Teaching Artist Interview with Dumeha Thompson

This is an extended interview of 2 hours and 15 minutes in length.  The mp3 may take a minute to begin playing.   Please be patient.  

 

Click Here for mp3: Dumeha Thompson Interview

Teaching Artist Interview with Renee Watson

 

Click Here for mp3: Renee Watson Interview

About Renee (her bio from the Community Word Project Website)…

 

Renée Watson ~~~ Teaching Artist

Renée Watson graduated from The New School, where she studied Creative Writing, and earned a certificate in Drama Therapy. Her one woman show, Roses are Red, Women are Blue, debuted at New York City’s Lincoln Center at a showcase for emerging artists. Her poetry has been published in With Hearts Ablaze and Theater of the Mind. Renée’s first children’s picture book, A Place Where Hurricanes Happen, will be published in 2010 (Random House). She has also published an article about teaching social justice issues in the classroom in Rethinking Schools. Renée graduated from CWP¹s Advanced TATIP program in 2005.

Teaching Artist Interview with Karen Fitzgerald

 

Click Here For mp3: Karen Fitzgerald Interview

 

Karen Fitzgerald’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States. The Queens Museum of Art, Islip Art Museum, Rahr-West Museum, Madison Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, the University of Arizona – Tucson and the United Nations in NY have featured her work in their active exhibition schedules. A recipient of two grants from the Queens Community Arts Fund, she has also received funds from the Greenwall Foundation and the Women’s Studio Workshop. Her work is in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Union Gas collection, the Rienhart Collection of Germany, the Museum of New Art in Detroit and many other public and private collections.

 

In 2005, she completed a commission for the New York City School Construction Authority. It consisted of 28 permanent panels at PS 239 in Queens. In 2003, she completed a 29 x 56 exterior mural for public school 193 in Whitestone, Queens. She has also completed collaborative commissions with composers Charles Griffin and Carl MaultsBy. She has provided comprehensive school reform services for 3 NYC public schools as a coach for Different Ways of Knowing. As project director for ArtistCares, she oversaw the development and implementation of programming in response to 9/11 in NYC, from 2001-2004.

 

She has been a teaching artist for 22 years and continues to provide consultations for a wide range of institutions on a variety of educational issues. She has taught at St. John’s University, Iona College and worked as education director for the Queens Symphony Orchestra. She was awarded an MFA from Hunter College in 1985, and a M.Ed. from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1990. Karens work can be seen at: www.Fitzgeraldart.com. She lives with her husband and three sons in Woodside, New York.

Creative Curricula – funding for teaching artists

Although the deadline for this year has passed, the Creative Curricula program is an interesting program to keep in mind. The guidelines are posted on the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s website…

http://lmcc.net/grants/boroughwide/creativecurricula/index.html 

 Creative Curricula is a local arts-in-education funding program administered by LMCC and supported by the Local Capacity Building Initiative of the Arts-in-Education Program at the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). The Local Capacity Building Initiative is a statewide effort to provide local support for widespread participation in arts-in-education.

How Creative Curricula Works

Creative Curricula makes matching grants for up to $5,000 to partnerships between schools and teaching artists or cultural organizations. Funding is provided for in-classroom projects that focus on the integrated study of arts and non-arts subjects developed by collaborating classroom teachers and teaching artists. Funding decisions are based on the proposal’s ability to meet the program criteria and local funding priorities as they are outlined in these application guidelines.

 

 

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to Run Artists’ Space on Governors Island

NY TIMES Article…

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to Run Artists’ Space on Governors Island
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: October 19, 2008
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has been selected to run an artists’ studio and exhibition space on Governors Island that will include a year-round artist residency and weekend events.
 
Governors Island, will be home to a year-round artists’ studio and exhibition space.
The arts programming is expected to begin next spring in 14,000 square feet of space on the ground floor of a building on the island’s north shore. Building 110 is the “first building you see when you arrive” by ferry from Manhattan, said Leslie Koch, president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation.
The selection of the council is the latest effort to transform the 172-acre island in New York Harbor into a destination that is an integral part of city life.
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is perhaps best known for its work on rejuvenating the arts downtown after the terrorist attacks of 2001. But it also has extensive experience with studio programs, having brought artists into donated spaces around the city, beginning in 1997 with its World Views program at the World Trade Center.
Ms. Koch said the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, established in 2003 to oversee the redevelopment, saw the arts as crucial to melding the island into the city’s dense urban culture. “We’re learning from other neighborhoods in New York, where artists come first,” Ms. Koch said.
Last December a team of architects was selected to design a 40-acre park on the island’s southern half: the New York firms Diller Scofidio & Renfro, Rogers Marvel Architects, Quennell Rothschild & Partners, SMWM of San Francisco and the Dutch firm West 8. A master plan for the park is to be released in the spring.
Construction is also under way on a building for the New York Harbor School, a Bushwick, Brooklyn, public high school that will be the first permanent tenant on the island. It is expected to open there in the fall of 2010.
To solicit proposals for the island’s arts programming, the corporation said, it notified every arts organization that receives funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and from the city’s department of cultural affairs, Ms. Koch said. She declined to name the other applicants.
Maggie Boepple, president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, said the island location would provide artistic inspiration. “It’s an extraordinary island,” she said. “The ability to step on a ferry and go to the middle of New York and have this relatively quiet place is going to produce some interesting work.”
The artists will keep bankers’ hours on the island: Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. (No overnight stays are permitted.) But during the island’s “public access” season — from the end of May to mid-October — artists will also be in their studios from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
During this year’s public-access season, which ended on Oct. 12, Governors Island received a record 128,000 visitors.
“As we look at Governors Island development over time, the first phase has to build on the success we’re already having with visitors,” Ms. Koch said.
Providing weekend cultural activity for the public is part of the cultural council’s mission at Governors Island. Events will include master classes, open rehearsals, workshops and open-air performances. “There has to be a program of exhibition and site-specific work and open studios,” Ms. Koch said.
The building is to have 30 artist studios and three rehearsal studios, Ms. Boepple said. The council plans to have up to three performing-artist, dance or theater ensembles and up to 20 visual artists in the studios at one time. Residencies will last three weeks in the public-access season and three months the rest of the year. Artists will be selected by a panel of experts. The $1.5 million cost of restoring the program’s space is to be covered by the corporation. The cultural council will pay no rent for the space, but will be responsible for annual operating expenses like heat, insurance and electricity, estimated at $250,000.
“We believe very passionately that the arts are critical to our success, that we provide a unique setting for artists to interpret,” Ms. Koch said.
More Articles in Arts » A version of this article appeared in print on October 20, 2008, on page C3 of the New York edition.Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to Run Artists’ Space on Governors Island

The Sept. 11th Oral History Records

Here’s a link to the transcripts of more than 500 oral history interviews of rescue workers involved in September 11th.

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This is from the New York Times Website…

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/20050812_WTC_GRAPHIC/met_WTC_histories_full_01.html

The Sept. 11 Records

A rich vein of city records from Sept. 11, including more than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians, were made public on Aug. 12. The New York Times has published all of them.

A message from Dave Issay (StoryCorps)

Dear Educators,

Thank you for your interest and participation in StoryCorps; your support and feedback has been so helpful to us as the project has grown and evolved. Today we are pleased to announce our newest effort: the first-ever National Day of Listening (NDL) to be celebrated on November 28, 2008. I’m writing to encourage you and your colleagues to celebrate NDL in the classroom and to help your students celebrate at home with their families.

The National Day of Listening is an effort to encourage, instruct, and inspire everyday people to start a new holiday tradition: sit down with a loved one on the day after Thanksgiving and record a meaningful conversation to preserve for years to come. It’s a chance for people to truly listen to one another and to discover what wonderful and unexpected stories can come from the simple question, tell me about your life.

To help teachers and students participate, StoryCorps has specially prepared a free NDL Teacher’s Toolkit, including a Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide with simple and easy to understand instructions for recording an interview at home or in the classroom. It also includes flyers to post around school, a sample letter to email or send home with students, links to free software to use in editing stories with older children, and more. You can download the Teacher’s Toolkit and watch a video showing a DIY interview step by step on www.nationaldayoflistening.org.

Starting an oral history tradition in your school enables your students to become fully engaged in new and meaningful ways. Oral history projects address state standards for social studies, language arts, and performing arts curriculums. The basic interview can be a valuable tool to spring board into both writing and research that connects lives, families, and communities. It can become an enjoyable and eye-opening way to provide a platform for learning. 

We hope you will visit www.nationaldayoflistening.org, download the free Teacher’s Toolkit, and bring the message that listening is an act of love to your school this holiday season. Please contact us directly at educators@storycorps.net with any questions you have about these materials, National Day of Listening in general, or with feedback about the Toolkit.

Thank you in advance for your help on this day. We believe that this day will be as rewarding for you and your students as it has for forty thousand StoryCorps participants and counting.

Sincerely,

Dave Isay
Founder & President, StoryCorps

Apollo Theater Oral History Project

In the New York Stories section of the Columbia University website, is a story about a new oral history project on the Apollo Theatre in Harlem.

Here is a blurb from the article and a link…

Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office has joined with the Apollo Theater Foundation, Inc. to document and preserve the vibrant history of Harlem’s Apollo Theater and its surrounding neighborhood. The Apollo Theater Oral History Project will feature interviews with performers, personalities and staff, as well as local cultural and political leaders in an effort to spotlight and safeguard one of New York’s most important cultural institutions.

Planned as part of the legendary theater’s upcoming 75th anniversary, the project will include an oral history archive, an online and on-site exhibition based on the interviews and an educational program for public school students.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/newyorkstories.html

Columbia University’s new Oral History Master’s Degree Program

Link to article on Columbia University’s new Oral History Master’s Degree Program…

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/oncampus/oralhistory.html.

Link to the university’s degree requirements..

http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/education/ohma.html