Archive for June, 2007
As an artist who earns very little from the art I produce, I was happy to read an article in a Madison, WI newspaper about how independent, part-time artists contribute to the economy. The gist of the article is that the folks who make and sell art part-time contribute to the economy in that they make the area more attractive to tourists who then perceive the area as creative and in turn spend more money in other businesses as they buy the art made by the independents. In Missoula during the summer there are many opportunities for people to buy art from an independent artist. On Saturdays, the Missoula Saturday Market runs on Pine Street off of Higgins Avenue downtown from 9AM until 1PM. There one will find an ever-changing variety of arts and crafts available for sale, ranging from photography and painting, to hand painted silk scarves, to soy candles, handmade jewelry and more. Known as “The People’s Market” locally, Missoula Saturday Market is a must activity for anyone in town during the summer on a Saturday. When tax season ends, H&R Block moves out of 306 North Higgins Avenue and in moves The Missoula Artist’s Shop Co-Op. The Artist’s Shop has a huge selection of independent art available at very reasonable rates and shouldn’t be missed. I’d be interested to know how much money independent artists in Montana bring to the economy. Does anyone know? Hey, you tourists out there, when you see and/or buy art from an independent artist, how does that make you feel? What is your perception of a city as a result of the independent art available there? Let me know in the comments. Tags: arts, economy, inspiration, jobsarts, economy, inspiration, jobs
In the course of trying to promote my art, and art in general, I’ve signed up with montana-artists.com and elected to be updated via email about goings on. I got this email today that I think is important to share. After reading it, I encourage all Montana artists who are readers of this blog to head over to montana-artists.com and sign up while remembering to post any events you may be planning on the site. Thanks. Marc I’ve tried to populate our calendar of events myself, but it apparently hasn’t been good enough for visitors to our site. The more I’ve thought about it I realized I may not have emphasized the use of the Calendar of Events to you the Artists, Gallery Owners and Art Museum Curators. So please consider this your official invitation to post events to our Calendar. What kind of events should be posted? Well, I guess any art related event that is open to the public, whether its’ free or paid. Classes, workshops, gallery nights, receptions, art auctions, art walks, etc. Why should you list your events here? In March 2007, the Montana-Artists.com web site surpassed LivelyTimes.com (The Montana Arts Councils vehicle for arts event promotion) for total number of monthly web site visitors, as well as overall page views. Since then, we’ve widened the gap, and now get nearly twice as many unique visitors, and nearly three times as many page views. When people are looking for art events in Montana, it appears we are the number one stop. If you have any questions or comments, please post them to this article, and I’ll reply to them as quickly as I can. With Regards, Branden Another posting straight from the Missoula Cultural Council email distribution list. This time, every state in the nation is directly afftected. Read on. Act. ——————- After postponing due to a procedural delay, the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to begin floor consideration of the FY 2008 Interior appropriations bill tomorrow [( 06.26.07)]. As you might have read in our Arts Action Alerts in the past few weeks, this bill includes an historic $35 million increase for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This increase will bring the NEA budget to $160 million and will provide new funding for the grants to state and local organizations, Challenge America, and American Masterpieces programs. This directly affects the arts in Montana! We learned this morning [ 06.25.070] that Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) (who received a “D†voting grade in our 2006 Congressional Arts Report Card) is planning to offer an amendment to cut funding to the NEA when the bill is considered on the House floor. We have worked too hard to allow this amendment to pass! If you have not yet sent a message, we ask that you take just two minutes to visit our Americans for the Arts E-Advocacy Center to contact your Members of Congress and ask them to support passage of H.R. 2643, (the House Interior Appropriations bill) and oppose this amendment.  With a few clicks, you can send this customizable message to your Representative and Senators. It only takes two minutes to make a difference - please send this message now Tags: arts, controversy, economy, insane, revitalizearts, controversy, economy, insane, revitalize
Friday night, many familiar faces joined together to share an intimate evening of dance presented by members of Headwaters Dance Co. and The Open Field Artists. Dawn Hartman, Sarah Bortis, Kitty Sailer, Ann Campbell and Heidi Junkersfeld danced for an hour straight, and in the process nearly brought me and many others to tears. It was beautiful. The evening began as a good friend greeted me at the door where she was taking tickets. She invited me to remove my shoes and find a seat on the cushions, which were arranged in a square around the room. Quiet evening sunlight melted into the room, and I noticed many people that I recognized. I found a seat and waited for the performance to begin. Having seen The Open Field Artists before, but never having seen Headwaters Dance Co., I was not sure what to expect during the course of the evening. I had spoken with one of the dancers, Heidi, a few days before the show, and she told me that this piece is different than anything I had seen before. She was right. Kaila June Gidley walked out onto the floor and began the night by welcoming us into the dance space where she spent so much of her time in Missoula. She smiled as she shared with us what the Missoula community means to her, and how happy and lucky she feels to have been a part of it. She spoke for about five minutes before telling us that her time to leave has come, and she wanted to share with us the beauty of the space in which we were all sitting. Kaila explained a little bit of what to expect from the piece, and then the dancers came out and began running around us along the perimeter where we sat. They dove and slid across the floor from different “doorways” in the seating arrangement. As I watched, I was thinking, I don’t know anything about dance. I don’t know what it means. I decided, though, that “getting it” on an intellectual level isn’t important to me. I “get it” on a visual and an emotional level, I “get it” on a physical level, knowing how difficult it is for someone to move their body in those ways. Much like classical music, dance is not something for me to have to think about. I just need to soak it in and let it envelop me.
I couldn’t wrap my head around some of the concepts, like Butoh, which Heidi had told me about, and Kaila touched on explaining briefly as she spoke in the beginning. Butoh traditionally explores the “transmutation of the human body into other forms, such as smoke, dust, ghosts, and animals”, earth, water, fire, wind, sky, war. Granted, the performance was not true Butoh, but it used elements from the form to communicate to the audience. There were times during the performance where I actually had to remind myself to breathe, the piece was so intense, the way the dancers moved their bodies with each other, the amount of love and trust visible on the floor. Towards the end of the performance, the five women stood in the center of the room and sang from Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. As they sang, they would pause and dance, then fall into each other. You know the “Do you trust me? The let go, and I’ll catch you” game that we all played as children? It was much like that, but more intense. “Dawn, fall”, Heidi said, and Dawn fell into her and all four of the other women supported her, but moved her body around on theirs, passing her around and gently holding her as they moved. Each of the women fell in turn and the other four supported them. I don’t know how to write about dance, really, but it was amazing, beautiful, emotional and intimate. I’ll leave you with some text from The Secret of the Vajra World by Reginald A. Ray that was included on the program that was distributed at the door: and so it is we see each other, and how? to negotiate circumstance, when associations fall short, I learn. whether you sit or stand, the invitation is woven. held close by forty hands…. Tags: art, art in missoula, arts and culture in missoula, butoh, friends, headwaters dance co, love, modern dance, open field artists, performance art, travel guide to montana, warart, art in missoula, arts and culture in missoula, butoh, friends, headwaters dance co, love, modern dance, open field artists, performance art, travel guide to montana, war
I’m on the mailing list for the Montana Arts Council, and recently received an important email from Arni Fishbaugh, the Executive Director of MAC. Fishbaugh and others have been hard at work on the draft of the Montana Arts Council’s Operational Blueprint for 2008-2013. More than 1,000 people shared their opinions with the arts council on what they would like to see for the future, and they have worked hard to incorporate that information into the Blueprint. Anyone interested in the arts in Montana, please go and download the arts council’s Blueprint. Read it. Once you’ve read it, give the Arts Council your feedback. Give feedback online here. Missoula, MT
Miles City, MT
Bozeman, MT
He walked into the bar with a swagger exuding confidence. On his head, he wore a hat reminiscent of the 1940’s, and, the thing was, he pulled it off. He had just finished a long day — nine hours — of painting, and had come back for a nightcap or two. He is Noah Ptolemy, who worked long days to complete a commissioned mural in the hallway at the newly opened Badlander Bar in the historic Hotel Palace building in Missoula, Montana. Over the course of the week, I would watch Ptolemy as he worked tirelessly on the playful expanse that includes a parade of red elephants amid a green sea filled with yellow sailboats. Over the course of the past year or so, Ptolemy is coming into his own in the Missoula art community. The 26 year old is well traveled, having done time in big cities like New York, Detroit and Seattle, even making it as far as Japan in a search to fill a hole in his life. It was in Detroit that he initially began to realize that art was the missing piece, the thing that would ultimately fill the hole he felt. After arriving in Missoula, Ptolemy had stopped creating and was feeling edgy and depressed again. He listened to himself honestly and once again returned to creating artwork to heal himself. As he painted, he sold his art in the streets of Missoula to try to make ends meet. Most recently, Ptolemy has been exhibiting at a variety of galleries in town, and his work can currently be seen at The Catalyst .
The first time I watched Ptolemy work, however, I did not know that he was even going to be painting. There was an art event happening at Caras Park downtown that had not been well publicized. Either that, or I just had not been paying attention. It was a Saturday afternoon in early spring, a warm day, and I was walking downtown to grab some lunch. As I crossed the bridge, I noticed the goings-on below me, and I walked down the steps to see what was happening. I wandered through the tent and saw the same familiar food vendors, the same beer tent. But what really caught my eye was a huge wall of yellow canvas that was, even then, drastically changing by the minute. Several other people had gathered to watch the artist at work, and I recognized him as Ptolemy. I walked up as he was painting to congratulate him on such a high exposure piece, and he grinned, telling me that the paints and the canvas had been donated. He wasn’t getting paid, but he was just happy to be able to paint on such a large scale. I could see the joy in his face and was happy for him. He had to work fast, as the painting was to be completed by day’s end. By the end of it, he told me, he was tired and sore from all of the reaching and bending he had to do in order to finish the painting. It was fun for me as a fellow artist to watch him work, but, as a simple casual observer, it was almost as much fun to watch others watch him work, and see the smiles as they witnessed one brushstroke cut a large swath of gray across the field of yellow that had developed, or as an area that looked completely developed disappeared beneath another field of yellow.
More photos of Ptolemy working: Tags: art, art in missoula, arts and culture in missoula, bar, economy, graffiti, how to price your artwork, inspiration, missoula, painting, performance art, ptolemy montana, public art exhibitions, travel guide to montana, workingmanart, art in missoula, arts and culture in missoula, bar, economy, graffiti, how to price your artwork, inspiration, missoula, painting, performance art, ptolemy montana, public art exhibitions, travel guide to montana, workingmanI’ve had an idea for this painting for a couple of months now. I finished it yesterday. It’s about 33″x34″. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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Last year I had four art openings, each with new and different work. Not prints. Original work. I spent much time and effort matting and framing all of the pieces myself, creating the marketing collateral materials, mailing postcards, hanging fliers and sending emails. One opening hung for four months and I sold six pieces from that show over the course of those four months. It felt good. So this year, my goal was to show every month, except January. I was unemployed, I figured I could do it. But I couldn’t get a show in February, March came and went with nothing, and I started to lose momentum by April. Then I remembered that my first show last year was in January, but I didn’t have another show again until June, so I didn’t sweat it. I was talking about this with a friend of mine, and told him that I needed to get my work out there again and keep the momentum from last year rolling. People were walking up to me in the street and asking me when my next show was going to be. I needed some exposure. John said, Well, as a friend of mine in Helena once said, “you can die from exposure” So again, I stopped stressing out. Even so, I was eager to show some work. The weather was getting to be nice and there was a good vibe in the air, which is why I decided to do the show in the alley that was so warmly received. Out of that show has come an opportunity for me to be the first artist to show at a business in town that wants to become part of the First Friday scene. I’ll write more about that later, but it’s definitely an exciting opportunity for me and for the business. That show will open in August. Meanwhile, in July, I’ll be doing two alley shows, I think. If memory serves me right, last year in July there was confusion as to when “First Friday” actually occurred, so that there were actually two “First” Fridays. I’ll be in an alley somewhere with all of my art on both of those Fridays. Watch this space for more news on that front. And I don’t expect that I’ll die from that exposure! |
