Call for Bloomingdale Artists!

here is a message from a neighbor:


Call for Bloomingdale Artists!

Artists of all kinds (visual artists, performing artists, musicians, craftspersons, writers, poets, spoken-word artists, and any others I may be forgetting momentarily) are invited to come together to form a steering committee/brainstorming/creative research group to build a local arts-based response to the various issues facing our community. The model and intent for this project springs from the Community-based Arts tradition (also known as Community Cultural Development), which holds that artists have skills that are of particular relevance for helping communities to process and transform the issues that they face through positive, joyful, creative processes.

Melanie St. Ours, a North Capitol St resident and community-based theatre artist who has worked with groups in Manhattan, The Bronx, and in New Delhi, is hoping to bring the work she loves a little closer to home. She's been impressed with the degree of community involvement and action, but believes that an arts-based process has a lot to add to the efforts that are already underway here. She's interested in heading up a performance component of the project, but hopes that as many artists from the community can be involved as possible and that we can have multiple aspects to the project to include many different media.

Right now, the intent is simply to gauge initial interest levels, meet with interested artists, and brainstorm ideas for a plan of action. If you're an artist in the neighborhood and are interested in finding ways to use your work to get to know your community better, serve that community, and collaborate with artists from other disciplines, please be in touch! No commitments are needed at this phase----just curiosity!!!

If you're interested in this project please send an email with your name, email address (and phone number if it's better to reach you by phone), the medium in which you work, and a basic idea of when you might be available for an initial meeting. Please write to: melaniest.ours @ gmail.com . Feel free to include other comments and questions as well, but know that many of those will be answered as we get to know each other and define the scope of the project more specifically. T

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you!

~Melanie St. Ours / melaniest.ours @ gmail.com