For Immediate Release:08/20/12
Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles Announces Creative
Placemaking Symposium on Saturday, October 20, 2012
SPARKING INCLUSIVE DIALOGUE
THROUGH CREATIVE PLACEMAKING
Los Angeles, CA— On Saturday, October 20, 2012, Emerging
Arts Leaders/Los Angeles (EAL/LA), a project of Community
Partners, will host a symposium entitled “Sparking Inclusive
Dialogue Through Creative Placemaking” at the Atwater Village
Theatre (3269 Casitas Avenue in Atwater Village, Los Angeles,
CA 90039). The event will begin at 11:00am and conclude at
4:00pm, with a networking mixer at The Griffin (3000 Los Feliz
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039) to follow. Tickets are $20.
This conference will explore how creative placemaking can
enjoin atypical collaborators – professionals across arts
disciplines and economic sectors, as well as community
members –in a dialogue not only about art, but also about the
community at large. Fostering the cultivation of Los Angeles and
areas within into “creative places” has a positive effect on the
arts sector and region as a whole: “In creative placemaking,
partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors
strategically shape the physical and social character of a
neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural
activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private
spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local
business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people
together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.”1
“Creative Placemaking.” 2010. Ann Markusen (Markusen Economic Research
Services) and Anne Gadwa (Metris Arts Consulting).
1
The keynote speaker for the symposium is John Malpede, the
Founder and Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department.
Panelists include Anne Bray, Co-Founder and Executive Director
of Freewaves, Brian Janeczko, Freelance Architect, and Dan
Kwong, Project Director of Collaboratory at Great Leap, Inc.
This day of dialogue is EAL/LA’s October 2012 iteration of an
annual Creative Conversations event convened in celebration of
National Arts & Humanities Month. Creative Conversations were
established in 2004 by Americans for the Arts and have been so
successful for EAL/LA, that an additional annual Creative
Conversations event is now held each April.
Creative Conversations are part of a nationwide effort to elevate
the profile of the Arts through local gatherings of Emerging
Leaders in communities across the country. Networks choose
topics of particular relevancy and/or interest to their local arts
community to address. The organization of these events varies
from city to city, but the intent remains consistent. EAL/LA has a
rich history of Creative Conversations and it is the most highly
attended event each year for the organization.
In line with the theme of inclusive dialogue, EAL/LA encourages
creators, performers, funders, arts administrators and anyone
who is interested from any and all fields to attend.
To purchase tickets today, please visit:
http://ealla.kintera.org/ecommerce.
For further information about Emerging Arts Leaders/Los
Angeles, please visit: http://ealla.org.
The EAL/LA October 2012 Creative Conversation is supported
by a generous grant from the James Irvine Foundation.
Schedule:
10:45pm-11:00am
Registration
11:00am-11:10pm
Welcome & Acknowledgments
Kelly Christ
Programming Chair
Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles
11:10pm-12:10pm
Keynote Address
John Malpede
Founder and Director
Los Angeles Poverty Department
12:10pm-1:10pm
Catered Lunch
1:10-2:40pm
Panel Discussion
Anne Bray
Co-Founder and Executive Director
Freewaves
Brian Janeczko
Freelance Architect
Dan Kwong
Project Director for Collaboratory
Great Leap, Inc.
2:40-3:40pm
Collaborative Creative Placemaking
Activity
3:40pm-3:55pm
Closing Remarks
4:00pm
Depart for Networking Mixer at The Griffin
3000 Los Feliz Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90039
Emerging Arts Leaders/Los Angeles, a project of Community
Partners and a local chapter of Americans for the Arts –
Emerging Leaders Council, is a network of emerging leaders in
the field of arts administration whose purpose is to grow and
support the next generation of creative leaders in Los Angeles
County. Members conceive of programs designed to expand
their network, share resources, and enhance their professional
development. The mission of Emerging Arts Leaders/Los
Angeles is to ensure sustainable innovation in arts leadership by
facilitating and providing a forum for preparing, educating and
inspiring emerging arts professionals to assume the next
generation of arts sector leadership positions.
EAL/LA members are in their early career (under 35 and/or with
less than five years’ experience in arts management) and share
a desire to deepen their leadership capacity by developing
innovative, effective, and responsible management practices.
They represent organizations from all arts disciplines, in both the
for-profit and non-profit sectors, and include artists,
administrative coordinators, managers, and directors, arts
funders, patrons, and consultants.
Speaker Biographies
Keynote Speaker
John Malpede
Founder and Director
Los Angeles Poverty Department
John Malpede directs, performs and engineers multi-event arts
projects that have theatrical, installation, public art and education
components. Malpede continues to direct the Los Angeles
Poverty Department (LAPD), which he founded in 1985. LAPD’s
mission is to create performances that connect lived experience
to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of
people living in poverty.
Recent work includes the LAPD’s Walk the Talk and State of
Incarceration (co-directed by Malpede and Henriëtte Brouwers;
The Box Gallery, Highways Performance Space, and the Radar
LA Theatre Festival), Wunderbaum’s Looking for Paul
(collaborating performer; REDCAT and Stadsschouwburg
Amsterdam), and Bright Futures (directed by Malpede;
performed by Nell Breyer, Malpede, and Tanya Selvaratnam at
MIT and NYC’s Performa Festival).
Malpede has produced projects working with communities in the
U.S., the U.K., France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Bolivia.
He has received a Bessie Creation Award, Adeline Kent Award,
individual artist fellowships from NYSCA, NEA, CAC, COLA,
California Community Foundation’s Visual Artist Fellowship, and
numerous project grants. He was a 2008-2009 fellow at MIT’s
Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Malpede performed in five
video works by Bill Viola and as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’
production of For An End to the Judgment of God.
In 2004, Malpede’s project RFK in EKY, was produced by
Appalshop, and developed with a host of community partners.
This monumental, real-time documentary-style performance by a
large community cast sought to put a historical mirror up to
present moment life in eastern Kentucky. RFK in EKY recreated
Kennedy’s original “war on poverty” tour in the course of a fourday, 200-mile series of events that included performance,
installations, and in-depth discussion of historic and current
events and social policy. He involved a number of his closest
artist/collaborators in elements of this project including Henriette
Brouwers, David Michalek, Harrell Fletcher, and Sjoerd
Wagenaar.
Panelists
Anne Bray
Co Founder and Executive Director
Freewaves
Anne Bray has been working at the intersection of public space
and media art as a hybrid artist and director of the nonprofit
media arts organization, Freewaves. The creativity of one and
the social outreach of the other have continuously fed each
other. Engagement with edgy, demanding, enlightening art by a
broad public is Bray’s mission. She connects challenging art with
venues that offer the visibility, equipment and timing for
prominent display with an involved viewership.
She is a visual instigator and translator. Her specialty is selecting
subjects that artists find most pressing and compelling. She
exhibits that work in formats that publics, often unaware of
contemporary art, can comprehend without the work losing its
integrity. In her art, like in her career, she contrasts different
points of view side by side. Viewers are asked to compare and
place themselves within her spectrums: masculine and feminine,
verbal and visual, logical and magical. Questions are often the
format.
Her artistic process expanded in 1989 when, with
representatives of other art groups, she co-founded Freewaves,
a grassroots yet global arts organization dedicated to collecting
and connecting innovative and culturally relevant independent
new media from around the world (see Freewaves.org). Eleven
biennial festivals presenting more than 3000 artists with the
partnership of 125 curators and 100+ organizations have been
held at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, The Getty
Center, Hammer Museum, on Hollywood and Chinatown streets,
and have been supported by the National Endowment for the
Arts, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and Warhol Foundations.
Freewaves’ 21st anniversary was celebrated at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art in June 2010 with an exhibition and a
launch of a book, DVD and new web archive. A phone app of 15
shorts and curatorial quips called Out the Window Uncensored is
launching in 2012.
Video projection is her chosen medium. Her work
spectacularizes still unresolved conflicts about women, art and
nature. She exhibits installation/performances of video, audio,
flat and 3-D screens at traditional and nontraditional venues
including museums, galleries, gas stations, malls, movie
theaters, and department stores, as well as on TV and
billboards. She has produced public art projects with GLOW art
festival in Santa Monica, Public Art Fund, NY Avant Garde
Festival, LACE, CRA, Cinematexas among others, and multimedia installations at Santa Monica Museum of Art, Track 16,
Pomona Museum of Art, MIT, Images du Futur in Montreal as
well as Armory Center for the Arts, Foundation for Art
Resources, Side Street Projects, Highways, NewTown, Civitella
Ranieri, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, First Night
Celebration, SkyArt Festival, University Art Museum at CSU
Long Beach, Otis Art Gallery, 6th International Triennial of Art &
Ecology at Umetostna Gallery, L.A. Municipal Art Gallery, Cité
des Arts et Nouvelles Technologies de Montreal, Banff Center,
Pacific Film Archive, Artist Space, Hayden Gallery at M.I.T. and
other experimental spaces.
Brian Janeczko
Freelance Architect
Brian Janeczko has operated a self-owned design and build
practice since 2011. Janeczko designs, fabricates and manages
the creation of furniture and other products. He has an innovative
approach to his craft; as an example, he has used reclaimed and
industrial materials for ‘bowling lane’ furniture. Recently,
Janeczko designed a mobile learning kiosk for the Huntington
Garden’s Discovery Carts program. Prior to his freelance career,
Janeczko worked with Taalman Koch Architecture—a design
office specializing in site built aluminum pre-fab homes, Didier
Hess—a public art design and build office specializing in material
research and fabrication technologies, and Emanate—a not-forprofit architecture and landscape research and design office
specializing in material investigation and fabrication
technologies. Janeczko received his Bachelors of Architecture
degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Dan Kwong
Project Director for Collaboratory
Great Leap Inc.,
Dan Kwong is an award-winning solo performance artist, writer,
teacher, playwright and visual artist who has been presenting his
work nationally and internationally since 1989. Hailed by critics
as “a master storyteller,” Kwong draws upon his own life
experiences as well as historical and contemporary material to
explore the many facets of identity. Culture, class, race, gender,
sexuality and nationality all come under scrutiny in his innovative
performances which weave together storytelling, multimedia,
poetry, striking visuals, dynamic physicality and a generous
sense of humor.
His works have explored subjects such as cultural confusion and
discovery in a mixed heritage family, allergic reactions to “Model
Minority Syndrome,” dysfunctional family “Asian American-style,”
Asian male identity, Japanese American internment during
WWII, the impact of HIV/AIDS on Asian Americans, Kwong’s
goal to become the First Performance Artist in Space, and the
complexities of having a U.S. passport and an Asian face.
Touring extensively, Kwong has performed at venues all across
the U.S. and in England, Hong Kong, Thailand, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Mexico, Canada, China and Korea. He is recipient of
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,
Rockefeller Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Art Matters Inc.,
Brody Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace, N.Y., and was twice
nominated for the Alpert Award in the Arts. He received awards
for Outstanding Mid-Career Artist from the California Community
Foundation and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs
Department and was honored by the Japanese American
Historical Society for Outstanding Contributions to Japanese
American culture and history.
His essays and performances have been published in The
Journal of American Drama and Theatre, High Performance, and
various anthologies including On A Bed of Rice – A Feast of
Asian American Erotica, Yellow Light – The Flowering of Asian
American Art and Living in America – A Pop Culture Reader. The
significance of his body of work was acknowledged in A History
of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). In
2004 he released his first book, From Inner Worlds to Outer
Space: The Multimedia Performances of Dan Kwong, published
by University of Michigan Press and edited by Prof. Robert
Vorlicky, NYU.
As a teacher, Kwong has played a key role in the development of
the next generation of Asian American solo performers through
his numerous workshops on autobiographical writing and
performing nationally and internationally. He was founder of
Treasure in the House, L.A.’s first Asian Pacific American
performance and visual art festival produced at Highways
Performance Space from 1991 to 2003, where he also served on
the Board of Directors for 17 years.
Since 2000, Kwong has worked on numerous international
collaborative projects in East and Southeast Asia including the
Women Warrior Tales touring residency in Java, The Art of Rice
interdisciplinary performance in Bali, and The Mekong Project
residencies in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. In 2005 and 2006,
he collaborated with Beijing artist Peng Jingquan on Sleeping
With Strangers, a critically-acclaimed duet combining traditional
Chinese opera with performance art to explore U.S.-China
relations.
His stageplay, Be Like Water, the story of a teenage Asian
American girl living in Chicago who is visited by the ghost of
Bruce Lee, premiered in Fall 2008 at East West Players Theater
in Los Angeles.
Since 2005, he has been Project Director for Great Leap’s
Collaboratory, a mentorship program to nurture and develop the
next generation of artist-leaders in Los Angeles.
He is currently collaborating with performance artist Iu-Hui Chua
developing Once We Wanted, an interdisciplinary multimedia
performance exploring the tension between human connection
and societal alienation.
Kwong is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and a Resident Artist at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa
Monica. You can view his website at DanKwong.com
###
Press Contact
Gavin Williamson
Marketing and Membership Chair
323-636-3903/gavin@ealla.org