Another posting straight from the Missoula Cultural Council email distribution list.  This time, every state in the nation is directly afftected.  Read on.  Act.

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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

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?
I see myself, with what lens?

to negotiate circumstance,
the well of knowledge flows
making ancient electric fire.

when associations fall short,
when the program loses memory,
when the space thickens,
and language is lost,
what then?

I learn.
and
there you are.

whether you sit or stand,
if I kneel or lay,
our ground is the same.

the invitation is woven.
time’s golden thread
incessantly spins
a curiosity of potentials,

held close by forty hands….

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.
There are two ways to give feedback, either online or at one of three town meetings. Note that the deadline for participating online is Friday June 29th. If you miss the deadline, go to one of the town meetings:

Missoula, MT
Friday, June 22, 2007
Noon - 2:00 p.m.
MCT Center for the Performing Arts
Room 302
200 North Adams
(406) 728-1911

Miles City, MT
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
6:00 - 8::00 p.m.
Custer County Art and Heritage Center
Main Gallery
Waterplant Road (west of the city)
(406) 234-0635

Bozeman, MT
Thursday, June 28, 2007
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Emerson Center for Art and Culture
Weaver Room
111 South Grand Avenue
(406) 587-9797

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:

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I’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.

“I’m so glad you’re doing this!” the woman said to me as she walked out of the alley. She had been out on a walk with her two young sons on a beautiful summer evening in Missoula when she stumbled upon my little impromptu art exhibition. Her sons were little artists themselves, and spent quite a bit of time coloring and drawing on a large piece of newsprint I had taped to the sidewalk, while their mother slowly walked up and down the alley, perusing my artwork.

After writing about graffiti as public art, I wanted to do some cool sort of public art myself, but wanted to do it in such a way that many could enjoy it and no one would be offended. So I packed my car full of most of my artwork and headed downtown to be a part of the First Friday Artwalk that Missoula hosts downtown each first Friday of the month. I didn’t make it to the alley until after six o’clock, and I wasn’t fully set up as the first stream of curious people began trickling in, but it was fun to have people watch me as I set up the DIY gallery.

People know that art is important, and in Missoula every first Friday of the month, they come out in droves to mingle, see art and buy art. I’ve done art shows in the past, and I’ve usually spend a good amount of money on fliers and postcards, sent out a blast email and all well in advance of the show. I wanted to see how well I would do with a one night stand in the alley, no marketing, no advanced notice, no pretension, just art. About 200 people walked through the alley that night. Some of them I knew, many of them I didn’t. It seemed that everyone was having fun and enjoying themselves.

As the evening wore on, I must admit I was a little frustrated that no one had bought anything. When I did the art in the alley show last year, it was in a different alley. I wondered if my location wasn’t right? Last year I sold some work in the alley. Sure, this year I had some inquiries, some people took a card and said they were thinking about it. But no solid sales. The sun was going down, and a guy I know only casually asked, “How much for these two?” I told him, he said, I’ll be right back,” and he left for a few minutes. He came back with cold hard cash an a promise to call me once they are hung in his house. Very cool.

I’m not sure what I’m doing next month. A business in town has approached me as a result of the show in the alley and asked if I might be interested in displaying work at their business for the month of July. I’m hoping to get something worked out on that front, and if a “real” show doesn’t pan out for August, look for me again in one of Missoula’s alleys. The only art gallery in town where you can bring your dog or smoke a cigarette while you look at beautiful art.

We as humans all feel the need to express ourselves in some fashion. Some have an obvious talent for creative expression, and they articulate this passion in the form of a painting, an original poem, a beautiful song, maybe an emotional dance piece. Some creative types are lucky enough to be good enough at their chosen form of expression to make a living creating their art. Others eek out a living that allows them to create the art they are driven to make.

Most big cities that one might visit have a plethora of public art displays. A quick visit to Missoula’s city webpage reveals a list of almost fifty examples of known sanctioned public art. Some of my favorite art in cities that I’ve visited has been public art, from Oldenburg and van Bruggen’sFree Stamp in Cleveland to Anish Kapoor’s CLOUD GATE in Chicago’s Millenium Park.

Another form of art that is more controversial and less recognized that can be found in all big cities across the world is graffiti. Some argue that graffiti is not art at all, but vandalism — a crime.

I actually had an argument with a good friend of mine about this. She was born and raised in Missoula and says that she does not want outsiders coming into “her town” to “ugly it up” with their graffiti. I argued that it’s likely many of the graffiti artists (”they aren’t artists”, she says) were also born and raised Missoulians. And I pointed out that most people who do graffiti try to do so in a responsible way because they want their work to remain up as long as possible. So they avoid painting or writing on obvious private property, they do not write obscenities or hateful things, they try to express themselves honestly in a public forum that might cause a discussion, might cause someone to think. They are exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.

In the end, she became upset and we had to agree to disagree. I personally think that Missoula has some beautiful graffiti and that it needs to be documented before the horrid Gray Cancer overtakes it, one stencil and tag at a time.

There are others who would disagree, and there is a very interesting (though slightly outdated) discussion about this over at Patia Stevens’ site. The folks who spread the Gray Cancer in Missoula are volunteers, and I wonder what motivates them. I wonder how they feel when they paint over a piece of graffiti that they personally enjoy. I wonder if there is a person like Fahrenheit 451’s Montag among them, who before he “burns the book”, or in this case, paints over the art, secretly takes a digital photo of it. If there is no Montag, and we have to assume that there isn’t, we need to be documenting this fast fading art form in Missoula. And we need to be contributing to it.

If you are visiting Missoula, please, enjoy all of the natural beauty it and its surrounding areas have to offer. As you return to your hotel at the end of the day, leave the car in the parkinglot. Walk downtown if that’s possible. Notice some of the street art that’s available to you. ADD TO IT IF YOU WANT. Hell, you won’t be here to deal with any consequences later, right? But definitely take it in, photograph it, share it with those folks at home when you get back there, so that they know Missoula is not just beautiful rivers and mountains, but also alive with underground art out on the streets.

Finally, if you are going to be around this Friday, June 1st, a friend of mine, Marlo Crosifisso, who I’ve never known to paint in the streets of Missoula, will be presenting a collection of stencil artwork entitled “Legs, Stags, and Things that Fly.” Local music sensation Freewood will be serving up a scrumptious acoustic set. And… There will be two screenings (6:30 & 7:30) of Montana Canvas, a three part PBS series that profiles independent female artists throughout Montana: figurative narrative painter Stephanie Frostad, singer-songwriter Sonya Lacava, and clothing designer Emily Kurth. Each short film outlines the roots, challenges and processes of the artist, combining to give voice to Montana’s emerging collective of female artists. Directed by Valerie Krex, Emily Craword, David Macasaet and Toni Matlock. Total Running time: 22 minutes. As per usual, there will be cookies, and vino. Betty’s Divine is located @ 521 S Higgins in Missoula.

See also Street Art In Missoula, a photoset on Flickr.

When I first saw The OpenField Artists, I had not known what to expect when I walked into the warmth of The Strensrud to see some art, hear some music, and watch a performance. That’s all I knew. I was in for a treat when The OpenField Artists (OFA) previewed their MonkeyRiding Buddhas show. I returned to The Strensrud the following Friday to experience the full performance.

Walking into the space of The Strensrud, I immediately noticed a giant canvas covering one of the front windows. Scattered about on the ledge below the window were various artist’s tools, brushed, buckets, paint, glue. During the performance, I soon learned, “Johnny Art” would be creating a spontaneous painting that fed off of the energy of the performance, as well as the energy of the crowd, while at the same time telling his own story.

From the beginning, The OFA created a sense of community, building trust with their audience by including their audience in the performance. They accomplished this with an interactive piece in which four members of The OFA stood in the performance space. The person stage right selected a portion of the audience, claiming it, and instructed them to clap their hands along with her. The OFA to her right, the audience’s left, selected a portion of the audience, claiming it as his, and instructed them to stomp their feet. The OFA to shout HEY YO! The fourth OFA selected and claimed her section of audience and instructed them to shout TELL ME THE TRUTH. Everyone in the building was clapping their hands, stomping their feet and shouting. The effect was tremendous, causing those of us in the audience to feel a part of the performance, but, more importantly, to feel a part of each other. Now we were ready to listen, watch, learn, experience joy and sorrow, happiness and beauty.

And, over the course of the next few hours, we did experience many emotions. The performance was a testament to the power of art in people’s lives. The power of art, in its many incarnations, to bring people together and to empower them as recipients of art, and to empower the performers and artists at the same time.

The Welcoming Committee featured two of The OFA who welcomed a variety of seekers, convincing the seekers that they, The Welcoming Committee, had the solution to whatever problem the seekers had, when, in reality, it became clear that The Welcoming Committee were selling things with the same type of marketing found in AS SEEN ON TV ads. But the seekers always bought the snake oil. One person wanted to be an instructor, and was told that, Oh, yes, we have what you need. That course takes three days, one day for each level. But we’ll start you on the third day and charge you for all three. The rest of the skit went on in the same way, with the seekers being convinced that The Welcoming Committee had the answers for them, while truly, The Welcoming Committee was merely exploiting the needs of others for their own gain. The piece, as with all of the pieces in The MonkeyRiding Buddhas, worked because it exposed truths in all of us without being preachy.

The Welcoming Committee went away for a while, so that a beautiful waltz could be danced. The waltz was charged with the needing and wanting of two people (lovers?) who want to make a connection with one another, but their own internal struggles prevent them from breaking down their walls completely enough for a real connection to occur.

After the waltz a man lost on his way to the Ole’s gas station and convenience store brought back The Welcoming Committee, who would gladly give him directions for “a nominal fee”, which, if memory serves, was somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars. In this instance, our seeker hero walked away from The Welcoming Committee, showing us, subtly, that we can learn, and refuse the “help” of people who try to manipulate us in the guise of being helpful.

One of the successes of MonkeyRiding Buddhas was the breaking up of longer pieces, like The Welcoming Committee, with other works, like the waltz. This sort of presentation kept the audience’s attention, and also allowed the audience to process what they were experiencing, while continuing to take in more information and experiences. Accessible, straightforward pieces were couched between less accessible pieces, and no one in the audience ever felt completely lost. If they didn’t “get it”, they knew, because they trusted the performers, that they would be sufficiently led, and they would eventually get it, or at least find a work that they could wrap their heads around.

Let’s not forget the painting. It was almost as if the painting were not taking place, but as the show progressed, the painting began taking on a life of its own. It was beautiful.

Next was a contemporary dance piece, featuring the music of Tool and the very intense dancing of Naga Nataka and Abby Stevens. The struggling for connection in this piece mirrored the struggle in the earlier waltz, but was much more visceral and driven, almost violent. It was beautiful and exhausting to watch. Some of the words that I scribbled while watching: sex, relation-slips, power, struggle, individuality, self, losing of the self in another.

Heidi Junkersfeld’s performance of spoken word piece written by Nataka was chilling. The piece itself is chilling. A woman paces the stage while speaking a soliloquy peppered with familiar landmarks in Missoula, familiar stereotypes, familiar hopes and fears. The entire time she’s speaking, she is dragging on the ground a dead body draped in an American Flag. Sax/ violin set a somber mood

“I drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes because it’s easier,” she confesses. And one can see that she is not proud of this fact, she wants to be a better person than she is, as we all do. So she goes on to tell us about her yoga practice and some of the other things that make her whole. And she gets defensive.

“You have to be able to DEFEND yourself.”

She speaks these words loudly, and in her face, we can see that sometimes she doesn’t believe them. She’s trying to talk herself into believing the words she speaks, for we live in confusing times. She’s remembering the advice of her father, “Honey, you gotta be able to back yourself up in any conversation, you have to be able to…”

Defend yourself.

“It’s a good thing I know so much,” she says, trying to convince us, trying to convince herself, the way many of us do in the same fashion. The piece takes us all to task, holding a mirror up to us, but does so in a gentle way, without judgment or chastisement.

After the dancing and performance art finished, we were treated to some beautiful singing by Lee Macafee and Heidi.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things here, but this is what I was able to slap together from my scribbled notes. I’ll stop by again tomorrow to talk more about The Open Field Artists, who will be performing this First Friday at The Loft.

This, from a good friend currently deployed in Afghanistan. A reminder to support our troops….Being that i have a lot of freetime on my hand and often eat bad food out here, I wondered how far the human ass travels in a lifetime because of farts. Assumptions: a good earthy, average fart oscillates the cheeks approx 10 times/sec a cheek moves 1/16″ per oscillation average fart approx 2 seconds the average person farts 13 times/day average American lifespan is 77 years given these numbers, one can marvel at how resilient the human body is. in the course of one’s lifetime, the ass will move 28.83 miles because of gas. thanks for the tax money :-)(fyi, “farts” was tagged as being misspelled by blogger. I just thought that was funny.)