placemaking. They get this, and they’ve been doing this for quite a while before I came to the NEA. The meetings were held at the Cannon Design Building, which is a great old building in St. Louis. It was a perfect setting for a conference focused on design, and it was really a beautiful space.

What’s great about MICD is that the mayors present their problems, and then the other mayors and design experts give them advice. There’s no press there, so it can be a very freewheeling, uninhibited back and forth. Mayors present their case studies, and there’s back and forth about advice.

To give you an example of how a session works, we heard from Peter Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He’s the youngest mayor in the nation of any city with a population over 100,000, and is going to be a real star. He’s very, very impressive. Mayor Buttigieg is trying to better engage South Bend residents with the St. Joseph River, and is creating a master plan to revitalize the downtown riverfront. He talked about how no one walks anywhere in South Bend. Something might be a ten-minute walk away, but people will drive. And he does that himself when he goes to the Notre Dame campus or goes downtown from where he lives. We had a transportation design expert there, and she said to him, “People drive everywhere because of how the streets are designed. The whole purpose of these streets is to get people to the freeways and expressways, and out of town as fast as possible. That’s why they’re one-way, and that’s why they’re so wide. Naturally they’re not conducive to walking around—cars are going too fast. You’ve got to make the streets two ways, and you’ve got to have street parking. You need a sense of, ‘Hey, slow down.’ If cars go slower, and people feel more comfortable walking, you’ll have much more vibrancy and downtown vitality on the streets.” So that’s the kind of back and forth that you hear with the mayors and their presentations.

We also heard from Jean Quan, the mayor of Oakland. There’s a big arts center on Lake Merritt, which is right in the middle of Oakland, that the mayor wants to transform into this big library and gallery space. She’s trying to raise money for that.

The MICD meetings really are the highlight of my year. They’re always fascinating to me, and I always come back stimulated and fired up. I always learn things I didn’t know before. I think it’s one of the most important things we do. And to have it in my hometown, that was the best. I just wish I could have stayed on and on.

Posted by Art Works at 9:23 am | Leave a comment

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Art Flows Through the Mississippi Delta

May 7, 2012

By Rebecca Gross

A student leaps during a dance workshop in Clarksdale, Mississippi, held by Ailey II member Shirley Black Brown (seated). Photo by Panny Mayfield

With a long history of poverty, poor education levels, and dismal health statistics, the Mississippi Delta region is accustomed to making do with meager resources. But despite the obstacles and the hardship, Robert Canon is determined that Delta residents will not have to make do without art.

After a long career in the arts, including several years as NEA director of what was then called Locals, Canon now heads the Mississippi Festival Foundation, which brings professional performing arts companies into schools and communities throughout the Delta. Since the not-for-profit launched in 2005, it has sponsored local performances by organizations such as the Birmingham Children’s Theatre, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and musician Ladysmith Black Mambazo, reaching roughly 100,000 individuals in the process.

From the start, Canon has insisted on presenting only the highest quality work; before his efforts, Alvin Ailey had never before performed in the state of Mississippi.  “I’m always going to try to push for serious, professional work. I think when you have that, anybody—whether they’re adults or children—gets a better understanding of what it’s all about and how it can affect their lives.”

Initially, the organization operated out of Jackson, and bused children into the city to see performances. But the three-hour trek from the Delta to the capital proved too great a logistical and financial challenge, and the Mississippi Festival began sending arts organizations into the Delta instead. (Original plans for a large-scale festival were also abandoned several years ago—“I probably need to change the name,” Canon said.)

The decision to sponsor Delta-based programs brought with it new challenges, including finding adequate facilities to house visiting companies. When the Ailey II dance company visited the region earlier this year, the Mississippi Festival Foundation located a 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) facility in Clarksdale that still had a suspended wood floor suitable for dance performances. With support from the NEA and others, the foundation fixed up the auditorium, making it usable for the company. The impact of the performances, Canon said, “was beyond anything we could have imagined.”

Ailey dancers in costume following their performance in Clarksdale. Photo by Panny Mayfield

“The majority population in this area is African-African. They’ve been very isolated, except for what they see on television. There are not even a lot of move theaters in this region, if you can imagine,” he continued. “[I]n the case of dance, [the students] suddenly people who are like them, who are up there dancing as professionals. It opened a whole new world for them.”

Canon’s organization has received dozens of letters from students expressing their gratitude for coordinating the Ailey II events, and several schools have continued the dance workshops that the Mississippi Festival sponsored in the weeks leading up to the performances. The state has even contributed funds to further restore the WPA pavilion, “a direct result of bringing in something of high quality,” Canon said.

“When [people] have an opportunity to see the best, they’re excited, interested, and it will develop a new audience,” said Canon. “In this region it’s particularly important because they have nothing else. I think we’ve changed lives as a result of this.”

Posted by Art Works at 10:49 am | Leave a comment

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